Word: riverae
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...jury shows which in art-conscious Paris used sometimes to approach the pinnacle of Paris success-a street riot. The Salons of America, an offshoot, was started four years later by disgruntled Independents. As anyone might have predicted, the fight this year centered upon the now hoary squabble between Rivera and Rockefeller Center, in which both societies were invited to exhibit. Claiming that Rockefeller authorities were certain to exercise censorship, John Sloan's Independents refused, went instead to the Grand Central Palace. Claiming exactly the opposite, the Salons went to the Center. Joy to the public...
...what will happen when the depression has lasted long enough to reduce the entire national corps of creative artists to the status of Government pensioners. Lugubrlous as the prospect is, it is not without its attractions: Mr. Mencken drawing a weekly stipend for turning out D.A.R. brochures, Senor Rivera naturalized and dotting the public parks of the land with equestrian General Pershings, a qualified muralist doing over the replastered Dartmouth Library walls with an "I pledge Allegiance to My Flag" motif . . . and subsidized humorists doing what they can with...
Late one night last week workmen wheeled a fleet of wheelbarrows into the RCA Building lobby, set a movable scaffold against the wall. It was no trick to get off the covering coat of cream-colored canvas. But Rivera's mural, like all true fresco, had been painted into a coat of plaster. The workmen tried to get it off in big chunks, save as much as they could. But they claimed later that once broken, the great fresco crumbled into powder which was wheeled out of the lobby to oblivion. Speedily the workmen slapped a fresh coat...
Such stealthy destruction of the Rivera mural by the Rockefeller management stirred a tumult in the art world. Against Rockefeller Center and next week's Municipal Art Exhibit to be held there, eleven members of the Society of Independent Artists declared a boycott. The Rockefellers were accused of "cultural vandalism," of "murder with malice aforethought." The American Society of Painters, Sculptors and Gravers (membership: 90) joined the boycott, declaring: "The Rockefeller family had no moral right. . . ." Radical Suzanne La Follette called a protest mass meeting, rallied critics as well as artists. In Mexico City Painter Rivera declared: "My object...
...lawyers of Rockefeller Center were better than artists at word logic. The latter, unwilling to tar themselves with Rivera's Communist brush, had muted their real indignation against the destruction of a fine work of art, on whatever grounds. Their boycott, they insisted, was based on destruction without the artist's permission. The lawyers dug up an old piece of Rivera rhetoric that sounded something like a "permission."' They flipped it at the artists, quickly and completely deflated the protests and boycotts. In that letter, dated last May, the Mexican muralist had said: "Rather than mutilate...