Science and Sex in Diego Rivera's Health Ministry Murals

Abstract

Diego Rivera's 1929 frescoes in the boardroom and the laboratory at the Mexican Ministry of Health building are among the least studied and most enigmatic of his works. Painted at a critical time in Rivera's career, for an institution entrusted with improving medical research and health care, the frescoes differed dramatically from the artist's more famous cycles of 1920s that dealt overtly with the themes of politics and national history. Working in one of Mexico City's most celebrated modern buildings, Rivera responded to existing architectural and decorative programs and to the recent destruction of a pair of frescoes there. He also responded to the Ministry's attempts to reform Mexican society by regulating behavior and promoting racial mestizaje. In this commission Rivera first explored the imagery of modern science and began to consider the implications of the growing reach of modern medicine into private life. His Ministry of Health frescoes laid the foundation for important aspects of his later cycle, Detroit Industry (1932), in which he synthesized, monumentalized, and universalized many of the forms and ideas that he had explored in response to the Ministry's distinctive circumstances and agenda.

KEYWORDS::

• Rivera, Diego
• Mexico
• Muralism
• Ministry of Health
• Science
• Gastélum, Bernardo

Notes

¹ I thank the editors of this issue and two anonymous readers for their many helpful suggestions, which have improved this essay considerably.

²Bertram Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera (New York: Stein and Day, 1963), 246. Wolfe identified one figure as “Knowledge,” which Rivera had in fact named “Science.” The figures' names, “Vida,” “Salud,” “Ciencia,” “Contenencia,” “Pureza” and “Forteleza,” were inscribed on the walls or in the cornice adjacent to the frescoes. The “Science” attribution is clear in a 1931 photograph of the room by Guillermo Kahlo.

³Carlos Mérida, Frescoes in Salubridad Health Dept. by Diego Rivera, 2nd ed. (Mexico City: Frances Toor Studios, 1943), n.p.

⁴Stanton L. Catlin, “Mural Census,” in Diego Rivera, A Retrospective, ed. Cynthia Newman Helms (New York: Founders Society Detroit Institute of Arts; W.W. Norton, 1986), 275.

⁵Luis-Martín Lozano, “Revolution and Allegories, Mexico and San Francisco,” in Diego Rivera, The Complete Murals (Hong Kong and Los Angeles: Taschen, 2008), 266.

⁶ Mérida, n.p.

⁷ Rivera was working on the more high-profile commissions, in more important buildings in the National Palace and in the Palace of Cortés in Cuernavaca at the same time.

⁸Dorothy McMeekin, Diego Rivera: Science and Creativity in the Detroit Murals (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1985); Linda Bank Downs, “Physics and Metaphysics in Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry Murals,” in Arte y Ciencia: XXIV Coloquio Internacional de Historia del Arte (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 2002), 357–376; Maura C. Flannery, “Images of the Cell in Twentieth-Century Art and Science,” Leonardo 31.3 (1998): 195–204; David Lomas, “Remedy or Poison? Diego Rivera, Medicine and Technology,” Oxford Art Journal 30.3 (2007): 456–483; Luis H. Toledo-Pereyra, “Diego Rivera and His Extraordinary Art of Medicine and Surgery,” Journal of Investigative Surgery 20 (2007): 139–143. On related issues in Frida Kahlo's work: Lucretia Hoover Giese, “A Rare Crossing: Frida Kahlo and Luther Burbank,” American Art 15.1 (Spring 2001): 52–73.

⁹ The full title of Rivera's incomplete mural at Rockefeller Center was Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future.

¹⁰ On Detroit Industry Max Kozloff, “The Rivera Frescoes of Modern Industry at the Detroit Institute of Arts: Proletarian Art Under Capitalist Patronage,” Artforum 12.3 (1973): 58–63; Laurence P. Hurlburt, The Mexican Muralists in the United States (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 127–158; Linda Bank Downs, Diego Rivera, The Detroit Industry Murals (New York: Detroit Institute of Arts and W.W. Norton & Company, 1999); Laura González Matute, “Dynamic Detroit: Diego Rivera and American Industrial Development,” in Diego Rivera, The Complete Murals, 317–321.

