by Diego Rivera
The show consisted of 150 pieces, including oils, pastels, water colors, and black and whites, in addition to the seven frescoes. It represented all my periods. Although there was embarrassment in some quarters about the frankness with which I represented the current economic crisis in “Frozen Assets,” my exhibition was well received.
It failed, however, to fulfill one of my hopes for the show—to give American museum directors and architects a grasp of the character and value of mural painting. A true appreciation of the mural may be long in coming to the United States, the chief obstacle being the essentially temporary character of its architecture, combined with the North American preference for commodities of easy manipulation, which results in the creation of expensive screenprinted wallpaper rather than wall painting of real artistic value. The movable panels which I did for the show gave a fairly good idea of my technique but not of the true uses of the medium.
A VISIT WITH HENRY FORD
EARLY IN 1932 Frida and I went by train to Detroit. We were met at the depot by a small welcoming party consisting officially of Dr. Valentiner and Mr. Burroughs, the Head Curator and Secretary of the Arts Institute. The reception was swelled by an unexpected contingent of Mexicans living in Detroit, led by the Mexican Consul. These well-wishers escorted Frida and me to lodgings reserved for us in the Brevoort Hotel, facing the Institute. After getting settled, we were introduced to Edsel Ford and the other members of the Art Commission.
Ford set only one condition: that in representing the industry of Detroit, I should not limit myself to steel and automobiles but take in chemicals and pharmaceuticals, which were also important in the economy of the city. He wanted to have a full tableau of the industrial life of Detroit. He said good-humoredly that he wished to avoid any impression of partiality toward the industry served by his father and himself.
After a comprehensive survey of the city’s plants and factories, I made preliminary sketches which I showed to Edsel Ford. Then I asked him for a concession. My commission called for frescoes on two walls, each fifty square yards, which I was to paint for the sum of $10,000. I could not possibly carry out my designs in this space. I therefore requested the space of all the four walls of the garden. Ford, who was taken with my preliminary sketches, not only acceded to my wish but raised my fee to $25,000.
I spent the two and one-half months between my meeting with the Art Commission and the beginning of my actual mural work in soaking up impressions of the productive activities of the city. I studied industrial scenes by night as well as by day, making literally thousands of sketches of towering blast furnaces, serpentine conveyor belts, impressive scientific laboratories, busy assembling rooms; also of precision instruments, some of them massive yet delicate; and of the men who worked them all. I walked for miles through the immense workshops of the Ford, Chrysler, Edison, Michigan Alkali, and Parke-Davis plants. I was afire with enthusiasm. My childhood passion for mechanical toys had been transmuted to a delight in machinery for its own sake and for its meaning to man—his self-fulfillment and liberation from drudgery and poverty. That is why now I placed the collective hero, man-and-machine, higher than the old traditional heroes of art and legend. I felt that in the society of the future as already, to some extent, that of the present, man-and-machine would be as important as air, water, and the light of the sun.
This was the “philosophy,” the state of mind in which I undertook my Detroit frescoes.
Not long after coming to Detroit, I heard of a museum of machinery in Dearborn which had been set up by Henry Ford but which, at that time, had not acquired its present popularity. The well-to-do people of fashionable Grosse Pointe and the Detroit workers as well ignored Greenfield Village, as this museum area was called. Almost nobody had any use for it, and I found out about it only through hearing people laugh at “old man Ford” for “wasting” millions on his “pile of scrap iron.” These gibes excited my curiosity, and I asked my friends how I could arrange a visit and what was the earliest time I might go.
“Any time you like,” they answered, not troubling to conceal their disdain.
I arrived at Greenfield Village six o‘clock the following morning, and spent an hour walking around it. At precisely seven o’clock, a marvelous mechanical clock, equipped with a figure hammering on bells, sent peals of music into the bright morning air. An old-fashioned wagon, drawn by three pairs of mules, an apparition out of the eighteenth century, crossed the road where the automobile I had come in was parked. I was startled by this sudden juxtaposition of the past and present. I asked my assistant, Clifford Wight, who had come with me, and our tour guide, to let me visit the museum by myself, if that was permitted. Cliff seemed surprised and may even have taken offense at my request.
