Diego Rivera: Up For Auction in US and Mexico?

A while ago, I asked if the owner of a work of art has the right to destroy it. I asked this in regard to the mural by Diego Rivera, “Man At The Crossroads,” demolished in the Rockefeller Center in 1933. Now, both the bankruptcy declaration by the city of Detroit and the trial facing “The Teacher” Elba Esther Gordillo pose at least two more questions about the work of this painter.

First question: Can the artistic heritage of a museum be considered an asset with which to repay the debts of a city? And second: What are the whereabouts of the six portable murals that the former union leader acquired, and what will ultimately become of them?

These are not just rhetorical questions. In the case of Detroit, I should point out that bodies of work have already been sold by other museums, such as the Fresno Metropolitan Museum of Art and Science, which paid its creditors and joined the thirty-some museums that closed in the U.S. between 2009 and 2010.

According to The New York Times report by Randy Kennedy and Monica Davey, following the bankruptcy of the city on July 19, the collection in the Detroit Institute of Arts has become a salable asset.

All the creditors of the city have asked about the value of the museum, said Bill Nowling, spokesperson for the Emergency Manager of Detroit. The more than 60,000 works in the Detroit Institute’s collection could come to a value of $2 billion, according to a study that The New York Times prepared on the issue.

Because of the quality of its collection, this museum has been considered one of the most important in the U.S., next to the MoMA and the Metropolitan in New York, and the National Gallery in Washington. And the emblematic works of the Detroit Institute, as you may have guessed, are the murals that Diego Rivera painted in 1930, funded by the Ford family.

Will the sale of the Diego murals serve to pay the debt of the city? Or will the public interest be reason enough to avoid the auction of hundreds of works, murals and the building itself?

Data from the U.S. federal government show that for each dollar invested in museums, seven are generated in the course of one year. Auctioning a museum would seem to be the worst business decision. If that’s not proof enough, ask the citizens of Fresno in California. It would be like trying to fix up a hole with a bigger one.

But if that possibility shocks the U.S. — a society that appreciates the murals in which Diego masterfully synthesized the momentum of machines and a specialized workforce — in Mexico we go so far as to ignore the fate of six portable murals that were painted for a Trotskyite workers school.

After the mural “The Man At The Crossroads” was destroyed at Rockefeller Center, Diego Rivera used the money they had paid him and painted 21 portable murals at the New Workers School in New York.

Unfortunately, not all the murals survived neglect and the passage of time.

Ex-president Echeverría acquired four and sold them a few years ago to the former leader of the teachers union, Elba Esther Gordillo.

Some time after that, the architect Enrique Norten announced that the then-director of the Mexican National Educational Workers Union had also recovered six of Rivera’s murals in order to create the Chapel of Diego Rivera in the City of Innovation that she was considering constructing on the route to Santa Fe.

Now that “The Teacher” Elba Esther Gordillo is facing prosecution and several of her assets have been seized by authorities, where are those murals located and what condition are they in? Could they be sold at public auction like many other assets held by relevant authorities? Wouldn’t it be suitable if the state could recover them for itself or, better said, for society, and safeguard them in a place more propitious for the benefit of all?

If Diego Rivera painted his murals in Mexico at the price of a square meter of a mason’s workmanship, wouldn’t it be worth it to allocate them to a museum that the painter himself imagined as a city of the arts and baptized as the House of Anauac, like the Anahuacalli Museum?