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Understanding Heidegger on Technology

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was perhaps the most divisive philosopher of the twentieth century. Many hold him to be the most original and important thinker of his era. Others spurn him as an obscurantist and a charlatan, while still others see his reprehensible affiliation with the Nazis as a reason to ignore or reject his thinking altogether. But Heidegger’s undoubted influence on contemporary philosophy and his unique insight into the place of technology in modern life make him a thinker worthy of careful study.

In his landmark book Being and Time (1927), Heidegger made the bold claim that Western thought from Plato onward had forgotten or ignored the fundamental question of what it means for something to be — to be present for us prior to any philosophical or scientific analysis. He sought to clarify throughout his work how, since the rise of Greek philosophy, Western civilization had been on a trajectory toward nihilism, and he believed that the contemporary cultural and intellectual crisis — our decline toward nihilism — was intimately linked to this forgetting of being. Only a rediscovery of being and the realm in which it is revealed might save modern man.

In his later writings on technology, which mainly concern us in this essay, Heidegger draws attention to technology’s place in bringing about our decline by constricting our experience of things as they are. He argues that we now view nature, and increasingly human beings too, only technologically — that is, we see nature and people only as raw material for technical operations. Heidegger seeks to illuminate this phenomenon and to find a way of thinking by which we might be saved from its controlling power, to which, he believes, modern civilization both in the communist East and the democratic West has been shackled. We might escape this bondage, Heidegger argues, not by rejecting technology, but by perceiving its danger.

Heidegger’s Life and Influence

The son of a sexton, Martin Heidegger was born in southern Germany in 1889 and was schooled for the priesthood from an early age. He began his training as a seminary student, but then concentrated increasingly on philosophy, natural science, and mathematics, receiving a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Freiburg. Shortly after the end of the Great War (in which he served briefly near its conclusion), he started his teaching career at Freiburg in 1919 as the assistant to Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. Heidegger’s courses soon became popular among Germany’s students. In 1923 he began to teach at the University of Marburg, and then took Husserl’s post at Freiburg after Husserl retired from active teaching in 1928. The publication of Being and Time in 1927 had sealed his reputation in Europe as a significant thinker.

Heidegger’s influence is indicated in part by the reputation of those who studied under him and who respected his intellectual force. Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans Jonas, Jacob Klein, Karl Löwith, and Leo Strauss all took classes with Heidegger. Among these students, even those who broke from Heidegger’s teachings understood him to be the deepest thinker of his time. Although he became recognized as the leading figure of existentialism, he distanced himself from the existentialism of philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre. In Heidegger’s view, they turned his unique thought about man’s being in the world into yet another nihilistic assertion of the dominance of human beings over all things. He insisted that terms such as anxiety, care, resoluteness, and authenticity, which had become famous through Being and Time, were for him elements of the “openness of being” in which we find ourselves, not psychological characteristics or descriptions of human willfulness, as some existentialists understood them.

Heidegger’s intellectual reputation in the United States preceded much direct acquaintance with his work because of the prominence of existentialism and the influence of his students, several of whom had fled Germany for the United States long before translators began producing English editions of his important works. (Being and Time was first translated in 1962.) Arendt in particular, who had immigrated to America in the early 1940s, encouraged the introduction of her teacher’s work into the United States. Heidegger’s most popular if indirect significance was during existentialism’s heyday from the end of the Second World War until its nearly simultaneous apotheosis and collapse on the hazy streets of San Francisco. Late Sixties Be-Ins — mass gatherings in celebration of American counterculture — appropriated existentialist themes; Heidegger’s intellectual rigor had been turned into mush, but it was still more or less recognizably Heideggerian mush. Herbert Marcuse, a hero to the more intellectual among the Sixties gaggle, was an early student of Heidegger’s, and his books such as Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man owe something to him, if more to Freud and, especially, Marx.

After the 1960s, Heidegger’s intellectual radicalism became increasingly domesticated by the American academy, where wild spirits so often go to die a lingering bourgeois death. His works were translated, taught, and transformed into theses fit for tenure-committee review. Still, Heidegger’s influence among American philosophy professors has remained limited (although not entirely negligible), since most of them are, as Nietzsche might say, essentially gastroenterologists with a theoretical bent. Heidegger became more influential, though usually indirectly, for the ways artists and architects talk about their work — no one can conjure a “built space” quite as well as Heidegger does, for instance in his essay “Building Dwelling Thinking.” And much of Heidegger can also be heard in the deconstructionist lingo of literary “theory” that over the past forty years has nearly killed literature. The result is that “Heidegger” is now a minor academic industry in many American humanities departments, even as he remains relatively unappreciated by most professional philosophers.

But Heidegger’s influence is not only limited by the lack of respect most of our philosophy professors have toward his work. More troubling for many both within and outside the academy is Heidegger’s affiliation with the Nazis before and during the Second World War. His mentor Edmund Husserl was dismissed from the University of Freiburg in 1933 because of his Jewish background. Heidegger became rector of the university in that same year, and joined the Nazi party, of which he remained a member until the end of the war. Even though he resigned the rectorship after less than a year and distanced himself from the party not long after joining, he never publicly denounced the party nor publicly regretted his membership. (He is said to have once remarked privately to a student that his political involvement with the Nazis was “the greatest stupidity of his life.”) After the war, on the recommendation of erstwhile friends such as Karl Jaspers, he was banned by the Allied forces from teaching until 1951.

For obvious reasons, some of Heidegger’s friends and followers have, from the end of the war to the present day, obfuscated the relationship between Heidegger’s thought and his politics. They are surely aided in this by Heidegger’s masterful ambiguity — for him it really does depend on what the meaning of the word “is” is. His admirers do not want his work to be ignored preemptively because of his affiliation with the Nazis. Heidegger, after all, was not Hitler’s confidant, or an architect of the war and the extermination camps, but a thinker who engaged in several shameful actions toward Jews, and for a time supported the Nazis publicly, and thought he could lead the regime intellectually.

This matter has come under renewed attention with the recent release of Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks,” which are a kind of philosophical diary he kept in the 1930s and 1940s and whose contents fill a six-hundred-page volume. In his will, Heidegger had requested that these notebooks not be published until after the rest of his extensive work was released. The notebooks’ editor, Peter Trawny, reports that they contain hostile references to “world Jewry” that indicate “that anti-Semitism tied in to his philosophy.” Careful study of these notebooks will be required to determine whether they in fact provide new evidence of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism and affiliation with the Nazis that is even more damning than what is already widely known. No one who has examined Heidegger is surprised by what has been reported. But the question still remains whether Heidegger’s thought and politics are intrinsically linked, or whether, as his apologists would have it, his thought is no more (and in fact, less) related to his politics than it is to his interest in soccer and skiing. In truth, it would be surprising if the connection between the philosophy and the political beliefs and actions of a thinker of Heidegger’s rank were simply random.

In fact, Heidegger’s association with the Nazis was far from accidental. One of his infamous remarks on politics was a statement about the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism that he made in a 1935 lecture course. In a 1953 republication of that speech as Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger appended a parenthetical clarification, which he claimed was written but not delivered in 1935, of what he believed that “inner truth and greatness” to be: “the encounter between global technology and modern humanity.” Some scholars, taking the added comment as a criticism of the Nazis, point to Heidegger’s explanation, following the speech’s publication, that the meaning of the original comment would have been clear to anyone who understood the speech correctly. But perhaps we should not be surprised to find a thinker so worried about “global technology” affiliating with the Nazi Party in the first place. The Nazis were opposed to the two dominant forms of government of the day that Heidegger associated with “global technology,” communism and democracy. In another of Heidegger’s infamous political remarks, made in that same 1935 lecture, he claimed that “Russia and America, seen metaphysically, are both the same: the same hopeless frenzy of enchained technology and of the rootless organization of the average man.” The Nazi’s rhetoric about “blood and soil” and the mythology of an ancient, wise, and virtuous German Volk might also have appealed to someone concerned with the homogenizing consequences of globalization and technology. More broadly, Heidegger’s thought always was and remained illiberal, tending to encompass all matters, philosophy and politics among them, in a single perspective, ignoring the freedom of most people to act independently. The ways in which liberal democracies promote excellence and useful competition were not among the political ideas to which Heidegger’s thought was open. His totalizing, illiberal thought made his joining the Nazis much more likely than his condemning them.

The study of Heidegger is both dangerous and difficult — the way he is taught today threatens to obscure his thought’s connection to his politics while at the same time transforming his work into fodder for the aimless curiosity of the academic industry. Heidegger would not be surprised to discover that he is now part of the problem that he meant to address. But if, as Heidegger hoped, his works are to help us understand the challenges technology presents, we must study him both carefully and cautiously — carefully, to appreciate the depth and complexity of his thought, and cautiously, in light of his association with the Nazis.

Technology as Revealing

Heidegger’s concern with technology is not limited to his writings that are explicitly dedicated to it, and a full appreciation of his views on technology requires some understanding of how the problem of technology fits into his broader philosophical project and phenomenological approach. (Phenomenology, for Heidegger, is a method that tries to let things show themselves in their own way, and not see them in advance through a technical or theoretical lens.) The most important argument in Being and Time that is relevant for Heidegger’s later thinking about technology is that theoretical activities such as the natural sciences depend on views of time and space that narrow the understanding implicit in how we deal with the ordinary world of action and concern. We cannot construct meaningful distance and direction, or understand the opportunities for action, from science’s neutral, mathematical understanding of space and time. Indeed, this detached and “objective” scientific view of the world restricts our everyday understanding. Our ordinary use of things and our “concernful dealings” within the world are pathways to a more fundamental and more truthful understanding of man and being than the sciences provide; science flattens the richness of ordinary concern. By placing science back within the realm of experience from which it originates, and by examining the way our scientific understanding of time, space, and nature derives from our more fundamental experience of the world, Heidegger, together with his teacher Husserl and some of his students such as Jacob Klein and Alexandre Koyré, helped to establish new ways of thinking about the history and philosophy of science.

Heidegger applies this understanding of experience in later writings that are focused explicitly on technology, where he goes beyond the traditional view of technology as machines and technical procedures. He instead tries to think through the essence of technology as a way in which we encounter entities generally, including nature, ourselves, and, indeed, everything. Heidegger’s most influential work on technology is the lecture “The Question Concerning Technology,” published in 1954, which was a revised version of part two of a four-part lecture series he delivered in Bremen in 1949 (his first public speaking appearance since the end of the war). These Bremen lectures have recently been translated into English, for the first time, by Andrew J. Mitchell.

Introducing the Bremen lectures, Heidegger observes that because of technology, “all distances in time and space are shrinking” and “yet the hasty setting aside of all distances brings no nearness; for nearness does not consist in a small amount of distance.” The lectures set out to examine what this nearness is that remains absent and is “even warded off by the restless removal of distances.” As we shall see, we have become almost incapable of experiencing this nearness, let alone understanding it, because all things increasingly present themselves to us as technological: we see them and treat them as what Heidegger calls a “standing reserve,” supplies in a storeroom, as it were, pieces of inventory to be ordered and conscripted, assembled and disassembled, set up and set aside. Everything approaches us merely as a source of energy or as something we must organize. We treat even human capabilities as though they were only means for technological procedures, as when a worker becomes nothing but an instrument for production. Leaders and planners, along with the rest of us, are mere human resources to be arranged, rearranged, and disposed of. Each and every thing that presents itself technologically thereby loses its distinctive independence and form. We push aside, obscure, or simply cannot see, other possibilities.

Common attempts to rectify this situation don’t solve the problem and instead are part of it. We tend to believe that technology is a means to our ends and a human activity under our control. But in truth we now conceive of means, ends, and ourselves as fungible and manipulable. Control and direction are technological control and direction. Our attempts to master technology still remain within its walls, reinforcing them. As Heidegger says in the third of his Bremen lectures, “all this opining concerning technology” — the common critique of technology that denounces its harmful effects, as well as the belief that technology is nothing but a blessing, and especially the view that technology is a neutral tool to be wielded either for good or evil — all of this only shows “how the dominance of the essence of technology orders into its plundering even and especially the human conceptions concerning technology.” This is because “with all these conceptions and valuations one is from the outset unwittingly in agreement that technology would be a means to an end.” This “instrumental” view of technology is correct, but it “does not show us technology’s essence.” It is correct because it sees something pertinent about technology, but it is essentially misleading and not true because it does not see how technology is a way that all entities, not merely machines and technical processes, now present themselves.

Of course, were there no way out of technological thinking, Heidegger’s own standpoint, however sophisticated, would also be trapped within it. He attempts to show a way out — a way to think about technology that is not itself beholden to technology. This leads us into a realm that will be familiar to those acquainted with Heidegger’s work on “being,” the central issue in Being and Time and one that is also prominent in some of the Bremen lectures. The basic phenomenon that belongs together with being is truth, or “revealing,” which is the phenomenon Heidegger brings forward in his discussion in “The Question Concerning Technology.” Things can show or reveal themselves to us in different ways, and it is attention to this that will help us recognize that technology is itself one of these ways, but only one. Other kinds of revealing, and attention to the realm of truth and being as such, will allow us to “experience the technological within its own bounds.”

Only then will “another whole realm for the essence of technology … open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth.” Placing ourselves back in this realm avoids the reduction of things and of ourselves to mere supplies and reserves. This step, however, does not guarantee that we will fully enter, live within, or experience this realm. Nor can we predict what technology’s fate or ours will be once we do experience it. We can at most say that older and more enduring ways of thought and experience might be reinvigorated and re-inspired. Heidegger believes his work to be preparatory, illuminating ways of being and of being human that are not merely technological.

One way by which Heidegger believes he can enter this realm is by attending to the original meaning of crucial words and the phenomena they reveal. Original language — words that precede explicit philosophical, technological, and scientific thought and sometimes survive in colloquial speech — often shows what is true more tellingly than modern speech does. (Some poets are for Heidegger better guides on the quest for truth than professional philosophers.) The two decisive languages, Heidegger thinks, are Greek and German; Greek because our philosophical heritage derives its terms from it (often in distorted form), and German, because its words can often be traced to an origin undistorted by philosophical reflection or by Latin interpretations of the Greek. (Some critics believe that Heidegger’s reliance on what they think are fanciful etymologies warps his understanding.)

Much more worrisome, however, is that Heidegger’s thought, while promising a comprehensive view of the essence of technology, by virtue of its inclusiveness threatens to blur distinctions that are central to human concerns. Moreover, his emphasis on technology’s broad and uncanny scope ignores or occludes the importance and possibility of ethical and political choice. This twofold problem is most evident in the best-known passage from the second Bremen lecture: “Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of countries, the same as the production of hydrogen bombs.” From what standpoint could mechanized agriculture and the Nazis’ extermination camps be “in essence the same”? If there is such a standpoint, should it not be ignored or at least modified because it overlooks or trivializes the most significant matters of choice, in this case the ability to detect and deal with grave injustice? Whatever the full and subtle meaning of “in essence the same” is, Heidegger fails to address the difference in ethical weight between the two phenomena he compares, or to show a path for just political choice. While Heidegger purports to attend to concrete, ordinary experience, he does not consider seriously justice and injustice as fundamental aspects of this experience. Instead, Heidegger claims that what is “horrifying” is not any of technology’s particular harmful effects but “what transposes … all that is out of its previous essence” — that is to say, what is dangerous is that technology displaces beings from what they originally were, hindering our ability to experience them truly.

What Is the Essence of Technology?

Let us now follow Heidegger’s understanding of technology more exactingly, relying on the Bremen lectures and “The Question Concerning Technology,” and beginning with four points of Heidegger’s critique (some of which we have already touched on).

First, the essence of technology is not something we make; it is a mode of being, or of revealing. This means that technological things have their own novel kind of presence, endurance, and connections among parts and wholes. They have their own way of presenting themselves and the world in which they operate. The essence of technology is, for Heidegger, not the best or most characteristic instance of technology, nor is it a nebulous generality, a form or idea. Rather, to consider technology essentially is to see it as an event to which we belong: the structuring, ordering, and “requisitioning” of everything around us, and of ourselves. The second point is that technology even holds sway over beings that we do not normally think of as technological, such as gods and history. Third, the essence of technology as Heidegger discusses it is primarily a matter of modern and industrial technology. He is less concerned with the ancient and old tools and techniques that antedate modernity; the essence of technology is revealed in factories and industrial processes, not in hammers and plows. And fourth, for Heidegger, technology is not simply the practical application of natural science. Instead, modern natural science can understand nature in the characteristically scientific manner only because nature has already, in advance, come to light as a set of calculable, orderable forces — that is to say, technologically.

Some concrete examples from Heidegger’s writings will help us develop these themes. When Heidegger says that technology reveals things to us as “standing reserve,” he means that everything is imposed upon or “challenged” to be an orderly resource for technical application, which in turn we take as a resource for further use, and so on interminably. For example, we challenge land to yield coal, treating the land as nothing but a coal reserve. The coal is then stored, “on call, ready to deliver the sun’s warmth that is stored in it,” which is then “challenged forth for heat, which in turn is ordered to deliver steam whose pressure turns the wheels that keep a factory running.” The factories are themselves challenged to produce tools “through which once again machines are set to work and maintained.”

The passive voice in this account indicates that these acts occur not primarily by our own doing; we belong to the activity. Technological conscriptions of things occur in a sense prior to our actual technical use of them, because things must be (and be seen as) already available resources in order for them to be used in this fashion. This availability makes planning for technical ends possible; it is the heart of what in the Sixties and Seventies was called the inescapable “system.” But these technical ends are never ends in themselves: “A success is that type of consequence that itself remains assigned to the yielding of further consequences.” This chain does not move toward anything that has its own presence, but, instead, “only enters into its circuit,” and is “regulating and securing” natural resources and energies in this never-ending fashion.

Technology also replaces the familiar connection of parts to wholes; everything is just an exchangeable piece. For example, while a deer or a tree or a wine jug may “stand on its own” and have its own presence, an automobile does not: it is challenged “for a further conducting along, which itself sets in place the promotion of commerce.” Machines and other pieces of inventory are not parts of self-standing wholes, but arrive piece by piece. These pieces do share themselves with others in a sort of unity, but they are isolated, “shattered,” and confined to a “circuit of orderability.” The isolated pieces, moreover, are uniform and exchangeable. We can replace one piece of standing reserve with another. By contrast, “My hand … is not a piece of me. I myself am entirely in each gesture of the hand, every single time.”

Human beings too are now exchangeable pieces. A forester “is today positioned by the lumber industry. Whether he knows it or not, he is in his own way a piece of inventory in the cellulose stock” delivered to newspapers and magazines. These in turn, as Heidegger puts it in “The Question Concerning Technology,” “set public opinion to swallowing what is printed, so that a set configuration of opinion becomes available on demand.” Similarly, radio and its employees belong to the standing reserve of the public sphere; everything in the public sphere is ordered “for anyone and everyone without distinction.” Even the radio listener, whom we are nowadays accustomed to thinking of as a free consumer of mass media — after all, he “is entirely free to turn the device on and off” — is actually still confined in the technological system of producing public opinion. “Indeed, he is only free in the sense that each time he must free himself from the coercive insistence of the public sphere that nevertheless ineluctably persists.”

But the essence of technology does not just affect things and people. It “attacks everything that is: Nature and history, humans, and divinities.” When theologians on occasion cite the beauty of atomic physics or the subtleties of quantum mechanics as evidence for the existence of God, they have, Heidegger says, placed God “into the realm of the orderable.” God becomes technologized. (Heidegger’s word for the essence of technology is Gestell. While the translator of the Bremen lectures, Andrew Mitchell, renders it as “positionality,” William Lovitt, the translator of “The Question Concerning Technology” in 1977 chose the term “enframing.” It almost goes without saying that neither term can bring out all the nuances that Heidegger has in mind.)

