Detroit — The Detroit Institute of Arts has a genuinely world-class collection ranging from contemporary art to ancient Egyptian artifacts. The museum’s most famous work, the Detroit Industry Murals by Mexican artist Diego Rivera, are regarded as a masterpiece and central symbol of the city of Detroit.
Despite all the glazing, however, Rivera isn’t the greatest artist at the DIA. That honor belongs to an artist more cleverly provocative, and far more American—the 19th century expat James Abbot McNeill Whistler.
Rivera, if you didn’t know, was an avowed atheist and communist during the prewar era. He’s hardly the only famous artist to court controversy with left-wing politics, but his adherence to marxism was stronger than most.
He visited Moscow during the 1920s at the invitation of the Soviet government, and was even commissioned to paint a mural for the Red Army Club. He was later kicked out of the Mexican Communist Party for suspected Trotskyite sympathies, which, if you’re unfamiliar with the infighting of communists of that era, meant he was on the extreme left of the party and advocated for a global communist revolution.
All of that might be forgivable, but he also married Frida Kahlo. Communism is one thing, but the unibrow is just too much.
There’s a lot of debate in the art world and broader culture about the impact of an artists’ politics and personal behavior on their art. Can we separate the art from the artist? Can we embrace impressive artworks from a person who’s otherwise deplorable? Should their work be shunned, banished due to their beliefs.
My view, generally, is that we should accept artworks at face value. Grant them status based on their own merit, not the persona of the artist. Yet art is never separated from the artist, and beliefs always shine through somehow. The context of their life and beliefs, in that case, becomes a useful tool to decode and understand their works.
Rivera’s mural at the DIA is a rather literal imposition of his beliefs, a Boschian hellscape where anonymous masses of mankind are utterly subsumed by perpetual toil and machinery.
It’s beautiful in the same way that Bosch’s paintings of hell are darkly beautiful, but it’s not triumphant, and it’s not American. Yet unlike Bosch, the fantastical elements of the mural are grotesquely shapeless, round, and fat. Much like Rivera himself, in fact.
Bosch’s figures, even his portly demons in Various Fantastic Figures (housed at the DIA but currently not on display), have deliberately bizarre, pointed shapes. Rivera’s mark making is broad, blocky, and round, as was the style of the 1930s. There’s a Picasso-esque quality here, and not in a good way—the body horror of cubism, without the visual interest of multi-faceted body forms from different perspectives at once.
Overwhelmingly, the mural presents its human figures as collective forces. Bees toiling in a beehive, moving engines down assembly lines, stoking flaming furnaces with long metal implements.
The only man alone, in the central murals, is a man in a suit and glasses with a clipboard, staring shrewdly out at the viewer. The capitalist, the factory owner—by Rivera’s view, the only man aware not only of the scene he’s in, but of the viewer as well.
His stare breaks the fourth wall; he’s conscious of you gazing at him. He has a look of scorn, of greed, a clenched jaw and icy blue eyes. Every other human in the mural is entirely occupied with the task of industrial labor, drowned in the collective mass effort, but this man is alone.
The only other solitary figures are archetypal mother figures on the smaller, higher panels. Rivera’s nod to the symbolic, a staunchly atheistic heavenly vision of the origin of the scenes below.
One panel, a little boy with his mother and father, flanked by a horse and oxen and three factory workers in the background, is plainly a nativity scene. Despite his atheism, Rivera played with the bare symbols of religiosity. The scene is interpreted by some as parody, but more likely fits within his broader symbolic language, an earthing of the heavens into physical, bodily muck.
Communist art, that’s the simplest and best way to describe it. The primacy of the collective over the individual, the leveling of spirituality into banality. Nothing is holy, and individuality is exploitation.
The genius of Rivera’s work is in the presentation, the grand scale, the implementation in a form previously only reserved for sacred images. Yet it’s not a celebration of labor. When you really spend some time with it, you start to understand. It’s horror, not exultation.
Whistler, on the other hand, has only two paintings at the DIA, but they’re two of his most profound. You’ll find them hidden away in a wood-paneled room, paired off next to each other.
One, a painting of the artist himself staring back at the viewer. The second, Nocturne in Black and Gold — The Falling Rocket, brought him infamy and ruin at the very height of his career.
Whistler was an incorrigible individualist, an American expat who settled in London in the mid 19th century. He was known as an extremely colorful character, highly opinionated and charismatic, a romantic figure of the age. He believed in “art for art’s sake,” that artworks must exist for their own purpose alone, needing no grander ideology or rationale.
His works are characterized by the combination of loose compositional brushstrokes with impeccable tonal precision. An early impressionist at a time when impressionism was a radical break from prior artistic conventions, he prioritized the mood of a work over the pictorial form, going so far as to title many of his works as “symphonies.”
He was arrogant about his artistic beliefs, even downright combative at times, and it earned him many enemies. The prominent art critic John Ruskin denounced Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold as “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.”
It caused an uproar, and Whistler brought a highly publicized libel suit against the critic. It went to trial, and Whistler won, but was awarded only a token amount equivalent to a single penny. The court costs and impact to his sales, combined with his extravagant lifestyle, ruined him. He declared bankruptcy and fled to Italy.
Whistler’s works, despite his long life as an expat in Europe, are triumphantly American. His self portrait, with a black beret and painter’s brushes, is unapologetically individualistic. The nocturne posits the primacy of human perception, of sense and experience and even emotion, over more discrete physical depiction.
You see his belief in the power of the individual throughout his work, and especially in these two paintings paired together. He didn’t give a damn about the collective, about what the masses thought of his work, or about motivating people toward some great revolution. He believed in himself and his own instincts, and even moreso, in the power of artworks to stand on their own as powerfully symbolic objects.
When the DIA workers unionized recently, they cited Rivera’s mural as motivation. They’re right, in a way—Rivera portrays the collective as a cosmic, chthonic force. A primordial entity that, for a group of museum staffers, gives them a shot at a few bucks more per hour.
Everyone deserves a fair wage for fair labor, but perhaps they missed the point of all the artworks they see every day. Forget the fact that Rivera himself paid his assistants terribly, though they did most of the actual painting of the mural. Even his work is a testament to individual vision and achievement.
Exceptional artworks are triumphs of the artist as the individual, forcing their own conception into the world through skill and strength of will. Whistler understood this better than anyone, and even in two of his simplest works, you feel that level of profundity inspiring human greatness to new heights.
Forget Rivera and his collective toil of the masses. If you’re an aspiring artist, go look at the Whistler paintings. You’ll find far more there to push you on, a true example of the capacity of the individual human spirit. That will serve you much more in the artistic life, which is mostly spent working alone, motivated only by nearly insane levels of belief in yourself and the importance of your own work.
Bobby Mars is art director of Michigan Enjoyer. Follow him on X @bobby_on_mars.
