In March 1933, Mexican artist Diego Rivera, already internationally renowned, embarked on one of the most controversial projects of his muralist career: “Man at the Crossroads,” The fresco was initially commissioned for the main lobby of Rockefeller Center in New York; however, it faced censorship only months into its creation and was destroyed by the same contractors. Only a year later, in November 1934, at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, Rivera created a second adapted version that breathed new life into the destroyed mural.
The exhibition delves into Rivera’s work “Man Controller of the Universe”, a cornerstone of the Museum of Palacio de Bellas Artes’ permanent collection. It explores two crucial moments in the creation of this monumental piece through archival materials such as sketches, photographs, film and audio fragments, newspapers, and paintings. First, Rivera’s trip to Russia in 1927, which laid the ideological and aesthetic foundations evident in the first mural. And second, the creation and destruction of the fresco in New York, as well as the political ideas that nourished, motivated, and hindered the Mexican artist.
Ninety years have passed since the destruction of the mural in New York and the creation of “Man Controller of the Universe” at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. This work stands as a testimony of his time, a period between wars where society sought new forms of political and social organization in response to the threat of totalitarian regimes. This exhibition invites us to rethink freedom of expression in the face of censorship and the role of institutions in the conservation of artistic heritage. It is a quest to promote new readings and approaches to the murals that are part of the museum’s permanent collection.
Diego Rivera’s visit to Russia in 1927, invited by the Society for Cultural Relations of the Soviet Union to the celebrations of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, coincided with the reshaping of forces within the Soviet Socialist Party. Despite the evident strengthening of education, industry, and the progress of the socialist country, there was also political instability due to various factions opposing the regime of the new party leader, Joseph Stalin. It was a decisive trip for Rivera, leading him to modify his own political stance—in favor of Trotsky, Stalin’s main opponent—and aesthetic stance—in favor of international proletarian struggle. This change would be reflected in various publications he collaborated on and especially in the composition of the mural “Man at the Crossroads.”
At the start of the journey, the artist was appointed master of monumental painting by the Moscow School of Fine Arts and invited to paint some murals, such as the one at the Red Army Officers’ Club, commissioned by Anatoly Lunacharsky, Commissar of Education. It was likely Lunacharsky who provided Rivera with iconographic material—such as the glass-supported photographs exhibited here—that served as a model for said mural. However, Rivera’s sympathy for artists considered dissenters of the regime, such as the October group, as well as his closeness to Trotsky, possibly resulted in none of these projects coming to fruition.
Facing Moscow’s Red Square, Rivera made several drawings, studies, and watercolors that photographer Tina Modotti would reproduce with her camera a year later. The artist returned to Mexico on June 14, 1928, with the clarity that his political support would be for Trotsky and that his aesthetic pursuit during this period would incorporate an artistic expression characteristic of the struggle for the October Revolution initiated by Lenin.
Visual Sources of an Artist
In the mural “Man Controller of the Universe” (1934), Diego Rivera engaged with the historical and scientific processes of his time. He proposed an optimistic vision of humanity, one that would build its future supported by science and machinery. Drawing from his experiences in the Soviet Union (1927-1928) and the United States (1930-1933), Rivera also configured an opposition between capitalism and socialism as modes of social organization. This video aims to explore the visual sources that aided Rivera in shaping an image of his time, while also inviting contemporary viewers to contemplate the historical complexity of the world in the 1930s.
Sound Testimonies of an Artist
Here is a selection of eleven audio excerpts taken from five sound documents spanning from 1930 to 1955. These files, preserved in the collection of the National Sound Archive, provide oral testimony of Diego Rivera’s political, aesthetic, and ethical thoughts. Through public speeches, radio interviews, and family gatherings, the historical context of Rivera’s visit to Russia in 1927, the conflict at the Rockefeller Center, and the muralist’s ideological positioning are revealed. With humor and eloquence, Rivera managed to convey the spirit of one of the most contradictory, belligerent, and creative periods in the history of the 20th century in Mexico and the Western world.