The heart of the matter for Heidegger is thus not in any particular machine, process, or resource, but rather in the “challenging”: the way the essence of technology operates on our understanding of all matters and on the presence of those matters themselves — the all-pervasive way we confront (and are confronted by) the technological world. Everything encountered technologically is exploited for some technical use. It is important to note, as suggested earlier, that when Heidegger speaks of technology’s essence in terms of challenging or positionality, he speaks of modern technology, and excludes traditional arts and tools that we might in some sense consider technological. For instance, the people who cross the Rhine by walking over a simple bridge might also seem to be using the bridge to challenge the river, making it a piece in an endless chain of use. But Heidegger argues that the bridge in fact allows the river to be itself, to stand within its own flow and form. By contrast, a hydroelectric plant and its dams and structures transform the river into just one more element in an energy-producing sequence. Similarly, the traditional activities of peasants do not “challenge the farmland.” Rather, they protect the crops, leaving them “to the discretion of the growing forces,” whereas “agriculture is now a mechanized food industry.”

Modern machines are therefore not merely more developed, or self-propelled, versions of old tools such as water or spinning wheels. Technology’s essence “has already from the outset abolished all those places where the spinning wheel and water mill previously stood.” Heidegger is not concerned with the elusive question of precisely dating the origin of modern technology, a question that some think important in order to understand it. But he does claim that well before the rise of industrial mechanization in the eighteenth century, technology’s essence was already in place. “It first of all lit up the region within which the invention of something like power-producing machines could at all be sought out and attempted.” We cannot capture the essence of technology by describing the makeup of a machine, for “every construction of every machine already moves within the essential space of technology.”

Even if the essence of technology does not originate in the rise of mechanization, can we at least show how it follows from the way we apprehend nature? After all, Heidegger says, the essence of technology “begins its reign” when modern natural science is born in the early seventeenth century. But in fact we cannot show this because in Heidegger’s view the relationship between science and technology is the reverse of how we usually think it to be; natural forces and materials belong to technology, rather than the other way around. It was technological thinking that first understood nature in such a way that nature could be challenged to unlock its forces and energy. The challenge preceded the unlocking; the essence of technology is thus prior to natural science. “Modern technology is not applied natural science, far more is modern natural science the application of the essence of technology.” Nature is therefore “the fundamental piece of inventory of the technological standing reserve — and nothing else.”

Given this view of technology, it follows that any scientific account obscures the essential being of many things, including their nearness. So when Heidegger discusses technology and nearness, he assures us that he is not simply repeating the cliché that technology makes the world smaller. “What is decisive,” he writes, “is not that the distances are diminishing with the help of technology, but rather that nearness remains outstanding.” In order to experience nearness, we must encounter things in their truth. And no matter how much we believe that science will let us “encounter the actual in its actuality,” science only offers us representations of things. It “only ever encounters that which its manner of representation has previously admitted as a possible object for itself.”

An example from the second lecture illustrates what Heidegger means. Scientifically speaking, the distance between a house and the tree in front of it can be measured neutrally: it is thirty feet. But in our everyday lives, that distance is not as neutral, not as abstract. Instead, the distance is an aspect of our concern with the tree and the house: the experience of walking, of seeing the tree’s shape grow larger as I come closer, and of the growing separation from the home as I walk away from it. In the scientific account, “distance appears to be first achieved in an opposition” between viewer and object. By becoming indifferent to things as they concern us, by representing both the distance and the object as simple but useful mathematical entities or philosophical ideas, we lose our truest experience of nearness and distance.

Turning To and Away from Danger

It is becoming clear by now that in order to understand the essence of technology we must also understand things non-technologically; we must enter the realm where things can show themselves to us truthfully in a manner not limited to the technological. But technology is such a domineering force that it all but eliminates our ability to experience this realm. The possibility of understanding the interrelated, meaningful, practical involvements with our surroundings that Heidegger describes is almost obliterated. The danger is that technology’s domination fully darkens and makes us forget our understanding of ourselves as the beings who can stand within this realm.

The third Bremen lecture lays out just how severe the problem is. While we have already seen how the essence of technology prevents us from encountering the reality of the world, now Heidegger points out that technology has become the world (“world and positionality are the same”). Technology reigns, and we therefore forget being altogether and our own essential freedom — we no longer even realize the world we have lost. Ways of experiencing distance and time other than through the ever more precise neutral measuring with rulers and clocks become lost to us; they no longer seem to be types of knowing at all but are at most vague poetic representations. While many other critics of technology point to obvious dangers associated with it, Heidegger emphasizes a different kind of threat: the possibility that it may prevent us from experiencing “the call of a more primal truth.” The problem is not just that technology makes it harder for us to access that realm, but that it makes us altogether forget that the realm exists.

Yet, Heidegger argues, recognizing this danger allows us to glimpse and then respond to what is forgotten. The understanding of man’s essence as openness to this realm and of technology as only one way in which things can reveal themselves is the guide for keeping technology within its proper bounds. Early in the fourth and last Bremen lecture, Heidegger asks if the danger of technology means “that the human is powerless against technology and delivered over to it for better or worse.” No, he says. The question, however, is not how one should act with regard to technology — the question that seems to be “always closest and solely urgent” — but how we should think, for technology “can never be overcome,” we are never its master. Proper thinking and speaking, on the other hand, allow us to be ourselves and to reveal being. “Language is … never merely the expression of thinking, feeling, and willing. Language is the inceptual dimension within which the human essence is first capable of corresponding to being.” It is through language, by a way of thinking, that “we first learn to dwell in the realm” of being.

The thought that opens up the possibility of a “turn” away from technology and toward its essential realm is the realization of its danger. Heidegger quotes the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin: “But where the danger is, there grows also what saves.” By illuminating this danger, Heidegger’s path of thinking is a guide for turning away from it. The turn brings us to a place in which the truth of being becomes visible as if by a flash of lightning. This flash does not just illuminate the truth of being, it also illuminates us: we are “caught sight of in the insight.” As our own essence comes to light, if we disavow “human stubbornness” and cast ourselves “before this insight,” so too does the essence of technology come to light.

The Way of Nature and Poetry

Acloser look at “The Question Concerning Technology” and some of the ways it adds to the Bremen lectures will help us further to clarify Heidegger’s view. In the Bremen lectures, Heidegger focuses on the contrast between entities seen as pieces in an endless technological chain on the one hand, and “things” that reveal being by bringing to light the rich interplay between gods and humans, earth and sky on the other. His example of such a “thing” in the first lecture is a wine jug used for sacrificial libation: The full jug gathers in itself the earth’s nutrients, rain, sunshine, human festivities, and the gift to the gods. All of these together help us understand what the wine jug is. In “The Question Concerning Technology,” it is products understood in a certain way that Heidegger contrasts with technology’s revealing. Drawing on Aristotle’s account of formal, final, material, and efficient causes, Heidegger argues that both nature (physis) and art (poiesis) are ways of “bringing-forth” — of unconcealing that which is concealed. What is natural is self-producing, self-arising, self-illuminating, not what can be calculated in order to become a formless resource. Poetry also brings things to presence. Heidegger explains that the Greek word techne, from which “technology” derives, at one time also meant the “bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful” and “the poiesis of the fine arts.”

In contrast to Heidegger’s notion of a thing or of revealing stands the kind of objectivity for which our natural sciences strive. But in spite of what Heidegger himself borrows from Greek thought, he emphasizes that there is a link between modern technology and classic philosophy because of Plato’s understanding of being as permanent presence. For Plato, the “idea” of a thing — what it is — is its enduring look, which “is not and never will be perceivable with physical eyes” and cannot be experienced with the other senses either. This attention to what is purely present in contemplation, Heidegger argues, ultimately leads us to forget the being of things, what is brought forth, and the world of human concern.

Heidegger’s brief sketches in these lectures suggest powerful alternatives to technological understanding that help us to recognize its limits. In “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger’s hope is to “prepare a free relationship to [technology]. The relationship will be free if it opens our human existence to the essence of technology.” It is not the case “that technology is the fate of our age, where ‘fate’ means the inevitableness of an unalterable course.” Experiencing technology as a kind — but only one kind — of revealing, and seeing man’s essential place as one that is open to different kinds of revealing frees us from “the stultified compulsion to push on blindly with technology or, what comes to the same, to rebel helplessly against it and curse it as the work of the devil.” Indeed, Heidegger says at the end of the lecture, our examining or questioning of the essence of technology and other kinds of revealing is “the piety of thought.” By this questioning we may be saved from technology’s rule.

Meaning and Mortality

Heidegger’s discussions offer several useful directions for dealing with technology, even if one disagrees with elements of his analysis. Consider his view of distance, where he differentiates neutral measured distance and geometrical shape from the spaces and distances with which we concern ourselves day by day. Someone thousands of miles away can be immediately present to one’s feelings and thoughts. Two tables may have identical size, yet each may be too big or small for comfortable, practical, or beautiful use. Heidegger’s understanding of the importance of space changes somewhat in his works, but what matters for us is his insistence that our understanding of the spaces in which we live is neither inferior nor reducible to a neutral, technical, scientific understanding of space. This is also true of time, direction, and similar matters. Perhaps most profoundly, Heidegger attempts to make visible an understanding of what is present, enduring, and essential that differs from a notion of the eternal based on time understood narrowly and neutrally. Heidegger’s alternatives provide ways to clarify the irreducibility of our experience to what we can capture technologically, or through natural science. One example of this irreducibility is Aristotle’s virtue, which acts in light of the right time, the right place, and the right amount, not in terms of measures that are abstracted from experience. Ordinary human ways of understanding are not mere folk opinion that is subservient to science, as some might say; they offer an account of how things are that can be true in its own way.

A second direction that Heidegger gives us for properly situating technology is his novel understanding of human being. For Heidegger, the traits that make us human are connected to our openness to being and to what can be revealed, to our standing in a clearing where things can approach us meaningfully. One feature of this understanding is that Heidegger pays attention to the place of moods as well as of reason in allowing things to be intelligible. Another feature is his concern for the unity in meaning in what is and is not, in presence and absence. For instance, an absent friend impresses on us the possibility of friendship as much as one who stands before us.

Central to Heidegger’s understanding of human being is the importance of death and dying in our understanding of our independence and wholeness. The importance of dying governs his choice of one of the examples he uses in the second Bremen lecture to clarify the difference between technology and ordinary concern:

The carpenter produces a table, but also a coffin…. [He] does not complete a box for a corpse. The coffin is from the outset placed in a privileged spot of the farmhouse where the dead peasant still lingers. There, a coffin is still called a “death-tree.” The death of the deceased flourishes in it. This flourishing determines the house and farmstead, the ones who dwell there, their kin, and the neighborhood. Everything is otherwise in the motorized burial industry of the big city. Here no death-trees are produced.

The significance of mortality fits together with Heidegger’s thought about reverence and gods. Gratitude, thankfulness, and restraint are proper responses to knowing ourselves as beings who are mortal. Heidegger does not have in mind dignity in a conventional moral or Christian sense. Rather, he has in view the inviolability of being human and of things as they can be revealed. Reestablishing the experience of reverence is central for limiting the control of technological thinking.

The Necessity of Making Distinctions

Heidegger’s arguments about technology also raise several difficulties. Most pressingly, he obscures the grounds for ranking what we may choose, and thus for choice itself. How exactly are the death camps different from, and more horrible than, mechanized agriculture, if they are “in essence” the same? How can we understand technology to be powerful but not so rigidly encompassing as to eclipse possibilities for ethical action?

Heidegger’s analysis of technology has something in common with what the early modern thinkers — from Machiavelli through Locke and beyond — who first established the link between modern science and practical life, considered to be radical in their endeavors: the importance of truth merely as effectiveness, of nature as conquerable, of energy and force as tools for control. In contrast to Heidegger, however, for these thinkers such views are tied to a larger argument about happiness and what is good. Now, these early modern views of science and practical life — and alternative views, such as those expressed in classical thought — seem to be the true grounds for understanding the dominance of technology, and also for our ability to limit this dominance. The question we must ask is what Heidegger adds to the discussion of these thinkers, if they account for the realm of openness, revealing, and significance that Heidegger appears to have discovered, while affording grounds for moral ranking and prudential judgment absent in Heidegger.

Indeed, one might ask (despite Heidegger’s objection to the question) whence technology arises in its essence. Is the way that beings present themselves to us meaningful only in Heidegger’s sense, or can an account be given for this meaning that at the same time allows and even demands moral choice and openness to being beyond what Heidegger allows? Because matters appear to us technologically in a way that seems tied to choices we make based on particular views of happiness, of the good, and of the sacred (all of which are at least to some extent subject to rational discussion), isn’t it true that everything technological can be judged, disputed, evaluated, and ranked? Is our understanding of happiness, of the good, and of the sacred truly subservient to a prior understanding of entities as technological, or is it instead interspersed and coeval with it, or even prior to it?

We see in Heidegger’s other works instances where he amalgamates radical differences, similar to if less grotesque than comparing death camps and mechanized agriculture, such as his claim that America and communist Russia are “metaphysically” the same, both equally dominated by technology and the “rootless organization of the average man.” This claim again indicates how Heidegger’s view of metaphysical identity can distort significant differences, and how to attend to and choose among them. Things that present themselves technologically in Heidegger’s sense seem so controlled by a pervasive unified horizon that the possibility of our grasping and ranking these differences — whether from within a technological understanding or from outside — remains obscure. In response, we might suggest that the distortion and the overreaching that make elements of technology questionable are in fact visible within technological activity itself because of the larger political and ordered world to which it belongs. This is not a causally reductive relation, but a descriptive and organizing one. To experience technology is also to experience its limits. We recognize the gulf between death camps and mechanized agriculture, and the difference in kind between Soviet tyranny and American freedom, despite seeming similarities with respect to the place of technology, because these belong to larger wholes about which we can judge. Perhaps the key to understanding technology and to guiding it is, despite Heidegger’s animadversions, precisely to wonder about the ordinary question of how to use technology well, not piece by piece to serve isolated desires, but as part of a whole way of life.

~ Mark Blitz · Winter 2014.

[impressivepress]

Judge Approves Historic Detroit Bankruptcy Plan, Protecting Its Museum

Judge Steven Rhodes approved Detroit’s bankruptcy plan today, allowing the city to move out of insolvency in the coming weeks and slowly towards financial independence. Rhodes called the plan “fair and feasible,” the Detroit Free Press reports, “providing the legal authority for the city to slash more than $7 billion in unsecured liabilities and reinvest $1.4 billion over 10 years in public services and blight removal.”

The fate of the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) has been bound up with the bankruptcy from the beginning; fears were first raised in May 2013 over the possibility that the city would try to force the sale of artworks from the museum’s collection in order to raise cash. In response, US Chief District Judge Gerald Rosen brokered a deal dubbed the “grand bargain,” which Rhodes approved today; it involves a number of nonprofit foundations, the state of Michigan, and the DIA itself committing a combined $816 over the next 20 years to a fund that will be used to pay off some of Detroit’s underfunded pensions. In exchange, the museum will be spun off from the city into an independent institution (to protect it should situations like the current one arise again).

Pensioners and creditors were initially resistant to the grand bargain, arguing that an appraisal conducted by Christie’s on behalf of the city did not reflect the true value of the museum’s collection, but the pensioners voted in July to accept the plan. Regarding the financial creditors, among them bond insurers Syncora and Financial Guaranty Insurance Co., the Free Press explains:

But they dropped their objections after reaching settlements in the middle of a 24-day trial featuring 41 witnesses and 2,327 exhibits on the viability of the city’s plan of adjustment. Both wound up with cash and city-owned property as part of their settlements.

“On the one hand, the received wisdom has been that the judge was going to rule in favor of the plan, and so we are thrilled and delighted that that particular projection turned out to be true,” DIA director Graham Beal told Hyperallergic in a brief conversation about the ruling. “We took pleasure and pride that the DIA presented a very strong case, because this has been consuming us for well over 18 months now, and in the end you learn nothing is certain. Here we were in a situation where there was simply no precedent anywhere. [And] because the collection belonged to the city, we, the private organization that runs the museum, were not central to the legal proceedings. This was the city that was in court, not the DIA.”

Beal explained that all the details are in order to enact the grand bargain — including the museum’s independence from the city — and “at the first moment” after a potential legal stay, “we will file the papers, our contributions to the grand bargain will be put into place, and the deal will be done. In a matter of moments.”

“Now, when people give money or art to the museum, they know it’s going to the museum and there’s no chance of it getting tangled up in city business,” he added. But Beal also pointed out that, although the bankruptcy battle is won, the museum still faces a long road to financial health. “We had a tax passed in 2012 so that we wouldn’t need to rely on [those donations] anymore, and this whole thing has taken two years out of a 10-year campaign. We’re going against the clock right now — we just lost two years in which we were hoping to have raised a target of $200 million. It’s back on that treadmill.”

Hopefully Rhodes’s ruling will help bolster the DIA in those efforts.

~ Jillian Steinhauer · November 7, 2014.

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How Frida Kahlo’s Miscarriage Put Her On The Path To Becoming An Iconic Artist

Before Frida Kahlo reached her 25th birthday, the Mexican artist had contracted polio, survived a horrific bus accident and endured a traumatic miscarriage. However, the loss of her baby — compounded by the alienation she was experiencing while living in Detroit — shaped her artistic vision and propelled her career forward, as shown in a new exhibition put on by the museum that brought her to the city 80 years ago.

“Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit” opens Sunday at the Detroit Institute of Arts. It looks at the time the couple spent in Detroit in 1932 as Rivera — by then an acclaimed artist — painted the “Detroit Industry” murals commissioned for the museum.

The cycle of frescoes celebrating the city’s booming industries wrap around the central court and are a foundation of its collection. Large scale “cartoons” Rivera drew as studies for the murals are shown in the exhibition for the first time in nearly 30 years.

But as Rivera worked on his famous murals, Kahlo was making some of her early definitive work, now shown for the first time in the city where it was made.

“Frida began work on a series of masterpieces which had no precedent in the history of art — paintings which exalted the feminine qualities of endurance of truth, reality, cruelty, and suffering,” Rivera said in his as-told-to autobiography My Art, My Life. “Never before had a woman put such agonized poetry on canvas as Frida did at this time in Detroit.”

In the first few months of the couple’s stay in Detroit, Rivera was preparing to paint the murals while Kahlo was disenchanted with Detroit, isolated and pregnant. Citing Kahlo’s letters to her doctor, the DIA exhibition says she feared injuries from her bus accident would make giving birth impossible, and considered terminating her pregnancy in May. In July, she lost a large amount of blood and was rushed to a hospital, where she miscarried. She spent two weeks there recovering, and turned 25 in a hospital bed.

“I cried a lot, but it’s over, there is nothing else that can be done except to bear it,” Frida wrote to her personal doctor.

Kahlo channeled her grief into art, drawing while in the hospital, then painting the evocative self portrait “Henry Ford Hospital.”

Kahlo reveals all of herself, bloody and crying on a hospital bed, with red strings tying her to symbolic images. She is marooned in an empty space, the industrial Detroit skyline far behind her. According to the exhibition information, Kahlo said the field represented Mexico, surrounding herself with the comfort of her homeland.

Her miscarriages and unfulfilled desire to have a child became a major theme of her work, the exhibition’s curator, Mark Rosenthal, told The Huffington Post.

The miscarriage also influenced Rivera to change a panel of his murals. Instead of an agricultural scene (shown in one of the prep drawings in the exhibition), the panel shows a baby inside the bulb of a plant.

Apart from her health issues, Kahlo missed Mexico and found little to like about Detroit. Rivera was busy with the murals, so she spent more time painting; he encouraged her to keep pursuing art.

While her husband was taken with the city and its industry, Kahlo saw “a shabby little village.”

“The industrial part of Detroit is really the most interesting; the rest is ugly and stupid,” she wrote in a letter.

Like Rivera, Kahlo incorporated allusions to Mexico into work she made in the U.S. However, while Rivera’s “Detroit Industry” murals depict the different cultures intertwined in a larger story, Kahlo’s work showed “no sign of the synthesis” of the two, Rosenthal said.

That can be seen in “Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States,” painted in Detroit. Kahlo stands between two starkly differentiated depictions of the two countries.

Before she and Rivera left in the spring of 1933, Detroit seemed to offer Kahlo torment after torment — she also returned to Mexico for a month to see her sick mother before she died. But for all the misery, her experiences in the city, where she started referring to herself as a professional painter, were a catalyzing force in her art career, pushing her to focus on the unflinchingly personal self-portraits for which she is known.

