This blog post accompanies my review of Diego Rivera: The Detroit Industry Murals by Linda Bank Downs (1999). It really is a beautifully produced book, giving the reader access to loads of preparatory sketches and cartoons made by Mexican muralist Diego Rivera before he painted the vast murals depicting the Ford motor factory at Detroit onto the walls of the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1932. It features photos of the great man in action (and catching sneaky kisses from his wife, Frida Kahlo) and a detailed analysis of each of the 27 murals’ design and meaning.
This post is a note about the epilogue to the main story of the murals, in which the book’s author, Linda Bank Downs, describes the fascinating incident of the political controversy which suddenly engulfed the murals almost 20 years after they were painted.
The Nightmare of War and Dream of Peace
Rivera had been expelled from the Mexican Communist Party in 1929, following a visit to Moscow during which he criticised Stalin’s leadership (he began the Detroit murals 3 years later). For the next twenty years he remained, rather pathetically, desperate to be readmitted to the party.
In 1952 twenty long years later, years which had seen the disastrous Second World War bring death and upheaval to every part of the globe, Rivera was commissioned to paint a portable mural for a Mexican art exhibition in Paris. He chose as his subject The Nightmare of War and Dream of Peace. Now, the Korean War had broken out in 1950 and was still ongoing. The communist North Koreans were backed by Stalin and were soon lent troops from China, which had only just come under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Tse-Tung. The portable mural Rivera created caused an international scandal.
Rivera’s mural is not only packed with detail but is, in fact, a painting within a painting. It is a mural of a mural. On a wall in some Mexican city is painted the political mural but, if you look closely, you can see that this mural ends three quarters of the way to the right, it ends along with the wall it’s painted on. Beyond the end of the building we can see a panoramic view of the modern Mexican city, with its bustling traffic, high rise buildings and billboards. And after a moment, you realise that all the figures along the front (including a portrait of his wife, Frida) are standing or walking in front of the wall with the actual mural on it.
The Nightmare of War and Dream of Peace by Diego Rivera (1952)
These figures standing in front of the mural are being moved along the pavement from right to left. They are being handed copies of the Stockholm Appeal by a man in a black suit at far right, by Rivera’s wife, Frida Kahlo in her wheelchair, by the central figure of the worker with his back to us, who acts as the dynamic fulcrum of the action, and on the left by the two chaps standing behind a makeshift table, who are persuading citizens – be they peasants or smart-suited urban types – to add their names to the petition.
So what was this Stockholm Appeal which is at the centre of the painting? The Stockholm Appeal was a short, simple text, launched in 1950, which called for an absolute ban on nuclear weapons. The appeal was launched by the French Communist physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie, and the petition gathered a supposed 273,470,566 signatures. Joliot-Curie is depicted to the left of the central worker, facing us, wearing a black beret and a yellow tie.
Behind this bustling scene of street-level politics is the mural itself. This depicts, at top left, Uncle Joe Stalin and Chairman Mao offering a peace treaty to the Western powers – France personified as a woman wearing a sky blue dress and a liberty cap, pugnacious John Bull standing behind her, resting a hand with knuckle dusters on the globe which stands between them, and a white-top-hatted Uncle Sam behind them both.
The two-thirds of the mural to the right depict the horrors of war. Against the backdrop of a vast atomic mushroom cloud, steel-helmeted soldiers are 1) crucifying 2) shooting by firing squad and 3) whipping the victims of war, peasants with Asian faces.
The Korean War
The point is that Rivera painted this mural at the height of the Cold War and two years into the bitter Korean War (1950 to 1953). The Korean War began when communist North Korean forces invaded South Korea, with no warning or pretext. They pushed the unprepared South Koreans and their handful of peacetime American allies right back to the south-east of the peninsula and very nearly conquered it all.
Until the hero of the war in the Pacific, American General MacArthur, launched a daring amphibious landing half way up the peninsula, not far from the southern capital of Seoul, threatening to cut the North’s supply lines and take them in the rear. The victorious allies forced the North right back up to the original border between the countries, and then pushed them back up towards Korea’s border with China.
