The Painting That Catholic Detroit Wanted Destroyed

Diego Rivera arrived in Detroit in the spring of nineteen thirty-two. He had been commissioned by Edsel Ford, president of the Ford Motor Company, to paint the garden court of the Detroit Institute of Arts. The subject was industry. The scale was twenty-seven panels. The figure being discussed as the commission amount was somewhere around twenty thousand dollars, a significant sum in the depths of the Depression.

Rivera spent months studying the River Rouge complex, Ford's vast manufacturing facility in Dearborn where iron ore entered one end and finished automobiles exited the other. He sketched workers at their machines, photographed the production lines, and produced what became the most comprehensive visual documentation of American industrial labor ever executed on a museum wall. The murals are floor-to-ceiling, north wall to south wall, east to west, every surface covered with lunging machinery and the human bodies operating it.

When the murals were unveiled in March of nineteen thirty-three, Detroit's Catholic archdiocese called them obscene and demanded the city order their destruction. The Detroit News called the work coarse and communist. City Council debated. Edsel Ford, whose name and money had commissioned the work, refused to touch it. The murals survived.

They nearly did not survive a second time. In twenty fourteen, when Detroit declared bankruptcy, creditors and the bankruptcy process raised the question of whether the city's art collection, including the DIA's holdings, could be sold to pay debts. A negotiation called the Grand Bargain pulled together eight hundred sixteen million dollars from state government, private foundations, and the museum itself to protect the collection and fund city pension commitments. The murals were saved twice in eighty years by the same basic argument: some things are not for sale.