Over a six month period in 1940, Diego Rivera painted an enormous mural in front of an audience of 30,000 people. The creation of Pan American Unity was a central feature of the Golden Gate International Exposition, generating excitement on account of Rivera’s global celebrity and the fact that he addressed themes as timely as the daily newspapers, including the debate over US involvement in the Second World War. But wartime priorities put permanent installation of the mural on hold. For two decades, it lingered in storage, finally landing in a theater on the main campus of the City College of San Francisco, open to everyone but hardly a major attraction.
This year, as CCSF builds a new theater, the mural has been moved to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The temporary relocation is expected to bring renewed attention to Rivera’s work, capturing the eye of hundreds of thousands of museum visitors and passers-by.
Diego Rivera, The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on This ... [+]
The gambit makes sense: Rivera’s celebrity has not diminished since his death in 1957, and many figures he depicted also remain famous, especially Charlie Chaplin Frida Kahlo. Equally important, many problems we now face are anticipated in themes that Rivera explored, especially his concerns about border restrictions and the rise of fascism. If his mural was a representation of current events when he painted it, today it might be seen as a premonition.
What makes this premonition most interesting is its rendering in a visual language that is clearly antiquated. Rivera’s style was particular to him, but also emblematic of his era. Recognition that our problems have a long history can provide us with valuable perspective. The fact that fascism was defeated in the past can give us courage to defeat it again. The fact that jingoism was never overcome, and that historical patterns of injustice remain recognizable today, may reveal causes that have previously been overlooked, or at least reinvigorate the effort to achieve what previous generations could not accomplish.
Murals such as Pan American Unity were extremely direct, which was both a strength and a weakness. The strength was that they could reach people without any explanation. Their popularity could motivate whole populations. Their weakness is that their populism is inherently simplistic, and unfit to address the complexity of the challenges they depicted.
Diego Rivera and assistant working on Pan American Unity mural, Treasure Island, 1940; image: ... [+]
Rivera represented unity through industry, positioning industrialization as redemption. He presented machinery as our collective destiny on a timeline of progress that put traditional practices in the past. “My mural will picture the fusion between the great past of the Latin American lands, as it is deeply rooted in the soil, and the high mechanical developments of the United States,” he declared before getting started at the Golden Gate International Exposition. He delivered on this promise.
His premise may have made for good rhetoric, but the consequences can be seen in our decimation of the natural world in the name of efficiency, and our dismissal of ancient practices that could guide us forward. Traditional societies are the hardest hit by the consequences of industrial development. The unity proposed by Rivera’s mural is both homogenizing and unsustainable.
None of this detracts from the historical importance of Pan American Unity. Every age is simplistic, and myopically incapable of recognizing the consequences of its preferred simplifications. Much as we can gain from our recognition of historical continuities in Rivera’s mural, we increase the likelihood of perceiving our own oversights by seeing past oversights that are now blatantly obvious.
We live in the age of the tech fix, and the Bay Area is the epicenter. The reemergence of Rivera’s mural is timely and important if we are to take up the cause of unity and to further Rivera’s good intentions today.