Russian Revolution or Third International
This is one of the two portable frescoes that Rivera painted for the House of Trotskyism in New York, in late 1933. Rivera prepared his response against those who attacked freedom of expression: not only did he finance this project with the money paid to him by his detractors from the Rockefeller Center, but he also once again depicted Lenin as the leader of the workers of the world and, this time, included the likeness of the founder of the Red Army and propagator of the Fourth International: Leon Trotsky. For Rivera and other followers, Trotsky symbolized opposition to Stalin’s totalitarian regime as he defended the pristine ideals of the revolutionary struggle initiated by Lenin, promoted the dictatorship of the proletariat worldwide against the capitalist system, and, in 1938, alongside André Breton and Rivera, advocated for an independent revolutionary art. Rivera petitioned President Lázaro Cárdenas for political asylum for Trotsky, who arrived in Mexico in January 1937 and was subsequently assassinated in his house in Coyoacán in August 1940.
Amid the financial and economic collapse in the United States, a nation recovering from the Great Depression of 1929, Diego Rivera worked for four years on various mural projects in the North American country. Since the inception of the construction of the architectural complex of the Rockefeller Center in April 1931, Rivera aimed to paint in the lobby of the main building, a goal achieved through the mediation of cultural agent Frances Flynn Paine, who facilitated communication between the Rockefeller family and the Mexican artist.
Artists Henry Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Diego Rivera were candidates to paint a monumental work in the Rockefeller Center’s lobby, tasked with creating a mural project under the theme of “New Frontiers.” The work was to be executed in oil on wooden panels using the grisaille technique—painting with various shades of gray that mimic sculptural reliefs. Rivera was the only one of the three artists to accept the Rockefeller’s and contractors’ proposal, assigned to develop the theme: “Man at the Crossroads, seeing with hope and high spirit the choosing of a new and better future.”
In March 1933, Rivera, who determined new technical and artistic conditions for the mural, began his work. By late April, he integrated the image of Lenin into the composition, leading to disapproval and censorship from the contractors, who ordered the removal of the socialist leader’s effigy. Frida Kahlo, a witness to these events, advised Lucienne Bloch, one of Rivera’s assistants, to photograph the progress made on the fresco.
On May 9, 1933, Rivera and all his collaborators were expelled from the building. John Sloan, president of the Society of Independent Artists, declared, “The contractors of the Rockefeller Center committed an act of vandalism.” Rivera concluded, “Thus, a battle was won against the portrait of Lenin; thus, freedom of expression was honored in the United States.”
Early Studies and Sketches for the Mural Man at the Crossroads, 1931-1933
One of architect Raymond Hood’s requests to Diego Rivera was to send him a sketch of the project for Man at the Crossroads. In the artist’s words, he would portray this figure as “the Peasant who extracts from the earth the products that are the origin and basis of all human wealth: the Worker of the cities who transforms and distributes the raw material provided by the earth: and the soldier who, under the Ethical Force that produces martyrs in religions and wars, represents Sacrifice.” Rivera’s sketch was accepted on November 7, 1932. One of the earliest known studies is the one Rivera dedicated to his daughter “Chapo,” Ruth Rivera Marín, while other sketches are part of the collection of the Diego Rivera/Anahuacalli Museum.
Lucienne Bloch, who worked as Rivera’s assistant since the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York at the end of 1931, stated that the Mexican artist made one of the first sketches of the Rockefeller Center mural on the notepads of the Wardel Hotel during his stay in Detroit: “He did it on a piece of paper, and it was extremely simple: just two intersecting ellipses with a rough drawing of Man at the Crossroads in the center. The ellipses represented what is seen through the microscope and the telescope: the microcosm and the macrocosm. It was a bold idea.”
Lucienne Bloch and Rivera’s group of assistants at the Rockefeller Center
On April 4, 1933, some artists began their work as assistants to Rivera in the creation of the fresco at the Rockefeller Center, among them: Lucienne Bloch, Ben Shahn, Hideo Noda, Andrés Sánchez Flores, Stephen Dimitroff, and Arthur Niedendorf. Some prepared the mixtures and sprayed the colors, while others perforated stencils and whitewashed certain areas of the wall to apply the intonaco layer, the surface where the fresco colors are applied, thus leaving the wall ready for the artist’s final execution.
