LETTERS IN THE TIME OF CORONA VIRUS
Controversy was brewing even before Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo arrived. The Great Depression had hit Detroit especially hard. By 1932 auto production had plummeted to 25% of what it had been just two years prior, there were 400,000 unemployed workers in Michigan, and wages for those who were still working were slashed by more than 50%. The welfare allowance was 15 cents per person per day, every neighborhood bank in Detroit had gone out of business, and the life savings of many unemployed workers and retirees had simply disappeared. A few days before the arrival of Diego and Frida, police and Ford Motor Company security workers had shot and killed 5 protesters and wounded 60 others during a Hunger March where unemployed workers had demanded jobs, health benefits, better working conditions, and a halt to the foreclosure on the homes of the unemployed.
Amidst the turmoil of the Great Depression, people were asking why a Mexican, rather than an American artist, had been hired to create such a massive undertaking; a series of 27 murals surrounding the courtyard at the Detroit Art Museum celebrating the industry, achievements and history of the city. Edsel Ford, son of the founder of Ford Motor Company had commissioned the artwork which was to feature the Rouge River Ford plant, at the time the largest industrial complex in the world. Others questioned the choice of Diego Rivera, whose communist leanings and Marxist beliefs seemed to be in direct conflict with the purpose of the murals which were meant to celebrate and commemorate the glories of capitalism. Socialist programs and agendas were viewed with skepticism by many in the Detroit area, although the Hunger March that had just ended disastrously had been organized in part by the Young Communist League as American workers flirted with socialism and communism in their struggle to come to terms with poverty, the loss of jobs, and the lack of a social safety net. Interestingly, Diego Rivera had just been kicked out of the Mexican Communist Party for having accepted commissions from wealthy patrons; Edsel Ford for the murals in Detroit, and his friends John D. and Abby Rockefeller for a massive mural planned as the centerpiece of Rockefeller Plaza in New York City.
To provide Diego Rivera with inspiration for the murals that he would paint, he had been given tours of the different industries at work in Detroit, and automobile manufacturing was not the only one. The 1930s were the beginning of some big discoveries in the biological and pharmaceutical industries. Alexander Fleming had just discovered penicillin, and the laboratories of the day were trying to replicate his findings. The electron microscope opened the world of viruses to scientists who could now see them and classify them according to their features, and vaccines against polio and other diseases were being researched with new diligence and increasing urgency.
When the murals were finally unveiled controversy had already erupted and the outrage in some quarters was deafening. They were denounced as communist, sacrilegious, and anti-American, a city councilman demanded that they be "scrubbed off the walls," and the three city newspapers called them slanderous, decadent, and foolishly vulgar. Rivera had painted workers of different races - black, white, and brown - working side by side, the allegorical nudes Rivera had painted depicting bounty and the harvest, were denounced as pornography, and one panel in particular was viewed with derision, heaped with scorn, and condemned as blasphemous by members of the religious community. The small panel features a baby in diapers in a medical laboratory flanked by a doctor and a nurse, with three other scientists conducting research in the background. The baby is being vaccinated. In the foreground are the animals that provided the serum that made the vaccine possible.
Religious authorities in Detroit were outraged, viewing the panel as mocking the religious traditions of the Nativity, believing that the woman represented Mary, the man represented Joseph, and the three figures in the back represented the three wise men. The animals were said to represent the manger in which the Christ child had been born.
In defense of the painting, Walter Pach, artist, critic, and writer said that he had seen the murals and studied the vaccination painting in particular and found that accusations that the art was irreligious were absurd. "The feelings that one gets from them", he said, "is reverence for life. I think there is no allusion whatever to the Holy Family." But others disagreed claiming that Rivera, an avowed atheist, was mocking religion, usurping the church, and attempting to subordinate the authority of the church to the dictates of science. According to the New York Times, Rivera “denied that the panel, ‘Vaccination’ was intended to caricature the Holy Family. On the contrary, he said, he had rather tried to sanctify science as contributing to the saving of life." To Rivera, medical technology would be the new savior of mankind.
But the controversy only deepened when it was revealed that Rivera based the image of the child on the recently kidnapped Lindbergh baby who had dominated the news, Mary was based on the popular movie star of the time, Jean Harlow, and the doctor was a portrait of the Detroit Art Museum director, William Valentiner. The three scientist/wise men Rivera referred to as "a Catholic, Protestant and a Jew — ecumenical wise/medical men.”
As an image for our times, the mural with its religious overtones is stunning. Rivera celebrated and critiqued the way that modern faith in science and obsession with celebrity interact with our societal mores and belief in religion. As the controversy still swirls 88 years later, now on Twitter rather than in the newspapers, and as vaxxers and anti-vaxxers come to terms with the promise and problems of vaccines, the mural captures the tension between those who trust and extoll the science, and those requesting a religious exemption, viewing the free exercise of religion as under attack. The animals, which to some look like references to the stable-residents in Bethlehem, and to others represent creatures who supplied the serum for the production of vaccines, are now being viewed by still others as representing the mass of humanity uncritically succumbing to a herd mentality, blindly following unjust government demands to get vaccinated rather than asserting the rights of personal freedom.
Viewed though the haze of political polarization that exists today, it seems unfortunate yet inevitable that the image cannot be seen for what it is; the vaccination of the baby Jesus, representing a confluence of the life saving work of Science and Savior, without the need to insist that their spheres of interest and influence are separate from one another. As an atheist, Diego Rivera denied any religious overtones, but despite protestations to the contrary, his intent seems clear. The design and composition of this panel are clearly inspired by the Renaissance portraits of the Holy Family, and his depiction of the Savior, endowed with the face of a kidnapped and murdered child, receiving the life saving gift of vaccination, is nothing short of inspired.
The monumental and equally controversial opus that Diego Rivera painted the following year as the centerpiece of Rockefeller Center in New York City, was destroyed on the whim of his patron before it was ever completed. Fortunately, these 27 frescoes, including the Vaccine Panel, can still be viewed today in the courtyard of the Detroit Museum of Art.
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Bill Sheehan
November 2021, Ajijic Mexico