“[Kahlo’s] breakthrough is Detroit,” art historian Victor Zamudio Taylor says in the documentary “The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo.” “In Detroit, Frida Kahlo, for the first time, consciously decides that she will paint about herself, and that she will paint the most private and painful aspects of herself.”

~ Kate Abbey-Lambertz · 03/13/2015.

[impressivepress]

Frida Kahlo's last secret finally revealed

The artist's confessions to her doctor were locked up for 50 years. Now the details of her misery at not being able to bear children have been exposed.

She was always one of the most painfully personal of artists, producing a series of autobiographical canvases that dealt with everything from the consequences of the terrible injuries she suffered in a tram crash to her abortion. But finally the one part of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo's life that has remained secret - at the orders of her former husband, fellow painter Diego Rivera - has been revealed in a new book published in Mexico.

It tells the contents of a series of letters that Kahlo exchanged with her physician, and confidant, after she suffered a miscarriage in 1932, describing the devastation she felt when she realised that she could never have Rivera's child. The new material is certain to fill out the biography of one of the most fascinating artists of the 20th century, whose colourful life, which included a reputed affair with Trotsky, rivalled her art.

Kahlo's confession, My Beloved Doctor, is a bilingual compilation of the letters she exchanged with Dr Leo Eloesser between 1932 and 1951, which remained hidden for 50 years after her death. Kahlo always began her letters with the phrase 'My beloved doctor', Doctorcito querido. Hence the title of the book.

The personal letters, published in the month of the centenary of her birth, were locked away in trunks and cabinets in her house in Mexico City on Rivera's orders. Rivera, 20 years Kahlo's senior, left strict orders to his trust's caretakers not to open the letters until 15 years after his death in 1957.

However, one of Rivera's patrons left the collection hidden behind bathroom walls inside the house turned museum, fearing it might contain information that would compromise the couple's image. Curators opened the trunks in 2004, a year after the patron's death.

'She felt so disheartened because she would have loved to have a little Dieguito, but her dream did not come true', said Isabel Granen Porrua, in charge of the restoration and compilation of the material found in the house.

Kahlo's inability to bear a child, after the injuries she suffered in a tram crash, was painfully close to her. She had had one abortion when it was clear that her health would not allow her to go through with the pregnancy. When she became pregnant again a couple of years later, she miscarried.

Twelve days after her miscarriage she wrote to Dr Eloesser: 'Doctorcito querido: I have wanted to write to you for a long time than you can imagine. I had so looked forward to having a little Dieguito that I cried a lot, but it's over, there is nothing else that can be done except to bear it.'

In 1931, she wrote to him: 'I'm not painting or doing anything. I dislike the "high society" here [in New York where she had travelled with Rivera] and feel a little rage against all these fat cats, since I've seen thousands of people in terrible misery.'

Kahlo even dedicated a self-portrait to Eloesser in 1940: 'I painted my portrait in the year 1940 for Dr Leo Eloesser, my doctor and my best friend. With all my love. Frida Kahlo.'

In the letters, she elaborates on the first days of her pregnancy; her earlier abortion and her excruciating back pain caused by a tram crash in 1925.

She was operated on more than 30 times during her life. Part of her leg was amputated months before she died in 1954. It was during one of her visits to a hospital in San Francisco that she met Eloesser.

Eloesser went on to play a key role in her relationship with Rivera. In November 1940 he convinced her to reconcile and marry Kahlo for a second time. 'Diego loves you very much, and you love him. It is also the case, and you know it better than I, that besides you, he has two great loves: 1) painting 2) women in general. He has never been, nor ever will be, monogamous,' the doctor wrote in one of his letters to Kahlo.

Kahlo's confidence in her doctor continued to grow and she even told him she was jealous of Guadalupe Marin, Rivera's first wife and the mother of his two daughters.

'Please don't get mad at me over what I'm going to say: this morning, when you invited me to the concert, I was determined to go to make you happy and see you, but when I learnt that Diego invited the friends of that Marin, who I can't stand, to his box, I lost the desire to go. I prefer to speak to you frankly, since I know you understand me and will forgive me for changing my mind.'

The letters are among 30,000 other objects kept in her house long after her death and are currently on display among photographs, notes, sketches, magazines, books and pieces of clothing at her former family home in Mexico City and the Palacio de Bellas Artes, the country's most important cultural centre. Eighty per cent of the material is being shown to the public for the first time. Other items on display to mark the centenary of her birth include X-rays of Kahlo's fractured back, a trolley bus ticket and a note with a lipstick-stained kiss.

~ Javier Espinoza · Sun 12 Aug 2007.

[impressivepress]

A Rare Look At How Diego Rivera Turned Sketches Into His Iconic Detroit Mural

A walk through the Detroit Institute of Arts’ first major exhibition since the city emerged from bankruptcy in December doesn’t just offer a closer look at the museum’s most famous piece; it gives visitors a chance to see the early stages of the artist’s masterpiece.

The exhibition, “Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit,” looks at the trajectories of the married Mexican artists before and after they arrived in the city in 1932; however, the exhibition directs most attention to the making of Rivera’s large-scale mural “Detroit Industry,” a piece made up of 27 individual panels. The fresco cycle, commissioned by the museum and paid for by auto baron heir Edsel Ford, fills an airy central court at the museum.

“It’s like a secular Sistine [Chapel] ceiling,” Mark Rosenthal told The Huffington Post, comparing Rivera to Michelangelo and praising a near-unmatched ability to “compose fantastic narrative” in his paintings.  

The mural, a celebration and subtle critique of modern industry, is sprawling in size and content, but every detailed inch contains symbolism of the city’s present, past and future. The exhibition takes a closer look at some of those details in their early form: Rivera’s large preparatory drawings, which served as drafts for the final murals, are on display for the first time since the 1980s. Placed alongside the panels they inspired, the exuberant charcoal sketches he called “cartoons” reveal how Rivera translated his broad strokes into the final scenes.

Rivera painted the mural over the course of seven months, panel by panel, standing on scaffolding to paint figures that towered over him. He finished the work in 1933. Much of the imagery in “Detroit Industry” was inspired by the Ford Rouge auto plant, where he spent weeks sketching.

In Rivera’s as-told-to autobiography, My Art, My Life, he speaks of his delight in the machinery and its power to liberate man from drudgery and poverty.

“As I rode back to Detroit, a vision of Henry Ford’s industrial empire kept passing before my eyes.” he said. “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 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.”

Rivera’s enthusiasm for an industry driven by capitalism can seem at odds with his politics. A dedicated Marxist, he arrived in Detroit as workers in the Ford plant were reeling. Several weeks earlier, layoffs had led to a march that ended in violence and five deaths. That politically-charged event, as well as a desperate workforce shrunk by the Great Depression, are scrubbed from the almost utopian view of the auto assembly line in “Detroit Industry.”

Still, Rivera depicts industrial progress in a more nuanced and critical light. He repeatedly represents both the constructive and destructive potential of modernization and technology. For example, two alternate panels show chemistry used to vaccinate a child and then used to build a bomb.

~ Kate Abbey-Lambertz · 03/23/2015.

[impressivepress]

Rivera, Kahlo, and the Detroit Murals: A History and a Personal Journey

The year 1932 was not a good time to come to Detroit, Michigan. The Great Depression cast dark clouds over the city. Scores of factories had ground to a halt, hungry people stood in breadlines, and unemployed autoworkers were selling apples on street corners to survive. In late April that year, against this grim backdrop, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo stepped off a train at the cavernous Michigan Central depot near the heart of the Motor City. They were on their way to the new Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), a symbol of the cultural ascendancy of the city and its turbo-charged prosperity in better times. The next 11 months in Detroit would take them both to dazzling artistic heights and transform them personally in far-reaching, at times traumatic, ways.

I subtitle this article “a history and a personal journey.” The history looks at the social context of Diego and Frida’s defining time in the city and the art they created; the personal journey explores my own relationship to Detroit and the murals Rivera painted there. I was born and raised in the city, listening to the sounds of its bustling streets, coming of age in its diverse neighborhoods, growing up with the driving beat of its music, and living in the shadows of its factories. Detroit was a labor town with a culture of social justice and civil rights, which on occasion clashed with sharp racism and powerful corporations that defined the age. In my early twenties, I served a four-year apprenticeship to become a machine repair machinist in a sprawling multistory General Motors auto factory at Clark Street and Michigan Avenue that machined mammoth seven-liter V8 engines, stamped auto body parts on giant presses, and assembled gleaming Cadillacs on fast-moving assembly lines. At the time, the plant employed some 10,000 workers who reflected the racial and ethnic diversity of the city, as well as its tensions. The factory was located about a 20-minute walk from where Diego and Frida got off the train decades earlier but was a world away from the downtown skyscrapers and the city’s cultural center.

I grew up with Rivera’s murals, and they have run through every stage of my life. I’ve been gone from the city for many years now, but an important part of both Detroit and the murals have remained with me, and I suspect they always will. I return to Detroit frequently, and no matter how busy the trip, I have almost always found time for the murals.

In Detroit, Rivera looked outwards, seeking to capture the soul of the city, the intense dynamism of the auto industry, and the dignity of the workers who made it run. He would later say that these murals were his finest work. In contrast, Kahlo looked inward, developing a haunting new artistic direction. The small paintings and drawings she created in Detroit pull the viewer into a strange and provocative universe. She denied being a Surrealist, but when André Breton, a founder of the movement, met her in Mexico, he compared her work to a “ribbon around a bomb” that detonated unparalleled artistic freedom (Hellman & Ross, 1938).

Rivera, at the height of his fame, embraced Detroit and was exhilarated by the rhythms and power of its factories (I must admit these many years later I can relate to that response). He was fascinated by workers toiling on assembly lines and coal-fired blast furnaces pouring molten metal around the clock. He felt this industrial base had the potential to create material abundance and lay the foundation for a better world. Sixty percent of the world’s automobiles were built in Michigan at that time, and Detroit also boasted other state-of-the-art industry, from the world’s largest stove and furnace factory to the main research laboratories for a global pharmaceutical company.

“Detroit has many uncommon aspects,” a Michigan guidebook produced by the Federal Writers Project pointed out, “the staring rows of ghostly blue factory windows at night; the tired faces of auto workers lighted up by simultaneous flares of match light at the end of the evening shift; and the long, double-decker trucks carrying auto bodies and chassis” (WPA, 1941:234). This project produced guidebooks for every state in the nation and was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal Agency that sought to create jobs for the unemployed, including writers and artists. I suspect Rivera would have embraced the approach, perhaps even painted it, had it then existed.

Detroit was a rough-hewn town that lacked the glitter and sophistication of New York or the charm of San Francisco, yet Rivera was inspired by what he saw. In his “Detroit Industry” murals on the soaring inner walls of a large courtyard in the center of the DIA, Rivera portrayed the iconic Ford Rouge plant, the world’s largest and most advanced factory at the time. “[These] frescoes are probably as close as this country gets to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,” New York Times art critic Roberta Smith wrote eight decades later (Smith, 2015).

The city did not speak to Kahlo in the same way. She tolerated Detroit — sometimes barely, other times with more enthusiasm — rather than embracing it. Kahlo was largely unknown when she came to Detroit and felt somewhat isolated and disconnected there. She painted and drew, explored the city’s streets, and watched films — she liked Chaplin’s comedies in particular — in the movie theaters near the center of the city, but she admitted “the industrial part of Detroit is really the most interesting side” (Coronel, 2015:138).

During a personally traumatic year — she had a miscarriage that went seriously awry in Detroit, and her mother died in Mexico City — she looked deeply into herself and painted searing, introspective works on small canvases. In Detroit, she emerged as the Frida Kahlo who is recognized and revered throughout the world today. While Vogue still identified her as “Madame Diego Rivera” during her first New York exhibition in 1938, the New York Times commented that “no woman in art history commands her popular acclaim” in a 2019 article (Hellman & Ross, 1938; Farago, 2019).

My emphasis will be on Rivera and the “Detroit Industry” murals, but Kahlo’s own work, unheralded at the time, has profoundly resonated with new audiences since. While in Detroit, they both inspired, supported, influenced, and needed each other.

Prelude

Diego and Frida married in Mexico on August 21, 1929. He was 43, and she was 22 — although their maturity, in her view, was inverse to their age. Their love was passionate and tumultuous from the beginning. “I suffered two accidents in my life,” she later wrote, “one in which a streetcar knocked me down … the other accident is Diego” (Rosenthal, 2015:96).

They shared a passion for Mexico, particularly the country’s indigenous roots, and a deep commitment to politics, looking to the ideals of communism in a turbulent and increasingly dangerous world (Rosenthal, 2015:19). Rivera painted a major set of murals — 235 panels — in the Ministry of Education in Mexico City between 1923 and 1928. When he signed each panel, he included a small red hammer and sickle to underscore his political allegiance. Among the later panels was “In the Arsenal,” which included images of Frida Kahlo handing out weapons, muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros in a hat with a red star, and Italian photographer Tina Modotti holding a bandolier.

The politics of Rivera and Kahlo ran deep but didn’t exactly follow a straight line. Kahlo herself remarked that Rivera “never worried about embracing contradictions” (Rosenthal, 2015:55). In fact, he seemed to embody F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notion that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function” (Fitzgerald, 1936).

Their art, however, ultimately defined who they were and usually came out on top when in conflict with their politics. When the Mexican Communist Party was sharply at odds with the Mexican government in the late 1920s, Rivera, then a Party member, nonetheless accepted a major government commission to paint murals in public buildings. The Party promptly expelled him for this act, among other transgressions (Rosenthal, 2015:32).

Diego and Frida came to San Francisco in November 1930 after Rivera received a commission to paint a mural in what was then the San Francisco Stock Exchange. He had already spent more than a decade in Europe and another nine months in the Soviet Union in 1927. In contrast, this was Kahlo’s first trip outside Mexico. The physical setting in San Francisco, then as now, was stunning — steep hills at the end of a peninsula between the Pacific and the Bay — and they were intrigued and elated just to be there. The city had a bohemian spirit and a working-class grit. Artists and writers could mingle with longshoremen in bars and cafes as ships from around the world unloaded at the bustling piers. At the time, California was in the midst of an “enormous vogue of things Mexican,” and the couple was at the center of this mania (Rosenthal, 2015:32). They were much in demand at seemingly endless “parties, dinners, and receptions” during their seven-month stay (Rosenthal, 2015:36). A contradiction with their political views? Not really. Rivera felt he was infiltrating the heart of capitalism with more radical ideas.

Rivera’s commission produced a fresco on the walls of the Pacific Stock Exchange, “Allegory of California” (1931), a paean to the economic dynamism of the state despite the dark economic clouds already descending. Rivera would then paint several additional commissions in San Francisco before leaving. While compelling, these murals lacked the power and political edge of his earlier work in Mexico or the extraordinary genius of what was to come in Detroit.

While in San Francisco, Rivera and Kahlo met Helen Wills Moody, a 27-year-old world-class tennis player, who became the central model for the Allegory mural. She moved in rarified social and artistic circles, and as 1930 drew to a close, she introduced the couple to Wilhelm Valentiner, the visionary director of the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), who had rushed to San Francisco to meet Rivera when he learned of the artist’s arrival.

Valentiner was “a German scholar, a Rembrandt specialist, and a man with extraordinarily wide tastes,” according to Graham W.J. Beal, who himself revitalized the DIA as director in the 21st century. “Between 1920 and the early 1930s, with the help of Detroit’s personal wealth and city money, Valentiner transformed the DIA … into one of the half-dozen top art collections in the country,” a position the museum continues to hold today (Beal, 2010:34). The museum director and the artist shared an unusual kinship. “The revolutions in Germany and Mexico [had] radicalized [both],” wrote Linda Downs, a noted curator at the DIA (Downs, 2015:177). Little more than a decade later, “the idea of the mural commission reinvigorated them to create a highly charged monumental modern work that has contributed greatly to the identity of Detroit” (Downs, 2015:177).

When Valentiner and Rivera met, the economic fallout of the Depression was hammering both Detroit and its municipally funded art institute. The city was teetering at the edge of bankruptcy in 1932 and had slashed its contribution to the museum from $170,000 to $40,000, with another cut on the horizon. Despite this dismal economic terrain, Valentiner was able to arrange a commission for Rivera to paint two large-format frescoes in the Garden Court at the new museum building, which had opened in 1927. Edsel Ford, the son of Henry Ford and a major patron of the DIA, pledged $10,000 for the project — a truly princely sum at that moment — and would double his contribution as Rivera’s vision and the scale of the project expanded (Rosenthal, 2015:51). Edsel also played an unheralded role in support of the museum through the economic traumas to come.

A discussion of Rivera’s mural commission gets a bit ahead of our story, so let’s first look at Detroit’s explosive economic growth in the early years of the 20th century. This industrial transformation would provide the subject and the inspiration for Rivera’s frescoes.

The Motor City and the Great Depression

At the turn of the 20th century, Detroit “was a quiet, tree-shaded city, unobtrusively going about its business of brewing beer and making carriages and stoves” (WPA, 1941:231). Approaching 300,000 residents, Detroit was the 13th-largest city in the country (Martelle, 2012:71). A future of steady growth and easy prosperity seemed to beckon.

Instead, Henry Ford soon upended not only the city, but much of the world. He was hardly alone as an auto magnate in the area: Durant, Olds, the Fisher Brothers, and the Dodge Brothers, among others, were also in or around Detroit. Ford, however, would go beyond simply building a successful car company: he unleashed explosive growth in the auto industry, put the world on wheels, and became a global folk hero to many, yet some were more critical. The historian Joshua Freeman points out that “Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) depicts a dystopia of Fordism, a portrait of life A.F. — the years “Anno Ford,” measured from 1908, when the Model T was introduced — with Henry Ford the deity” (Freeman, 2018:147).

Ford combined three simple ideas and pursued them with razor-sharp, at times ruthless, intensity: the Model T, an affordable car for the masses; a moving assembly line that would jump-start productivity growth; and the $5 day for workers, double the prevailing wage in the industry. This combination of mass production and mass consumption — Fordism — allowed workers to buy the products they produced and laid the basis for a new manufacturing era. The automobile age was born.

The $5 day wasn’t altruism for Ford. The unrelenting pace and control of the assembly line was intense — often unbearable — even for workers who had grown up with back-breaking work: tilling the farm, mining coal, or tending machines in a factory. Annual turnover approached 400 percent at Ford’s Highland Park plant, and daily absenteeism was high. In response, Ford introduced the unprecedented new wage on January 12, 1914 (Martelle, 2012:74).

The press and his competitors denounced Ford — claiming this reckless move would bankrupt the industry — but the day the new rate began, 10,000 men arrived at the plant in the winter darkness before dawn. Despite the bitter cold, Ford security men aimed fire hoses to disperse the crowd. Covered in freezing water, the men nonetheless surged forward hoping to grasp an elusive better future for themselves and their families.

Here is where I enter the picture, so to speak. One of the relatively few who did get a job that chaotic day was Philip Chapman. He was a recent immigrant from Russia who had married a seamstress from Poland named Sophie, a spirited, beautiful young woman. They had met in the United States. He wound up working at Ford for 33 years — 22 of them at the Rouge plant — on the line and on machines. They were my grandparents.

By 1929, Detroit was the industrial capital of the world. It had jumped its place in line, becoming the fourth-largest city in the United States — trailing only New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia — with 1.6 million people (Martelle, 2012:71). “Detroit needed young men and the young men came,” the WPA Michigan guidebook writers pointed out, and they emphasized the kaleidoscopic diversity of those who arrived: “More Poles than in the European city of Poznan, more Ukrainians than in the third city of the Ukraine, 75,000 Jews, 120,000 Negroes, 126,000 Germans, more Bulgarians, [Yugoslavians], and Maltese than anywhere else in the United States, and substantial numbers of Italians, Greeks, Russians, Hungarians, Syrians, English, Scotch, Irish, Chinese, and Mexicans” (WPA, 1941:231). Detroit was third nationally in terms of the foreign-born, and the African American population had soared from 6,000 in 1910 to 120,000 in 1930 (WPA, 1941:108), part of a journey that would ultimately involve more than six million people moving from the segregated, more rural South to the industrial cities of the North (Trotter, 2019:78).

