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mexico lazaro cardenasconcept:movement muralism mexican

Man at the Crossroads (Man, Controller of the Universe)

Fresco mural by Diego Rivera. Originally commissioned for the RCA Building lobby at Rockefeller Center, New York, 1933. Destroyed in 1934 before completion after the Rockefeller family demanded Rivera remove a portrait of Lenin; Rivera refused. Rivera recreated the mural in 1934 at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, under the new title 'Man, Controller of the Universe', retaining the Lenin portrait and adding a portrait of Trotsky and the Rockefellers at a party scene. The destruction of the original is one of the most celebrated cases of political censorship in 20th-century art history.

Scholarly Significance

Rivera's Man at the Crossroads — destroyed/reconstructed mural; canonical case of political censorship in art history.

Notes

  • ·The original 1933 commission was titled 'Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future'.
  • ·Rivera included a portrait of V.I. Lenin; when Nelson Rockefeller demanded its removal, Rivera offered to balance it with a portrait of Abraham Lincoln but refused outright removal.
  • ·The Rockefellers covered the mural with plaster and later had it jackhammered off.
  • ·The recreation adds portraits of Leon Trotsky, Frederick Engels, and Karl Marx, and depicts the Rockefeller family at a party alongside a dish bearing syphilis bacteria.
  • ·The episode became synonymous with the vulnerability of radical public art to capitalist censorship.