Word: rivera
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...theme had been handed him with the contract: "Man at the Crossroads looking with uncertainty but with Hope and High Vision to the choosing of a course leading to a New and Better Future." To Rivera, the "Crossroads" were capitalism and Communism, so he painted a mural contrasting Wall Streeters on a binge with Lenin uniting the workers. The Rockefellers said Lenin must go: Rivera thumbed his nose. In the end the Rockefellers had the fresco reduced to plaster dust...
...Rivera's latest mural, which was unveiled last summer in Mexico City's new Del Prado Hotel, made history too (TIME, June 14-21). It contained a portrait of one of Juárez' anticlerical followers displaying a placard with the words Dios no existe-"God does not exist." The slogan was drawn straight from Mexican revolutionary history, but in predominantly Roman Catholic Mexico it still spelled riot. The Archbishop refused to bless the hotel...
...citizenry was outraged. As one cab driver put it: "We know Rivera is our greatest painter, but he hurts our feelings...
Cannon in the Dining Room. Catholic students raided the hotel, scratched out the brief blasphemy and mutilated Rivera's self-portrait as well. The hotel management hastily boarded up the whole thing.* Today, customers in the Del Prado's wine-carpeted dining room nibble their canard faisandé before a decorous red screen, on the other side of which Rivera's painting stands like a hidden cannon...
...Rivera himself considers it his best mural. Critics could agree in placing it among the best-integrated and liveliest in color of Rivera's paintings, but they might reasonably complain that it takes the maestro himself to even begin to tell what it is all about...