DIA planners projected that Detroit would become the second-largest U.S. city by 1935 and that it could surpass New York by the early 1950s. “Detroit grew as mining towns grow — fast, impulsive, and indifferent to the superficial niceties of life,” the Michigan Guidebook writers concluded (WPA, 1941:231).

The highway ahead seemed endless and bright. The city throbbed with industrial production, the streetcars and buses were filled with workers going to and from work at all hours, and the noise of stamping presses and forges could be heard through open windows in the hot summers. Cafes served dinner at 11 p.m. for workers getting off the afternoon shift and breakfast at 5 a.m. for those arriving for the day shift. Despite prohibition, you could get a drink just about any time. After all, only a river separated Detroit from Canada, where liquor was still legal.

Rivera’s biographer and friend Bertram Wolfe wrote of “the tempo, the streets, the noise, the movement, the labor, the dynamism, throbbing, crashing life of modern America” (Wolfe, as cited in Rosenthal, 2015:65). The writers of the Michigan guidebook had a more down-to-earth view: “‘Doing the night spots’ consists mainly of making the rounds of beer gardens, burlesque shows, and all-night movie houses,” which tended to show rotating triple bills (WPA, 1941:232).

Henry Ford began constructing the colossal Rouge complex in 1917, which would employ more than 100,000 workers and spread over 1,000 acres by 1929. “It was, simply, the largest and most complicated factory ever built, an extraordinary testament to ingenuity, engineering, and human labor,” Joshua Freeman observed (Freeman, 2018:144). The historian Lindy Biggs accurately described the complex as “more like an industrial city than a factory” (Biggs, as cited in Freeman, 2018:144).

The Rouge was a marvel of vertical integration, making much of the car on site. Giant Ford-owned freighters would transport iron ore and limestone from Minnesota and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula down through the Great Lakes, along the St. Clair and Detroit Rivers, and then across the Rouge River to the docks of the plant. Seemingly endless trains would bring coal from West Virginia and Ohio to the plant. Coke ovens, blast furnaces, and open hearths produced iron and steel; rolling mills converted the steel ingots into long, thin sheets for body parts; foundries molded iron into engine blocks that were then precision machined; enormous stamping presses formed sheets of steel into fenders, hoods, and doors; and thousands of other parts were machined, extruded, forged, and assembled. Finished cars drove off the assembly line a little more than a day after the raw materials had arrived at the docks.

In 1928, Vanity Fair heralded the Rouge as “the most significant public monument in America, throwing its shadow across the land probably more widely and more intimately than the United States Senate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Statue of Liberty.... In a landscape where size, quantity, and speed are the cardinal virtues, it is natural that the largest factory turning out the most cars in the least time should come to have the quality of America’s Mecca, toward which the pious journey for prayer” (Jacob, as cited in Lichtenstein, 1995:13). My grandfather, I suspect, had a more prosaic goal: he needed a job, and Ford paid well.

Despite tough conditions in the plant, workers were proud to work at “Ford’s,” as people in Detroit tended to refer to the company. They wore their Ford badge on their shirts in the streetcars on the way to work or on their suits in church on Sundays. It meant something to have a job there. Once through the factory gate, however, the work was intense and often dangerous and unhealthy. Ford himself described repetitive factory work as “a terrifying prospect to a certain kind of mind,” yet he was firmly convinced strict control and tough discipline over the average worker was necessary to get anything done (Ford, as cited in Martelle, 2012:73). He combined the regimentation of the assembly line with increasingly autocratic management, strictly and often harshly enforced. You couldn’t talk on the line in Ford plants — you were paid to work, not talk — so men developed the “Ford whisper” holding their heads down and barely moving their lips. The Rouge employed 1,500 Ford “Service Men,” many of them ex-convicts and thugs, to enforce discipline and police the plant.

At a time when economic progress seemed as if it would go on forever, the U.S. stock market drove over a cliff in October 1929, and paralysis soon spread throughout the economy. Few places were as shaken as Detroit. In 1929, 5.5 million vehicles were produced, but just 1.4 million rolled off Detroit’s assembly lines three years later in 1932 (Martelle, 2012:114). The Michigan jobless rate hit 40 percent that year, and one out of three Detroit families lacked any financial support (Lichtenstein, 1995). Ford laid off tens of thousands of workers at the Rouge. No one knew how deep the downturn might go or how long it would last. What increasingly desperate people did know is that they had to feed their family that night, but they no longer knew how.

On March 7, 1932 — a bone-chilling day with a lacerating wind — 3,000 desperate, unemployed autoworkers met near the Rouge plant to march peaceably to the Ford Employment Office. Detroit police escorted the marchers to the Dearborn city line, where they were confronted by Dearborn Police and armed Ford Service Men. When the marchers refused to disperse, the Dearborn police fired tear gas, and some demonstrators responded with rocks and frozen mud. The marchers were then soaked with water from fire hoses and shot with bullets. Five workers were killed, 19 wounded by gunfire, and dozens more injured. Communists had organized the march, but a Michigan historical marker makes the following observation: “Newspapers alleged the marchers were communists, but they were in fact people of all political, racial, and ethnic backgrounds.” That marker now hangs outside the United Auto Workers Local 600 union hall, which represents workers today at the Rouge plant.

Five days later, on March 12, thousands of people marched in downtown Detroit to commemorate the demonstrators who had been killed. Although Rivera was still in New York, he was aware of the Ford Hunger March before it took place and told Clifford Wight, his assistant, that he was eager “not [to] miss…[it] on any account” (Rosenthal, 2015:51). Both he and Kahlo had marched with workers in Mexico and embraced their causes. Rivera had captured their lives as well as their protests in his murals in Mexico.

As it turned out, they missed both the march and the commemoration. Instead, the following month Kahlo and Rivera’s train pulled into the Michigan Central Depot, where Wilhelm Valentiner met them. They were taken to the Ford-owned Wardell Hotel next to the Detroit Institute of Arts. The DIA was the anchor of a grass-lined and tree-shaded cultural center several miles north of downtown. The Ford Highland Park Plant, where the automobile age began with the Model T and the moving assembly line, was four miles further north on the same street. Less than a mile northwest was the massive 15-story General Motors Building, the largest office building in the United States when it was completed in 1922, designed by the noted industrial architect Albert Khan, who also created the Rouge. Huge auto production complexes such as Dodge Main or Cadillac Motor — where I would serve my apprenticeship decades later — were not far away.

Valentiner had written Rivera stating, “The Arts Commission would be pleased if you could find something out of the history of Detroit, or some motif suggesting the development of industry in this town. But in the end, they decided to leave it entirely to you” (Beal, 2010:35). Beal points out “that what Valentiner had in mind at the time may have been something like the Helen Moody Wills paintings, something that had an allegorical slant to it. They were to get something completely different” (Beal, 2010:35). Edsel Ford emphasized he wanted Rivera to look at other industries in Detroit, such as pharmaceuticals, and provided a car and driver for Rivera and Kahlo to see the plants and the city.

But when Rivera visited the Rouge plant, he was mesmerized. He saw the future here, despite the fact that the plant had been hard hit by the Depression: the complex had been shuttered for the last six months of 1931, and thousands of workers had been let go before he arrived (Rosenthal, 2015:67). His fascination with machinery, his respect for workers, and his politics fused in an extraordinary artistic vision, which he filled with breathtaking technical detail. He had found his muse.

Rivera took on the seemingly impossible task of capturing the sprawling Rouge plant in frescoes. The initial commission of two large-format frescoes rapidly expanded to 27 frescoes of various sizes filling the entire room from floor to ceiling. Rivera spent the next two months at the manufacturing complex drawing, pacing, photographing, viewing, and translating these images into large drawings — “cartoons” — as the plans for the frescoes. He demonstrated an exceptional ability to retain in his head — and, I suspect, in his dreams — what he would paint.

Rivera’s Vast Masterpieces

Rivera’s “Detroit Industry” murals are anchored in a specific time and place — a sprawling iconic factory, the Depression decade, and the Motor City — yet they achieve the universal in a way that transcends their origins. Rivera painted workers toiling on assembly lines amid blast furnaces pouring molten iron into cupolas, and through the alchemy of his genius, the art still powerfully — even urgently — speaks to us today. The murals celebrate the contribution of workers, the power of industry, and the promise and peril of science and technology. Rivera weaves together Aztec myths, indigenous world views, Mexican culture, and U.S. industry in a visual tour-de-force that delights, challenges, and provokes. The art is both accessible and profound. You can enjoy it for an afternoon or intensely study it for a lifetime with a sense of constant discovery.

Roberta Smith points out that the murals “form an unusually explicit, site-specific expression of the reciprocal bond between an art museum and its urban setting” (Smith, 2015). Over time, the frescoes have emerged as a visible and vital part of the city, becoming part of Detroit’s DNA. Rivera’s art has been both witness to and, more recently, a participant in history. When he began the project in late spring 1932, Detroit was tottering at the edge of insolvency, and 80 years later, the murals witnessed the city skidding into the largest municipal bankruptcy in history in 2013. A deep appreciation for the murals and their close identification with the spirit and hope of Detroit may have contributed to saving the museum this second time around.

I still vividly remember my own reaction when I first saw the murals. As a young boy, the Rouge, the auto industry, and Detroit seemed to course through our lives. My grandfather Philip Chapman, who was hired at Ford’s Highland Park plant in 1914, wound up spending most of his working life on the line at the Rouge. As a young boy, I watched my grandmother Sophie pack his lunch and fill his thermos with hot coffee before dawn as he hurried to catch the first of three buses that would take him to the plant. When my father, Max, came to Detroit three decades later in the mid-1940s to marry my mother, Rose — they had met on a subway while she was visiting New York City, where he lived — he worked on the line at a Chrysler plant on Jefferson Avenue.

One weekend, when I was 10 or 11 years old, my father took me to see the murals. He drove our 1950 Ford down Woodward Avenue, a broad avenue that bisected the city from the Detroit River to its northern border at Eight Mile Road. Woodward seemed like the main street of the world at the time; large department stores — Hudson’s was second only to Macy’s in size and splendor — restaurants, movie theaters, and office buildings lined both sides of the street north from the river. Detroit had the highest per capita income in the country, a palpable economic power seen in the scale of the factories and the seemingly endless numbers of trucks rumbling across the city to transport parts between factories and finished vehicles to dealers.

We walked up terraced white steps to the main entrance of the Detroit Institute of Arts, an imposing Beaux-Arts building constructed with Vermont marble in what had become the city’s cultural center. As we entered the building, the sounds of the city disappeared. We strolled the gleaming marble floors of the Great Hall, a long gallery topped far above by a beautiful curved ceiling with light flowing through large windows. Imposing suits of medieval armor stood guard in glass cases on either side of us as we crossed the Hall, passed under an arch, and entered a majestic courtyard.

We found ourselves in what is now called the Rivera Court, surrounded on all sides by the “Detroit Industry” murals. The impact was startling. We weren’t simply observing the frescoes, we were enveloped by them. It was a moment of wonder as we looked around at what Rivera had created. Linda Downs captured the feeling: “Rivera Court has become the sanctuary of the Detroit Institute of Arts, a ‘sacred’ place dedicated to images of workers and technology” (Downs, 1999:65). I couldn’t have articulated this sentiment then, but I certainly felt it.

The size, scale, form, pulsing activity, and brilliant color of the paintings deeply impressed me. I saw for the first time where my grandfather went every morning before dawn and why he looked so drawn every night when he came home just before dinner. Many years later, I began to appreciate the art in a much deeper way, but the thrill of walking into the Rivera Court on that first visit has never left. I came to realize that an indelible dimension of great art is a sense of constant discovery and rediscovery. The murals captured the spirit of Detroit then and provide relevance and insight for the times we live in today.

Beal points out that Rivera “worked in a heroic, realist style that was easily graspable” (Beal, 2010:35). A casual viewer, whether a schoolboy or an autoworker from Detroit or a tourist from France, can enjoy the art, yet there is no limit to engaging the frescoes on many deeper levels. In contrast, “throughout Western history, visual art has often been the domain of the educated or moneyed elite,” Jillian Steinhauer wrote in the New York Times. “Even when artists like Gustave Courbet broke new ground by depicting working-class people, the art itself still wasn’t meant for them” (Steinhauer, 2019). Rivera upended this paradigm and sought to paint public art for workers as well as elites on the walls of public buildings. By putting these murals at the center of a great museum in the 1930s through the efforts of Wilhelm Valentiner and Edsel Ford — and more recently, under Graham Beal and the current director Salvador Salort-Pons — the Detroit Institute of Arts opened itself and the murals to new Detroit populations. Detroit is now 80-percent African American, the metropolitan area has the highest number of Arab Americans in the United States, and the Latino population is much larger than when Rivera painted, yet the murals retain their allure and meaning for new generations.

Upon entering the Rivera Court, the viewer confronts two monumental murals facing each other on the north and south walls. The murals not only define the courtyard, they draw you into the engine and assembly lines deep inside the Rouge. The factory explodes with cacophonous activity. The production process is a throbbing, interconnected set of industrial activities. Intense heat, giant machines, flaming metal, light, darkness, and constant movement all converge. Undulating steel rail conveyors carry parts overhead. There were 120 miles of conveyors in the Rouge at the time; they linked all aspects of production and provide a thematic unity to the mural. And even though he’s portraying a production process in Detroit, Rivera’s deep appreciation of Mexican culture and heritage infuses the frescoes. An Aztec cosmology of the underworld and the heavens runs in long panels spanning the top of the main murals and similar imagery appears throughout the frescoes.

On the north wall, a tightly packed engine assembly line, with workers laboring on both sides, is flanked by two huge machine tools — 20 feet or so high — machining the famed Ford V8 engine blocks. Workers in the foreground strain to move heavy cast-iron engine blocks; muscles bulge, bodies tilt, shoulders pull in disciplined movement. These workers are not anonymous. At the center foreground of the north wall, with his head almost touching a giant spindle machine, is Paul Boatin, an assistant to Rivera who spent his working life at the Rouge. He would go on to become a United Auto Workers (UAW) organizer and union leader. Boatin had been present at the Ford Hunger March on that disastrous day in March 1932 and still choked up talking about it many decades later in an interview in the film The Great Depression (1990).

In the foreground, leaning back and pulling an engine block with a white fedora on his head may have been Antonio Martínez, an immigrant from Mexico and the grandfather of Louis Aguilar. A reporter for the Detroit News, Aguilar describes how fierce, at times ugly, pressures during the Great Depression forced many Mexicans to leave Detroit and return to their homeland. The city’s Mexican population plummeted from 15,000 at the beginning of the 1930s to 2,000 at the end of the decade. If the figure in the mural is not his grandfather, Aguilar writes “let every Latino who had family in Detroit around 1932 and 1933 declare him as their own” (Aguilar, 2018).

A giant blast furnace spewing molten metal reigns above the engine production, which bears a striking resemblance to a Charles Sheeler photo of one of the five Rouge blast furnaces. The flames are so intense, and the men so red, you can almost feel the heat. In fact, the process is truly volcanic and symbolic of the turbulent terrain of Mexico itself. It brings to mind Popocatépetl, the still-active 18,000-foot volcano rising to the skies near Mexico City. To the left, above the engine block line, green-tinted workers labor in a foundry, one of the dirtiest, most unhealthy, most dangerous jobs. Meanwhile, a tour group observes the process. Among them in a black bowler hat is Diego Rivera himself.

On the south wall, workers toil on the final assembly line just before the critical “body drop,” where the body of a Model B Ford is lowered to be bolted quickly to the car frame on a moving assembly line below. Once again, through his perspective Rivera draws you into the line. A huge stamping press to the right forms fenders from sheets of steel like those produced in the Rouge facilities. Unlike most of the other machines Rivera portrays, which are state of the art, this press is an older model, selected because of its stylized resemblance to an ancient sculpture of Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess of life and death (Beale, 2010:41; Downs, 1999:140, 144).

On the left is another larger tour group, which includes a priest and Dick Tracy, a classic cartoon character of the era. The Katzenjammer Kids — more comic icons of the time — are leaning on the wall watching the assembly line move. The eyes of most of the visitors seem closed, as if they were physically present, but not seeing the intense, occasionally brutal, activity before them. Rivera, in effect, is giving us a few winks and a nod with cartoon characters and unobservant tourists.

~ Harley Shaiken · Fall 2019.

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The Striking Absence in the Detroit Institute of Arts’s Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Blockbuster

“The number of reverberations between then and now becomes horrible, and frightening, and amazing.” So said Detroit Institute of Arts curator Mark Rosenthal last week, at a preview of “Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit.” He’s right, possibly more so than even he knows.

During the Great Depression, the museum almost went under; the storm of publicity surrounding its commission of Diego Rivera’s epic Detroit Industry frescoes in 1932 saved it, inspiring the city to step in to fund DIA. Having just suffered another near-death experience amid Detroit’s recent bankruptcy, DIA is clearly hoping this show focusing on the art-history power couple’s year in Motor City can serve as a symbolic comeback. It will certainly bring crowds. (The show runs through July 12.)

Of course, by now it is Frida, not Diego, who is the main attraction (see Frida Fever: Iconic Photos of Frida Kahlo by Edward Weston and Others at Throckmorton). The Detroit Institute of Arts’s new crowd-pleaser is unlikely to change that gospel; her mordant self-examination just feels more contemporary than his grandiose political allegory.

And yet “Diego and Frida in Detroit” shows the Rivera/Kahlo pairing in a new light for me. There’s a story to be told—and since we are talking about parallels to the present, that should be told—about their art’s relative merits that is less about our changing tastes, and more about the tangled relationship of art and money, art and power.

The show features work from “Before,” “After,” and “During” their sojourn in Detroit in 1932.

In the first category are examples of Rivera’s stately images of flower sellers, as well as Kahlo’s double wedding portrait of the two—he a giant, she tiny—painted while they were visiting San Francisco in 1931 (this picture represents the first time her self-conscious costuming makes an appearance in her art).

“After” features a focused but wide-ranging gathering of canvasses that give a sense of where they each wound up, aesthetically: Rivera’s stylish, willowy Portrait of Ruth Rivera (1949), his daughter from an earlier marriage; Kahlo’s gory true-crime painting A Few Small Nips (1935), showing a man having just butchered his wife.

But the heart of the show clearly resides in the galleries that chronicle the crucial year of 1932: the large-scale cartoons Rivera made to plan Detroit Industry, his meticulous 27-panel cycle depicting scenes from Ford’s River Rouge plant, which surround the DIA’s Rivera Court, and which are widely considered Rivera’s most important mural work in the United States. Also in these galleries are Kahlo’s series of canvasses and drawings showing her sharp turn towards Surrealism.

Detroit’s Agony

When they arrived in Detroit, the 44-year-old Rivera was one of the most celebrated artists in the world. As the key exponent of “Mexican Muralism,” he had built up a level of art fame that is now probably unthinkable. His retrospective at the young Museum of Modern Art was only the institution’s second devoted to a single figure. The first was Matisse.

His wife, 25, was a brash near-unknown. The two had ejected themselves from the Mexican Communist Party in 1929, but were still celebrity radicals, given to blustery anti-capitalist talk and mercurial symbolic gestures. The commission for Detroit Industrywas $20,000 at the height of the Great Depression, more than $300,000 today. It would be paid for by Edsel Ford, the son of Henry and the chief of the Ford Motor Company, the era’s single most emblematic capitalist name.

Detroit, meanwhile, was deep in the throes of the Depression, swollen with the homeless and unemployed. Ford’s River Rouge plant, which Rivera would depict with such muscular bravado in Detroit Industry, had laid off thousands of workers and was operating at reduced capacity. Pay had been slashed for the remaining workers—River Rouge paid more than $181 million in wages in 1929; two years later, just $76 million. Two months before the couple arrived, workers had marched on that very plant, demanding higher pay. Company security and police reacted with violence, killing six. The result came to be known as the “Ford Massacre.”

