Fauvism, an introduction

Expressionism, an introduction
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Self-Portrait As a Soldier
Street, Dresden
Street, Berlin

Vasily Kandinsky

Improvisation 28 (second version)
Klänge (Sounds)

Cubism + early abstraction

The Case for Abstraction

Pablo Picasso

Georges Braque

Fernand Léger, Contrast of Forms

Robert Delaunay, Simultaneous Contrasts: Sun and Moon

Russian avant-garde

School of Paris

Amedeo Modigliani, Young Woman in a Shirt
Constantin Brancusi

The Kiss
Bird in Space

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare

De Stijl

Piet Mondrian

British art and literature

British Art and Literature During WWI

Dada + Surrealism

Introduction to Dada
Marcel Duchamp

Surrealism, an introduction
The Case for Surrealism

The Persistence of Memory
Metamorphosis of Narcissus

German art between the wars

Prints and photography

Telephone Pictures
Composition A.XX
Climbing the Mast

New Objectivity

Christian Schad, Self-Portrait

Nazi visual culture

Latin American modernism

Mexican Muralism

José Clemente Orozco, Dive Bomber and Tank

Frida Kahlo

Wilfredo Lam, The Jungle

Joaquín Torres-García, Inverted America
Lygia Clark, Bicho

Brazilian modernism

Tarsila do Amaral, Abaporú

American art to WWII

American Impressionism

Henry Ossawa Tanner

The Banjo Lesson
Angels Appearing before the Shepherds

Ashcan School

The American southwest

Social Realism

Jacob Lawrence

The Migration Series
Ambulance Call

Todros Geller, Strange Worlds
Grant Wood

Grant Wood, American Gothic
Grant Wood, Parson Weems' Fable

Alexander Calder, Mobile

Postwar American art

Abstract Expressionism

Mark Rothko

Jackson Pollock

Franz Kline at MoMA
The Painting Techniques of Franz Kline

New York School

The Impact of Abstract Expressionism
Jasper Johns

White Flag

Robert Rauschenberg

Abstract Painting
Ad Reinhardt at MoMA
The Painting Techniques of Ad Reinhardt

Helen Frankenthaler

Mountains and Sea
The Bay

Frank Stella, The Marriage of Reason and Squalor

Postwar figurative art

Benny Andrews, Flag Day

Postwar abstraction

Josef Albers, Homage to the Square
Ruth Asawa, Untitled

Pop art

Contemporary Art, an introduction
Pop Art

Andy Warhol

Claes Oldenburg

Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks
Floor Cake

Minimalism + Earthworks

Donald Judd, Untitled
Robert Morris

(Untitled) L-Beams

Tilted Arc
Intersection II
Torqued Ellipse IV

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Gates

Postwar European art

Jean Dubuffet

A View of Paris: The Life of Pleasure

Alberto Giacometti, Walking Man II

Joseph Beuys

Sigmar Polke

Watchtower series

Gerhard Richter

Anselm Kiefer, Shulamite

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Androgyne III

Conceptual + Performance Art

Conceptual Art

Narcissus Garden
Yayoi Kusama (Tate)

Performance Art

Post Minimalism

Louise Bourgeois, Cumul I
Eva Hesse

Eva Hesse, Untitled (Rope Piece)
Eva Hesse, Untitled

Global vanguards

Uche Okeke

Song Su-Nam, Summer Trees

Liu Chunhua, Chairman Mao en Route to Anyuan

Architecture and design

Vienna Secession

Otto Wagner, Postal Savings Bank

Chicago School

Louis Sullivan, Carson, Pirie, Scott Building

New York skyscrapers & landmarks

International style

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City

American design

Late Modernism/Post-Modernism Diego Rivera, Man at the Crossroads, 1933, Rockefeller Center, New York (destroyed)

When the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes opened on November 29, 1934 in Mexico City, the general public finally had a chance to see Diego Rivera’s Man, Controller of the Universe. At 15.75 x 37.5 feet, this epic work demands attentive viewing. Less than ten months earlier Rivera’s first version—originally titled Man at the Crossroads—was destroyed at Rockefeller Center in New York City after months of controversy.

