Frescoes of Diego Rivera [VHS]
In 1933, the Rockefeller family of New York commissioned Mexican master Diego Rivera to add a fresco to the entry hall of Rockefeller Center. They approved his sketches, and he began to paint, becoming a tourist attraction as he worked. Fresco painting is one of the most difficult media in which a painter can work because it involves painting with fresh plaster; in the end, the fresco becomes a part of the wall itself. Rivera had been hard at work a few months when he was summoned to speak with the Rockefellers, who asked him to remove a certain figure from the fresco. The face had been unclear in the sketch they had approved but now--vivid in Rivera's Michelangelo-like colors--the objectionable face was far too prominent to be kept. Rivera refused. The Rockefellers paid him in full for the whole project but sent him promptly home. Later on, much to Rivera's irritation, they destroyed the fresco. The objectionable face: Lenin's.As a young man, Rivera spent seven years in France and Spain studying classical European techniques as a part of the École de Paris. But the Mexico of the '20s was just beginning to accept, and be proud of, its Aztec and Maya heritage, and it was in this environment of an artistic and spiritual transformation in Mexico that Rivera developed his frame of art: His central question was how to make art useful. He came to reject what he considered frivolousness in cubism and avant-garde art and turned instead to a goal of glorifying the culture and life of the Mexican people--not its aristocracy, but its lower classes: Indians,campesinos, miners, workers. "Art has a social function like any craft," Rivera once wrote. "An artist must be the conscience of his age."Michael Camerini's 1986 documentary carefully juxtaposes the life, the politics, and the art of Diego Rivera, with stunning, close-up photography of his most significant works--the viewer enjoys details sometimes too remote on frescoed ceilings to perceive otherwise. This admixture of Rivera's social philosophy with such beautiful photography of his work is riveting. Rivera was controversial, and Camerini's problematization of his art results in a beautiful, intelligent, and informative 35-minute study of one of the Western Hemisphere's most important 20th-century artists.--Erik Macki