The guide, however, answered, “We’ve been told, sir, to do absolutely everything you wish.” With that, he returned to the car with the puzzled Clifford.
The first thing I encountered on entering the museum was the earliest steam engine built in England. As I walked on, marveling at each successive mechanical wonder, I realized that I was witnessing the history of machinery, as if on parade, from its primitive beginnings to the present day, in all its complex and astounding elaborations.
Henry Ford’s so-called “pile of scrap iron” was organized not only with scientific clarity but with impeccable, unpretentious good taste. Relics of the times associated with each machine were displayed beside it. To me, Greenfield Village, inside and out, was a visual feast.
While I was inside the model of an early American cabin, a strange thing occurred. I was looking at the furniture, tools, clothing, and yellowed ballad sheets affixed to the walls when suddenly the light began to fade. In a few seconds, I was in total darkness.
As I felt my way along a wall in an attempt to get out, I heard a man’s voice say, “Don’t you want some light?”
“Yes, certainly I do!” I answered. The light came on at once, but no human being was visible. As I hunted for the source of the voice, I heard it again. “What do you think of my electrical system?”
“Marvelous,” I replied, continuing to look about me for the man who had spoken.
“That’s fine,” the voice said, and then there was silence. Shrugging my shoulders, I continued on my tour, which lasted hours and hours.
At last I began to feel weak. It occurred to me that it was already night, and I probably needed food. I found the car at an exit waiting for me. Alongside it stood a man who introduced himself to me as Henry Ford’s secretary. Mr. Ford, he said, realized that I, no less than he, was a very busy man. Nevertheless, he begged me to set aside time the following day to lunch with him in his home. I accepted this invitation warmly. The secretary pointed out Mr. Ford’s house to me. It was not far from where we were standing. I was surprised to see that it was much like the homes of the engineers and skilled workers living in Dearborn. There was nothing to set it apart from the other houses in the neighborhood.
I had already begun working in the Arts Institute. And early the following morning, I found a motion-picture cameraman, with all his paraphernalia, waiting for me on the scaffold.
He said, “Mr. Ford instructed me to come here every day while you’re working on your murals and take pictures of you in action. I must have each day’s shooting ready to be shown to him in his home by evening. He is eager to watch you paint, and since he can’t spare the time during the day, he thought of this idea. It will make him feel as if he were actually here.”
I told the photographer I was delighted with Mr. Ford’s personal interest in my work, and he was welcome to take pictures of me at any time.
Later that day, I kept my luncheon appointment with Henry Ford, whom I found a most charming man, old in years but in other ways very young. Discarding formalities, Ford greeted me with a hearty handshake and then began one of the most intelligent, clever, and lively conversations I have ever enjoyed. This amiable genius radiated a kind of luminous atmosphere.
After a while, he said,
“Since you like mechanics so much, I’d like to show you something. Please follow me.”
He led me into an amazing kitchen, so highly mechanized there was almost nothing in it to be done by hand. He explained that he believed human sensitivity and intelligence should be reserved for the full enjoyment of food, rather than wasted in its preparation. Standing in Ford’s kitchen, I had the odd sensation of being surrounded by a mechanical orchestra.
At table, Ford described the electrical systems in Greenfield Village. Suddenly a bell rang in my head and I looked at him inquiringly. Smiling, he said, “Yes, Diego, that voice you heard yesterday in the cabin was mine. I couldn’t resist playing the prank on you, since you seemed to be as fond as I am of those piles of scrap iron. Am I right, boy?” Chucking, he slapped me good-naturedly on the shoulder.
