Diego Rivera was considered to be the world's greatest artists coming to one of the world's
most powerful cities to make a painting about what the city of Detroit itself was about and when
Edsel Ford gave the commission to Diego Rivera he basically got the commission for one wall and then
of course there was Mission Creek and Diego Rivera ends up being commissioned for the whole court but
Edsel Ford let Diego Rivera choose the subject matter. He basically provided a car and a driver
to drive Diego Rivera around the city of Detroit seeing what might interest him and it was Diego's
decision to capture this monumental complex which was the Rouge plant for Ford Motor Company.
Politically, Rivera was a communist. He was kicked out of the Communist Party and let back in again.
It was like everything else about Rivera. He was outrageous and full of life but when he agreed
to paint these murals he was excited because he regarded the Rouge River plant as America's
pyramids. In fact it upset his wife Frida Kahlo who was anti just about everything yankee. She was
upset because Rivera thought that this industry was just so so extraordinary, it was the future.
The underlying theme of the murals is dualities, man, machine, man and nature, organic-inorganic,
all of those things but there's also in a way two sets of murals. There are the main panels
that show the creation of an automobile and in those panels, Rivera has managed to fit
in a way that engineers at the time said was perfectly coherent, two or three miles
of production line everything happening in the right place and then running underneath it are
a group of panels we call the brudela, that is a day in the life of the worker but the other
panels that were added later are allegorical. Rivera juxtaposed the the good and the bad,
the use of chemistry for vaccinations and health, and then on the other hand the use of chemistry to
create gas for war. The murals that we have here you can see that's called the American
Engineer. It's a combined portrait of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison seated in front of this great
big turbine shape that some scholars think is an ear because Ford was famous for sort of spying on
his employees. On the other side you have Rivera himself combined with the heroic worker. Very
prominently he's wearing a glove that has a red star on it how could he get away with flaunting
his communism in this way? Well it just so happens that at that time there was in Detroit a company
called the Red Star Glove Company and he slipped a few things like that to throughout the murals.
When these murals were first created there were protests but of course there is no such
thing as bad publicity. That only brought larger crowds into the art museum people
could see it for themselves and make up their own minds about them. Rivera prided
himself on getting the latest technology into these images but there are a couple of things
that are not realistic and one of them is the identity of the men on the line there
because in those days all of those people would have been white. There were people of
color but they didn't have jobs as good as that one so the thought is that Rivera here
was showing what he hoped would be a future when mankind was in fact working together.