Man at the Crossroads: the clash between the Rockefeller family and Mexican artist Diego Rivera in 1933

In the late 1920s and 1930s, a rapprochement between the United States and Mexico occurred through the artistic movement of muralism, which was accompanied by an appreciation of Mexican culture and nationalist sentiments. The Rockefeller family, primarily associated with entrepreneurship, had begun to approach Latin American art and planned to include artists from around the world for their Rockefeller Center project, which focused on the importance and valorization of technological progress for the future of humanity. The commission of Diego Rivera to paint a mural in 1932, the inclusion of the portrait of Vladimir Lenin, and his refusal to remove it led to a conflict in 1933 that revealed the scope of free speech in art and the boundaries between the aesthetic and political significance of a work of art. The purpose of this paper is to explore the motives that led the Rockefellers to hire such a controversial and politically engaged figure as Diego Rivera –in an environment where socialist ideas were met with public disapproval– and the reasons why the artist accepted the commission, coming from a family that was the epitome of capitalism. Through the use of primary sources and scholarly literature and the application of a qualitative approach, this thesis argues that the vision that the Rockefeller family and Diego Rivera had for the mural was similar in terms of the role of technology in the development of human society. What was at odds, however, was the ideological standpoint from which each took the commission and their vision of the future society. Rivera was not willing to give up his political beliefs, and the Rockefellers believed that the artist could separate his political goals from the aesthetic project. The divergence was thus inevitable, but at the same time this episode served to reassure both sides of their importance in their respective contexts and to reflect on the paradoxes in the relationship between art interests and business advantages.