Rivera’s Compromise

As he had been everywhere he went on his US tour, Rivera was wined and dined in Detroit. He would remember that Henry Ford was a “true poet and artist” and that Edsel had the “simplicity and directness of a workman in his own factories.” Kahlo seems to have been less enthused, resorting to impotent needling of their hosts, asking Henry, a well-known anti-Semite responsible for injecting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion into the public mind, whether he himself was Jewish.

How did Rivera square the circle of his revolutionary beliefs and his arch-capitalist patron in his head? A book could be written about the combination of industrial romanticization (he claimed that during his visit to Russia in 1927-28, he had seen Ford’s image revered alongside Marx and Lenin) and artistic self-delusion (he believed that if he won the Yankee masses to his mural style, he had secured a public for revolutionary art) at play, but there is no doubt that it deeply compromised him, politically and artistically.

Detroit Industry is a heroic and memorable depiction of factory labor, which is not nothing. It has passed deep into Detroit’s civic symbolism. But the striving enfilade of auto workers who form its central image are stolid, impassive—it is a picture of labor peace painted at a time of labor strife. They are also pointedly multiracial, when in fact the Fords kept their plants segregated.

Most importantly, it is, ultimately, a celebration of the boss: Edsel Ford, inserted in a panel at the corner in the manner of Renaissance paintings of patrons, gazes out benignly. It is a bravura work, but it is also an image that could serve in any PR pamphlet emphasizing Ford’s “progressive” corporate values—which is how it has often functioned.

As his final act in Detroit, Rivera wrote to Edsel Ford, asking him to rehire one W.J. Settler, a photographer with whom the artist had worked. In the words of Rosenthal’s catalogue essay, Settler “had been fired from his job with the Ford Company for smoking in his own home, thus violating one of the rules for employees.”

Edsel Ford did not rehire Settler. On some level, Rivera must have known that he had let himself be used.

Indeed, with some of this in mind, the most famous controversy of Rivera’s career—when, in the ensuing months of 1933, he inserted an image of Lenin (and what Rivera would describe as “a night-club scene of the debauched rich” featuring John D. Rockefeller, Sr.) into his Rockefeller Center mural commission in New York, provoking its destruction—appears to be a desperate grab at socialist credibility after a very public cop-out in Detroit.

Kahlo’s Breakthrough

In the lead up to Rivera commencing Detroit Industry, Kahlo became pregnant. On July 4, 1932, she lost the child. (The DIA show’s public text and audio indicate a miscarriage; the catalogue authors suggest that it was a self-induced abortion; I gather the truth is not known.) The emotion of this event, all the more focused as Kahlo felt stranded in a hostile city, knocked her art in a new direction, with lasting effects.

The painting that compresses all this is the compact, devastating Henry Ford Hospital. A bed floats in a barren plane. On it, Kahlo has painted herself, blood staining the sheets. Red threads branch from her abdomen connecting to various floating objects, hieroglyphic representations of trauma: an anatomical model; a crumpled orchid, inspired by the ones that Rivera had brought her in the hospital; a fractured pelvic bone; and so on.

Rivera’s art was seemingly affected by the loss of the child as well, possibly accounting for the most idiosyncratic element of Detroit Industry. He had been planning a tableau of agricultural labor for the main East Panel. Now this section was taken over by an image of an unborn child, cradled in the bulb of a plant, a bit of personal mythology embedded in this very public statement.

But most importantly to me is how Kahlo’s laceratingly personal Henry Ford Hospital can be read as a kind of rebuttal to Rivera’s mythologization of Detroit. On the side of the blood-soaked bed, Kahlo has stamped the title, “Henry Ford Hospital.” Yet she has placed herself not in the interior of the hospital, but outdoors, exposed in public; on the horizon in the background, Detroit’s industrial architecture is arrayed like a collection of castoff toys—the very structures that her husband was researching with a view to glorify. It is as if the painting were saying, “All is not right in the world of Henry Ford.”

Here, then, is an aesthetic hypothesis: If Kahlo’s work strikes us today as more alive, this is not only because social realism has gone out of vogue in favor of the intimate and the psychological. It’s almost the opposite, I think: Because Rivera became trapped in celebrating his host, he had to step back from the painful reality of the world he was depicting; Kahlo’s art, unencumbered by this burden and focusing on her own experience, actually does express some of that missing reality.

In this case, because Kahlo’s work is more personal, it is also more political.

Ford’s Gamble

There’s one final, long footnote on a part of the story of Diego and Frida in Detroit that doesn’t get told correctly.

Part of the legend of Rivera’s Detroit Industry, cementing its reputation as an enduringly subversive work, is the uproar surrounding its opening. Upon its unveiling in early 1933, conservatives protested the murals as atheistic, communist, dangerous. The debate in the press attracted hoards to the opening. There was even a bloc of workers who organized to defend Rivera’s opus.

Edsel Ford is given credit for having put a lid on the fracas by issuing a statement to those alarmed at the specter of the Mexican artist’s socialist politics that declared, “I admire Rivera’s spirit.” A key detail, however, is that this controversy was very possibly trumped up by Edsel Ford in the first place by planting incendiary stories in the papers. According to current DIA director Graham Beal, when Ford’s assistant showed him the attacks on the murals in the papers, the industrialist is said to have told him that “we’d accomplished what he wanted.”

Why? Ford had been personally bankrolling the museum through the Depression. The Rivera controversy attracted popular attention; the popular attention brought in big crowds; and the big crowds convinced the city to raise the museum’s budget, thereby taking a money-suck off his hands.

But there is another, much more important piece of context that doesn’t get nearly enough attention in telling the tale of Detroit Industry: the Detroit Banking Crisis of 1933, a disaster in which Edsel and Henry Ford played a very, very prominent role. To escape his father’s long shadow, Edsel had moved into banking in the 1920s, heading up the Guardian Trust Company. It expanded rapidly and unwisely, gobbling up smaller banks with real estate holdings that went dramatically sour after the stock market crash of 1929.

Throughout the entire period of the commission, creation, and unveiling of Detroit Industry, Edsel Ford would have been principally consumed with the intensifying crisis. He personally had to inject money into Guardian to backstop its escalating losses. Looking over its books, the national bank examiner would describe its operations as “the worst I’d ever seen.” In February, the government desperately tried to broker a rescue—but the deal would have involved Henry Ford freezing his massive deposits. Instead, the elder Ford threatened to remove them, ensuring disaster. “Let the crash come,” said the man Rivera remembered as a poet.

On February 14, 1933 after Ford refused the Feds’ rescue plan, all banks in the state of Michigan were shuttered. Five days later, on February 19, the first cartoons for Detroit Industry were shown at DIA.

This Lehmann Brothers moment—touching off a cascade of panic—was the immediate context of the unveiling of the work. Banks would not open again until March 24; and the Rivera Court, transformed with Rivera’s murals, debuted on March 21.

Perhaps the controversy that roared up around the DIA murals was fueled by their association with Edsel Ford. Indeed, the same right-wing radio preacher who attacked Rivera’s Vaccination panel as sacrilegious had been inveighing relentlessly against “banksters,” provoking alarming deposit withdrawals from his followers on Mondays after his sermons.

Yet one can also imagine that Edsel Ford might actually prefer, at such a moment, having a spotlight on his support of a left-wing artist’s depiction of labor instead of his role as figurehead of a failed company that was unleashing nationwide economic chaos.

Indeed, Ford’s support of Rivera continues to play that role to this day. Consider the catalogue for the present show, which contains an essay by John Dean titled, “‘He’s the Artist in the Family’: The Life, Times and Character of Edsel Ford,” extolling his “love of place, family, hard work, self-reliance, community, capitalism, and competition.” Dean argues that Edsel Ford’s partnership with Rivera makes him an example of the “businessman as artist.” He does not mention his role in one of the most catastrophic incidents of the Great Depression, despite its proximity to the Rivera event.

A little radical art patronage, it seems, buys you a lot of good PR, and for eternity. But it would be a shame to let the allure of art celebrity occlude what should be the larger moral of this show’s story, one that seems very relevant for the present indeed: Ford giveth, and Ford taketh away.

~ Ben Davis · March 16, 2015.

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Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit

The story told through this exhibition begins and ends in the Garden Court of the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) where in 1932 the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera executed a monumental set of wall paintings to celebrate the city’s industrial spirit against the backdrop of the devastating Great Depression. Just months before the arrival of the muralist and his wife, Frida Kahlo, the city had considered closing the museum and selling its artworks, but this commission was part of a larger set of efforts to restore Detroit’s identity. Rivera’s splendid Detroit Industry murals make this show, curated by contemporary specialist Mark Rosenthal, uniquely site-specific; at no other venue in the world could the narrative of Rivera and Kahlo’s epic year be presented, and at no more of an appropriate historical moment than now. In the wake of Detroit’s recent Chapter 9 bankruptcy which again threatened the DIA’s renowned collections but ended with a comprehensive restructuring plan—the “grand bargain”—in late 2014, Rivera and Kahlo have once more helped Detroit get back its groove.

The exhibition itself actually opens not in the Garden Court but rather in the galleries, and with a wall-sized photograph of the newlywed Mexican artists sharing a kiss by the courtyard scaffolding; the image is a visual and conceptual enticement consistent with (just-retired) DIA director Graham Beal’s self-professed interest in presenting human stories to engage a general audience rather than emphasizing more scholarly art-historical narratives. This makes the show an unmistakable crowd-pleaser, but it also means that biography often overshadows historical and cultural details, particularly in regards to Kahlo whose work is the popular draw. An audio tour featuring just seventeen artworks largely supplants the spread of more extensive wall texts and individual labels that one might expect in a show of nearly seventy works by both Rivera and Kahlo produced just before, during, and in the years following their time in Detroit. The voices of Beal, Rosenthal, and a number of other experts from a variety of fields provide engaging perspectives on a clear narrative, but also leave many of the rich artworks unaddressed. An accompanying catalogue featuring eight essays provides more information about the artists, their subjects, and the larger historical context.

A clear highlight is the revelation of the process by which Rivera ultimately produced Detroit Industry. This includes his interactions with the city and museum, as well as with its ambassadors: among them, then-DIA Director William Valentiner, who invited Rivera, and Edsel Ford, who bankrolled the murals. Rivera spent his first months absorbing and sketching especially the River Rouge complex in nearby Dearborn, which became his principal inspiration; this was the heart of the Ford Motor Company, where Edsel’s father Henry made manifest his vision of the standardization of production for the Model A, and consequently created a model for modern factories worldwide. Rivera was enthralled by the machinery and by the throngs of laborers he saw as working in harmony with innovative technologies; the finished car itself makes only the most fleeting appearance in the final murals, as Rivera reveals his real fascination with the process of production rather than with the product.

Appropriately, Rivera’s massive preparatory drawings for the murals—the largest almost thirty feet in length—occupy a substantial portion of the gallery spaces, demonstrating the intense observation that went into his own process, well before he ever scaled the scaffold. These rarely seen cartoons are the subject of two essays in the catalogue, providing detailed analyses of the subject matters, materials, and techniques. Other works are a reminder that his Detroit period comes amid major mural commissions in San Francisco (completed), Chicago (scuttled), and, most famously, New York (destroyed); while in Detroit, Rivera created the detailed drawings for the ill-fated Rockefeller Center mural Man at the Crossroads (1933). The show’s larger contextual lens considers Rivera’s evolution over time, with varied styles and subjects including his picturesque Flower Day (1925) and the expressive Dance in Tehuantepec (1935), both of which illustrate his persistent reverence for indigenous Mexico and its popular traditions.

While Detroit was Rivera’s commission, it is Kahlo’s work that initiates the exhibition and is poised to provide the compelling personal narrative on which the curatorial vision depends. Her 1931 painting Frieda and Diego Rivera first confronts viewers with a portrait of the couple as a study in contrasts, with him as the gargantuan painter who dominates his comparatively diminutive wife in her now familiar woven rebozo and full skirt. These formal contrasts seem to corroborate the slogan of the exhibition’s national ad campaign: “He carried a pistol; she carried a flask. He drank for recreation; she drank for relief. He painted his heritage; she painted her reality.” On the other hand, the spare frontality of the double portrait also suggests a relationship not exactly “explosive” (also from the ads) with constant reactive synergy so much as the union of two distinctive people more often simply operating in the same space. Nevertheless, the work helps to frame one of the show’s dominant but overly simplified narratives: whereas Rivera is the only one holding a palette in 1931, Kahlo will truly realize her identity as an artist in Detroit.

Twenty-three works by Kahlo are featured in the exhibition, including a handful created during her time in the Motor City. This includes Henry Ford Hospital (1932), a surrealist depiction of her physical and emotional traumas following a pregnancy loss, and Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States (1932), whose title alone suggests a sense of divided identity also expressed elsewhere in her art. With such works, the exhibition proposes, Kahlo becomes self-actualized: according to Rosenthal, when she arrived in Detroit, she was “a complete unknown” (18), but “her metamorphosis started while she was in the hospital” after which she “[stages] her rebirth as an artist” (60). A change indeed appears evident as the last gallery comes alive with many dramatic later-period works such as The Suicide of Dorothy Hale (1940), a contemporary transformation of the traditional Mexican ex-voto used here as an indictment of the social values that would provoke such a tragedy.

The narrative claims that this artistic growth was rooted in 1932; however, Kahlo’s developing profile was a good deal more complex, with artistic and personal explorations beginning well before Detroit. Beyond this exhibition, works like Kahlo’s fascinating Café de los Cachuchas from 1927 (identified in the catalogue with the historically imposed but inaccurate title Pancho Villa and Adelita) suggest her connections with growing avant-garde circles in Mexico. Likewise, Portrait of Luther Burbank (1931) depicts the horticulturalist, whose widow Kahlo had befriended in California, as a human-plant hybrid, perhaps a meditation on a corporeal duality akin to her own European and Mexican heritage. In fact, this painting initiates FRIDA KAHLO: Art, Garden, Life, a concurrent exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden (May 16–November 1, 2015), which offers an image of the artist not defined by biographical details—like her marriage or the streetcar accident—but rather as an intellectual in her own right, with an early interest in playing with ideas grounded in her spatial and cultural connections to Mexico.

In Detroit, the key biographical detail around which Kahlo’s transformation is shown to revolve is the pregnancy that has received substantial attention. In a show that eschews generous labeling, a large freestanding wall providing contradictory details surrounding the pregnancy stands out. A timeline of events suggests legitimate confusion over whether or not her hospitalization was the result of a miscarriage or an abortion, a question complicated, as Lisa John Rogers has written, by the way a related lithograph displayed in the same room has been labeled over time (“‘Abortion,’ ‘Miscarriage,’ or ‘Untitled’? A Frida Kahlo Lithograph’s Complicated History,” Hyperallergic, April 29, 2015). But if anything is clear from the information provided there and in the catalogue essay by Salomon Grimberg, it is that Kahlo herself did not particularly wish to clarify the situation for the general public. This is a woman, after all, who had already begun to manipulate dates on her artworks, rework details from earlier pieces, and change her own name depending on circumstances. Her deliberate staging of word and image ought to remind us that the reality which she claimed to be painting was expertly constructed. It also bears noting that the traumatic experience in Detroit was neither her first nor her last pregnancy loss. Another truth: Kahlo’s intimate stories draw us in, and at the DIA, her works offer one bridge to the emotionally less available Rivera. They also sell at the gift shop, through which you must exit to get to the grand finale.

Detroit Industry proclaims Rivera’s own inspired way of reaching people, across time and through pictorial and real space. In the Garden Court, Rivera manages to resolve the many contradictions of his commission: a set of monumental modern murals on serene marble walls of a Beaux-Arts structure, the depiction of mile upon mile of factory in a single tightly contained courtyard, and a subject matter driven by the artist’s Marxist perspective but underwritten by capitalist dollars. The north and south walls are the showstoppers here, conveying a totality of the Motor City industries, the intense movement of laborers working back to back in an unrelenting forest of machines and among the technologies of modern science, but not in the chaotic jumble that one might expect; instead Rivera’s vision coincides remarkably well with that of Henry Ford at the River Rouge, where orderly production sequences create an efficiency that the artist uniquely renders above the bodies, sweat, and din.

Rivera’s spatial compressions produce unexpectedly harmonious polyscenic narratives, like the individual components of the assembly line precisely choreographed to produce something greater than the sum of their parts. This describes too the images from Rivera’s own preparatory drawings which only truly come together here to create an even grander narrative, with the allegorical representations above the laborers revealing the nascent transfer of energies from the raw materials that ultimately give rise to this Machine Age. As the only part of the exhibition that still remains at the DIA, and at an original cost of a mere ten thousand dollars, Rivera’s Detroit Industry may well be that city’s grandest bargain ever.

~ Delia Cosentino · February 4, 2016.

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Detroit Through the Eyes of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo

The period between April 1932 and March 1933, when artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo sojourned in Detroit, was a desperate time for the city. The Great Depression had hit so hard that officials cut the Detroit Institute of Arts’ (DIA) budget to just a tenth of what it had been before; there was even talk of shutting it down and selling off its collections. “Things were horrible, worse than they were two years ago,” curator Mark Rosenthal told Hyperallergic.

Rivera had arrived to paint his famous Detroit Industry murals at DIA, and despite the Motor City’s woes, was fascinated by what he saw. The Marxist painter worshipped Henry Ford and thought the industrial production exemplified by the River Rouge automobile factory could bring about utopia. The 27 panels he created are still widely considered one the 20th century’s greatest artistic reflections on technology.

It’s strangely fitting, then, that DIA’s first major exhibition since the city settled its bankruptcy (with the museum’s help) revisits this unfortunate period and its incredible artistic legacy. Opening this weekend, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit explores the year that one of art’s most famous couples spent in the city. “It’s a wild coincidence, because when the exhibition was first conceived a bankruptcy was being discussed, but nothing yet to do with the museum,” Rosenthal said. “There’s a sense of coming full circle.”

Rivera and Kahlo’s stay in America’s heartland proved transformative for them both. When they arrived, Rivera was already famous, having just had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art — only the second the institution had ever devoted to a living artist (the first was Matisse). For the next several months, he sketched Ford’s plant with a lover’s admiring eye and a draftsman’s deft hand, creating massive drawings that were transferred by assistants to DIA’s walls. The museum saved the original cartoons, now on display for the first time since a retrospective in 1986. “[In the drawings], you’re seeing the line and the artist’s hand, whereas when you’re looking at the finished painting it’s a picture,” Rosenthal noted. “The drawing curator keeps walking around staring and marveling at them.”

While the newspapers praised her husband, they referred to Kahlo simply as “Mrs. Rivera.” That would soon change. Before Detroit, the artist had sporadically painted a few relatively conservative portraits of family members. But after suffering through the loss of a pregnancy and the death of her mother while far from home (Mexico City), she began to paint herself in a powerfully vulnerable way.

Kahlo completed two important pieces while in Detroit. “Henry Ford Hospital” (1932) depicts the artist lying naked in a bloody hospital bed; the towers of the Ford Industry Plant rise ominously in the distance. “Diego at the time said no woman had ever painted such a subject,” Rosenthal said. “I think it’s fascinating to think about that painting vís-a-vís the male gaze and all these paintings of women in beds. This was radical. It was the beginning.”

The second painting, “Self-portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States” (1932), shows Kahlo straddling the US-Mexico border. The left half of the work is sunny and bright, a landscape of mysterious Aztec ruins and vibrant native flowers; to the right, the pollution of Ford’s factories chokes the air, suppressing all signs of life. The image shows the degree to which Kahlo’s point of view differed from her husband’s. “[In his murals], Diego was trying to conceive a grand meeting of the Northern and Southern hemispheres in one colossal new entity,” Rosenthal explained. “Frida didn’t see it that way. She didn’t think the hemispheres would ever be united.” In fact, “Henry Ford Hospital” might even be interpreted as a bitter punch at Rivera’s adoration of the car company; Kahlo imprinted Ford’s name across the bed in the work, as if spelling out a cause of her pain.

The tides of their careers would soon change. After Rivera completed the DIA murals in 1933, he headed to New York to work on another commission at Rockefeller Center, but it was torn down after he included a portrait of Lenin and showed one of the Rockefellers drinking. Dejected and morose, Rivera returned to Mexico with Kahlo. He continued working for another 25 years, but his career was never as illustrious as before.