¹¹ The large stone sculpture of the Coatlicue, an Aztec deity, is one of the best-known works of pre-conquest art.

¹² Kahlo's miscarriage is cited by Downs, Diego Rivera, 69, and Hurlburt, Mexican Muralists, 144–146 as an explanation for the images associated with pregnancy. Downs has linked the images of crops to Rivera's strict diet in 1932, 74. Hurlburt has given the east wall, with its images of the child in the bulb, native crops, and large female figures special significance, suggesting that “all the other walls ultimately derive from this small but complex scene,” 146.

¹³Robert Linsley has argued that the ways Man at the Crossroads challenged R.C.A. (the most important tenet at Rockefeller Center), the development's larger artistic program, and the mural's focus on uncertainty were at the core of the controversy and ultimate destruction of the fresco. “Utopia Will Not Be Televised: Rivera at Rockefeller Center,” Oxford Art Journal 17.2 (1994): 48–62. In essays on other murals, Renato González Mello and Anthony W. Lee have also drawn attention to the ambiguities and irresolutions in Rivera's major works of the 1920s and 1930s. González Mello, “The Murals in the S.E.P.,” in Diego Rivera, The Complete Murals, 28–32; Lee, “Worker and Painters: Social Realism and Race in Diego Rivera's Detroit Murals,” in The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere, eds. Alejandro Anreus, Diana L. Linden, and Jonathan Weinberg (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 201–220.

¹⁴ On the Education Ministry's architectural and artistic program: Luis Carranza, Architecture as Revolution: Episodes in the History of Modern Architecture (Austin: University of Texas, 2010), 14–55. On Rivera's S.E.P. murals and indigeneity and nationalism, Mary K. Coffey, “The ‘Mexican Problem:’ Nation and ‘Native’ in Mexican Muralism and Cultural Discourse,” in The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere, 43–70.

¹⁵ Vasconcelos' influence on Rivera's work has been widely noted. In connection with Rivera's work on medicine see Lomas, “Remedy or Poison?,” 478–481.

¹⁶ Carranza, Architecture as Revolution, 38–40.

¹⁷ Ibid., 41–47.

¹⁸Jean Charlot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 1920–25 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967), 280–293.

¹⁹ The Contemporáneos group also included painters who worked principally on canvas, foremost among them Manuel Rodriguez Lozano, Julio Castellanos, and Rufino Tamayo.

²⁰Alberto J. Pani, Hygiene in Mexico: A Study of Sanitary and Educational Problems. Trans. Ernest L. de Gogorza (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, Knickerbocker Press, 1917), vi–vii. Italics in original.

²¹Bernardo Gastélum, “Democracia asimétrica,” Contemporáneos 1.6 (Nov. 1928), 245.

²² Gastélum, “Democracia asimétrica,” 248–249.

²³ On politics and public health: Anthony J. Mazzaferri, “Public Health and Social Revolution in Mexico: 1877–1930,” Ph.D. diss., Kent State University, Kent, OH, 1968; Katherine Elaine Bliss, Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001); Claudia Agostoni, “Popular Health Education and Propaganda in times of peace and war in Mexico City, 1890s–1920s,” American Journal of Public Health 96.1 (Jan. 2006): 52–61.

²⁴ Alberto Pani, “El Gobierno Constitucionalista ante los problemas Sanitario y Educativo de México,” talk before the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences and the Society of Arbitration and Peace, Philadelphia, 10 Nov. 1916, reprinted in Alberto J. Pani, Hygiene in Mexico, 50–51.

²⁵ Agostoni, “Popular Health Education,” 58.

²⁶ As an example, see Ana María Kapelusz-Poppi, “Rural Health and State Construction in Post-Revolutionary Mexico: The Nicolaita Project for Rural Medical Services,” The Americas 58.2 (2001): 261–283.

