Controller Of The Universe Poem by gershon hepner

Controller Of The Universe

Rating: 2.8


Lenin, in a mural that Diego called,
“Man, Controller of the Universe, ”
caused patrons, bourgeois hoi polloi, to be appalled:
unlike Diego, they knew Lenin was a curse.
In his fight for freedom, he abandoned Frida
for other women, as she also would abandon
for other lovers, men and women, him, her leader
not a uni-lover who controlled the tandem.

Elisabeth Malkin writes about an exhibition of the works of Diego Garcia in Mexico City (“Rivera, Fridamania’s Other Half, Gets His Due, ” NYT, December 25,2007:
“Diego was a deluge of work, ” said Raquel Tibol, a prominent art critic and historian who organized one of the shows. “He was too dynamic, and so many cultural themes opened his interest in a very vibrant way.” There are the huge works: Rivera produced part of a giant mosaic to adorn the city’s Olympic Stadium, murals for hospitals, government buildings and even hotel bars. The Bellas Artes exhibition showed portable murals from private collections as well as sketches and cartoons of the larger murals. At the National Museum of Art, the first comprehensive show of Rivera’s illustrations reveals an unexpected diversity in style and subject matter over 50 years….It was only after he returned to Mexico at the end of a bloody decade of fighting that he began to create the work that made him famous. As he turned frescoes on public buildings to universal themes, he melded elements from European masters and Modernists with pre-Hispanic forms and designs to create his own pictorial language. But by 1929, as revolutionary fervor veered toward authoritarianism, and Rivera fell out with the Mexican Communist Party, he accepted an offer to paint in San Francisco. He spent four years in the United States. After California, Rivera and Kahlo went to Detroit. There his patron Edsel B. Ford opened the doors of the largest Ford plant, and Rivera carried out the research for his landmark mural cycle at the Detroit Institute of Arts, a series celebrating the auto industry and the capitalist worker at its heart.New York followed, where Rivera was to paint a mural in the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center. But after he rejected a request by Nelson Rockefeller to remove a portrait of Lenin, the mural was covered and then destroyed. He later repainted it in Bellas Artes, calling it “Man, Controller of the Universe.” After that debacle, he created a series of portable murals, “Portrait of America, ” for the New Workers School in New York. Several were in the Bellas Artes show: intense, knotted pictures of injustice, greed and the dehumanizing power of technology. But even in those critical works, Rivera found something exalted in America, in the innovations of its scientists and the nobility of its working people.

12/25/07

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