Diego Rivera’s Marxist homage to Detroit industry.

These murals were commissioned in 1932 by capitalist Edsel Ford, the son of Henry Ford. The only rule? Rivera needed to relate the murals to the history of Detroit and the development of industry. So Diego Rivera went whole hog, painting all four walls of the Detroit Institute of Art’s Garden Court. 

Rivera began painting in the midst of the Great Depression and the city’s industrial sector had taken a hard hit. At the time Rivera was first approached about the mural, thousands of unemployed workers were organizing against the Ford Motor Company. Our man Edsel was undoubtedly being strategic in his commissioning of a set of murals in honor of the workforce. Are your former employees up in arms? Pull an Edsel. Paint a mural in their honor. That’ll definitely feed the kids.

The final product is made up of 27 fresco panels which depict assembly workers of all ethnicities working side by side, a nativity scene playing tribute to medicine, several other of Detroit’s industries, some nude ladies representing fertility, and Henry Ford himself gazing god-like over the masses. 

The mural’s subject matter proved to be super controversial. The nativity scene in particular, which depicts the three wise men (a Catholic, a Protestant, and a Jew) as doctors and scientists vaccinating a child, was condemned as blasphemous by religious communities.  Looks like anti-vaxxers have been around longer than we thought! Those naked ladies we mentioned were deemed pornographic, and many critics claimed that Rivera had painted a communist manifesto in the midst of America’s industrial heartland. What a daring guy-- and it totally paid off. The initial controversy drew over 10,000 visitors to the museum in a single day.  

For a Mexican Marxist to have painted a set of murals celebrating American industry in the midst of the Great Depression is undoubtedly contradictory. However, Edsel Ford stood in strong support of the finished work ('Let’s pretend people are still employed!') and Rivera himself considered these murals the finest works of his career.