²⁷ Details of Gastélum's professional life can be found in the Archivo Histórico de la Secretaria de Salubridad y Asistencia, Fondo Secretaria de Salubridad y Asistencia, Sección Secretaria Particular, Caja 316, Expediente 3 Diplomas, Premios, Distinciones, Meallas, etc. and in Dirección de Relaciones Publicas y prensa, Boletín 585 (25 Aug. 1979).

²⁸ See Alexandra Minna Stern, “Responsible Mothers and Normal Children: Eugenics, Nationalism, and Welfare in Post-Revolutionary Mexico, 1920–1940,” Journal of Historical Sociology 12.4 (Dec. 1999): 369–397.

²⁹ For example, Stanford Wolsterstan, An Enquiry into the Causes of Diseases in General and the Disturbances of the Humors in Man's Body wherein the Nature of the Blood, of the Air, and of a Pestilential Constitution are briefly considered. Together with some Observations, shewing wherein the Venom of Vipers, particularly that of the English ADDER, does consist (London: Thomas Ballet, 1692).

³⁰Departamento de Salubridad Pública, Instituto de Higiene, Calzada Nueva Tacuba-Chapultepec, D.F., Sueros, vacunas, reactivos para el diagnositico biológico, cultivos microbianos, medios de cultivo (Mexico City: Departamento de Salubridad Pública, 1931), 5.

³¹ Instituto de Higene, 6–7.

³² Ibid., 23.

³³Rafael López Rangel, Diego Rivera y la Arquitectura Mexicana (Mexico City: Dirección General de Publicaciones y Medios, 1986). Cemento was the trade journal of the Mexican cement industry.

³⁴ My suppositions about the cells at the Health Ministry are based on the interpretations of cells Dorothy McMeekin offered in her reading of the “Healthy Human Embryo” panel in Detroit Industry (1932), 24–26.

³⁵ Downs, Diego Rivera, 116.

³⁶ Translation in Catlin, “Mural Census,” 275.

³⁷ Before coming to Mexico, Balmes traveled with 22 orphans from Spain to other parts of New Spain to vaccinate people throughout the colony. His journey was the first large-scale international inoculation campaign of its kind. Carlos Franco-Paredes, Lorena Lammoglia, and José Ignacio Santos-Preciado, “The Spanish Royal Philanthropic Expedition to Bring Smallpox Vaccination to the New World and Asia in the 19th Century,” Clinical Infectious Diseases 41 (2005): 1285–1289.

³⁸ The texts were Instrucción sobre la introducción y conservación de la vacuna Demostración de las eficaces virtudes nuevamente descubiertas en las raices de dos plantas de Nueva-España, especies de ágave y de begónia, para la curación del vicio venéreo y escrofuloso, y de otras graves enfermedades que resisten al uso del mercurio, y demas remedios, 1794.

³⁹ Guillermina Guadarrama Peña, “Hacia una legislación para la defensa del patrimonio y el muralismo,” http://discursovisual.cenart.gob.mx/anteriores/dvweb10/art05/art05.html (accessed 2 Jun. 2011).

⁴⁰ The photograph is reproduced, without a credit, in Fernando Leal, Fernando Leal: Fundador y disidente del movimiento muralista de Mexico (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y literatura, 1973), n.p.

⁴¹ The sketches are in the Carlos Obregón Santacilia archive at the Instituo Nacional de Bellas Artes.

⁴²Luis Ortiz Macedo, Secretaria de Salud (Mexico City: Grupo Gráfico Logu, 1991), 56.

⁴³ Leal's mural was one of many twentieth-century Mexican murals destroyed. Guillermina Guadarrama Peña, “Hacia una legislación.”

⁴⁴ Sketches by Obregón Santacilia in his archive in the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes show groups of multiple figures in the niches and on the large panels in the boardroom. The architect wrote of his dislike of the mural, calling some of the figures “ugly,” in 50 Años de Arquitectura Mexicana (1900–1950) (Mexico City: Editorial Patria, 1952), 48.

⁴⁵William Spratling, “The Public Health Center, Mexico City, Mexico,” Architectural Forum (Nov. 1931), 591.