They had to work diligently on a surface of 130 square meters and deliver the finished work by May 1 of that same year. Despite all the effort and hours invested, even with days when they worked 24 hours without rest, they did not manage to finish the fresco. When Rivera decided decisively to intervene in the mural with the image of Lenin—since everything seems to indicate that it was not in the initial project—all his assistants were excited and quickly obtained a photo of the Bolshevik leader to serve as a reference. Upon learning that the contractors and Nelson Rockefeller wanted to remove Lenin’s image from the mural, his assistants threatened to go on strike. Rivera was very proud of them.
Lenin as the Image of Discord
In Rivera’s imagination, Lenin (Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov) represents the spirit of the October Revolution, the figure of the great leader of the proletariat and of humanity’s future, in whom the international union of workers, peasants, and soldiers would be fulfilled. The apology or exaltation of the socialist leader’s effigy became the image of discord for the contractors of the Rockefeller Center, who, through Nelson Rockefeller’s mediation, advocated for capitalist ideals, monopoly, private property, and the pursuit and construction of an American social identity based on the American Dream.
For Rivera, the image that complements that of the Russian leader is that of the “controller of the universe” (a primordial cyborg image), representing the utopian power of progress in the era of the machine. The true American artist for Rivera would be the engineer, who would transform people’s lives and society with his technical discoveries. In Rivera’s vision, progress and the welfare of humanity would be achieved only through scientific, technical, and aesthetic knowledge in a Marxist-Leninist communist system against totalitarianism, capitalism, fascism, and Nazism. North America represented, for Rivera, the perfect niche for the realization of the society of the future.
The Fallout from the Conflict at the Rockefeller Center
Diego Rivera had experienced a rough patch shortly after the clashes at the Rockefeller Center: General Motors canceled his request for a project to participate in the pavilion of the Chicago World’s Fair (1933-1934) under the theme «A Century of Progress”, and his physical health was deteriorating due to liver, kidney, and heart problems. However, this did not discourage him from creating the adapted recreation of Man at the Crossroads, which began in New York and ended in Mexico City with the title Man Controller of the Universe. In Mexico, shortly after completing the mural at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Rivera finished the frescoes at the National Palace and subsequently created four altarpieces for the Hotel Reforma, Carnival of Mexican Life (1936), which are also part of the permanent collection of the Museum of the Palacio de Bellas Artes.
Eighteen years after recreating the destroyed mural in New York, Rivera embarked on a monumental painting project titled Nightmare of War and Dream of Peace (1952). It was a portable altarpiece that was intended to be presented in Paris, but Mexican and French diplomatic agents decided not to exhibit it. This work, documented in its creative process by photographer Juan Guzmán, was supposed to be installed in the Palacio de Bellas Artes. To this day, the whereabouts of this mural remain unknown.
From 1928 to 1934, a period known as the Maximato, the consolidation process of the National Revolutionary Party took place in Mexico, under the leadership of Plutarco Elías Calles. This period relied on public art and, especially, the muralist movement for the construction of an official national identity based on post-revolutionary values. On November 29, 1934, the National Museum of Fine Arts was inaugurated at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, with its main works being José Clemente Orozco’s Katharsis and Rivera’s Man Controller of the Universe.
The conditions and political climate in Mexico City were very different from those in New York, starting with the patronage, now represented by a government that required cultural capital to solidify its populist political ideal. This administration knew how to legitimize itself by welcoming Rivera’s work, which had been censored and destroyed in the country that boasted of being a defender of democracy and freedom of expression, into the newly inaugurated Palacio de Bellas Artes.
The dimensions of the mural at Bellas Artes were smaller than those at the Rockefeller Center. Rivera established minimal but significant differences; for example, the appearance of the image of John D. Rockefeller Jr. in the nightclub scene, related to venereal diseases, whom Rivera associated with a sickly and vicious nature, a product of the capitalist system. Also, the image of Lenin, to which Rivera added those of Marx, Engels, Trotsky, and other characters such as James P. Cannon, Jay Lovestone, and Bertram Wolfe, who hold the flag of the Fourth International. As a manifesto in favor of revolutionary art and as a donation to the Mexican people, Rivera gave new life to the murdered mural, precisely on the wall adjacent to this room.
