(gentle piano music)
- [Man] We're in the Philadelphia Museum of Art
looking at a large portable fresco
by Diego Rivera, called Sugar Cane,
constructed and painted in 1931.
- [Man] It shows a scene in Mexico on a sugar plantation.
- [Man] This weighs roughly a thousand pounds,
but that's because it uses an
ancient tradition, the tradition of fresco.
- [Man] Diego Rivera became world famous
as a modern artist who brought back a tradition
of wall painting that had roots
both in Italian Renaissance fresco painting
and in ancient Mexican wall painting.
- [Man] And Diego Rivera was a precocious artist.
He joined the oldest academy of art
in the Americas as a teenager.
- [Man] He was given a fellowship
in order to travel to Europe.
- [Man] And he spent 14 years in Europe
amongst modernists like Picasso.
And because he was in Europe,
he missed the most violent period
of the Mexican revolution between 1910 and 1920.
- [Man] In 1920, Alvaro Obregon was elected president.
Obregon recognized that the visual arts
could be very, very important for communicating
the messages of the revolution
to very wide swaths of the citizenry in Mexico.
Rivera was in Paris and then the new government
in Mexico sent him to Italy to study
Italian Renaissance fresco painting.
And then he was called back to Mexico
to become one of the founders of
what we call the Mexican Muralist School.
- [Man] One of the three great ones,
Siqueiros, Orozco and Rivera.
This was a truly public art.
- [Man] Both in terms of the technique
and in terms of the imagery.
Rivera spends the 1920s executing
a set of titanic fresco commissions around Mexico
for government and other kinds of public institutions
which stand for the revolution and the nation.
- [Man] But, ultimately, the president was assassinated
and funding for this kind of public art began to dry up.
Rivera looks north for new patronage.
He looks to the United States.
- [Man] In the States in '20s and '30s,
there's a great vogue for Mexican culture.
The Museum of Modern Art decides that it's going
to devote its second ever one-artist exhibition,
the first one having been given to Matisse,
to Diego Rivera, which is an index
of exactly how prestigious
and famous Diego Rivera was in New York at that time.
- [Man] Rivera did have opportunities
to produce murals in San Francisco,
in the brand new Rockefeller Center
and then, ultimately, in Detroit as well.
- [Man] At the Museum of Modern Art
his problem was that the work
for which he was most well known
was immovable and architectural.
And so he need to invent a new hybrid kind of painting,
which we call portable murals, large scale pictures
on reinforced concrete with true fresco surfaces.
- [Man] A series of ever finer layers
of plaster would be applied.
- [Man] It's said that he worked 15 hour days
with three assistants in order to produce the first five.
Those five would get kind of historical cycle
of the struggle of the Mexican people
against their oppressors from the time
of the Spanish conquest in the 1500s to modern times.
- [Man] And Sugar Cane is a representation of the inequality
that prompted the revolution itself.
- [Man] It's really a picture of race
and class in the social system
of a hacienda or a plantation.
- [Man] These were enormous land holdings
that were manned by small armies of laborers
that were in almost every respect, except legally, slaves.
- [Man] So, in the foreground,
you have relatively benign image of an indigenous woman
and you can tell she's indigenous
because of the dark color of her skin
and the way her hair is braided
and also the white clothing that she wears.
Together with her children, a boy and girl,
they haul baskets, and she's cutting papaya from a tree.
And one of the pillars of official Mexican cultural policy
and one of the great themes of Mexican mural painting
by Rivera and others was a celebration
of indigenous people as a link
to the foundational ancient cultures
that preceded the Spanish conquest.
So it's really a framing device,
and as you look back, there is quite
a strong contrast to the scene of brutality
that fills up the middle ground and the background,
laborers, their bodies bowed by
the heavy bundles of cut sugar cane
which they have pulled together with ropes.
Then you have a blond, light-skinned,
therefore, Spanish, overseer, with a gun,
who's pointing a whip in the direction of these workers.
Your eye zigzags into the background
to find another armed man who is sitting,
but is guarding the owner of plantation,
who's also a European, but, more importantly,
he's the person who is lying in the hammock
with guard dogs for good measure
protecting him on the veranda of the plantation house.
- [Man] And it's in such contrast to the sense of purpose
of the more innocent figures in the foreground.
- [Man] This is a redo of a theme that Rivera
had already painted in a mural in the palace in Cuernavaca.
- [Man] But that rendering doesn't
have the figures in foreground.
- [Man] If we continue to the background,
we see three more workers standing right above
the bottoms of already cut
stalks of cane continuing the cutting.
So you have also the sugar cultivation
part of the sugar industry.
- [Man] Sugar was one of most
lucrative crops that could be grown,
but sugar is a labor-intensive crop
and it required the exploitation of indigenous labor.
- [Man] Rivera is a Marxist,
but Mexico is primarily agrarian economy even in his time
rather than an industrial one,
so what he's doing is he's taking
the Marxist idea of class struggle
and he's showing how it plays out
in an agrarian frame with a racial dynamic.
- [Man] But what's so fascinating is
that this is a painting that was made
for an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art,
founded by one of the Rockefellers.
And, so, you have this clash between
the ideology of capitalism and the ideology of Marx.
- [Man] Rivera was an extremely
politically self-aware artist,
and you knew very well that there were hazards
in taking as patrons wealthy Americans,
but he also knew that he could do some good as a, kind of,
cultural and political ambassador for Mexico.
It was felt by Rivera and many of his colleagues
that a realist style was the best
because it would be widely appreciated by a broad public.
What Rivera was doing was making political propaganda.
But, of course, when he was in the U.S.,
the receiver was a little bit different.
- [Man] But as complex as this particular panel is,
it's just one of a series.
In the museum in Philadelphia,
it's directly across from another painting
that is even more brutal.
- [Man] Rivera executed five portable murals,
tracing from the Aztec times to modern times.
The next one is the tragic image
called Liberation of the Peon,
which tells the story of
the revolutionary period in Mexico.
- [Narrator] And a peon is somebody
who was bound to a landowner by their debt.
- [Man] This a scene of the whipping, maybe to death,
of one of these indentured laborers on a hacienda.
His body's being tended to by some revolutionary soldiers
while the plantation where he worked
is in flames in the background.
The five scenes of Mexico were the ones
that Rivera was able to complete
by the time of the opening of his retrospective,
but in the next few weeks afterwards,
he went back and made three more scenes,
also portable frescos, that represented scenes of New York.
The largest and most powerful
of which is called Frozen Assets
and is a allegory of the American social system
in desperate times during the Depression.
- [Man] This confrontation between
the growth of skyscrapers in the American skyline
and the intense poverty being experienced
by workers around the country.
- [Man] U.S. audiences were very struck
by Rivera's ability
(people chattering) to tell historical stories
in a way that brought out their tragedy
and their grandeur and especially
their complexity and ambiguity.
(gentle piano music)