There’s something extremely compelling about Diego Rivera’s “Detroit Industry” murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts. The Rivera courtyard in the museum, where the murals live, has been something of a constant in my life since I was 8 or 9. In the past ten or twenty years that compulsion has gradually taken the form of taking photographs there. The room is a spectacular place to sit and watch the constantly changing, almost tidal, number and position of visitors with the murals in the background. If you’ve followed Compendium: The Kitchen Sink over the past few years you might remember another photo essay I posted with photos from the Rivera courtyard. I love the random positioning of visitors. The perspectives available as people move through the room remind me of Renaissance single point perspective paintings… you know, the broad courtyards and even religiously themed paintings peopled in seemingly random arrangements, although these perspective paintings were surely more rigidly composed to fit into the genre. And they are so much different than the nature of the arrangements and perspectives in the Rivera murals, which achieve a near cubist composition and layering of action and characterizations while staying rather completely in a realist genre, married to the Mexican indigenous color schemes and figures that Rivera was famous for and brilliant at composing.
It's great the way people, visitors to the courtyard, become mesmerized, looking up at the murals and almost becoming a part of the paintings... as if they fade into the paintings. Are the murals a portal of some kind? Was Rivera a wizard?
Kids in a museum are always a thrill. Of course, they call to mind my own experience in the courtyard during school field trips in elementary school. I also cherish memories of taking my granddaughter to various museums, including The Detroit Institute of Arts. I discovered early on that the best approach when taking a youngster to a museum is to let them take the lead, basically following them around.
This young lady made herself quite at home and I was pleased that her parents did not intervene to make her stand.
We spoke with the woman in the blue coat. She told a story about how Frida Kahlo would come to the museum every day while Rivera worked. She brought lunch to him, being completely convinced that he could not get the kind of Mexican food he loved. There once was a fountain in the middle of the room, where the red tiled circle is, and they would sit there and eat together. She didn’t like Detroit at all. Mostly it was because of the weather (one remembers she lived in constant pain due to a horrific accident when she was young, and Detroit's damp, cold climate wouldn't be conducive to the kind of constant pain she experienced. She also had a miscarriage while they were in Detroit) and the painting was done during the cold months. Rivera loved Detroit however and spent a lot of time at Ford’s River Rouge complex to study the machinery and the movement of the workers. He spoke little English so one of the workers fluent in Spanish was assigned to be his tour guide. This woman also showed us where Rivera signed the work, and where he painted himself into the murals, neither of which I had ever been aware of! We spoke at length about one of the features in the murals, a huge punch press. I told her I had a job in a punch press plant years ago, making truck body parts and how people being cut or otherwise hurt while operating the punch presses was almost daily occurrence. She talked about how Rivera's aim in depicting the punch press, which dominates one end of one wall, was to make it into a kind of mechanized representation of Huitzilopochtli (I think that's right), the Aztec destroyer god that occupies the same position in the Aztec pantheon as Shiva in the Hindu pantheon: a destroyer and a creator.
Susan spent the majority of our time in the museum in the Rivera Courtyard. Her favorite place there. There's also a special exhibit in the museum until mid-June, "Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898 – 1971"... an excellent finale to our time there.