Communist Riches

While Kansas City was last week ceremoniously installing one of the most important U. S. collections of old masters in a marble palace Manhattan critics were traipsing down to a dingy garret on slummy 14th Street to look at the most important modern paintings of the year. The route was obscure: past a cut rate drugstore, a toy shop and a haberdashery to a grimy doorway labeled: NEW WORKERS SCHOOL; up a narrow steep staircase straight to the top floor; through the bare offices of New York's Communist Opposition headquarters, to an oblong lecture room. There from door to door ran a set of 21 heavy, richly-colored fresco panels, a present to Communism by a man generally acknowledged to be the world's greatest muralist--Diego Maria Concepcion Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodriguez de Valpuesta.

When his great fresco for Rockefeller Center was rejected, paid for and boarded up (TIME, May 22), Diego Rivera took his $14,000 and offered to reproduce the subject free for any one who would give him wall space. The New Workers took him up.* But since Communist workers have no walls to match those of the Capitalist Rockefellers the original scheme had to be dropped. What Artist Rivera made instead was a cartoon strip, a panorama of civilization in the U. S. as seen through Communist eyes from the landing of the Pilgrims and the liquidation of the Indians to NRA and the farm strike. The New Workers' tenure of the garret being none too permanent, the metal lath and plaster panels of each fresco, weighing up to 350 lb., were made removable.

Conservative critics found their usual faults with Rivera's work--a lack of coordination between the various sections, a terrific overcrowding of the individual pictures with figures and incidents. What no one realized until he actually saw the frieze was the effective propaganda Artist Rivera could make when freed from the necessities of Capitalist contracts. Biased as a princess slip though they were, the 21 fresco panels made the most exciting show of the season.

At a reception last week to inspect the panels and to speed Artist Rivera back to Mexico, Critic Walter Pach spoke feelingly behind his great mustache: "Diego Rivera has given artists in this country a great example of artistic integrity." Added Artist John Sloan: "These are the first examples of an inspired, fired man's mural art in this country."

The number of historic incidents that Artist Rivera managed to crowd on his hard plaster panels was impressive. To be quickly identified were Dutch settlers purchasing Manhattan at the point of a matchlock; a slave trader lashing a black; the Boston Massacre with Crispus Attucks in the centre; Thomas Paine and the "Rights of Man"; the Declaration of Independence; Thomas Jefferson; the Whiskey Rebellion; the Annexation of Texas; gold in California; John Brown arming the slaves; John Brown on the gallows; the Ku Klux Klan; Karl Marx--on through riots, strikes, lynchings, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler (with a pansy in his necktie) to a scene of violence and confusion superimposed by a placard: WORKERS UNITE OR THE BLUE EAGLE WILL WEAR A BROWN SHIRT. NRA PAVES THE WAY FOR FASCISM.

As Rivera works his way down toward 1933, his panels take on something of the excited quality of newspaper headlines.

Two of the best deal with the War and its aftermath. In one is to be seen a very dowdy Woodrow Wilson broadcasting while a little dove exhibits the message "He kept us out of War''; Eugene Debs in jail; the faces of the Rockefellers, J. P. Morgan, Sir Basil Zaharoff, Colonel House, Clemenceau, Tsar Nicholas, the Emperor of Japan, Bernard Baruch; behind them the "Living Death" and other photographic War horrors taken whole from The Horror of It (TIME, March 21, 1932). The other panel shows a row of blue-clad factory girls apparently chained to a stamping machine, nine young Negroes to represent the seven "Scottsboro boys,'' Tom Mooney in jail, and Sacco & Vanzetti in electrode masks at the moment of their execution.

Nelson Trust

Since the first traders sailed the Nile it has been a law as certain as gravity that Art follows Business. European statesmen have made effort after effort to prevent their great paintings from drifting to the U. S. But foreign laws have not been enough to keep the U. S. from becoming more & more the art treasure house of the world. Because great collections of Old Masters, instead of being concentrated exclusively in metropolitan galleries, are spread among smaller cities, few U. S. citizens fully appreciate the sum total of their country's artistic riches. Last week Kansas City took its place beside Toledo, Cleveland, Omaha, Worcester and Springfield as a prime U. S. art centre.

With fanfare and speeches the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art opened its massive bronze doors to let the public see a $4,000,000 collection sumptuously housed in a $2,500,000 marble palace. The Governors of Missouri and Kansas were there. So were the presidents of their State universities, not to mention half the tycoons of the Midwest. Led by Lord Duveen, dealers and art critics arrived from New York, Chicago, Paris, Venice, Madrid.

William Rockhill Nelson migrated to Kansas City from Indiana 55 years ago, founded the Star which quickly grew to fame. Known as the Baron of Brush Creek, he died in 1915. By his will, and those of his wife and daughter a $12,000,000 trust fund from the sale of the Star to its employes was set up to build a great museum, to fill it with treasures.* There was only one important restriction: the museum may only buy the works of artists 30 years dead.

For three years Advisor Harold Woodbury Parsons has sailed around the coastline of Europe in his own yacht, making forays inland to pick pictures. On his advice the Nelson fund directors have bought lavishly and well. Critics picking their way through echoing marble galleries last week spotted at least half a dozen paintings of world importance: Velasquez' St. Peter; Rubens' Portrait of Old Parr; El Greco's Penitent Magdalene; Goya's Don Ignacio Omulryan y Rourera; Titian's Antoine Perrenot de Granvella; Nicolas Poussin's Triumph of Bacchus.

*Rivera was expelled from the Communist Party in 1929.

*The Nelsons had a horror of letting others use their personal belongings. The Nelson cars, upon their owners' death, were soaked in gasoline and burned. Their jewels, clothes and furniture were shipped 250 miles away to be sold at auction. Oak Hall, the family home, was taken apart brick by brick and the art museum erected on the site.

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