The Detroit Institute of Arts

The Rivera Court and the Weight of Beautiful Things

The Detroit Institute of Arts sits on Woodward Avenue in midtown with the quiet authority of a building that knows it houses one of the finest art collections in the Western Hemisphere and does not need to shout about it. The Beaux-Arts facade, all limestone and columns, gives you the expected museum greeting. But nothing prepares you for what waits inside.

I came for Diego Rivera, and I will not pretend otherwise. The Rivera Court - officially the Detroit Industry Murals - is a room that rearranges your understanding of what paint on plaster can do. Commissioned by Edsel Ford in 1932, Rivera spent eleven months on scaffolding in this courtyard, covering all four walls with twenty-seven panels depicting the workers of Detroit's automobile industry. The scale is staggering. The figures are monumental - men and women at the forge, the assembly line, the chemical plant - painted with a muscularity and precision that makes them look not like portraits of labor but like labor itself, frozen mid-motion.

I stood in the center of the court and turned slowly. The south wall shows the production of the 1932 Ford V-8 engine, and the detail is almost absurd - you can identify specific machines, specific processes, specific moments in the sequence of manufacture. Rivera spent weeks inside the Rouge River Plant sketching, and it shows. These are not metaphors for industry. They are industry, anatomized and rendered sacred.

The controversy was immediate and predictable. Critics called the murals pornographic, communist, sacrilegious. A city council vote to whitewash them failed by a narrow margin. Edsel Ford, to his eternal credit, stood behind them. "I admire Rivera's spirit," he said. The murals stayed.

Here is the detail that most visitors walk past: on the east wall, in the predella - the small panels below the main murals - Rivera painted a scene of a child being vaccinated. It is a direct visual quotation of a nativity scene, the child held by a nurse in the position of the Madonna, a doctor and attendants arranged like the Magi. Rivera was an atheist making a deliberate argument: that science is the modern sacred, that the laboratory is the new cathedral. It is six inches tall and it contains an entire worldview.

The DIA is free for residents of Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb counties. For visitors, admission is fourteen dollars and worth fifty. The Rivera Court alone is worth the trip from anywhere. Go on a weekday morning, when the court is empty and the light from the skylights falls evenly across the walls, and stand there. Let the workers look down at you. Let the argument wash over you. It has been ninety years, and it has not lost a single pound of force.