“From seven in the morning until half past one the next morning—that’s quite a record time for a visitor to stay at a museum,” he continued. “It proves that you may be even more interested in mechanics than I am. And you almost have to be a fanatic to compete with me. That’s certainly something!” he exclaimed, grinning broad approval of our common bond.
Having eaten lunch, I got up to return to my job. Ford shook hands with me again and said warmly, “Good-bye, Diego, thank you for coming. I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed our meeting.”
“Good-bye and thank you too, Henry,” I responded with equal warmth.
As I rode back to Detroit, a vision of Henry Ford’s industrial empire kept passing before my eyes. In my ears, I heard the wonderful symphony which came from his factories where metals were shaped into tools for men’s service. It was a new music, waiting for the composer with genius enough to give it communicable form.
I thought of the millions of different men by whose combined labor and thought automobiles were produced, from the miners who dug the iron ore out of the earth to the railroad men and teamsters who brought the finished machines to the consumer, so that man, space, and time might be conquered, and ever-expanding victories be won against death.
And then I recalled, as clearly as if they were now flowing into my ears, the words I had heard spoken by a Russian worker. On a visit to his home I had noticed, hanging on a wall, three separate portraits above a fourth, of Stalin. The first portrait was of Karl Marx, the center one of Lenin, and the third, a likeness of my esteemed new friend, Henry Ford. As my face showed astonishment at this unique ensemble, the worker had explained, “Those three make the establishment of socialism a real possibility. Karl Marx produced the indispensable theory. Lenin applied the theory with his sense of large-scale social organization. And Henry Ford made the work of the socialist state possible. None of their contributions would have meant anything, however, without the political genius of Stalin.”
Recalling these words now, I regretted that Henry Ford was a capitalist and one of the richest men on earth. I did not feel free to praise him as long and as loudly as I wanted to, since that would put me under the suspicion of sycophancy, of flattering the rich. Otherwise, I should have attempted to write a book presenting Henry Ford as I saw him, a true poet and artist, one of the greatest in the world.
Some time later Frida and I were invited by Ford to a party where the guests danced early American dances. Frida, looking lovely in her Mexican costume, soon became the center of attraction. Ford danced with her several times.
When the party was over, beckoning me to follow, Ford escorted Frida outside, where a car was waiting. It was a new Lincoln, a chauffeur at the wheel. Ford told Frida that the chauffeur had already been paid and that both he and the car were at Frida’s disposal for the time she remained in Detroit.
I was embarrassed for us both and thanked Ford but declared that neither Frida nor I could possibly accept such a lavish gift. This car, I said, was too rich for our blood.
Ford took my refusal with gracious understanding. Then, without our knowledge, he got his son Edsel to design a special small Ford car, which he presented to Frida a short time later.
THE BATTLE OF DETROIT
WORKING AT THE ARTS INSTITUTE now absorbed me completely. Despite the fact that I was on a rigorous meat-free and debilitating thyroid-supplemented diet to lose weight, I averaged fifteen hours a day on the scaffold, seven days a week. When I started painting, I weighed a good deal more than three hundred pounds; when I was done, I had worked and dieted off more than one hundred pounds.
Frida was also working. She had developed her own style and was beginning to paint real masterpieces. When we had been in Detroit for about six months, however, her mother fell fatally ill, and Frida had to return to Coyoacán. I remained in Detroit, laboring harder than ever.
In my previous murals, I had tried to achieve a harmony in my painting with the architecture of the building. But to attempt such a harmony in the garden of the Institute would have defeated my purposes. For the walls here were of an intricate Italian baroque style, with little windows, heads of satyrs, doorways, and sculpturesque mouldings. It was within such a frame that I was to represent the life of an age which had nothing to do with baroque refinements—a new life which was characterized by masses, machines, and naked mechanical power. So I set to work consciously to overpower the ornamentation of the room.
