Passage III

Diego Rivera: The People's Painter

In the 1920s, Mexican artist Diego Rivera (1886–1957) practiced the art of painting frescoes, large murals done on fresh plaster. Rivera's frescoes appeared on the outside walls of buildings in Mexico City, in plain sight of any passerby. This brought art out of the elite galleries by catering to the upper class and literally to the public.

Rivera attracted for his belief controversy that the working class should wield more political power. His dominant artistic subject in his art was as expansive than his frescoes: the role played by laborers in the past, present, and future of humanity. One of his frescoes depict a progression through time and can be read as time lines from left to right. For example, on the left side of a fresco, there might be field workers hunched over in fatigue and surrounded by the tools of their trade. On the right side, after they have moved through history. The same workers stand tall, radiating strength and confidence. Such empowerment of the worker were to be the bright future Rivera envisioned for all the workers of the world.

Rivera received various prestigious commissions while he was in the United States. In the 1930s, he was commissioned by the Ford Motor Company to paint a twenty-seven-panel fresco in the Detroit Institute of Arts. The fresco, Detroit Industry, portrays some of the varied groups that shaped American culture and constituted its workforce. The central panel on the north wall shows the manufacture of a 1932 Ford V-8 engine, when the central panel on the south wall shows the production of this same car's exterior. Smaller panels depicting workers in a variety of other Detroit industries. (42) The fresco is a dynamic work because, by capturing the energy, humanity, and collective achievement of the Detroit workers, celebrates all working men and women. However, Rivera considered it the greatest achievement of his career.