I wanted to write about Dorothy Miller some more, but her trajectory started in one of the biggest art scandals: Diego Rivera’s mural destruction.
So this is part one. We’ll explore how and why New York lost a Rivera mural at the Rockefeller Center in the weeks leading up to the First Municipal Art Exhibition. However, one of the biggest art controversies occurred there just weeks before it opened, threatening to thwart the exhibition. We’ll return to Miller and that exhibition in the next post; she’s the thoroughline here.
The destruction of Rivera’s mural ends up being a pretty on-the-nose example of what American art institutions chose to value. (Hint: not communism.) It created a perfect breeding ground for highly individualistic artist statements.
How A Diego Rivera Mural Shook New York’s Art Scene
This is a reproduction of Man at the Crossroads in the beautiful Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico. Because the original mural was destroyed.
The driving force behind the creation of MoMA, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, bought a few of Rivera’s murals from his MoMA retrospective. She also underwrote Rivera’s trip. In short, she was a key patron of his. So in 1933, when her son, Nelson Rockefeller, wanted a mural for the Rockefeller Center’s Main Lobby, Abby Rockefeller put forward Rivera. (It’s a lot of Rockefellers. I know. )
Rivera’s show at MoMA in 1931 set attendance records, even with an admission fee during the Great Depression. While at work on the MoMA murals, Rivera received a commission to create a fresco for the then-under-construction Rockefeller Center. (Incidentally, it appears in the center of another of his murals, Frozen Assets.)
Signing the Contract
The Rockefellers initially wanted Picasso or Matisse to paint the mural. However, the wealthy family required sample sketches, and moreover specified how exactly the samples “were to be done”. Picasso, slighted, flatly refused. Matisse, politely, essentially said he did not see a match between his art and the Rockefellers’ vision.
But Rivera negotiated. The Rockefellers and Rivera came to argreement to the tune of $21,000 in May 1932. They signed a contract.
How I would love to be a fly on the wall when communists Rivera and Frida Kahlo discussed the theme of the mural with the robber-baron Rockefellers. The theme: “Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future”. By his own account, Rivera was excited to start. But his leftist friends were less impressed that Rivera took a commission from a Rockefeller.
Diego Rivera Begins Painting
Rivera started working on Man at the Crossroads in March 1933.
According to a 2014 exhibition at the Mexican Cultural Institute, this is what Rivera planned on painting:
But that didn’t happen. What Rivera painted instead was a working man squished between ideologies: capitalism and socialism. Like the man in the mural, Rivera also became a linchpin in an artistic ideological tumult.
Weeks went by. Rivera painted. According to Rivera, the Rockefellers seemed happy with the progress.
In Rivera’s memory, the Rockefellers knew about Lenin as he was in early sketches. According to the Mexican Cultural Institute, he painted in Lenin after criticism from his leftist friends. I’m not sure which version is correct, whether Lenin was in sketches from the start or added in later.
Regardless, all seemed well enough in the early weeks of work. That is, until a journalist from the anti-labor newspaper New York World-Telegram interviewed Rivera.
The Tinderbox Interview
Rivera recalls that pivotal interview about his depiction of Lenin:
A newspaper reporter for a New York afternoon paper came to interview me about my work, then nearing completion. […] I said that, as long as the Soviet Union was in existence, Nazi fascism could never be sure of its survival. Therefore, the Soviet Union must expect to be attacked by this reactionary enemy. If the United States wished to preserve its democratic forms, it would ally itself with Russia against fascism. Since Lenin was the pre-eminent founder of the Soviet Union and also the first and most altruistic theorist of modern communism, I used him as the center of the inevitable alliance between the Russian and the American. In doing this, I said, I was quite aware that I was going against public opinion.
Having heard me out, the reporter, smiling politely, remarked that, apart from being a remarkable painter, I was also an excellent humorist.
The next day, April 24, 1933, the New York World-Telegram reported the story with the headline:
Rivera Paints Scenes of Communist Activity and John D. Jr. Foots the Bill
Not unexpectedly, after this news, Nelson Rockefeller wanted to avoid more controversy and asked Rivera to paint out Lenin.
But Rivera offered an alternative: he’d paint Abraham Lincoln surrounded by John Brown, Nat Turner, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. (Ah, what we missed out on.) But, Rockefeller didn’t budge. And Rivera refused to “mutilate his artistic conception and abdicate his opinions.”
The Covering of the Mural
Rivera kept painting his mural, but took photos secretly, suspecting something would go amiss.
It did.
About a fortnight after May Day 1933, Rockefeller finally made his move (with the help of a recently reinforced Radio City private police).
They removed Rivera from the premises, covered the mural, and, according to Rivera, a violent scene broke out:
Other men, meanwhile, removed my scaffold and replaced it with smaller ones, from which they affixed canvas frames covering the entire wall. Other men closed off the entrance with thick curtaining. As I left the building, I heard airplanes roaring overhead. Mounted policemen patrolled the streets. And then one of the very scenes I had depicted in my mural materialized before my eyes. A demonstration of workers began to form; the policemen charged, the workers dispersed; and the back of a seven-year-old girl, whose little legs could not carry her to safety in time, was injured by the blow of a club.
