Diego Rivera and the one percent

NEW YORK—Worlds away from and yet intimately related to downtown Manhattan’s Zucotti Park—epicenter of the Occupy Wall Street movement—is midtown’s modernist, sleek Museum of Modern Art, or MoMA, as most people refer to it. It was founded in 1929—the year of the Great Depression—by some of the richest people on the planet at the time, including Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. The Rockefeller clan continues to be part of the moneyed elite, old-guard members of the one percent that the 99 percenters (that’s you and me) regularly rail against.

Of the two-and-a-half-acre park, centrally located in the city’s financial district and a stone’s throw away from the World Trade Center site, one might say, as many are wont to do, that the park lies at the heart of Wall Street. If that’s true, then it might be the only heart Wall Street has—and one that very much wishes to paradoxically give it heart failure. Protesters, who come from all walks of life, will I am sure be quick to point out that Wall Street has no heart, for it responds not to claims on human sympathy nor to pleas for compassion or justice but simply and only to the demands of the market. God may be great, but as Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street would doubtless nod vigorously in affirmation, the market is even greater. Apart from uttering those memorable three words (“Greed is good”), Gekko had some choice lines to say, and they still ring true: “The richest one percent owns half our country’s wealth, five trillion dollars,” though the last aforementioned sum is today probably much greater.

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and columnist for the New York Times, who sympathizes with OWS, in a recent column also quotes the Gekko character (played convincingly by Michael Douglas) and notes that he tells his eager apprentice, “Now you’re not naive enough to think we’re living in a democracy, are you, buddy?”

The distance between the park and the polished interiors of MoMA isn’t great, perhaps three miles, but the distance between those who have taken to the streets and the moneyed patrons and funders of MoMA can almost be measured in light years. That morally disturbing gap is alluded to by a current museum exhibition, one with a great deal of irony: Diego Rivera and some of his works.

Among those included are pages from Rivera’s sketchbook, done on a visit to Moscow in 1929 (where he was lionized and where the crash of Wall Street rendered Communism and the Soviet Union shine like a beacon to the world’s struggling masses and leftist intellectuals); Emiliano Zapata, the Agrarian Leader; with the bemustached all-in-white revolutionary holding on to the reins of a magnificent white stallion, whose rider, presumably the oppressor, lies at Zapata’s feet; and, in view of social, economic, and political mess we are in, the most striking work in the exhibition, Frozen Assets.

A powerful work, Frozen Assets seems at first glance a paean to New York’s distinctive architecture, and it is, but at the same time Rivera subverts this glorious skyline by revealing a cross-section of the city’s social world expressed as geographical layers. The edifices that pierce the sky, symbols of a gilded age, rest on a foundation, an underworld, an exposure (and exposé) that lays bare Rivera’s sympathies for the underdog. Beneath the street, marked by a line of faceless figures, and occupying the middle segment, is a warehouse of sleeping homeless bodies, watched over by a somewhat menacing guard or warden. At the base of the work Rivera depicts bank vaults, repository of the riches that have made all this construction possible—and the attendant misery—a woman examining her deposit box, as three people wait their turn.  One of these resembles John D. Rockefeller Jr., Abby’s husband.

In New York as in Moscow, Rivera was the toast of the town, but he wore out his welcome, at least with his hosts the Rockefellers, when the fresco he was creating in situ at the Rockefeller Center, then being completed, included a portrait of Lenin. This didn’t, predictably, endear him to Nelson Rockefeller, who visited the lobby regularly as Rivera and his assistants worked. Unhappy with the inclusion of Lenin in one of the temples of capitalism, Rockefeller asked that Rivera substitute the face “of some unknown man.” Rivera refused; the Rockefellers paid him in full, dismissing him from the project, and had the mural destroyed. As interesting as the appearance of Lenin was the fact that Rivera portrays him alone, without Stalin. It was customary at the time for devoted adherents of the Soviet Union to reference both Lenin and Stalin, suggesting that the dictator was Lenin’s worthy heir. Painting Lenin solo indicated Rivera’s sympathies for Leon Trotsky, who had by this time fallen out of favor with Stalin. Trotsky would move to Coyoácan, now a district of Mexico City, where Diego and his wife, the painter Frida Kahlo lived. He then had an affair with Frida. In 1940 he was assassinated by an agent of Stalin.

Another probable and perhaps stronger reason for the Rockefeller family’s disaffection was a small part of the mural that showed several men in evening clothes drinking liquor with a bevy of women of the night. As in Frozen Assets, one of the men looked remarkably like John D. Rockefeller Jr. The Rockefellers had backed Prohibition, and so this clearly imputed hypocrisy to the family and especially to one of its most prominent members. The representation was judged by the Rockefellers to be “obscene and … an offense to good taste.” Back in Mexico City, Rivera, with funding from the Mexican government, re-created much of the mural that now graces the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.

Even beyond their powerful Social Realist resonance with the contemporary situation, the works would still elicit my admiration purely for their artistry. Rivera spoke the truth to power and he does so even today. Viewing his works, I would be abject in my denial were I not to see any parallels to present-day economic and social unrest–too evident to admit of any doubt.

Nor, alas, should it be doubted that history, especially that of folly, repeats itself, again and again and again.

Copyright Luis H. Francia