Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderFact

In 1933, Diego Rivera was painting a huge Rockefeller Center mural when he added Lenin's portrait. Nelson Rockefeller asked him to replace it; Rivera refused. He was dismissed, the mural was covered and later cut from the wall. Rivera's assistants had photographed it first, helping him recreate the composition in Mexico City.

Diego Rivera / Rockefeller Center / Museum of Modern Art

ArtHistory

The story behind the card

The mural, Man at the Crossroads, was painted for the lobby of the RCA Building, the centrepiece of Rockefeller Center. It set scenes of capitalism and socialism on either side of a worker at the controls of a vast machine. After a newspaper attacked the Lenin portrait, Nelson Rockefeller asked Rivera to replace the face; Rivera refused, but offered to add Abraham Lincoln for balance. In May 1933 he was ordered to stop and paid his full fee of $21,000, and the unfinished fresco was covered. In February 1934 workmen removed it from the wall and destroyed it. Rivera had asked his assistant Lucienne Bloch to photograph it, and in 1934 he repainted it at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City as Man, Controller of the Universe.

Türkçe oku
Diego Rivera 1933'te Rockefeller Center için dev bir duvar resmi yaparken resme Lenin'in portresini ekledi. Nelson Rockefeller portrenin değiştirilmesini istedi, Rivera kabul etmedi. İşine son verildi; resim önce örtüldü, sonra duvardan söküldü. Rivera, yardımcılarının çektiği fotoğraflarla eseri Mexico City'de yeniden yaptı.

Man at the Crossroads (Yol Ayrımındaki İnsan) adlı resim, Rockefeller Center'ın merkezindeki RCA Binası'nın girişi için yapılıyordu. Ortada dev bir makineyi yöneten bir işçi, iki yanında ise kapitalizmden ve sosyalizmden sahneler vardı. Bir gazete Lenin portresini hedef alınca Nelson Rockefeller, Rivera'dan bu yüzü değiştirmesini istedi. Rivera reddetti, ama denge için Abraham Lincoln'ü de eklemeyi önerdi. Mayıs 1933'te çalışması durduruldu, 21.000 dolarlık ücretinin tamamı ödendi ve yarım kalan fresk örtüldü. Şubat 1934'te işçiler resmi duvardan söküp yok etti. Rivera, yardımcısı Lucienne Bloch'tan resmi fotoğraflamasını istemişti; 1934'te Mexico City'deki Palacio de Bellas Artes'te eseri Man, Controller of the Universe (Evrenin Yöneticisi İnsan) adıyla yeniden yaptı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Man at the Crossroads
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderHistory

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) filled his notebooks with inventions: flying machines, a parachute, an armoured vehicle, a vast stone bridge. Very few were built in his lifetime, and many could not have worked with the materials of his day.

Leonardo kept notes almost daily, and thousands of his pages survive, mixing anatomy, rivers and bird flight with grocery lists. In the short Codex on the Flight of Birds, written around 1505 and now in Turin, he studied how birds use the air and sketched machines to copy them. Some of his ideas have since been tested. In 2000 the British skydiver Adrian Nicholas made a safe descent under a parachute built to Leonardo's pyramid-shaped design. In 1502 Leonardo offered the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II a single stone arch 240 metres long across the Golden Horn in Istanbul. It was never built, but in 2001 a smaller wooden version opened as a footbridge in Ås, Norway, and in 2019 engineers at MIT built a scale model and found that the design would have stood.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderHistory

Magna Carta, Latin for “Great Charter”, was sealed by King John of England at Runnymede, beside the Thames, on 15 June 1215 to make peace with rebel barons. It promised swift justice and protection from unlawful imprisonment, and put limits on the king's power in writing.

The peace did not last. Neither side kept its promises, Pope Innocent III annulled the charter in August 1215, and the First Barons' War broke out. After John died in 1216, the advisers ruling for his nine-year-old son, Henry III, reissued a shortened version. It was issued again in 1217 and 1225, and in 1297 Edward I made it part of English statute law. Its most famous clause, number 39 in the 1215 text, promised that no free man would be imprisoned or stripped of his rights except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land. Four copies of the 1215 charter survive: two at the British Library, one at Lincoln Castle and one at Salisbury Cathedral. Three of its clauses, as reissued in 1297, are still law in England and Wales.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderHistory

The Protestant Reformation spread fast partly thanks to printing. From 1517 onwards Martin Luther's writings came off the presses as short, cheap pamphlets, many of them in German rather than Latin; in the first third of the 16th century, about one in five works printed in Germany was his.

The Reformation was the 16th-century movement that split Western Christianity and created Protestant churches independent of Rome. It is usually dated from 31 October 1517, when Luther, a monk and university teacher in Wittenberg, circulated his Ninety-five Theses against the sale of indulgences, certificates the Church sold to reduce the punishment for sins. A century earlier the Czech reformer Jan Hus had made similar criticisms and was executed in 1415; the historian Lyndal Roper argues that print is the main reason Luther escaped the same fate. Johannes Gutenberg's movable-type printing, developed in the mid-15th century, made short pamphlets cheap, and presses were scattered across many German towns, so no single authority could stop them. Towns with a printing press were more likely to adopt the Reformation. As most people could not read, Luther's friend the painter Lucas Cranach the Elder made woodcut pictures that put his ideas into images.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderHistory

In August 1947 British rule in India ended and the land was divided along religious lines into two countries: India, with a Hindu majority, and Pakistan, with a Muslim majority. Between 12 and 20 million people had to leave their homes, in one of the largest migrations in history.

Pakistan became independent on 14 August 1947 and India on 15 August. Pakistan was made of two separate parts with India in between; the eastern part broke away in 1971 and became Bangladesh. Two large provinces with mixed populations, Punjab in the west and Bengal in the east, were split between the new states. The border was drawn by Cyril Radcliffe, a British lawyer who had never been to India and was given about five weeks for the task. It was published only on 17 August, two days after independence, so on independence day many people in the border districts did not know which country they were in. Hindus and Sikhs moved towards India and Muslims towards Pakistan, many on foot or in packed trains. There was terrible violence on both sides; estimates of the dead range from 200,000 to two million.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderArt

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was a master of counterpoint: writing several independent melodies that sound at the same time and fit together. In a fugue, one short theme enters again and again in different voices, following strict rules. That precision is why his music can sound mathematical, while it still moves listeners.

Bach's rules could be very strict. In his Goldberg Variations, published in 1741, an opening aria is followed by 30 variations, and every third one is a canon, in which a second voice repeats the first a little later. The gap in pitch between the two voices grows by one step each time, from the same note in variation 3 to nine notes apart in variation 27. In The Art of Fugue, left unfinished at his death, the last fugue brings in a theme that spells his own name in German note letters: B flat, A, C and B natural, written B, A, C, H. After he died his style was thought old-fashioned, yet composers kept studying it; Mozart and Beethoven both learned from his Well-Tempered Clavier. In 1829 the young Felix Mendelssohn conducted the St Matthew Passion in Berlin, starting a wider Bach revival.

BritannicaRead card
Next card in the archiveFor the 1939 New York World's Fair, the sculptor Augusta Savage made The Harp, a 16-foot plaster figure of Black singers standing like the strings of a harp. It became one of the fair's most photographed works, but Savage could not afford to cast it in bronze, move it or store it, and it was destroyed when the fair ended.Read next →