He Offered to Add Lincoln
The Rockefeller Center tree went up last Saturday. Behind it is the lobby where a Rockefeller had a Diego Rivera mural destroyed for including Lenin. Rivera's proposed compromise is on the wall now.
The Rockefeller Center Christmas tree arrived last Saturday, a 76-foot Norway spruce from West Edmeston, New York, and it gets lit on December 2. It stands at the plaza entrance of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Walk past it into the lobby and the big mural behind the information desk is the second one painted for that wall. A Rockefeller had the first one destroyed.
In 1932 Abby Aldrich Rockefeller was collecting Diego Rivera, a famous communist. The family hired him anyway, with full knowledge of his politics, to paint the main lobby wall of the RCA Building, the tallest tower in the complex. The fee was $21,000. Nelson had wanted Matisse and Picasso on the side walls; Matisse was busy, and Picasso never answered a telegram addressed to "Pierre Picasso."
The assignment came with a title nineteen words long: Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future. Rivera's idea of a better future had Lenin in it, holding hands with a group of workers, across the wall from society ladies playing cards. In April 1933 the World-Telegram called the work anti-capitalist propaganda. Nelson Rockefeller, then a director of the Center, wrote and asked him to take Lenin out.
Rivera refused, politely. As a compromise he offered to add Abraham Lincoln on the other side, for balance. Rather than mutilate it, the letter said, he would prefer "the physical destruction of the conception in its entirety."
He got what he asked for. In May 1933 he was stopped mid-work and paid in full, and the wall was covered with canvas. In February 1934 workmen took the fresco off the wall, and Rockefeller Center announced it in a two-sentence press release saying the wall had been replastered. Before any of that, Rivera had asked his assistant Lucienne Bloch to photograph the mural, just in case.
He took the photographs to Mexico City and repainted the whole thing at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, under a new title, Man, Controller of the Universe. Mostly the same composition, with a few additions. Trotsky got in, next to Marx and Engels. So did John D. Rockefeller Jr., a famous teetotaler, now drinking in a nightclub with a woman, under a dish of syphilis germs. It's still there.
Back in New York, John D. Rockefeller Jr. made sure no art went into the Center again without his say. The Spanish painter Josep Maria Sert got the wall, and in 1937 he finished American Progress: men building modern America, in sepia, with Gandhi, Emerson and, according to Rockefeller Center's own description, Abraham Lincoln in a prominent role. Daniel Okrent tells the whole saga in Great Fortune, his Pulitzer-finalist history of the place.
Rivera got his Lincoln after all. Someone else painted it.