Art: Communist Riches

While Kansas City was last week ceremoniously installing one of the most important U. S. collections of old masters in a marble palace Manhattan critics were traipsing down to a dingy garret on slummy 14th Street to look at the most important modern paintings of the year. The route was obscure: past a cut rate drugstore, a toy shop and a haberdashery to a grimy doorway labeled: NEW WORKERS SCHOOL; up a narrow steep staircase straight to the top floor; through the bare offices of New York's Communist Opposition headquarters, to an oblong lecture room. There from door to door ran a set of 21 heavy, richly-colored fresco panels, a present to Communism by a man generally acknowledged to be the world's greatest muralist—Diego Maria Concepcion Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodriguez de Valpuesta.

When his great fresco for Rockefeller Center was rejected, paid for and boarded up (TIME, May 22), Diego Rivera took his $14,000 and offered to reproduce the subject free for any one who would give him wall space. The New Workers took him up.* But since Communist workers have no walls to match those of the Capitalist Rockefellers the original scheme had to be dropped. What Artist Rivera made instead was a cartoon strip, a panorama of civilization in the U. S. as seen through Communist eyes from the landing of the Pilgrims and the liquidation of the Indians to NRA and the farm strike. The New Workers' tenure of the garret being none too permanent, the metal lath and plaster panels of each fresco, weighing up to 350 lb., were made removable.

Conservative critics found their usual faults with Rivera's work—a lack of coordination between the various sections, a terrific overcrowding of the individual pictures with figures and incidents. What no one realized until he actually saw the frieze was the effective propaganda Artist Rivera could make when freed from the necessities of Capitalist contracts. Biased as a princess slip though they were, the 21 fresco panels made the most exciting show of the season.

At a reception last week to inspect the panels and to speed Artist Rivera back to Mexico, Critic Walter Pach spoke feelingly behind his great mustache: "Diego Rivera has given artists in this country a great example of artistic integrity." Added Artist John Sloan: "These are the first examples of an inspired, fired man's mural art in this country."

The number of historic incidents that Artist Rivera managed to crowd on his hard plaster panels was impressive. To be quickly identified were Dutch settlers purchasing Manhattan at the point of a matchlock; a slave trader lashing a black; the Boston Massacre with Crispus Attucks in the centre; Thomas Paine and the "Rights of Man"; the Declaration of Independence; Thomas Jefferson; the Whiskey Rebellion; the Annexation of Texas; gold in California; John Brown arming the slaves; John Brown on the gallows; the Ku Klux Klan; Karl Marx—on through riots, strikes, lynchings, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler (with a pansy in his necktie) to a scene of violence and confusion superimposed by a placard: WORKERS UNITE OR THE BLUE EAGLE WILL WEAR A BROWN SHIRT. NRA PAVES THE WAY FOR FASCISM.

As Rivera works his way down toward 1933, his panels take on something of the excited quality of newspaper headlines.