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Diego Rivera: The Detroit Industry Murals

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For anyone who has ever been fascinated with Diego Rivera and his works, this is a wonderfully detailed guide to the Detroit Industry Murals. Readible either from cover-to-cover or in chapters, this book is filled throughout with photos, historic background, interviews and amazingly interesting details to all that went into the Detroit Industry Murals. Starting with other Rivera murals located across the United States, Downs leads into the situation of Henry Ford wanting a depiction of Detroit and the auto industry for a neglected garden gallery. A chapter details the fresco process used by Rivera during this immense project, and is skippable for those not interested in art technique. Another chapter details how Rivera and his wife, artist Fridah Kahlo, spend their time in the Motor City. The especially amazing introduction tells the story of how in 1979 Detroit Institute of Art staff found in a dusty closet the original "cartoons" (full size pencil sketches) that Diego Rivera had made during the planning and layout of the murals. Downs ends the book with reactions to the finished project, which ranged from churches outrage to extreme pride for the city's auto workers, which the work most positively depicted. Because of the artist's political convictions (Mexican communist) the murals were almost destroyed during the Cold War and had to be protected under armed guard. Detroit is the last place you would expect to find the masterpiece of the Mexican muralist movement's greatest son. Just like it's topic, this book is an amazing and unexpected masterpiece.

In 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, Diego Rivera arrived in Detroit, where, at the behest of Henry Ford, he began murals celebrating the American worker on the walls of the Detroit Institute of Arts. Completed in 1933, the piece depicted industrial life in the United States, concentrating on the car plant workers of Detroit. Though the fresco was the focus of much controversy, Edsel Ford, Henry's son, defended the work and it remains today Rivera's most significant painting in The United States. Rivera provided the first inspiration for Franklin Delano Roosevelt's WPA program. Of the hundreds of American artists who would find work through the WPA , many continued on to address political concerns that had first been publicly presented by Rivera. Both his original painting style and the force of his ideas remain major influences on American painting. At this critical time in the auto industry, Rivera's murals dramatically detail the beginning.