Rivera was in the midst of a prolific period when he began this mural. His retrospective exhibition at MoMA opened in December 1931 to positive reviews and contemporaneous mural projects in San Francisco and Detroit enhanced his celebrity as one of the greatest Mexican muralists. Yet something went amiss with the Rockefeller commission: whether it was censorship, a miscommunication or something in between, Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads became one of the most infamous artworks that never was. Diego Rivera, Man, Controller of the Universe, 1934 (Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City)

In the later (surviving) version at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Man, Controller of the Universe, a worker at the center directs an enormous machine at the crossroads of the political ideologies dominating this period: capitalism (to the figure’s right) and communism (to the figure’s left). Man at the center of the mural (detail), Diego Rivera, Man, Controller of the Universe, 1934 (Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City) (photo: Joaquín Martínez, CC Attribution 2.0 Generic)

Though the composition is bursting with activity, Rivera establishes order by using the central figure as a vertical axis: if we fold the scene down the middle, spaces and objects (like the two giant magnifying glasses) align. Brutalities of WWI, including poison gas and machine guns (detail), Diego Rivera, Man, Controller of the Universe, 1934 (Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City) (photo: Peter Van Eynde, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

This arrangement encourages comparisons between the two sides.

For example, at the top of the capitalist side (on our left, the central figure’s right) the brutalities of World War I are on display. Rivera underscores how capitalist nations use technology (poison gas, machine guns, and warplanes) as destructive forces.

By contrast, the top of the communist side (our right, the central figure’s left) highlights the glories of the Russian Revolution, whose momentum overflows into the lower part of the composition.

If we continue to focus on the right side, we see key figures in the worker’s movement (León Trotsky, Friedrich Engels, and Karl Marx) standing at the foot of a headless classical sculpture brandishing a swastika. As our gaze moves to the lower right, we realize workers are seated on the sculpture’s decapitated head. Defaced classical sculpture surrounded by the political figures of the Russian Revolution (detail), Diego Rivera, Man, Controller of the Universe, 1934 (Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City) (photo: Peter Van Eynde, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

On the other side of the composition, Rivera places another classical sculpture (this one anachronistically wears a Christian cross). Though the figure lacks hands, his face and lightning bolt reveal him as Zeus, the supreme Greek god.

By defacing these classical sculptures, Rivera critiques traditional art history (and its seemingly rarefied tastes) as well as the political elite (from the empires of Antiquity to the Catholic Church and Fascists) that—in his view—had repressed the popular masses throughout human history.

Through this symbolic beheading, the communists have replaced the dominant ideology in Europe with a new way of thinking. Though the statue on the other side holds a ray of lightning, his handless state renders him powerless amidst the turmoil in capitalist countries: behind the sculpture’s base workers in New York City fight against the police while the wealthy (whose ranks include a bespectacled Nelson Rockefeller), indulge in debauchery between the magnifying glass on the left and the central worker. The “pie slice” across from this scene features Vladimir Lenin holding the hands of workers of distinct races. Despite being a small fragment of the mural, this tableau is at the heart of the controversy Rivera faced in the United States.

Though Rivera enjoyed tremendous success, he also faced harsh controversy, for both his political beliefs and artistic practice. Though he considered his murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts (1932-33) among his greatest works, his work there faced opposition due to the depiction of men of different races working together.

The most notorious controversy of his career came as he painted Man at the Crossroads, the mural for Rockefeller Center’s Radio Corporation of America (RCA) building in 1933 (the fresco that he later based Man, Controller of the Universe on). Of the hundreds of characters in Man at the Crossroads, Lenin caused the most debate. An April 24th headline from the New York World-Telegram stated “Rivera Perpetrates Scenes of Communist Activity for RCA Walls—And Rockefeller, Jr. Foots Bill.” Ten days later Nelson Rockefeller, Rivera’s patron and member of a famously wealthy family, asked the artist to remove Lenin. When Rivera refused, he was paid in full and dismissed. The murals were covered up and later destroyed, as Rivera’s supporters rallied to save the work. E.B. White’s “I Paint What I See,” written in protest, poignantly highlights this meeting of differing political ideologies:

I paint what I paint, I paint what I see,
I paint what I think, said Rivera […] I’ll take out a couple of people drinkin’
And put in a picture of Abraham Lincoln; […] But the head of Lenin has got to stay!
It’s no good taste in a man like me,
Said John D’s grandson, Nelson. […] For this, as you know, is a public hall.
And people want doves, or a tree in fall,
And tho your art I dislike to hamper,
I owe a little to God and Gramper.
And after all,
It’s my wall…
We’ll see if it is, said Rivera. 1

As White predicted, Rivera had the last laugh. Eight decades later his mural exists in two places: physically, in the Museo; and, as befitting a censored work, thriving in art history scholarship.
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