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Late in March Rivera squared off at his bare white wall in the RCA lobby. Tickets were issued to watch him do his daily stint. Art students, businessmen and Communists bought tickets as Rivera slowly spread paint down over the wall in a characteristic composition made up of huge, chunky units. Rockefeller Center workmen came free. Painting directly on wet plaster as in all true fresco, Rivera put on the wall the essentials of his submitted and approved sketches. Nelson Rockefeller came too to watch, told Rivera he liked the fresco. On May Day Rivera came to the head of the Leader, made it the head of Lenin.
Soon afterwards Rivera and his assistants became aware of a changed attitude in Rockefeller Center. The number of guards was increased. When Rivera brought men to photograph his fresco, they were sent away. Personal feuds sprang up between the Rockefeller Center guards and Rivera's assistants. A guard threatened to brain an assistant if he tried to take a snapshot. Rivera's heavy scaffolding was replaced by a movable scaffold. Rivera draped tracing paper over the outside railing, screening the platform from the guards, and a woman assistant took a camera from under her skirt to photograph, close up, part of the fresco. The scaffold was moved, the operation repeated until Rivera had photographs of the whole fresco. He was scarcely surprised that the Rockefellers objected to his work when they saw it as living art and realized what it meant.
Last week Rivera cashed his $14,000 check, went to see his lawyer. He was told he might sue to establish an artist's dubious right under an "implied covenant" to force exhibition of his work, but that he had no legal right to the fresco he had sold and been paid for. He fell back on "a moral question" of the artist's right "to express himself; and the right to receive the judgment of the world, of posterity." Said he: "They have no right, this little group of commercial minded people, to assassinate my work and that of my colleagues. They accepted my sketches." He offered to do the whole thing over gratis on any fit Manhattan wall offered him.
To this the Rockefellers said nothing. The RCA Building was on the newspapers' front pages again. They noted that Communistic Rivera who needs walls to work on has worked on the walls of "commercial minded" people exclusively for the past year. Rivera's next commission after the RCA Building was a "Forge and Foundry" mural for General Motors Corp. at its building in Chicago's Century of Progress Exposition (see p. 14). After the Rivera-Rockefeller ruckus, General Motors paused to consider what it had better do.