It was at this point that Mao Tse-Tung’s Communist China – which had only ‘fallen’ to the communists as recently as 1950 – sent huge numbers of Chinese Red Army cadres to reinforce the North Koreans, while the Americans, leading a supposedly United Nations force, reinforced its armies – and so the war settled down to a brutal war of attrition.
Rivera wasn’t wrong in depicting a world brought to the brink of nuclear war. When the Chinese joined the war and pushed the allied forces right back to the middle of the peninsula, MacArthur seriously suggested to President Harry Truman that they launch a nuclear attack on Chinese cities. He was promptly sacked, but that’s how close to a nuclear war the world came.
Controversy in Detroit
OK so how does any of this affect the Detroit murals which Rivera painted 20 years previously? For the simple reason that Rivera depicts as heroes of peace the two brutal communist dictators, Stalin and Mao, which the USA was at war with, against whose armies American boys were fighting and dying – and this depiction inflamed American public, political and artistic opinion against him.
Rivera was vilified in the right-wing and liberal press, by artists and politicians alike. The McCarthyite hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee were just about to start, with their hounding of anyone suspected of even the slightest left-wing leanings and in this mood of war fever and patriotic paranoia, it’s no surprise that voices were raised criticising the largest example of Rivera’s work in America – the Detroit murals. Why, asked patriots and anti-communists, was Detroit promoting the work of a war-mongering commie?
Detroit’s city council took up the cry, and one councilor, Eugene Van Antwerp, called for the murals to be whitewashed over. However, the director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, Edgar Richardson, to his great credit, stood his ground. He argued that the murals were great works of art and an obvious tribute to the capitalist inventiveness and industriousness of America, which were in no way affected by the changing political beliefs of their creator.
Richardson had a massive sign painted and hung up outside the institute, which read:
Rivera’s politics and his publicity-seeking are detestable.
But let’s get the record straight on what he did here.
He came from Mexico to Detroit, thought our mass production industries and our technology wonderful and very exciting, painted them as one of the great achievements of the twentieth century.
This came just after the debunking twenties when our own artists and writers had found nothing worthwhile in America and worst of all in America was the Middle West.
Rivera saw and painted the significance of Detroit as a world city.
If we are proud of this city’s achievements, we should be proud of these paintings, and not lose our heads over what Rivera is doing in Mexico today.
Given the local and national pressure he was under, this is an eloquent and canny defence, appealing not to vague principles of artistic freedom, but to his reader’s patriotism and civil pride. The politicians insisted that there be a public consultation about the work’s future but, in the event, Richardson only received a handful of letters and the protest, such as it was, fizzled out.
Rivera and the Communist Party
If we return to the big art expo in Paris which he’d painted the Nightmare for, the organisers of the Mexico stand pleaded with Rivera to change his depiction of the Russian and Chinese dictators. When he refused, they decided not to exhibit the painting. This prompted the Mexican Communist Party to express righteous indignation, propagandise about ‘freedom of expression’ and to hold a public viewing of the mural, attended by numerous communist officials, writers and fellow travellers.
Sadly for Diego, none of this helped his almost obsessive attempts to rejoin the Party. In the same year, his fourth application to rejoin was rejected. In 1953 Rivera sent the mural – which was always designed to travel – to China where it subsequently disappeared and has never been seen again. How fitting it would be if it was destroyed by radical students in the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s!
In 1954 Kahlo, now very ill, committed suicide. Rivera made her funeral into a Communist Party demonstration, and his fifth application for readmission to the Mexican Communist Party of Mexico was finally accepted. Three years later Rivera himself died.
Frida Kahlo (in wheelchair, left) and Diego Rivera and (standing on the right) in front of the unfinished mural, The Nightmare of War and the Dream of Peace (1952) Photo by Juan Guzmán
How long ago all these Cold War concerns seem. The world was an incomparably more dangerous place in 1952 than it is now, as mention of the Korean War going to the brink of nuclear disaster indicates.
Related links
- Diego Rivera website
- An online essay about the murals by Linda Banks Down
- The Art of Peace in the Early Cold War by Rachel Leow
Books & Boots 