First Against the Wall
Fig. 1. The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on This Continent (Pan American Unity) by Diego Rivera (1886–1957), 1940. Fresco on steel- framed cement panels, 22 by 74 feet. City College of San Francisco, © Banco de Mexico Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico City, Mexico D.F. / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York; photograph courtesy of Cultural Heritage Imaging. The paintings of Diego Rivera bring to mind something that Dr. Johnson once said about John Milton, that he was “a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock; but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones.”1 That assessment, though woefully wrong with regard to the English poet, is an excellent entrée into the work of the Mexican muralist, the subject of a new retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. An intermittent Communist, Rivera once signed a manifesto proclaiming: “We condemn as aristocratic all the so-called easel painting and art of the ultra-intellectual clique!”2 Rivera did indeed create small easel paintings, some of them very good, but he seemed most himself when conjuring entire worlds into being across the expansive walls of a great public building. By its very nature, this new exhibition, Diego Rivera’s America—the most extensive examination of the artist in twenty years—is forced to emphasize his smaller, more portable works over those great and immovable murals that were the main fruits of his genius. Focusing on Rivera’s work in the United States from the 1920s to the 1940s, the show tells its tale in more than 150 drawings and easel paintings, while resorting to large-scale film projections to give a sense of the ambitious murals that Rivera conceived for New York, Detroit, and Mexico City. Only the