Diego Rivera and the Murals They Tried to Destroy

In the spring of nineteen thirty-two, Diego Rivera stood in the Garden Court of the Detroit Institute of Arts and looked at the empty walls. Edsel Ford had commissioned him to paint something. Rivera spent weeks touring the River Rouge complex, filling sketchbooks, observing workers in the foundry and on the stamping lines, watching the smelting of ore and the pressing of sheet metal. He told people he thought the Rouge was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

The twenty-seven fresco panels he painted over the next several months covered the north and south walls of the Garden Court from floor to ceiling. They showed the actual workers of River Rouge, men of multiple races performing the dangerous, skilled, physical work of automobile manufacturing. They showed blast furnaces, conveyor belts, medical laboratories, a vaccination scene, airplane engines, chemicals. Rivera embedded symbolic imagery throughout: Aztec deities behind the industrial forms, a row of workers at the base of the north wall who represent the four human races, a central figure he called the germination of life.

The panels were unveiled on March thirteenth, nineteen thirty-three. The reaction from Detroit's Catholic clergy was immediate. The Reverend R. J. R. Baumgartner publicly called the murals blasphemous, citing a vaccination panel Rivera had arranged so that the infant receiving the injection resembled the Christ child, with three figures nearby who could be read as Magi. The Reverend called for the murals to be whitewashed. Other religious leaders joined the campaign.

Edsel Ford refused. He had put up twenty thousand dollars for the commission and believed in the work. He said the murals would remain. They did.

Diego Rivera returned to Mexico. The Garden Court in which he worked is preserved as he left it. Ninety years later, the Rivera murals are the most visited attraction at the Detroit Institute of Arts. The panels that religious leaders wanted plastered over are now a national treasure. What Edsel Ford held firm to protect belongs to everyone who walks through those doors.