My subject matter lent itself, both historically and pictorially, to this conflict. And to strengthen and integrate it plastically I decided, throughout its whole, to establish a rhythm more elemental, more powerful than any other in the garden. I chose one of the dominant rhythms in the life process—the wave. My Detroit Institute mural consists of twenty-seven panels divided roughly into three levels; at the base, inset scenes depict events in the workers’ day; at the main level, from the base mouldings to the tops of the columns, the major area of the composition, are shown machines in motion; on the upper level, the painting represents the physiography of the region, its soil, its minerals and fossils, its lake and river transport, and finally, directly under the rafters, its civilian and military aviation and the races of man. In panel after panel, the undulating wave reappears—in the giant steel conveyor belts, in the tubes and piping, and in the strata of the subsoil.
Thoroughly immersed in my labors though I was, I became conscious after a time, that whispers were beginning to circulate through the city concerning certain subjects of my frescoes. On the upper level of one wall, I had painted hands breaking through the surface of the earth to bring up pieces of minerals and metals. Above this portrayal, I had painted two reclining female nudes: one black, representing coal; one red, representing iron. On the wall directly opposite, I had shown hands taking limestone, sand, sulphur, and other light-colored substances from the earth, and directly above, had again represented their human analogues in white and yellow female nudes.
The females, who also represented the races of man, were autochthonous types, hardly “pretty.” The gossip spread that I was painting a poem to ugliness, that this was what the figures symbolized, standing above the roar and glint of steel machinery. I, who knew better, merely worked on. What I did not understand was that certain people in Detroit were looking for a pretext to attack me and my mural.
In a pharmacological panel, they found it at last. In front of three men at work in a modern biochemical plant, I had pictured a child, in the arms of a nurse, being vaccinated by a white-gowned physician. Directly before them stood a horse, a cow, and some sheep—animals from whose tissues many vaccines are prepared. The panel was intended to celebrate the noble work of men of science fighting against disease. To some people, the panel seemed to be a portrayal of the Holy Family in modern dress, the three laboratory workers standing for the three kings, and the animals the animals of the manger. To my enemies, because it had sprung from my conception, the painting was sacrilegious.
One day, from my scaffold, I observed a peculiar-looking man studying my panels. He was introduced to me as a painter of stained-glass windows for churches. Completely bald on top, he had a round, rosy-cheeked face framed i
n long gray hair which fell to his shoulders in curls. On greeting me, his thin lips widened into a weak smile. His blue-gray eyes were cast down as if he had lost something essential and was looking for it.
His gray suit was unusually shabby and dirty for someone living in the United States. He was shod in black canvas slippers in the style of Saint Antoine, who became a church janitor.
As he spoke, he joined his fingers in a handclasp, like a schoolgirl. He was, this odd creature told me, of French descent, and he had devoted all his life to religious art. Taking one last, sweeping look around the room, he congratulated me on my work with obvious insincerity and hurriedly departed. I didn’t understand his purpose until several days later.
The following day another visitor, presented to me as a columnist for one of the big Detroit newspapers, came to see me at work. This visitor was even more unpleasant-looking than the religious painter. He wore his hat pulled down over his eyes, which, when he lifted his head, were obscured by lenses as thick as bottle glass.
After watching me for a time, he shouted up, “Don’t you think the perspective is wrong?”
I peered down, and suddenly I found the sight of this terribly myopic, hat-blinded man so amusing that I could not control myself and burst out laughing.
The columnist squinted back at me in an uncomprehending and embarrassed manner. Finally, he asked where the lavatory was. Between gasps for breath, I gave him directions. Needless to say, he did not return.
But the following day he officially opened the campaign against me in his column. The basis of his condemnation was the alleged immorality of my frescoes. How, in such a beautiful museum, he asked, could I be permitted to paint such filth! He had been informed, he said, by trustworthy authorities, that I was dishonoring the walls of the Institute with pornographic paintings. If I was not stopped now. . . .