Meanwhile, Kahlo was claimed by the Surrealists and began showing her work in New York and Paris; when the women’s movement discovered her in the 1970s, her fame exploded. “There was a tremendous reversal of fortune,” Rosenthal said. “When they came here, he was the big famous artist and she was unknown. Today it’s often noticed in the Rivera Court, where these paintings are — I’ve often heard it myself, but others at the museum have heard it too — people will be talking and they’ll say, ‘Oh, these paintings were done by the husband of Frida Kahlo. I can’t think of his name.’”

Detroit too has had its ups and downs, from the industrial boom spurred by World War II to the economic decline that became evident after the 1967 riots and culminated in the 2013 bankruptcy. Today, cheap rent is sparking a revival that’s drawn many artists to the city. Hopefully they will leave a legacy of their own.

~ Laura C. Mallonee · March 12, 2015.

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Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit

“Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit” is the story of two artists, two countries and one city. Filling several galleries at the Detroit Institute of Arts, it is also a serendipitous celebration of this exemplary museum’s hard-won independence.

While the show was conceived nearly a decade ago, its opening closely followed the happy conclusion of a tense 20 months during which the city, which owned the museum’s art collection and was facing bankruptcy, explored the possibility of selling valuable masterpieces for quick cash.

Last November, a judge approved the City of Detroit’s plan of adjustment, which included an agreement called the Grand Bargain. Under this, the museum pledged to contribute $100 million over 20 years to the city’s pension costs, while state, local and national foundations pledged an additional $715 million combined. In return, the collection’s ownership was transferred from the city to the museum. Thousands in Detroit and elsewhere breathed a huge sigh of relief.

The Rivera-Kahlo exhibition revisits the creation of a masterpiece made in Detroit, for Detroit, that would have been hard to sell because it is an intrinsic part of the Detroit Institute’s building. “Detroit Industry” is an idealized ode to the city in 27 frescoes. These formed the project that brought Diego Rivera, best known of the Mexican muralists, to Detroit in April 1932, accompanied by his much younger wife, Frida Kahlo, also an artist. Over the next 11 months, Rivera researched, designed and painted the frescoes that cover the four vaulting walls of the museum’s courtyard, now known as the Rivera Court. It features heroic scenes of muscular workers and even more idealized earth mothers grasping sheaths of wheat or armloads of fruit. All told, the “Detroit Industry” frescoes are probably as close as this country gets to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

This is to say that they are both monumental and awe-inspiring and, given that they were made four centuries after Michelangelo’s ceiling, something of an anachronism from the start. Still, they form an unusually explicit, site-specific expression of the reciprocal bond between an art museum and its urban setting, and Rivera considered them one of the pinnacles of his career.

Kahlo’s time in Detroit was perhaps even more important, even though she did not enjoy her stay. When she arrived, she was well along in synthesizing the influences of Mexican folk art and Surrealism into a mature vision. But in many ways, the miscarriage she suffered while in Detroit spurred the searing form of self-representation that is her contribution to art history. This miscarriage was the second physical trauma of her fraught, intensely creative life, the first being a near-fatal traffic accident in Mexico City in 1925, which caused her continual pain for the remainder of her life and severely reduced her chances of having children. (Kahlo depicted the colliding buses in a 1926 drawing on view in the show’s opening gallery.)

The show, which includes nearly 70 works executed by both artists before, during and after their Detroit sojourn, is a kind of contest between a hefty hare and a tiny tortoise. Rivera takes up most of the room — as, tall and bulky, he did in real life — but Kahlo emerges in the final galleries as the stronger, more personal and more original artist.

“Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit” has been organized by Mark Rosenthal, now an independent curator and scholar with decades of museum work on his résumé. It is studded with key loans, rarely seen works and surprises. It contains, for example, four of the immense actual-size charcoal drawings that Rivera made for individual fresco panels — fragile works that the museum is displaying for the first time in 30 years. Also on hand: four of the five paintings Kahlo made while in the city, starting with “Henry Ford Hospital” (1932), her reprise of the miscarriage, which shows her lying naked on a bloody bed set in an arid landscape with Ford’s River Rouge plant shimmering in the distance like an early Renaissance city. And there are three superb little exquisite corpse drawings that Kahlo made with her friend Lucienne Bloch when they escaped Detroit for a visit to New York City.

Yet in any other context, this exhibition might seem rather piecemeal, and it is riven with dumbed-down labels that emphasize the artists’ relationship, presenting a much simpler view of their artistic efforts than Mr. Rosenthal does in the catalog. But with “Detroit Industry” just down the hall, the show functions as a giant frame that illuminates Rivera’s frescoes to stunning effect.

A mesmerizing if slightly bombastic combination of heroic reality and nebulous idealism, and of friezes of figures alternating with deep vistas, the frescoes depicted Ford Motor Company blast furnaces and assembly lines; research scientists in their laboratories at Parke-Davis (later Pfizer) and workers trudging to and from factories. Nature is conjured not only by the robust female nudes but also in geological strata showing iron-ore formation and, in one of the best small panels, as black chunks of disease destroying crepuscular living cells. In a trompe l’oeil tour de force, Rivera renders a tanker carrying South American rubber as if it were a bronze relief.

There were hints of Rivera’s ambivalent Communist proclivities: a villainous-looking line foreman, visibly passive bourgeois visitors touring a plant, and a lone worker wearing leather gloves emblazoned with a red star. But as with any Renaissance work, there were also portraits of patrons: William R. Valentiner, the German-born director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, and Edsel Ford, the scion of one of the nation’s wealthiest families, who underwrote the project.

Perhaps the most arresting expressions of Rivera’s subversive instinct are the narrow panels at the top of the courtyard’s longer walls. Each features two large figures; the four represent what Rivera saw as the world’s four races. Rising between each pair is a jagged mound of deep red earth from which protrude sturdy hands of various colors. Many hold clumps of dirt or rocks, suggesting an angry mob working its way to the surface.

Within the frame this exhibition sets around Rivera’s frescoes, Kahlo’s development is a small vivid sidebar of more than equal weight. Her work is everything Rivera’s art is not: small in size and suffused with personal emotion and existential torment. If Rivera’s frescoes are a kind of cathedral and also a colossal period piece, Kahlo’s small paintings are portable altarpieces for private devotion and a high point of Surrealism that speaks to us still.

No surprise, among the ephemera reproduced here is an article about Kahlo that appeared in The Detroit News. In it she said of her husband, “Of course, he does pretty well for a little boy, but it is I who am the big artist.”

~ Roberta Smith · April 3, 2015.

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Detroit, 1932: when Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo came to town

The Detroit of 1932 had many parallels to the Detroit of today.

The city was teetering toward bankruptcy. People were out of work. The city was so pressed for funds that it seriously considered closing its art museum and selling off its collection – just as it did when Detroit filed for bankruptcy in 2013.

And social unrest was in the air. On March 7 1932, the Ford Hunger March took place, during which laid-off factory workers clashed with anti-union enforcers hired by Henry Ford. Four marchers were killed, while 60,000 people took part in the funeral procession.

It was in this atmosphere of financial depression and social unrest that the burly Mexican muralist Diego Rivera – an avowed communist, fresh off a visit to the Soviet Union – came to Detroit to execute a massive mural for the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA). With him, he brought his petite new bride, Frida Kahlo.

Eighty-two years later, the Detroit Institute of Arts is celebrating the works of Rivera and Kahlo with an exhibition that will run until July 12.

What the two artists produced during their year in Detroit marked the high point of each artist’s respective career.

For Rivera it was a mural – Detroit Industry – which he regarded as his masterpiece: the single most complete, powerful expression of his social and artistic ideals.

For Kahlo it was a series of self-portraits and harrowing narrative paintings that deal with themes like childbirth, abortion and suicide.

Yet how did a city that epitomized the nation’s industrial prowess come to commission a mural by an avowed communist? And why was he bankrolled by the heir to an auto empire that had revolutionized mass production and consumption? (During the height of the Red Scare, the Detroit Industry murals would be accompanied by a banner that began, “Rivera’s politics and his publicity seeking are detestable…”)

It’s a peculiar story, one that features larger-than-life personalities and awe-inspiring works of art. Like the best characters, all involved were conflicted, flawed and not quite what they seemed.

The commission

In 1932, Rivera and Kahlo arrived at the beckoning of the DIA’s museum director, Wilhelm Valentiner.

Valentiner was educated and trained in Germany. Over the course of his career, he created several great American art museums, spent most of his life in elite social circles and gave little indication of his political views, although he was briefly involved in political reform movements as a young man.

Ostensibly married, he seems to have been homosexual. Perhaps because of this, he kept his private life and inner feelings closely guarded.

And while he was the key figure in conceiving the commission, his motives for doing so aren’t clear.

Was it simply because Rivera was a star of the art world, or did Valentiner have some deeper political or social agenda?

Rivera’s portrait of Valentiner – another highlight of the exhibition – presents a figure who seems at once tight-lipped and tremulously sensitive.

Valentiner managed to execute the project through the financial support of Henry Ford’s only son, Edsel Bryant Ford, whose relationship with his father was conflicted, to say the least.

While nominally the head of the Ford Motor Company, Edsel had little actual control: his father, Henry, continued to manage the family business with an iron fist. Henry regarded Edsel as unmanly, a bit of a sissy who was much too interested in art.

Somehow, father and son skirted open conflict; but they worked in separate spheres, often in direct opposition to each other.

Henry Ford, for example, refused to hire Jews; his son quietly donated money to Jewish causes. While Henry ran the day-to-day operations of the business, Edsel retreated to the design studio, where his extraordinary genius for graceful, functional design helped rescue the Ford Motor Company from near bankruptcy.

Though the family business survived the stock market crash, the Great Depression had devastated the city’s working class. Wages were slashed, thousands lost their jobs and unemployment insurance didn’t exist.

Perhaps harboring complex feelings of privilege and guilt, Edsel seems to have sensed that a mural by Rivera could act as a healing force, reducing tensions between the owner and his workers.

And so he wrote a $20,000 check to cover Rivera’s fee – the equivalent of $320,000 today.

Detroit Industry

Upon arriving in Detroit, Diego Rivera – the avowed communist – was mesmerized by the efficiency of the city’s factories, which fulfilled his romantic notions of a productive, modern industrial state.

Somewhat surprisingly, he was also completely captivated by young Edsel Ford, a figure of considerable elegance and charm, who – save for his avowed reverence for capitalism – personified Rivera’s ideals of the enlightened modern leader.

With precise attention to detail, Rivera studied every process of the Ford factory complex at River Rouge, before compressing them into a single composition, spread over two large panels. He then inserted scenes of science and industry, accompanied by vast, nude, female allegorical figures, which symbolize the four directions and the different races of mankind.

The result was Detroit Industry: 27 panels that work in unison, highlighted by the two large panels of the River Rouge factories. Together, they line the DIA’s Rivera Court.

If we go through the laborious process of decoding the different scenes, we find that Rivera often organized them using contrasts, like the manufacturing of poison gas juxtaposed with the healing vaccines of modern medicine and science.

Yet despite the often heavy-handed use of didactic messages, the overall emotional effect is oddly ambiguous. Is the mural a celebration of the modern age? Or is it a nightmarish portrayal of soul-crushing industry? (Ironically, while Rivera claimed to be a communist, he grossly underpaid his workers for their help executing the mural.)

A couple that quarreled and inspired

Rivera and Kahlo were far from a model couple. They argued constantly. They divorced and remarried. He had an affair with a number of other women, including Kahlo’s sister. She had multiple affairs as well, with both men and women.

Yet despite the turmoil, they clearly possessed a profound artistic bond. While he could often be brutish and chauvinistic, it was Rivera who encouraged his wife to unleash, on canvas, her pain and anger towards men, to enter uncharted realms of subject matter and feeling.

Compared to Rivera’s huge murals, Kahlo’s paintings are initially a bit of a let-down: they’re surprisingly small in scale and not particularly impressive at the technical level.

Nonetheless, they’re surely landmarks because they dealt with subjects that had never been treated in the entire history of art: birth and abortion. The more one studies and deciphers the stories these images tell, the more arresting, haunting and unforgettable they become.

Sadly, the organizers couldn’t obtain the most impressive of Kahlo’s paintings: My Birth, 1932, which belongs to the pop star Madonna.

But the show does include Henry Ford Hospital, which depicts Kahlo’s abortion, along with A Few Small Nips – a rendering of a man with a dripping knife standing beside the bloody corpse of the woman he’s just murdered. There’s also the enigmatic Suicide of Dorothy Hale, a painting of a New York socialite jumping out of a tall building.

As with Rivera’s work, there’s an odd internal ambivalence to Kahlo’s work. Many of her paintings portray women as victims, either to the brutality of men or to the cruelty of natural processes, such as birth. Yet as a whole, they seem to simultaneously celebrate the strength of women.

In Kahlo’s world, the suffering and accomplishments of women are the dominant threads of human history, a story in which men play a secondary role.

Such an intensely feminist viewpoint had never before been expressed in art. And while Kahlo herself declared that she was a greater artist than Rivera, she was largely overlooked at the time. Now, however, Kahlo’s reputation and popular appeal – particularly among women – has come to overshadow that of Rivera.

Yet both should be lauded for finding inspiration in the struggles of daily life, for pinpointing issues that still concern and confound us today.

Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit will be exhibited until July 12 2015.

~ Henry Adams · April 27, 2015.

[impressivepress]

In defense of Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry frescoes

“Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit,” at the Detroit Institute of Arts, March 15-July 12, 2015 The current exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), “Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit,” treats the 11 months the famed Mexican artists spent in the city, between April 1932 and March 1933.

The exhibition contains much that is fascinating and even sublime. However, the overall approach taken by the curators, which exalts art concentrated on the “self,” is troubling and, in some places, wrongheaded and even reactionary.

Rivera (1886-1957) and Kahlo (1907-1954) were married in August 1929, and spent much of the years 1930 to 1933 in the US, in response, in part, to an anti-communist witch-hunt in Mexico. A socialist and supporter of the October Revolution, Rivera had been expelled from the Communist Party of Mexico in 1929 for speaking out in opposition to Stalin.

While in Detroit, Rivera painted his magnificent Detroit Industry frescoes, which remain the centerpiece of the DIA. The murals depict industrial production in all its facets, with workers at the center of the imagery, as well as the natural and social processes that culminate in modern human life. This complex work directs the viewer to many of the great dramas and dilemmas of the 20th century.

The DIA show contains full-sized cartoons, the preparatory drawings for the murals, as well as documentary videos, paintings and drawings by both Rivera and Kahlo from before, during and after the time the artists spent in Detroit. The cartoons, in particular, are spectacular, but fragile. They have not been seen for thirty years.

A brief video of Rivera at work is riveting. The great care, precision and enthusiasm with which he and his collaborators carried out the mural work are evident. Often working eighteen hours at a time, the Mexican artist lost a great deal of weight in the course of the Herculean physical and mental effort.

Another video clip shows workers in soup lines, and then, on March 7, 1932, Dearborn police and Ford company thugs attacking the Hunger March of 3,000 unarmed, unemployed people as they approached the Ford Rouge Plant. Four workers were shot to death in the infamous incident, a fifth died of his injuries three months later and 60 more were wounded in the bloody attack.

The funeral procession five days later, estimated at 60,000 people, shook the city’s foundations as chorus after chorus of “The Internationale” echoed for miles. That took place only weeks before Rivera and Kahlo arrived.

A series of works illustrates Rivera’s art prior to his stay in Detroit. There is the iconic portrait of Emiliano Zapata, the revolutionary peasant leader, and a lithograph of a peasant, “Boy with Dog,” from 1932. The unforgettable paintings “Flower Day” from 1925 and “Flowered Barge” (1931) in his mature, glowing, monumental style, appear as well. “Sawing Rails,” done in Moscow in 1927, and “Soviet Harvest Scene” are also on display.

Frida Kahlo’s “Portrait of Eva Frederick” from 1931 is appealing and shows the influence of Rivera. Her painting “Frieda and Diego Rivera, 1931” uses a flattened, primitive approach. Kahlo’s “Window Display on a Street in Detroit” (1932), the first painting she completed in Detroit, is quite touching.

Rivera’s pieces, “Juanita Rosas,” “Self-Portrait” and “Nude with Beads,” all from 1930, and “Friend of Frida,” from 1931, along with Portraits of Edsel Ford and DIA director William Valentiner, responsible for Rivera’s coming to Detroit, are included as well.

On May 24, 1932, Valentiner wrote in his diary with deep respect and admiration: “Today Rivera made a sketch of me in profile, with finest red and black chalk. While other artists usually waste a lot of paper, he used only one sheet. With the greatest assurance he drew the outlines with fine and even lines. It was at its best after half an hour, when the sketch was finished… Contrary to other great artists, he immediately brings out the likeness between the portrait and the model. With his mathematically inclined mind he immediately hits upon the right proportions.” (Margaret Sterne, The Passionate Eye, The Life of William R. Valentiner)

Unfortunately, as noted above, the remarkable character of many of the works in “Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit” does not compensate for the exhibition’s real and significant weaknesses, which tend to compromise and undermine its important material.

At the center of the difficulties lies the organizers’ unjustifiable attempt to elevate Kahlo’s artistic stature and, more generally, to make the case for art that primarily explores the individual artist’s “anguish and sense of suffering,” in the words of a DIA press release. This effort is in line with contemporary identity politics and upper-middle class self-absorption. This inevitably involves, implicitly or explicitly, diminishing or dismissing the significance of the Detroit Industry frescoes and its subject matter.

To understand why the frescoes are so offensive to contemporary art museum officials and critics alike, one has to grasp the driving forces in Rivera’s artistic life in the early 1930s, which animated the painting of the murals. The Mexican painter was inspired by great events, especially the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, in the production of his most important works.

It will come as a revelation, and one hopes an inspiration, to many who attend the exhibition that there is a history and tradition of revolutionary art. It has proved possible in the past to develop the highest forms of creative expression wedded to the aspirations, struggles, sufferings and trials of the masses. Rivera and his work were perhaps the greatest demonstration of this possibility in the field of fine art in the 20th century.

Leon Trotsky, whose supporter Rivera became for a number of years, wrote in 1938: “In the field of painting, the October revolution has found her greatest interpreter not in the USSR but in faraway Mexico… Nurtured in the artistic cultures of all peoples, all epochs, Diego Rivera has remained Mexican in the most profound fibres of his genius. But that which inspired him in these magnificent frescoes, which lifted him up above the artistic tradition, above contemporary art, in a certain sense, above himself, is the mighty blast of the proletarian revolution. Without October, his power of creative penetration into the epic of work, oppression and insurrection, would never have attained such breadth and profundity.” (“Art and Politics in Our Epoch”)

Rivera defended Trotsky against the vicious attacks of Stalinism and was instrumental in the Russian revolutionary’s obtaining asylum in Mexico in 1937. They collaborated, together with André Breton, on an important “Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art.” The omission of Trotsky’s name from the exhibition can hardly be an accident.

One of the extraordinary videos on display at the DIA shows a mass of workers battling police, as well as Rivera and Kahlo in front of a banner advertising works by Lenin and Marx in English. “There remained one thing left for me to prove,” said Rivera, speaking of his trip to the US. “My theory of revolutionary art would be accepted in an industrial nation where capitalists rule.” An overhead view of the DIA courtyard when the murals were opened to the public in March 1933 shows the space packed wall to wall.

Both in the mural work and in the video footage, a powerful sense of the industrial working class in Detroit emerges. Museum-goers perhaps used to the often demoralized and irrationalist outpourings of postmodernism, racial politics, feminism and other trends in recent decades will be struck by the massive and creative force of the working class.

The viewer must also be struck by the striking parallel, despite the changes over many decades, between present-day Detroit and the situation described in one of the videos of growing popular anger over the mass poverty at one pole of society and the immense wealth at the other, in the midst of the Depression. Many must see this and think, “So it remains today!”

