Magazine Art History
The Art of Propaganda

The Art of Propaganda: Diego Rivera’s Detroit Frescos

In his greatest work in the US, Rivera combined classic socialist imagery of the proletariat with Vasconcelos’ hermetic race theories to form his own utopian fantasy

Michael Pearce / MutualArt

Jan 07, 2022

The Art of Propaganda: Diego Rivera’s Detroit Frescos

In Mexico, Diego Rivera helped to build a new cultural milieu for the post-revolutionary country, painting socialist murals that incorporated native Mexican imagery within them as a dominant theme. Aztec gods and costumes were liberally scattered throughout these paintings, and he repeatedly combined colonial imagery with native themes, establishing the idea of a Mexico saved by its revolutionary native people, led by Zapata. How would he express himself when he came to the United States to paint for Edsel Ford at the Detroit Institute?

To his biographer, Bertram Wolfe, Rivera said, “Your engineers are your greatest artists. These highways are the most beautiful things I have seen in your beautiful country. In all the constructions of man’s past – pyramids, Roman roads and aqueducts, cathedrals and palaces, there is nothing to equal these. Out of them and the machine will issue the style of tomorrow … the best modern architects of our time are finding their aesthetic and functional inspiration in North American industrial constructions, machine designs and engineering, the greatest expressions of the artistic genius of the New World.” The idea of painting this uniquely American transformation of the landscape, to capture this energetic new culture in imagery, now took hold of Rivera’s imagination. Excited by the prospect, he imagined himself at the van of a great new hybrid art, propelling forward José Vasconcelos’ ideas of la raza cósmica (the cosmic race), which described a superior mestizo people made up of a mixture of all races of humanity. Echoing Vasconcelos, he said, “I have always maintained that art in America, if some day it can be said to come into being, will be the product of a fusion between the marvelous indigenous art which derives from the immemorial depths of time in the center and south of the continent… and that of the industrial worker of the north.”

Diego M. Rivera, Detroit Industry, East Wall, 1932-1933 fresco. Photo courtesy of Detroit Institute of Arts

Once in Detroit, Rivera focused entirely upon the industrial processes of the great car-making city, with its extraordinary range of manufacturing procedures, all leading to the production of the motorcar, from the most basic acquisition of raw materials to the last finishing touches of trim and detail. The great industrial innovator Henry Ford owned mines and smelting plants where ores were transformed into steel; he owned titanic machines installed in factories where thick and gigantic red-hot sheets of plate metal rolled through vast presses and hammers, dwarfing the workers who tended them; he owned vast factories equipped with endless conveyor belts producing the parts needed for the engines, chassis, wheels, and seats, where thousands of men labored on the production lines. This was the America of which President Calvin Coolidge had said, “The man who builds a factory builds a temple; the man who works there worships there, and to each is due, not scorn and blame, but reverence and praise.”  Industry was the religion and duty of all good citizens of the United States. For three months, Rivera studied it all, making countless sketches that he merged into extraordinary panels showing the interconnection of the various procedures of the factories in the assembly line, impressed by the factories, but disturbed by the way the industrial workers were subsumed to the great machines.

The magnificent Detroit Industry Murals were Rivera’s greatest work in the United States. Painted on each of the walls of an Italianate courtyard complete with a fountain, the murals described man’s role at work within the industrial processes of the Ford Motor Company, and transforming the mineral gifts of the earth. The East wall, facing the entrance to the courtyard, was mostly occupied by an entryway to a staircase, but here he began a frieze encircling the space, painting a long panel of an embryo held within the embrace of tree roots, embedded within the fossil-strewn mineral deposits of the earth, while in the corner panels primitive and earthy female figures sat with the produce of the land in their laps, one with wheat and corn, and the other with apples. Two smaller panels held pictures of corn, gourds and fruit.

Diego M. Rivera, Detroit Industry, South Wall, 1932-1933 fresco. Photo courtesy of Detroit Institute of Arts

The long frieze of mineral deposits continued with a band of white plates giving way to a sedimentary layer with embedded fossils of fishbones and seashells, while crystals proliferated in the corners. Above the mineral panel, two mysterious, taciturn female nudes, one Caucasian, one Asian, held offerings of the earth in their upturned palms. Between them, fists rose through a mountain of chunky ochre. In a square panel at the top left, a man worked at a refrigerator in a laboratory, while a gaggle of uniformed women labored with heads downturned toward tables gathered about a bald male administrator, who reached to an adding machine. A male worker used a huge wrench to adjust a device. In the opposite corner, two men co-operated to move a giant lever. Behind them workers peered at dials in a control room, and others huddled over equipment, while a man with a shovel struck at a box. A masked worker used a long tool above steaming buckets in the foreground.

