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DIEGO RIVERA -- MY ART, MY LIFE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY (WITH GLADYS MARCH) |
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ONE MAN SHOW IN THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART WHILE I WAS AWAY in San Francisco, I had left two of my assistants, the American painter Ione Robinson and the Russian painter Arnautov, to continue my work in the National Palace. They had painted several of the arches in the central stairway, and also the sky in a panel adjacent to one I had completed before my departure. They had imitated my style, yet their work looked so different to me from what I did with my own hands, that I could not let it stand. I was obliged to scratch out every stroke of their painting. Where I had expected to find a gain, I met with a loss. But having been out of the country for about a year, the return to Mexico again had a revitalizing effect upon me. I started painting with the same unbounded exuberance I had felt while working on the Ministry of Education murals. Sometimes I kept going for twenty-four hours without a break. I was sustained by an ethereal drunkenness, a pure joy which the act of painting gave me. All my materials having previously been prepared, I did the entire central panel, sixty-five feet in width and forty feet high, in three and a half months! One day, while at work on my scaffold, I was visited by the New York art dealer Frances Flynn Paine. As a Director of the newly formed Mexican Arts Association, she had come to offer me a one-man show in the New York Museum of Modern Art. To every modern artist, this is the pinnacle of professional success. As soon as I had completed the work presently required in the National Palace, I began to prepare for this show. At the same time, with the money I had earned in California, I started building my house in San Angel. Accompanied by Mrs. Paine, Frida and I sailed for New York on the Morro Castle early in November, 1931. The captain graciously provided me with temporary studio facilities enroute; and, upon our arrival, Mrs. Paine secured for me a spacious studio gallery right in the Museum building, where I began at once to prepare seven movable frescoes -- movable because the Museum was then in temporary quarters, a floor of the Heckscher Building. Four of these panels were adaptations of details from my Mexican murals. The remaining three were representations of subjects I observed in the city. "Electric Welding" showed a group of workers welding a big boiler in one of the power and light plants of the General Electric Company. "Pneumatic Drilling" depicted laborers drilling through the rock ledge of Manhattan preparatory to the construction of Rockefeller Center. The most ambitious of these frescoes represented various strata of life in New York during the Great Depression. At the top loomed skyscrapers like mausoleums reaching up into the cold night. Underneath them were people going home, miserably crushed together in the subway trains. In the center was a wharf used by homeless unemployed as their dormitory, with a muscular cop standing guard. In the lower part of the panel, I showed another side of this society: a steel-grilled safety deposit vault in which a lady was depositing her jewels while other persons waited their turn to enter the sanctum. At the bottom of the panel were networks of subway tunnels, water pipes, electric conduits, and sewage pipes. A journalist who came to report the show, which opened on December 23rd, baptized this fresco "Frozen Assets," a name which Mrs. Paine, now my agent, at once adopted for it. The show consisted of 150 pieces, including oils, pastels, water colors, and black and whites, in addition to the seven frescoes. It represented all my periods. Although there was embarrassment in some quarters about the frankness with which I represented the current economic crisis in "Frozen Assets," my exhibition was well received. It failed, however, to fulfill one of my hopes for the show -- to give American museum directors and architects a grasp of the character and value of mural painting. A true appreciation of the mural may be long in coming to the United States, the chief obstacle being the essentially temporary character of its architecture, combined with the North American preference for commodities of easy manipulation, which results in the creation of expensive screen-printed wallpaper rather than wall painting of real artistic value. The movable panels which I did for the show gave a fairly good idea of my technique but not of the true uses of the medium.
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