The Industry frescoes are the greatest draw at the DIA and have always held a special place with the most conscious elements of the population in Detroit and beyond. The threat to the DIA two years ago, in connection with city’s filing for bankruptcy protection, aroused popular outrage. On the one hand, DIA officials are obliged to pay nominal tribute to the frescoes, describing the work as a “masterpiece” in their promotional material. On the other hand, the current show contains a sustained and consistent attack on Rivera and his work.

Before the Detroit Industry murals were made public in 1933, right-wing forces and religious bigots were howling for their destruction. Rivera’s artistic response was powerful and enduring. The frescoes depict the emergence of the working class, drawn like minerals from all regions and races and formed in the cauldron of industrial production into the central creative force of a bright future.

Now, however, a new kind of attack is under way, proceeding from within, as it were, from the DIA hierarchy and the art world.

Along these lines, certain aspects of the current exhibition’s organization are significant. The room containing Rivera’s breathtaking cartoons, for example, is followed by one almost entirely devoted to Kahlo’s miscarriage, or abortion, that occurred while she was in Detroit.

Three weeks before Rivera began to paint his murals, his wife entered Henry Ford Hospital. Evidence suggests, according to the exhibition catalogue, that Kahlo induced the loss of her pregnancy on July 4, 1932 by ingesting quinine. A few weeks later, with Rivera’s encouragement, she made the lithograph “Frida and the Abortion, 1932” to memorialize the event.

The end of her pregnancy figures prominently in Kahlo’s work and may have influenced Rivera’s decision to replace an agricultural scene, which appears in the exhibition as a full-sized cartoon, with a healthy infant curled in a plant bulb. This remarkable series of cartoons of the images that surround the infant is at the center of the current show. Root systems extend into rich soils and subterranean aquifers. Plowshares cultivate the surrounding terrain.

The artist said the image represented the museum “as the central organism for the development of the aesthetic culture of the community.” (“Dynamic Detroit--An Introduction,” Creative Art, April 1933). Giant, exquisite female nudes cradle fruits and grain on either side and lovingly watch over the child--the picture of a rich and satisfying future for all.

In any event, the loss of the unborn baby was traumatic for Kahlo and Rivera, but the curators’ decision to raise this personal tragedy to the level of a world-historical event strikes a false, tasteless and disoriented note.

In Kahlo’s “Henry Ford Hospital, 1932” we are confronted with a stricken woman, in a pool of blood, connected by multiple umbilical cords to a fetus, a snail, a pelvis and several other objects. The curator’s argument that somehow this agonizing, intimate experience must supplant the grand conception of a harmonious future for all mankind is deeply disturbing.

This sort of imagery becomes the basis for the claim, for example by the New York Times’ Roberta Smith, that “Kahlo emerges in the final galleries as the stronger, more personal and more original artist.” Kate Abbey-Lambertz headlines her piece at the Huffington Post, “How Frida Kahlo’s Miscarriage Put Her On The Path To Becoming An Iconic Artist.”

One of the foulest efforts to denigrate Rivera, Michael H. Hodges’ “Kahlo trumps Rivera in popular fame,” recently appeared in the Detroit News, a chief organ of Detroit business circles. There is a certain appropriateness here. The new, slightly more sophisticated, assault on the murals is taken up by the newspaper that was at the center of the original attacks.

On March 19, 1933, a News editorial argued that the Rivera murals were “psychologically erroneous, coarse in conception and, to many women observers, foolishly vulgar.” The News further asserted that the work was “un-American, incongruous and unsympathetic,” recommended that DIA director Valentiner be fired and concluded that “perhaps the best thing to do would be to whitewash the entire work and return the Court to its original beauty.”

Hodges’ piece in March 2015 takes a different tack, assembling fashionable and snobbish contemporary attacks on Rivera. The News journalist first notes that in 1932 Rivera was one of the most famous artists in the world. “How times have changed,” he observes, and then carries on: “Kahlo, the subject of the hit 2002 movie ‘Frida,’ has morphed into a pop-culture superstar and feminist icon, her fame today easily swamping Rivera’s. To explain this, curators and art historians point to changing fashions and the compelling nature of Kahlo’s personal narrative, which resonates with our self-obsessed age.

“For Rivera, one-half of the current Detroit Institute of Arts blockbuster… it’s been quite a fall from grace,” he writes.

Hodges calls on none other than the current, soon-to-retire, DIA director Graham Beal to help make his case. Beal terms Kahlo “an international superstar,” adding, “you often have to explain to people--particularly anyone under 40--just who Rivera was and why we should care.” (Who talks like this, using terms like “international superstar?”)

The News article continues: “‘When I first visited here in the early 1970s,’ he [Beal] adds, ‘Rivera looked hopelessly old-fashioned and wrong-headed--realistic, political, and in a way, propagandistic. Her art is much more in keeping with today--highly personal and intimate, full of pain and uncertainty.’”

These comments speak to decades-old processes that are now coming to a head. Wide layers of the so-called intelligentsia, who have become affluent and moved far to the right, no longer feel the need to conceal their social indifference and outright hostility to the working population… and their utter obsession with themselves. It’s repugnant.

They latch onto Kahlo because what they read in her art corresponds to their own unease, interpreted in purely existential and individual terms. Rivera’s challenging and carefully conceived imagery of people at work or engaged in epic struggles against war and disease, ignorance and prejudice is compared unfavorably to a series of pictures focusing on one individual’s physical and psychic injuries.

The attack on art that addresses great social questions is relentless. On the audio guide, for example, guest curator Maria Cotera, a Women’s Studies professor at the University of Michigan, asserts that we now know that “the minor is where we find the big ideas” and that “big ideas became deeply personal.” Wall texts celebrate Kahlo’s subjectivism and criticize Rivera for advocating and explaining political principles and big historical and intellectual conceptions.

The curators write, for example, “Her [Kahlo’s] intellectual and artistic interests hinged on defining and representing herself,” while “Diego Rivera wanted his murals to become part of a dialogue about society that supported his intellectual and artistic agendas.”

The line of the exhibition, never stated in an honest manner, is that Rivera may have had some justification for his social art given the conditions of the 1930s, but we have long since transcended the period when art and politics concentrated on the working class. Kahlo’s critique of life is far more profound, “more thorough” than the class struggle conception promoted by Rivera because it is not fixated on changing the external world. Instead, it focuses on the inner being and “deeper” questions such as gender, sexuality, etc.

These views inevitably raise more directly the question of Kahlo’s art and career, a subject far too large for extended treatment here. It is evident that the discovery of Kahlo coincides with the emergence of gender politics and postmodern ideology in the 1970s and 1980s.

As “Made in Her Image: Frida Kahlo as Material Culture,” by Lis Pankl and Kevin Blake, points out: “It is certainly no accident that Kahlo’s popularity rose with the linguistic and cultural turn in the humanities and social sciences. With a greater emphasis on representation and identity politics, the academy found in Kahlo a perfect subject for analysis. Kahlo’s complex ethnicity… artistic autoeroticism, and evident links to gender construction are of much appeal to poststructuralists.”

One cannot place all the blame for the uses to which she and her work are put on Kahlo, but there is certainly some basis in the art itself for the current infatuation. It does violence to the history of art and helps no one to reduce Rivera, a colossal figure who drew upon a profound study of art and conveyed powerfully the impact of the Russian and Mexican Revolutions, to the benefit of Kahlo, a figure identified with extreme subjectivity. Such a readjustment in the artistic-intellectual world’s opinion must give one pause.

The victim of a serious accident at the age of 18 that required her to undergo dozens of surgeries over the course of her lifetime, Kahlo was no doubt a gifted artist, but her work is strikingly dominated by considerations of herself and her difficulties. She produced 143 paintings, 55 of which were self-portraits. Why so many? “Because I am so often alone,” she explained, “because I am the subject I know best.” Yes, but did she truly understand herself? An immense focus is hardly a guarantee that one understands a subject all that well.

There is something static, unchanging, in Kahlo’s self-portraiture, even immature. Of course, she died quite young and she came under various influences, not all of them happy or helpful ones. But in the self-portraits of Rembrandt and van Gogh, for example, one feels an unending intellectual and aesthetic development, the result of a bottomless curiosity about the world, history, society, resulting in an intense and compassionate realism.

A self-portrait is more than a picture of an individual. In its psychological depth and rigorous objectivity, a great self-portrait points beyond itself to something about the human situation in general, and perhaps the artistic personality in particular. Kahlo’s self-portraits are unusual and distinctive, but they tend to refer the viewer always back to Kahlo and her immediate situation. They seem often to be a reminder of her anguished presence more than a window onto something broader. One cannot help but have the feeling these paintings are intended in part to impress and even to shock.

The subject cannot be removed from art, nor should it be, but there is a distinction between dealing honestly and vividly with oneself and one’s circumstances and self-obsession. If a work becomes excessively personal, the universal may be lost in the process.

At a certain point, if the representation becomes too particular, why should anyone else care a great deal? Kahlo was neither the first nor the last person to suffer physical ailments and complications. Pankl and Blake write, “Kahlo’s depictions of bodily pain are the most widely explored elements within her work.”

Art also requires a certain detachment, and the most compelling artistic figures have treated suffering, including their own, with restraint and dignity, not self-pity.

Uncritical admirers of Kahlo are miseducating the public and aspiring artists as well when they suggest, by implication, that wholeheartedly embracing one’s afflictions or perhaps one’s biology by itself is a possible route to artistic greatness. If such were the case, there would be no need for a serious study of art or society, or a concern with the fate of anyone other than oneself. And, indeed, such an outlook helps account for the largely desiccated, angst-ridden and self-centered art that predominates today.

All in all, the DIA’s “Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit,” a peculiar and contradictory event, raises a host of pressing issues.

Much of the imagery, including video imagery assembled by the curators themselves, tends to direct the museum-goer toward the big events of the 20th century, to the revolutionary role of the working class and, by implication, to a consideration of what point society and the human condition have now reached. After all, the exhibition is being held in an economically devastated city, where tens of thousands of people face the possibility of having their water shut off in the near future!

Yet the show’s organizers and museum officials, along with their media apologists, are waging a ferocious ideological campaign in opposition to such concerns—even at the expense of the DIA’s own centerpiece—in favor of art, in the words of the New York Times ’ Smith, suffused with “existential torment.”

The defense of the Detroit Industry frescoes falls once again, as it did in the 1930s, to the only social force with an interest in the cultural development of the population as a whole and in art that looks at life and reality critically, the working class.

~ Tim Rivers, David Walsh · 21 April 2015.

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Live like a Rockefeller — The Rivals by Diego Rivera

At first glance, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and the Mexican artist Diego Rivera couldn’t have been more different. She was the daughter of a prominent Republican senator and had married into one of America’s most famous capitalist families; he was a devoted member of Mexico’s Communist party, who had visited Moscow before his first U.S. mural commission in San Francisco.

Abby, however, was a huge admirer of Rivera’s art. He’d developed a reputation as one of his generation’s leading modern artists, and she knew all about his triumphs as a muralist in his homeland (in buildings such as the Ministry of Education in Mexico City), not to mention his mural for the Pacific Stock Exchange Tower in San Francisco. She purchased a number of Rivera’s oil paintings, sketches and watercolours. Her first purchase in 1929 was May Day Parade, a Rivera sketchbook (now in the collection at MoMA), which he had completed on a trip to Moscow.

In 1931, in her capacity as co-founder and trustee of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Abby invited Rivera for a solo exhibition at the institution, making him only the second artist, after Matisse, to receive that honour. It is likely that Mexico had been on her mind for decades, ever since her first trip to the country in 1903. Rivera embodied everything that Abby and Alfred Barr, MoMA’s first Director, were looking for in terms of the museum’s programming: he was both a modernist genius with a towering body of work and as Mexico’s leading muralist, he was the foremost proponent of a genuine art movement from the Americas to the world.

On arrival in New York, Rivera paid a visit to the Rockefellers’ Manhattan home with his wife, the artist Frida Kahlo. ‘He was a very imposing and charismatic figure: tall and weighing three hundred pounds,’ Abby’s son, David Rockefeller, recalled in later life.

Rivera brought with him a new canvas, titled The Rivals, which Abby had commissioned and which he had painted in a makeshift studio aboard the steamship, the SS Morro Castle, en route from Mexico. The painting depicts a traditional festival from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca known as Las Velas, a colourful celebration in observance of local patron saints and of the natural bounties of spring.

‘It’s undoubtedly one of Rivera’s masterpieces,’ says Virgilio Garza, Head of Latin American Paintings at Christie’s. ‘Compared with his murals — which are epic in scale and content, with sweeping vistas and narratives that are often ideologically or historically driven — this easel painting is equally monumental in presence, yet devoid of Rivera’s politics. It’s a much more intimate scene focused on regional traditions, and the brushwork is deliberately looser.’

Others have praised the rich combination of bright colours, reminiscent of Matisse (whom Rivera knew from the decade he’d spent in Paris, between 1911 and 1921) but also, more pertinently, reflecting the vivid hues evident across Mexico: from its flora to its architecture. ‘And then there’s his modern conception of space through the use of multiple planes of colour that recall the formal effects of synthetic Cubism,’ says Garza. ‘Forms and figures are synthesised and reduced to their essential elements. The viewer’s gaze recedes in stages, from the men in the foreground, to the brightly dressed women under the hanging papel picado. Rivera’s brilliant composition of intersecting planes creates a cinematic narrative.’

The Rivals  was as popular with Abby as Rivera’s sell-out MoMA retrospective proved to be with New York’s public. In 1932, she approached the artist about another project: completing a mural for the lobby of the RCA Building, the centrepiece of the Rockefeller Center, her husband, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s new complex in Midtown Manhattan.

Rivera’s idea was a fresco on the twin themes of human cooperation and scientific development, and he sent Abby a planned sketch of it along with a letter saying, ‘I assure you that… I shall try to do for the Rockefeller Center — and especially for you, Madame — the best of all the work I have done up to this time.’

In the process of painting the mural Man at the Crossroads, Rivera made several changes to his original sketch that would have fateful consequences. Chief among these was the addition of Lenin’s features into the face of a labourer. When news of this change in the mural reached  Nelson Rockefeller, David’s older brother, he asked Rivera to substitute the late Soviet leader for another figure.

The painter, despite many attempts to persuade him, refused. Equally vexing to the Rockefeller family was the depiction of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. on the left side of the mural drinking among a group of men and cavorting with women of questionable repute. The latter was a striking image given the family’s devout religious views and their abstinence from drinking and smoking, as well as the Rockefellers’ firm support of U.S. Prohibition-era laws. With no compromise reached, Rivera was dismissed, and although he was paid in full the mural was destroyed. ‘The mural was quite brilliantly executed,’ wrote David Rockefeller in Memoirs in 2002, ‘but not appropriate’.

Rivera would go on to recreate Man at the Crossroads, in modified form as Man, Controller of the Universe, on the walls of the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. Here again, Rivera depicted John D. Rockefeller, Jr. clutching a martini amid scenes of gambling and excess, while the other side featured workers and various Communist leaders.

Despite all these events, Abby and her sons Nelson and David remained admirers until the end. She would donate many of the Rivera works she owned to MoMA, although The Rivals  was one piece she held on to. As a sign of how highly she valued it, Abby gave it to David and his wife Peggy McGrath as a wedding present in 1940. They, in turn, would give the painting pride of place, for decades, in the living room of their summer residence, Ringing Point, in Maine.

David Rockefeller’s interest in Latin America and its art and culture spanned many decades. In January 1946, after completing his military service in the Second World War and before he started work at Chase Bank, he and Peggy decided to take ‘a second honeymoon’. They settled on Mexico as the destination for their six-week holiday.

‘This was our first direct exposure to Latin America, and we were very much taken with what we saw,’ David wrote years later. ‘We were especially fascinated by the remarkable pre-Columbian monuments and artefacts, as well as by the charm of much contemporary Mexican painting and folk art.’ He recounted how keen they were to see the famous Mexican frescoes of Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City and Cuernavaca. ‘We especially wanted to see Rivera’s murals, since I had met Rivera with my mother when he first came to New York in 1931,’ he recalled. ‘I had always found him to be a very sympathetic person, and I liked his painting.’

The couple had travelled to Mexico armed with letters of introduction from Nelson Rockefeller, who had been appointed Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs by President Roosevelt and had subsequently visited virtually all the Latin American nations. One letter was addressed to Roberto Montenegro, an artist friend of Nelson’s, who introduced David and Peggy to other contemporary Mexican artists.

At the beginning of his long career with Chase, one of David’s first assignments was in the bank’s Latin American division. In 1965 he assumed the chairmanship of both the Council of the Americas and its new cultural adjunct, the Center for Inter-American Relations (CIAR). The latter was responsible for introducing Americans to the cultures and artists of Latin America, including staging the first one-man show in New York for Fernando Botero.

In 1991, he endowed the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard, which continues to explore Latin American politics, society, and culture, and after his retirement from the bank David was made chairman of The Americas Society, which afforded him, he said, ‘many new opportunities to visit the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean, and to appreciate their diverse art and culture.’

~ ROCKEFELLER COLLECTION | AUCTION PREVIEW · 9 May 2018.

[impressivepress]

Diego Rivera in the Soviet Union: An exhibition in Mexico City

Diego Rivera and his Experience in the USSR, presented in Mexico City at the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo House Studio Museum (Museo Casa Estudio Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo) and the Diego Rivera Mural Museum (Museo Mural Diego Rivera) until April 8.

Diego Rivera (1886-1957), the Mexican painter and muralist, was one of the most significant artistic figures of the 20th century. The artist was inspired by great events, especially the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, in the production of his most important works.

The current exhibition in Mexico City, Diego Rivera and His Experience in the USSR ( Diego Rivera y la experiencia en la URSS, at the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo House Studio Museum and the Diego Rivera Mural Museum), focuses on the artist’s two visits to the Soviet Union, the first in 1927-28 and the second in 1955-56. The exhibition contains materials from 28 collections around the world, including watercolors, paintings, sketches and letters. It also showcases photographs and posters that Rivera acquired in the USSR and kept until his death.

Rivera had a long and complicated history with the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, most of which, unfortunately, is not examined in the current show. Absent this context, the viewer would fail to understand the changes that Rivera—and the USSR itself—underwent in the almost three decades between his two visits. However, despite its limitations, the exhibition, particularly materials from his first visit, sheds light on the experiences that inspired Rivera to go beyond the confines of Mexican nationalism and, during his healthiest period as an artist, take up the creation of revolutionary art.

In 1927, Rivera was invited to the USSR to participate in the commemorations of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. He was part of a delegation of “workers and peasants” representing Mexico. Upon arrival, he was certified as a member of the Communist Party and named a delegate of the Mexican Peasant League.

His relationship to the Mexican Communist Party (PCM), however, was already strained. Prior to his first visit, Rivera had resigned (1925) and been readmitted (1926) to the Mexican Stalinist party.

The 10th anniversary of the Revolution was celebrated amid the Stalinist bureaucracy’s continued and ferocious efforts to silence Leon Trotsky and what was at the time the United Opposition (including the forces led by Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev). Oppositionists participated in celebrations of the anniversary of the Revolution with their own banners. Their slogans included: “Strike Against the Kulak, the NEPman, and the Bureaucrat!” Stalinist-organized thugs violently attacked Opposition contingents in Leningrad and Moscow. Trotsky’s anticipation of reprisals proved correct. He and many Oppositionists were expelled from the Communist Party in December 1927, and in January 1928, Trotsky was banished to Alma Ata in Soviet Central Asia.

The 10th anniversary also took place one year after the British General strike of 1926 and on the heels of the bloody defeat of the Chinese Revolution, both betrayed by Stalinism’s rejection of the very internationalist program and outlook that had guided the October Revolution 10 years earlier.

These monumental events seriously weakened the Soviet and international working class and strengthened the grip of the national-opportunist Stalinist bureaucracy.

However, the 10th anniversary of the revolution also underscored the considerable achievements of the first worker’s state, particularly under the terribly difficult conditions of the imperialist-organized civil war and the continued isolation of the Soviet Union.

