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(Detroit Institute of Arts)
In 1933, as the Depression dragged on and fascism continued its rise, the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) unveiled its newly decorated Garden Court. In that grand Roman Baroque space—all marble floors and elaborate doorways—the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera had painted the series of frescos known as the Detroit Industry Murals. The murals covered all four walls and depicted not only the machines and laborers of the shop floor, but also figures in gas masks, a baby, women typists, fists emerging from a mountain, and strata of earth and minerals.
By the time he was commissioned to paint the Garden Court at the DIA, Rivera was internationally established as a major figure in the Mexican muralist movement. In 1930, he had traveled to San Francisco to paint a series of murals; it was there that he met the Director of the DIA.[1] He had recently (in 1929) been ejected from the Communist Party because of his Trotskyite tendencies, but his communist politics remained both deeply held and widely known.[2] The result, when the murals were finally unveiled in March 1933, was controversy on the left and right alike. The CPUSA condemned his work as inadequately (or incorrectly) radical, while anti-communists objected to the depictions of non-Christian spiritual practices and the celebration of workers. (The range of responses, Alex Goodall has observed, was representative of the many divisions among communists and anti-communists alike.[3]) All of these reactions were complicated by the fact that Henry Ford’s son, Edsel Ford, funded the project—indeed, Rivera had walked the shop floor of the Ford Rouge plant as preparation for the painting.[4]
The murals themselves reveal the many tensions that of the Depression era. Massive, complex machines loom over everything, inspiring both awe (even, Henry Adams–style, religious awe) and, as the gas masks imply, fear.[5] The factory workers strain against dangerous labor, crowded along the assembly line, yet they appear dignified, coordinated, respectable. On the north and south walls, nature presses in upon the intensely artificial world of the factory, geologic processes proceeding in the panels above the assembly lines. The whole series is both obviously modern and American and simultaneously ancient and Indigenous.
In commissioning these murals for the Garden Court, the DIA placed the challenges and contradictions of the industrial U.S. at the very heart of the museum. The frescos loom over visitors, demanding their attention to both the peril and the potential confronting the city. One scholar of Detroit Industry has written:
Rivera’s imaginative association of art, life, and regeneration illuminates three concepts through which he unified the discrete narratives in Detroit Industry. The first looked beyond America’s crisis to a healed community imagined through a complex symbolism of the living body. A second signaled the importance of art as a chief instrument of envisioning and bringing about that renewal. Rivera synthesized these ideas in a third thematic element centered on the rich visual culture of Mexico that, to many North Americans of the day, exemplified a vital society in which art and myth played central roles in the lives of its citizens.[6]
At the S-USIH 2025 meeting, we, too, will contemplate art, myth, and regeneration. Like Rivera, we turn to history to make sense of the world around us; also like him, Detroit itself will be central to our investigations. We very much hope you’ll join us in November for conversation, solidarity, and hopefully a visit to the DIA!
Submit a proposal for a panel or individual paper before May 1! CFP here: https://s-usih.org/2025/02/s-usih-2025-cfp-creativity-renewal/
[1] Linda Downs, “Diego Rivera’s Portrait of Edsel Ford,” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 57, n. 1 (1979), 47.
[2] Alex Goodall, “The Battle of Detroit and Anti-Communism in the Depression Era,” The Historical Journal 51, n. 2 (2008), 461.
[3] Goodall, “Battle of Detroit.”
[4] Downs, “Portrait of Edsel Ford.”
[5] “Rivera rendered a stamping press—one of the most dangerous machines at the Rouge—as a modern incarnation of Coatlicue, the goddess in Aztec cosmology whose child was the god of war.” George Speer, “’Detroit Industry’: Art and Healing in the Body Politic,” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 85, n. 1, 67.
[6] Speer, “’Detroit Industry,’” 66.
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