The front lobby wall of the RCA Building in Manhattan's Rockefeller Center has worn a false face of white plaster since last spring (TIME, May 22). Behind that mask was a great, bright unfinished fresco by Muralist Diego Rivera. When the visage of Nikolai Lenin unexpectedly blossomed in the centre of the painting, the Rockefellers paid Communist Rivera off with $14,000 due him, covered his work with canvas.
Late one night last week workmen wheeled a fleet of wheelbarrows into the RCA Building lobby, set a movable scaffold against the wall. It was no trick to get off the covering coat of cream-colored canvas. But Rivera's mural, like all true fresco, had been painted into a coat of plaster. The workmen tried to get it off in big chunks, save as much as they could. But they claimed later that once broken, the great fresco crumbled into powder which was wheeled out of the lobby to oblivion. Speedily the workmen slapped a fresh coat of plaster on the scarified wall. Next morning a faint smell of new plaster was the lobby's only clue to the night's deed.
Such stealthy destruction of the Rivera mural by the Rockefeller management stirred a tumult in the art world. Against Rockefeller Center and next week's Municipal Art Exhibit to be held there, eleven members of the Society of Independent Artists declared a boycott. The Rockefellers were accused of "cultural vandalism," of "murder with malice aforethought." The American Society of Painters, Sculptors and Gravers (membership: 90) joined the boycott, declaring: "The Rockefeller family had no moral right. . . ." Radical Suzanne La Follette called a protest mass meeting, rallied critics as well as artists. In Mexico City Painter Rivera declared: "My object was attained when the painting was destroyed. I thank the Rockefellers for its destruction because the act will advance the cause of the labor revolution. . . ."
But the lawyers of Rockefeller Center were better than artists at word logic. The latter, unwilling to tar themselves with Rivera's Communist brush, had muted their real indignation against the destruction of a fine work of art, on whatever grounds. Their boycott, they insisted, was based on destruction without the artist's permission. The lawyers dug up an old piece of Rivera rhetoric that sounded something like a "permission."' They flipped it at the artists, quickly and completely deflated the protests and boycotts. In that letter, dated last May, the Mexican muralist had said: "Rather than mutilate the conception, I should prefer the physical destruction of the conception in its entirety." One by one, "in spite of any personal feelings individual members may still have," the artists' societies called off their boycott of the Municipal Art Exhibit. Rivera replied that he was ready to paint replicas of the historic fresco wherever there was a wall.