Rivera witnessed the anniversary festivities firsthand, producing sketches of the serpentine masses of men and women marching through the Red Square. He was deeply touched by this powerful manifestation of the force of the working class. “I will never forget the first time that I saw the march and organized movement of the people in Moscow,” writes Rivera. “Snow was falling in an early morning. The marching mass was black, compact, rhythmically united, it had the elastic movement of a viper, but it was more threatening than any snake I could imagine.”

Rivera interacted with a wide range of Soviet artistic figures during his stay. He met the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and was a guest in the home of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who Rivera had previously met in Mexico. Eisenstein belonged to the October artistic group, which, although it pledged itself to “proletarian culture,” was one of the last gasps of the Soviet avant garde. Sympathetic to the group’s mission, Rivera joined the collective.

Rivera spoke at several artists’ groups and was named an instructor in the Moscow Academy of Fine Arts. The Krasnaya Niva ( Red Field) magazine commissioned Rivera to paint a picture for the cover of their Paris Commune anniversary number.

Rivera had hopes of encouraging a muralist movement in the Soviet Union similar to the one which he, along with David Álfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco, had pioneered in Mexico to portray the cultural and political life of peasants and workers. In November 1927, Rivera was commissioned by Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Soviet People’s Commissar of Education, to paint a fresco in the Red Army Club in Moscow.

Rivera was given several photographs showing “innovative architectural projects, factories, metalworking plants, petroleum fields, technological advances, schools, theater, and general life and Russian culture.” Several of these photographs, along with sketches of the proposed mural, are on display at the exhibit.

In early May 1928, Lunacharsky informed Rivera that he should leave the country to avoid being arrested for “anti-Stalin” activities. Although it is unclear what immediately prompted his quasi-expulsion, it is likely that Rivera’s relationship with artists who previously had a positive relationship with the Left Opposition put him in the crosshairs of the bureaucracy. His Red Army mural was never completed, and he would not return to the Soviet Union until two years before his death.

Rivera’s first visit to the Soviet Union had a consequential impact on his future work. According to the exhibit, “while he had previously incorporated workers as the principal element in his prior murals, it wasn’t until his return to Mexico when this element began to have a different narrative, always placed in front of machines, factories or next to characters from the Soviet Army.”

The time he spent with the October group also had a lasting effect on Rivera’s compositions. The collage configurations that the group used in their propaganda posters is present in many of Rivera’s murals after his trip, according to the exhibition’s catalog.

One year after his visit, Rivera was once again expelled from the Communist Party after speaking out against Stalinism. An anticommunist witch-hunt in Mexico the same year led Rivera and Frida Kahlo, his wife and fellow socialist, to spend much of the early 1930s in the United States.

He painted some of his most well-known murals during this period. Rivera completed his breathtaking Detroit Industry frescos at the Detroit Institute of the Arts in 1933. His Man, Controller of the Universe was reproduced in Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes in 1934 after the original in Rockefeller Center in New York City was destroyed for its portrayal of Lenin. These works brought to life the trials and struggles of the working class and depicted socialists—principally Lenin and Trotsky—providing leadership to the masses.

In 1936, Rivera became an open supporter of the movement for a Fourth International and helped persuade Mexican President Lázaro Cardenas to grant Trotsky asylum in Mexico. During this period, Rivera was consciously expressing the need to link artistic endeavors with the advancement of international socialism, making him one of the greatest interpreters of the October Revolution at the time. In 1938, Rivera collaborated with Trotsky and French writer André Breton on “A Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art”:

“True art, which is not content to play variations on ready-made models but rather insists on expressing the inner needs of man and of mankind in its time—true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society. This it must do, were it only to deliver intellectual creation from the chains which bind it, and to allow all mankind to raise itself to those heights which only isolated geniuses have achieved in the past.”

Also in 1938 (“Art and Politics in Our Epoch”), Trotsky paid tribute to Rivera’s specific contribution to art and society:

“In the field of painting, the October revolution has found her greatest interpreter not in the USSR but in faraway Mexico. … Nurtured in the artistic cultures of all peoples, all epochs, Diego Rivera has remained Mexican in the most profound fibres of his genius. But that which inspired him in these magnificent frescoes, which lifted him up above the artistic tradition, above contemporary art, in a certain sense, above himself, is the mighty blast of the proletarian revolution. Without October, his power of creative penetration into the epic of work, oppression and insurrection, would never have attained such breadth and profundity.”

Rivera’s artistic effort is indelible, but he was not to prove immune to the immense pressures and traumas of the mid-20th century. Trotsky’s assassination in 1940, combined with the betrayals of Stalinism, the rise and crimes of fascism and the horrors of the Second World War, disoriented an increasingly skeptical and pessimistic layer of artists and intellectuals who chose to believe that Stalinism presented the continuity of the October Revolution. Rivera, losing confidence in the working class and the ability of the Fourth International to construct a revolutionary leadership, fell into the trap of confusion and demoralization. He made numerous attempts to rejoin the PCM and was finally readmitted in 1954.

Rivera visited the Soviet Union for a second time in 1955-56 to seek cancer treatment at Moscow’s Botkin Hospital. Cobalt therapy—the type of treatment that Rivera received—was more advanced in the Soviet Union and not yet available in Mexico.

Like Rivera, the Soviet Union had undergone profound changes over the course of 30 years. The Mexico City exhibition lacks any discussion of the Stalinist betrayal of the Russian Revolution or the mass murder of revolutionary workers and youth. Many of the artists that Rivera had met during his first visit had since perished, through the purges or suicide, or been silenced by the bureaucracy. The show’s brief discussion of “Socialist Realism” fails to explain why this anti-socialist and anti-realistic dogma arose, let alone its alternatives or consequences.

Rivera’s political disorientation is perhaps best illustrated by his continued friendship with Siqueiros, who had led the first assassination attempt on Trotsky’s life in May 1940. Siqueiros visited Rivera while he was at the hospital, and several photographs of Rivera, Siqueiros, and Emma Hurtado, Rivera’s fourth and last wife, can be seen in the exhibition.

By this time, Rivera was not especially honest with himself or others. In his comments at the time, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to separate out what was genuine appreciation for the advances made by Soviet society and what was an effort to curry favor with the post-Stalin regime and international apparatus. “I am living in a new society, made up of people that are truly human beings,” writes Rivera. “What finesse, what firmness, what clarity of thought, what delicacy in feeling, and what simple and constant friendliness and kindness!”

The exhibition displays many sketches of the doctors, nurses, and fellow patients that Rivera met during his four-month treatment in Moscow. In the outings he was allowed during his recovery, Rivera painted many passersby, particularly families and young children playing in the snow. He witnessed the October Revolution anniversary celebrations for a second time from the Moscow National Hotel.

During his second visit, he paid tribute to the participants of former revolutions by painting Veteran of 1905 and Veteran of 1917. A 20-year-old who had fought in 1905 would have been 70 years old, while a corresponding participant of the October Revolution would now be 58. The Veteran of 1917 is treated with honesty and, one senses, a great deal of respect and admiration. Looking into the eyes of the Veteran of 1917, one comes out with a clear feeling: the Russian working class is not to be trifled with.

With a few exceptions, however, there is a noticeable decline in the quality of the art Rivera produced during his second visit. The depictions of the powerful working class and the Red Army were replaced mostly by individual portraits. He no longer paints the great socialist leaders that he once defended to the point of having his murals censored or destroyed. Rivera’s break with revolutionary socialism and capitulation to its betrayers dealt a heavy blow to his ability to synthesize the objective truth about the world around him.

Following Rivera’s treatment, Rivera and Hurtado conducted a tour through eastern Europe. They visited the Auschwitz concentration camp and Hitler’s bunker in Germany, among other sites. The pair then returned to Mexico in April 1956.

Rivera passed away on November 24, 1957, leaving behind several works he was unable to finish before his death. In Botkin Hospital, Rivera produced fascinating sketches for a new mural for the Faculty of Chemical Sciences at Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM). The sketch contains hand-written instructions by Rivera on the themes and materials to be used in the new mural.

Rivera maintained a belief in the planned economy’s ability to produce scientific achievements until his death. He closely followed the launch of Sputnik I, the first artificial Earth satellite, in October 1957. “Diego Rivera interpreted the Sputnik launch as proof that communism was capable of leading humanity to a new global order, and, using technology, to a better place in the cosmos,” according to the museum catalog.

Diego Rivera and his Experiences in the USSR brings forward a large amount of previously little-known material and is worth a visit, despite its limitations. One hopes that the artists and youth that attend will be inspired to learn more about the Russian Revolution and, following Rivera’s example, turn toward the working class to produce new revolutionary art to awaken the consciousness and feeling of the masses.

~ Alex González · 12 January 2018.

[impressivepress]

New York: ‘Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917′ at the Museum of Modern Art

Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917, at the Museum of Modern Art, features almost 120 paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures completed by Henri Matisse within the span of four years.

1913 marks a turning point in Matisse’s evolutionary career: in the twilight of WWI, the artist made a profound move toward conceptual distortion.  He worked in German-occupied France while his brother was in a prison camp and his mother was behind enemy lines–conditions he deemed the “methods of modern construction” that altered the course of his artistic and personal development.

Matisse’s works approach abstraction, often distilling his images from photo-realistic paintings into shapes, shadows, and colors evocative of the human form.  Matisse favored suggestion over detail, constructing bodies and objects from the sum of several carefully placed lines.  The result of this ambiguity is an anonymity suitable to the indiscriminate killings Matisse would have witnessed during this time.

As a 44 year old with a weak heart, Matisse was barred from serving in the French army in 1914.  While contemporaries Georges Braque and Andre Derain fought in the war, Matisse remained at home, painting: “I sometimes emerge victorious, but winded,” he said, likening his artistic endeavors to a conquerable battlefield.  He began to use sober blacks and grays increasingly, which may be reflective of the deterioration of Paris he witnessed and the gravity of his familial circumstances.  Even Matisse’s neutral tones, however, are sumptuous and textured, a feat he achieved by layering, scoring, scuffing, and scratching his canvases, painting in a manner comparable to sculpture.

Despite the reductionist nature of Matisse’s work from 1913-1917, x-rays have revealed up to seven layers of nearly completed paintings under his finalized canvases, indicating a purposeful frugality.  The uniqueness of this period for Matisse is evidenced by his return to naturalism and conventionalism at the end of the war, when the artist relocated to Nice, France.

While Matisse painted familiar objects, it is his style that became structural in the face of chaotic war.  In 1951 Matisse told an interviewer, “Despite the pressure from certain conventional quarters, the war did not influence the subject matter of painting, for we were no longer painting subjects.” This quotation alludes to his prioritization of essence over material.  His painting of a dark-haired Italian woman, for instance, is exceptional not for its subject matter, but rather for Matisse’s animation of the wall behind her, which seems to be simultaneously engulfing and protective.

~ August 2nd, 2010.

[impressivepress]

Chicago exhibit looks at enigmatic phase in Matisse's art

A new exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago takes a close – sometimes even microscopic – look at one short and enigmatic phase in the 65-year-long artistic career of France’s Henri Matisse.

Matisse, who lived from 1869 to 1954, is often seen as the least controversial and the most serene of the great 20th century modernists. Though his occasional early sculptures are darker, Matisse’s paintings and prints seem to live in a sunny place outside of time. Their tone of bright calm makes their reproductions favored decor for hospital corridors.

Looking at them, you would not know that Matisse lived through both world wars and the Great Depression, or that Paris fell to enemy troops twice in his lifetime – in 1871 and 1940.

Except for the academic interiors and still lifes he painted as a student after abandoning the law for art at age 20, Matisse’s enduring trademarks were bright colors and a deceptively simple approach to form.

Those aspects were present from the oils Matisse presented in 1905 as leader of the fauvists to the vast paper cutouts he created late in his life when arthritis made painting impossible. But they disappeared suddenly when he returned to Paris from a trip to Morocco in 1913 and did not fully reappear until after the end of World War I. During that time, Matisse’s paintings were dominated by blacks and grays, and there was an uncharacteristic density to his composition.

That period is the focus of the new exhibition “Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917,” which runs through June 20 at the Art Institute. It will be on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from July 18 through Oct. 11.

Stephanie D’Alessandro of the Art Institute and John Elderfield of the Museum of Modern Art in New York curated the show.

It contains nearly 120 of Matisse’s paintings, sculptures, etchings and drawings – many from that crucial period, but some from before and after.

Some critics attribute the change to war pressures and the challenge of a younger generation of painters, particularly the cubism championed by Matisse’s younger friend and rival, Pablo Picasso. But D’Alessandro and Elderfield believe Matisse decided to reinvent himself artistically and develop new methods of art construction.

To explore that idea, they delved into Matisse’s writings and had technicians examine his works with microscopic and X-ray analysis.

“Our study was inspired by our own collection at the Art Institute – especially by that wonderful painting ‘Bathers by a River,’” D’Alessandro said.

D'Alessandro noted that when the Art Institute acquired the work a year before Matisse's death, the artist told the museum it was one of the five most pivotal works of his career. She also said he had kept it in his studio for years as an object for study. Matisse began "Bathers by a River" in 1909 and revised it several times over the next year. He reworked it again several times in 1913, and again in 1916-1917.

“We have learned that the canvas experienced more than 20 states (of composition) over the years, and that Matisse deliberately left traces of some of the older versions visible in its final form,” D’Alessandro said.

It was a practice he continued when he returned to a brighter palette and lighter forms in the 1920s and 1930s.

“He said once that the greatest works were those in which you had to start over from scratch to rework them,” she added.

Elderfield said that in his later paintings, Matisse often scraped off almost as much paint as he applied, and he made no effort to conceal that he had done so. He also moved elements around on the canvas multiple times.

Gray and black are dominant tones in “Bathers by a River,” but traces of brighter pigments remain on its four monumental and faceless human figures.

Elderfield conceded that the somber tone of the painting probably had something to do with World War I. He noted that Matisse – who was 44 and in poor health in 1914 – had been rejected for military service and he also was distressed that so many of his younger colleagues and friends were in the trenches.

“How does an artist respond to a war?” Elderfield asked. “For one thing, with a refusal of ostentation, which may account for the dark tones and the fact that Matisse would not mount any shows of his work during the war.”

But both curators said the change in the artist’s work went beyond reaction to the war, and showed he was striving toward what Matisse called “methods of modern construction.”

Once he had established those methods, they said, Matisse could return to an apparent simplicity achieved through distillation.

~ The Associated Press · Apr 23, 2010.

[impressivepress]

Art review: 'Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917' @ Art Institute of Chicago

If the world is coming apart at the seams and society's provisional fabric is being shredded, how does an artist respond? With anger? Analysis? Denial? Disinterest?

That's a question that thrums through a breathtaking exhibition, newly opened at the Art Institute of Chicago. And in the case of its subject, the great French painter Henri Matisse (1869-1954), the answer is not so simple.

The show is a concentrated look at a nearly five-year period between Matisse's last visit to Morocco, where the saturated light had such a deep impact on his color sense, and his departure from Paris, where he made his career, to live in the ancient Mediterranean resort at Nice. It includes some of the greatest, most enigmatic works of his long career but has never been the focus of a show.

The period also roughly coincides with World War I. When the German army advanced on Paris in 1914, having already occupied the town in northern France where the artist grew up (and members of his family still lived), and as the mountain of gruesome corpses in the most horrific conflict Europe had known since the Middle Ages piled ever higher in ensuing years, Matisse did something unexpected: He reinvented his art.

One painting places his young son Pierre by an open window, seated at a piano awaiting a lesson. Another shows the willowy figure of a dark-haired Italian woman, the wall behind her miraculously wrapping around her right shoulder like a consoling shawl. A studio interior juxtaposes a painter's palette, propped on a table, with a big cylindrical glass vase filled with water, in which a couple of goldfish swim.

Perhaps most remarkably, a huge canvas poses four monumental nudes by a river. The four stone-colored, monolithic figures might also be a single woman, seen from different sides. Statuesque, they're like prehistoric goddesses in a landscape at once lush and forbidding. And if that narrow, pointed white shape rising from the bottom edge of the 12-foot-wide canvas is indeed a serpent, are these "Bathers by a River" meant to conjure up an archaic Eve?

Matisse made several exceptional bronze sculptures too. One series began as a life-size bust of a young woman, its richly modeled surface appealing to a viewer's sense of touch through the intricate play of light and shadow. That bust becomes progressively more abstract through each of the next four iterations until, by the end, it consists of two enormous eyes split by a nose that rises into a bulbous brow. "Jeannette (V)," made in 1916, bristles with the formal power of the African tribal sculptures Matisse admired and collected.

Another series of 6-foot bronze reliefs resonates with "Bathers by a River." In each, a nude woman  seen from the back, presses her body against a wall. Her head rests in the crook of her upraised left arm, and the fingers of her right hand are splayed. The pressure between body and wall seems to energize both, until finally the structure of the body, the wall and the entire relief fuse into one.

Matisse also produced prints. The most surprising are little monotypes, made by covering small copper plates with black ink, incising a linear drawing of a still life or head and pressing the plate into paper for a single quick impression. You peer into the dark surface, and the black glows with an inner light.

How do these and other of the 117 works assembled for the exhibition respond to the cruel chaos of war? The show's title says it: "Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917."

Invention was not new to his art, but after 1913 he cranked up the visual volume. Matisse was 44 and already successful as war broke out, but he was turned down when he volunteered for military service. Friends did march off to fight, and some did not return. They gave their all, and he did too.

It's not a question of subject matter. In a quotation posted in the show, the artist told an interviewer in 1951: "Despite pressure from certain conventional quarters, the war did not influence the subject matter of painting, for we were no longer merely painting subjects." Instead, Matisse just never let up. The intensity of wartime Paris is matched by the fervor of his experiments.

The show begins with a necessary, even lengthy throat-clearing -- more than two dozen works that precede 1913, including 1907's still-startling "Blue Nude (Memory of Biskra)," with its transformation of a classical odalisque into something formidable and aggressive, and "Le Luxe (II)," with its sumptuous trio of female bathers abstracted from observable form. They resonate with the small Cézanne painting of bathers that Matisse owned -- the only work not made by him included in the show -- a picture of primitive paradise.

A weirdly beautiful 1913 still life, "Flowers and Ceramic Plate," is an almost entirely blue canvas with a green disk (the ceramic plate) hovering like some exotic sun above a vase of red, yellow and orange flowers below. A loose sheet of paper, perhaps a drawing or print, hangs suspended, tucked between the plate and the wall. Raking black shadows connect the disparate objects, while the colors breathe optical space into flattened shapes.

Look slowly, and the history of this painting's fabrication soon emerges -- circular echoes of larger green plates, for example, which Matisse painted over to make the shape smaller and smaller. Finally the painting assumed an existence independent of the actual still life he looked at in his studio. Color, structure and aesthetic decisions combine to assemble this amazing picture, and Matisse displays them all.

Art is not an image here, but a complex process of becoming.

He called his radical invention the development of "methods of modern construction." First inspired by   color, then by the Cubism of his friend and rival Picasso, he made painting analogous to sculpture as a physical art form with distinctive material qualities. Using a variety of tools, Matisse scumbled, scored, layered, scratched and incised the paint; he scraped, scuffed and wiped the paintings' surfaces. Black and gray became voluptuous colors, rather than a void or neutral space.

Things reach a crescendo in 1916. One gallery holds the newly monumental canvases "The Piano Lesson," "Bathers by a River" and "The Moroccans" -- the last a memory of his final trip to Tangier -- plus the bronze relief "Back (III)" and that final head of Jeannette. They propose complex themes of art, sensuality and Arcadian accord.

Curators Stephanie d'Alessandro and John Elderfield note that these "radically inventive" paintings and sculptures date from the war's most menacing moment. Ferocious battles in nearby Verdun, where the German army chief Erich von Falkenhayn promised to "bleed France white," and in the region of the Somme threatened to let rivers of blood flow to Paris.

Matisse was not, as is sometimes claimed, indulging in escapist fantasy. Instead, the show's remarkable example (and first-rate catalog) suggests a profound understanding: Great artists know that the world is always already in the process of unraveling. During the epic convulsion of World War I, Matisse made sure his radical inventiveness was commensurate to the gravity of the circumstance.

~ Christopher Knight · March 22, 2010.