THE NEWYORKER, MARCH 2, 2020 69
ing in a dizzying dance of co-optation
that extended to adulatory coverage in
Forbes and peaked with his masterpiece
murals, completed in 1933, in the Detroit
Institute of Arts, of a Ford plant in full-
tilt operation. This celebrity proved tricky
for him at home, where Siqueiros, among
others, denounced him as a sellout to
class enemies. Rivera countered by paint-
ing a head of Lenin into his grand mural
suite for Rockefeller Center, in 1933. Or-
dered by Nelson Rockefeller to remove
the Bolshevik, Rivera refused. (Light
verse by E. B. White in this magazine
had the mogul objecting, “After all / It’s
my wall,” before it concluded, “ ‘We’ll
see if it is,’ said Rivera.”) The work was
destroyed in 1934. The same year, Rivera
painted a new version, “Man, Control-
ler of the Universe,” in Mexico City.
The Whitney show features a full-sized
(nearly sixteen feet high by thirty-seven
and a half feet wide) digital reproduc-
tion of the surviving mural, printed on
a single sheet of vinyl glued to a wall. I
don’t know what to make of that except
as an instance of technical whoop-de-do.
Much as I empathize with Haskell’s yen
for a pièce de résistance, I swear by the
physical integrity of painting, here be-
trayed by a smooth-as-silk illusion.
R
ivera inspired American painters to
create tableaux of laboring or pro-
testing workers (police brutality figures
often) and of historical events and themes.
The work of the African-American artist
Charles White is notable; give an eye to
his “Progress of the American Negro:
Five Great American Negroes” (1939-40),
which works such heroes as Booker T.
Washington and Marian Anderson into
a baroque panorama. The show also in-
cludes ten temperas from Jacob Lawrence’s
“Migration Series,” of 1940-41: little pic-
tures, narrating the northward exodus of
Southern blacks, that reverberate with
intense color, clenched design, and a quiet
power of conviction that makes much
other work here seem forced and fustian.
But America already had a promi-
nent public artist: the ebullient neo-Man-
nerist Thomas Hart Benton, who hailed
Rivera until he was alienated by his Marx-
ism. Benton’s output might be termed
liberal-nationalist with a heaping side
order of Hollywood. His bravura series
“American Historical Epic” (1924-27) has
the virtue of featuring noble Indians
along with the vice of casting them as
perennial losers. He could be callous. But
he was right on time for certain popu-
lar moods of the thirties—so much so
that his reputation crashed soon there-
after. He has come to be mentioned most
often as a teacher of Jackson Pollock—a
status that happens to be at the beating
heart of the Whitney show.
The young Pollock was a student, too,
of Siqueiros, who was at once the mural
movement’s most adamant Stalinist (in
1940, he led a failed attempt, with ma-
chine guns, to assassinate Trotsky) and
its most experimental, indeed avant-garde,
painter. Pollock attended a workshop that
Siqueiros conducted in New York, in 1936,
teaching innovative techniques: using
non-paint materials, airbrushing, and,
among other heterodox procedures, drip-
ping and pouring. Meanwhile, Pollock
emulated Orozco’s dark, fierce, rhythmic
Expressionism to the point of making
works that are almost—but not quite—
hard to distinguish from it. Relatively
neutral politically, Orozco favored myth-
ological subjects in such explosively com-
posed works as “Prometheus,” a mural
at Pomona College, in California, which
the Whitney represents, at about half
scale, in another digital reproduction.
Juxtapositions of paintings by Orozco
and Siqueiros with contemporaneous
ones by Pollock amount to a riveting
show within the show: a crucible in which
the apolitical American found ways
around the crushing authority of Picasso,
Matisse, Miró, Mondrian, and other Eu-
ropean paragons. The vehemence of the
Mexicans matched his volcanic temper-
ament; and the heft of their gestural forms
showed him how to rival, while evading,
the tinkered unities of Cubism. I recom-
mend comparing and contrasting the
seething intensity of Pollock’s “Compo-
sition with Flames” (1936) with that
of “The Fire” (1938), by Orozco, and
Siqueiros’s “The Electric Forest” (1939).
“Vida Americana” valuably augments
standard histories of modern art. With-
out the Mexican precedents of amplified
scale and passionate vigor, the develop-
ment of Abstract Expressionism in gen-
eral, and that of Pollock in particular,
lacks crucial sense. As for the politics,
consider the persistently leftward tilt of
American art culture ever since—a re-
sidual hankering, however sotto voce, to
change the world.
TO FIND OUT MORE, CONTACT
JILLIAN GENET | 305.520.5159
[email protected]
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