In addition to the loss of the original Man at the Crossroads, Rivera lost other commissions in the United States, including one at the General Motors Building at the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago.
A group of conservative artists, the Advance American Art Commission, eagerly jumped onto the bandwagon and condemned hiring foreign artists like Rivera.
Other artists supported Rivera, including Rockwell Kent, Lewis Mumford, Waldo Piece, and more. They argued the mural belonged to Rivera and there should be no destruction without the artist’s permission. As did the New Workers School. John Sloan, president of the Society of Independent Artists, said he would never exhibit at the Rockefeller Center.
E.B. White even wrote a poem on the topic, published in the New Yorker:
I paint what I paint, I paint what I see,
I paint what I think, said Rivera,
And the thing that is dearest in life to me
In a bourgeois hall is Integrity
- E.B. White
News travelled far and the impact lasted. When the New Deal began its art program, Franklin D. Roosevelt expressed some concern and quipped that he didn't want "a lot of young enthusiasts painting Lenin's head on the Justice Building".
Meanwhile, Dorothy Miller and her partner, Holger Cahill worked hard on an upcoming exhibition, the first Municipal Art Exhibition, planned at the Rockefeller Center for Feburary 1934. Tensions grew thorought the year between supporters and opposers. Free speech and censorship. And like Man at the Crossroads, capitalism and socialism. Artists, including exhibiting artists at the Municipal Art Exhibition, began to boycott the exhibit, including the Society of Independent Artists.
A spokesperson for the Rockefeller Center said they had no intention of damaging the mural.
The Destruction of Man at the Crossroads
Of course, the boycott made the creators of the Municipal Art Exhibition nervous, including Dorothy Miller. While I cannot currently get access to Miller speaking about this incident, there is an oral record. (So let me know if you can access it.) But we know she asked the director of MoMA, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., to step in and help. (Incidentally, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller also appointed Barr. Also in 1932–33, Holger Cahill served as acting director of MoMA.)
Barr and MoMA worked to try to move the mural, but it was not a “movable mural” like the pieces Rivera previously created for MoMA.
Man at the Crossroads was a true fresco and painted into the plaster. It could not be moved.
Lawyers worked in the background as the controversy grew. According to the Time article published on February 26, 1934, “Art: Radical Muralists”, Diego Rivera’s own words encouraged the artist societies’ boycotters to stand down. In May 1933, Rivera said: “Rather than mutilate the conception, I should prefer the physical destruction of the conception in its entirety.”
Legally, the Rockefeller Center held full ownership of Man at the Crossroads in the contract Rivera signed.
Day of Destruction
Accounts differ, but on February 10, 1934, after almost a year languishing behind canvas sheets, Man at the Crossroads was destroyed without notice. The spokesperson’s promise not to destroy the mural was broken, with the flimsy excuse that structural changes required the removal of the painting. The art world was shocked.
Maurice Becker, an artist, of 434 Lafayette Street, said last night that he had been invited to exhibit at the Municipal Art Exhibition but that he would withdraw. He said that H. J. Glintenkamp, another prospective exhibitor, had told him that he would do likewise. Mr. Becker prophesied that many more artists would follow suit […].
The boycott grew, but ultimately fizzled out.
In some accounts, workers tried to “peel off” the mural, but claimed that the fresco crumbled into powder. Others recall an almost gleeful smashing. Rivera remembers the moment, “One last thing remained. In February of 1934, after I had returned to Mexico, my Radio City mural was smashed to pieces from the wall. Thus was a great victory won over a portrait of Lenin; thus was free expression honored in America.”
Whatever happened, the walls were replastered quickly. No trace of Man at the Crossroads remained outside of the pictures Rivera’s assistant took.
The Fallout
In destroying my paintings, the Rockefellers have committed an act of cultural vandalism.
There ought to be, there will yet be, a justice that prevents the assassination of human creation as of human character.
– Diego Rivera
Destruction of art is painful, whatever the circumstances. Truly, if you get the chance to see Diego Rivera’s murals in person, do so. And if you’re in the United States, check out the New Deal post office murals likely inspired by him, which may be a little closer to home than you realize.
This destruction occurred just weeks before the Municipal Art Exhibition, where 1,200 pieces of art by artists associated with New York waited for exhibition at the Rockefeller Center. I cannot find anywhere that states the mural’s destruction correlated directly to the opening, but it seems too convenient not to be related. Too many players gained from removing this distraction from the exhibition.
But I cannot think of a clearer indication of the future path of American art. The destruction of Man at the Crossroads signaled a capitulation to capitalism and individualism. The road at the crossroads depicted in the mural clearly has been chosen.
And with that, we’ll return in the next post to Dorothy Miller and the First Municipal Exhibition at the Rockefeller. Where she gained prominence, and how the form of MoMA group exhibitions and their accompanying artist statements ultimately took shape.
(But first, I’m moving across the country.)