⁴⁶ On the Chapingo cycle see Raquel Tibol, Los Murales de Diego Rivera: Universidad Autónoma Chapingo (Chapingo, Estado de México: Universidad Autónoma Chapingo, 2002).

⁴⁷ The full title of the panel is The Liberated Earth with the Natural Forces Controlled by Man.

⁴⁸ On this topic in the History of Cardiology: Lomas, “Remedy or Poison?,”456–483.

⁴⁹ Rivera and Gladys March, My Art, My Life; an autobiography (New York: Citadel Press, 1960), 182.

⁵⁰ McMeekin, Science and Creativity, 36–39; Toledo-Pereyra, “Diego Rivera,” 142–143.

⁵¹ Downs observed of these figures that their “faces are essentially expressionless…The heads are large in proportion to the bodies. The bodies, in turn, are diminished in size by the infant in the bulb of the plant.” Diego Rivera, 74.

⁵² Downs linked these panels to Rivera's strict diet, Diego Rivera, 74.

⁵³Hayden Herrera, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (New York: Perennial, 1984), 133–160.

⁵⁴ The model for this figure was Homer C. Fritch, executive vice-president of Parke-Davis pharmaceutical company. Downs, Diego Rivera, 115.

⁵⁵ Wolfe likened the image to a Temptation of St. Anthony scene. Downs, Diego Rivera, 114–115.

⁵⁶ On the controversy about the mural: Anna Indych-López, “Mexican Muralism in the United States: Controversies, Paradoxes, and Publics,” in Mexican Muralism: a Critical History, eds. Alejandro Anreus, Robin Adèle Greeley, Leonard Folgarait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 218–222.

⁵⁷ On Rivera's use of Christian imagery: Indych-López, “Liberation of the Peon,” in Diego Rivera: Murals for the Museum of Modern Art, eds. Leah Dickerman and Anna Indych-López (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2011), 68–73.

⁵⁸Michael Foucault, Naissance de la Clinique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963); Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978).

⁵⁹Robin Adèle Greeley, “Muralism and the State in Post-Revolution Mexico, 1920–1970,” in Mexican Muralism: a Critical History, 13–36. Renato González Mello, “The Murals in the S.E.P.,” 28–32.

⁶⁰ Indych-López, “Mexican Muralism,” 218–222; Lee, “Worker and Painters,” 201–220.

⁶¹Jennifer Jolly, “Art of the Collective: David Alfaro Siquieros, Josep Renau and their Collobartion at the Mexican Electricians' Syndicate,” Oxford Art Journal 31.1 (2008): 129–151; Hurlburt, “Siqueiros Experimental Workshop: New York, 1936,” Art Journal 35.3 (Spring 1976): 237–246.

⁶²Indych-López, “Technology, Labor, and Realism: Diego Rivera's Secretaría de Educación Pública Murals,” in Technology and Culture in Twentieth-Century Mexico, eds. Araceli Tinajero and J. Brian Freeman (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013), 283–301.

⁶³James Oles, South of the Border: Mexico in the American Imagination, 1914–1947 (Washington, D.C. and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993); Indych-López, Muralism Without Walls: Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros in the United States, 1927–1940 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).

⁶⁴Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, “The Chicano Movement/The Movement of Chicano Art,” in Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America, ed. Gerardo Mosquera (London and Cambridge, MA: Institute of International Visual Arts and MIT Press, 1996), 176–177.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kathryn E. O'Rourke

Kathryn E. O'Rourke is assistant professor of art history at Trinity University in San Antonio where she teaches courses on the art and architecture of Latin America. Her research focuses on twentieth-century architecture in Mexico. Her publications include essays on Mexican architectural rationalism, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's work in Latin America, and urbanism in Mexico City. She is currently completing a book project, Building History: Modern Architecture in Mexico City, about the influence of Mexican architectural history on modern architecture in the capital. Professor O'Rourke holds a Ph.D. in the history of art from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. in architecture from Wellesley College. Prior to joining the faculty at Trinity, she taught architectural history at Swarthmore College.