Inauguration of the exhibition Diego Rivera:

Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art is organized by Leah Dickerman, Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art. MoMA is the exhibition’s sole venue. Ii will be on view at MoMA from November 13, 2011, to May 14, 2012. Comprising five of the eight murals that were shown in the 1931 exhibition, they are drawn from public and private collections in the United States and Mexico, including MoMA’s own collection. The murals, which are up to six feet by eight feet in size and weigh as much as 1,000 pounds, are made of frescoed plaster, concrete, and steel.

In addition to the murals, the exhibition features three eight-foot working drawings; a prototype “portable mural” made in 1930; as well as smaller drawings, watercolors, and prints by Rivera. The exhibition also includes materials related to Rivera’s infamous Rockefeller Center mural, a project he began to discuss while in residence at the Museum.

Ms. Dickerman states, “The story of this extraordinary commission for The Museum of Modern Art brings to life Diego Rivera’s pivotal role in shaping debates about the social and political role of public art during a period of economic crisis in the United States.”

By 1931, Rivera was the most visible figure in Mexican muralism, a large-scale public-art initiative that emerged in the 1920s in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. But his murals—by definition fixed on a single site—were impossible to transport for exhibition. To solve this problem, the Museum brought Rivera to New York six weeks before the show opened and provided him with a makeshift studio in an empty gallery in the Museum’s original building. Working around the clock with three assistants, Rivera produced five “portable murals,” large blocks of frescoed plaster, concrete, and steel that feature bold images commemorating Mexican history. Four of these five panels featured images borrowed, with some adaptations, from the mural cycles in Mexico that had established Rivera’s reputation.

At MoMA these images formed a new cycle: a series of historical snapshots of Mexican power relationships. Together they present the nation in a continual state of revolution—from the Spanish Conquest in the 16th century to labor unrest in the decade in which they were made. The first of these panels to be made, Agrarian Leader Zapata, later joined MoMA’s collection, and is now a familiar icon on the Museum’s walls.

After the exhibition’s opening, Rivera added three more murals, each depicting labor and construction in Depression-era New York. The city’s advanced industrialization provided Rivera with exciting modern subjects for his murals, while its economic inequities offered ample opportunity to scrutinize class and power in the United States. All eight panels were on display for the duration of the exhibition’s run.

The five murals from the 1931 retrospective that are on view in Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art are Agrarian Leader Zapata (1931), Indian Warrior (1931), The Uprising (1931), Frozen Assets (1931–32), and Electric Power (1931–32). Two of the three remaining murals— Liberation of the Peon (1931) and Pneumatic Drilling, (1931–32)—are represented in the exhibition through full-scale working drawings. The exhibition also features archival materials, including designs and photographs drawn from MoMA’s archives, related to the commission and production of the works.