This Painting Was at the Center of a Communist Controversy. Here's Why

This painting is not as simple as it seems. At first you might wonder what these heavily ripped giant men are doing in the same painting as Abraham Lincoln. So confusing. And why is everyone else wearing pants but not these colossal giants? Let's see the bigger picture, shall we? And I assure you, it's huge. That's better. This enormous 16 foot high and 41 foot long painting is actually a mural titled American Progress by Spanish artist José María Sert. It is housed at New York's famous Rockefeller Center. The mural is a vast allegorical scene depicting the development of America and remains the focal point at the Rockefeller Center's lobby to this day. The mural depicts the development of the United States of America through the unity of intellect, intellect, and physical strength. On the right, looking upward, are three graces, poetry, music, and dance, which often symbolize human intellectual activity along with its dreams, ideals, and creativity. Beneath them, above them, and behind them is a long charade of men and scaffoldings, as if they were building the towers behind them. On the left are titans, the pre-Olympian gods with blocky, muscular, giant-like bodies carrying a tree trunk and the axes used to tear it apart. The titans working alongside chains of men give off an air of intense dynamicism. And right in the middle, Sert has placed two American figures you just can't miss. Wearing a top hat is Abraham Lincoln, representing the political sphere of action. Lincoln rests his hand on the shoulder of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a personification of philosophers and thinkers. The background is laden with rising skyscrapers, most probably the towers of the same Rockefeller Center this mural was made for. Drawn with toned, stony colors, the mural also needed to be decorative and function with the environment around it, the architecture and the design. This makes it a classic Art Deco work. And as with most Art Deco works, American progress was supposedly made to celebrate the age of the machine, the technological and social progress associated with capitalism. But if it does represent the glamour of technological mastery over nature, why is the mood still so somber? Is there a deeper irony we are missing out on? Something lies underneath the layers of Sert's stony colors, hidden away from us, both literally and figuratively. To find out, let's rewind a bit, shall we? In 1932, the famous Rockefeller family decided to spend more than a million Depression-era dollars to fund the artworks which would decorate the complex of the Rockefeller Center. Let's not even try and estimate how much the construction of the buildings cost. José María Sert and English artist Frank Brangwyn were commissioned to paint the walls near the lifts of the RCA building of the complex. And the wall on which you can see American progress today was not part of Sert's original commission. The main wall was to be painted by the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. And the mural was supposed to look something like this, titled Man at the Crossroads. This mural portrayed the never-ending struggle between capitalism and socialism in Diego's unique artistic metaphor. On the left, the mural displayed technology as a destructive force in response to the brutalities of the First World War. And meanwhile, on the right, are the fruits of communism. He was, after all, a well-sought-after artist and a leading figure of Mexican muralism. Then what went wrong? Well, not what, but who. This is the who. Rivera, a member of the Communist Party, added a portrait of the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. But what the Rockefellers were looking for was essentially lobby art for an industrialist. And this was not it. This was a scandal. When the Rockefellers asked Rivera to remove the portrait, he refused and said he'd rather have his painting destroyed than compromised. Rivera even suggested that he'd add famous American heroes as well, including President Lincoln. Be careful what you wish for, Diego. Although Lincoln made his way to the same wall, Rivera's mural was destroyed. After being paid in full, he was dismissed from the job. Following the mural's destruction, Rivera made a smaller replica, which now lies at Years later, in 1937, it was decided that José Sert would paint the mural on the main wall. Sert had already become famous for his frescoes at the League of Nations in Geneva. However, is Sert's portrayal of the American titans as the protagonists of this new world as simple as it seems? While the gigantic figures in American Progress transporting giant trees and the axe which tames them are a symbol of the power and progress of capitalist America, the tones of the mural and the figure's exaggerated proportions convey something more. To fully understand the meaning of these gigantic titans, one has to look around the room a bit. On the ceiling of the main wall and around the building, more murals are done in an eerily similar style by Sert himself. These humongous titans make a comeback in Contest 1940, where they play with the world as if it were a football. In another mural in the same building, titled Abolition of War, Sert was to depict the elation felt at the end of a war. However, in Sert's portrayal, the figures are not simply the freed slaves of war, but they end up using their chains as weapons. Instead of celebrating a world without war, they seem to be preparing for it. American Progress may not look like much at the onset, but its dark, expressionist tones and exaggerated proportions see far beyond the capitalist rebellion against natural forces. It sees into the darker future of what the consequences of this could be. Sert's own country, Spain, was after all in the middle of a civil war, which was to become the prelude to the Second World War. Like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, where the scientist Victor Frankenstein uses technology to defy the laws of good and evil, and faces inevitable punishment, the monster created by ambitious greed rebels against its creator. José María Sert's titans are also intent on showing the dark side of human ambition, but only when looked at carefully. Sert was somewhat critical of the new American capitalism that commissioned his project, even if he came from a much more indirect perspective than that of Diego Rivera's. Then, was José María Sert, through his dark titans, forewarning the future clashes that the Second World War would bring? After all, by the time José was asked to paint his mural at the Rockefeller Center, he was well aware of the damage caused by clashing ideologies. He not only witnessed the destruction of Diego Rivera's mural, but he had also seen how the Spanish Civil War led to the burning of the Vic Cathedral, which he had so meticulously decorated. The war had also led to his poet friend Manuel de Fala's exile to Argentina. While he had already been devastated by the assassination of another friend and writer, Federico García Lorca. Not much is written about Sert after his death in 1945. This is also due to his later in life outspoken support of the fascist leader, General Francisco Franco, and the friendship he continued to have with him even after Franco became the dictator of Spain in 1939. This makes it even more difficult to read between the lines of American progress and the general demeanor of the artist. Was American progress a solely decorative work to glorify Rockefeller's ideals of capitalism or was there more artistic depth in the way Sert saw the world around him, especially a world being ravaged by war? If Sert would have painted American progress in his studio and not on the walls of Rockefeller Center, could he have been more candid? What do you think? Let us know in the comments below. Thank you for watching and I will see you soon in the next video. Until then, may your life be artful.