Rivera compared the complex series of industrial processes he had seen in Detroit’s factories with the image of the Aztec goddess of the earth, Coatlicue, who gives as much as she destroys, painting an obsolete stamping press as an anthropomorphic version of her. The industrial complex had become a process that simultaneously exploited and fed the goddess, taking the minerals needed to create the airplanes, medicines, motors, and market produce from her body, and providing workers as human sacrifices to her. This goddess-press dominates the right-hand side of the South wall, with conveyors twisting around it. In the bottom right corner, Rivera painted portraits of Edsel Ford and Wilhelm Valentiner. On the other side of the busy scene there was an overwhelmingly complex sequence of workers humping metal car parts fed to them upon mechanized tracks. A crowd of spectators watched them labor. Masked workers ground and shaped the steel, and others lifted a chassis onto a platform. A receding row of steering wheels led the viewer to the distant and tiny form of a little car, almost lost in the hubbub, which was the product of all this frenzied work. Ford’s famous maxim was that his customers could have their car in any color they liked as long as it was black. But Diego’s was a Marxist car – the only color he wanted was red.

Diego M. Rivera, Detroit Industry, West Wall, 1932-1933 fresco. Photo courtesy of Detroit Institute of Arts

On the West wall, broken by the entrance to the courtyard from the street foyer, Rivera painted a high fresco in three panels, crafted as if the decorative architecture of the wall framed a window to another world, filled with imagery of airplanes and engines, with masked pilots wearing oxygen breathing gear preparing to board their flying machines, and workers laboring on the engines of the aircraft. A compass arrow indicated that the wall was aligned South-South-West and a star separated a divided human head – neatly bisected – one half a skull and the other half a face, another reference to Coatlicue as the source of life and death. This strange feature was at the center of the long frieze, but here, instead of continuing the long mineral underworld around the entire space, Rivera painted an image of men working on shores divided by an ocean. On the left side of the water, industrial workers labored in a factory, while on the right they carved spiral grooves into the bark of rubber trees. In the sea, huge cargo ships spanned the horizon, and while men in motorboats set sail from the East, fish swam toward them from the West. A bird flew among sunflowers in a small panel on the left of the wall, and an eagle startled a dove on the right.

Diego M. Rivera, Detroit Industry, North Wall, 1932-1933 fresco. Photo courtesy of Detroit Institute of Arts

The North wall was another masterpiece of fresco-painting. Again, it was the big central panel that deserved accolades. A brilliant piece of work, it was a scene of extraordinary labor, with many workers preparing car parts for installation and laboring over the assembly line, which receded into the distance. Here, grey panels showed the faceless workers clocking in, a furnace crucible pouring molten metal, two industrial factories, workers dwarfed by huge machines, and hunched men taking their lunch, surrounded by the factory machinery they served. It is hard to make a strong red in fresco, which tends to mute the color palette. Rivera re-painted the flames of the furnace on the North wall with scarlet casein to make the blaze appear hotter and more vibrant, and sang out the words of the communist anthem, the Internationale as he worked.

Rivera’s American frescos had become more politically radical as he gained confidence, and although the official account of the Detroit Art Institute’s mural describes his love affair with the impressive machinery and overwhelming power of the Ford industrial system as his principal inspiration, it is hard to ignore the blank-faced and impassive anonymity of the workers in this piece. While these men strain their bodies to move heavy engine blocks piled onto a cart, they are watched over by supervisors who peer at them suspiciously. Despite the conflict between Rivera’s financial gain and the mystically egalitarian principles of his racial creed, the communist message of the murals is clear, and esoteric theory aside, Rivera’s lifelong commitment to socialist doctrine of one form or another is indubitable. In Detroit he combined classic socialist imagery of the proletariat with Vasconcelos’ hermetic race theories to form his own utopian fantasy for the future – and clearly revolutionary communism was the path that would achieve it.


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Diego Rivera
Mexican, 1886 - 1957

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