Diego Rivera Keeps Up the Fight
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The exhibition “Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art” reunites, for the first time in 80 years, five “portable murals,” freestanding frescoes with bold images addressing the Mexican Revolution and Depression-era New York that Rivera created at the Museum for his 1931-32 MoMA exhibition.
The murals, which are up to six feet by eight feet in size and weigh as much as 1,000 pounds, are made of frescoed plaster, concrete, and steel. Comprising five of the eight murals that were shown in the 1931 exhibition, they are drawn from public and private collections in the United States and Mexico, including MoMA’s own collection.
MoMA’s Leah Dickerman, the curator of the exhibtion, states, “The story of this extraordinary commission for The Museum of Modern Art brings to life Diego Rivera’s pivotal role in shaping debates about the social and political role of public art during a period of economic crisis in the United States.”
“Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art” runs through May 14, 2012 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, New York, NY 10019, 212-708-9400, moma.org.
Franklin Einspruch, an artist and writer, blogs at Artblog.net.