Word: frescos
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Into the lobby of Rockefeller Center's towering RCA Building last week stalked Rental Manager Hugh Robertson, followed by twelve uniformed guards. The procession halted before a huge (63 ft. by 17 ft.) unfinished fresco on the wall facing the doors. Its bright colors and hard, compact figures filled the lobby like a parade. On scaffolding before it stood a big, drooping man with a gloomy face and sad Mexican eyes: Diego Rivera, the world's foremost living fresco painter. A guard called to Rivera to come down from his scaffold. He laid down his big brushes...
Next day newspapers splashed across their front pages the ostensible reason for all the hubbub. On May 1 (May Day), near the centre of the Fresco had appeared a small head of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s son Nelson had asked Rivera ''to substitute the face of some unknown man where Lenin's face now appears." Rivera had countered by offering to balance Lenin with a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. The Rockefellers exploded, fired Rivera...
...publicity was tremendous. Rivera knew that John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s wife and his son Nelson were trustees of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art which gave Rivera a show a year ago. In that show was many a frankly Communistic picture by Rivera, notably a fresco Frozen Assets, showing starving men, idle mills. In early March, one of Rockefeller Center's architects, Raymond Hood, went to Detroit where Rivera was finishing his frescoes for the Detroit Institute of Arts. He approved Rivera's big, colored sketch for Rockefeller Center...
...were issued to watch him do his daily stint. Art students, businessmen and Communists bought tickets as Rivera slowly spread paint down over the wall in a characteristic composition made up of huge, chunky units. Rockefeller Center workmen came free. Painting directly on wet plaster as in all true fresco, Rivera put on the wall the essentials of his submitted and approved sketches. Nelson Rockefeller came too to watch, told Rivera he liked the fresco. On May Day Rivera came to the head of the Leader, made it the head of Lenin...
Soon afterwards Rivera and his assistants became aware of a changed attitude in Rockefeller Center. The number of guards was increased. When Rivera brought men to photograph his fresco, they were sent away. Personal feuds sprang up between the Rockefeller Center guards and Rivera's assistants. A guard threatened to brain an assistant if he tried to take a snapshot. Rivera's heavy scaffolding was replaced by a movable scaffold. Rivera draped tracing paper over the outside railing, screening the platform from the guards, and a woman assistant took a camera from under her skirt to photograph, close...