A Communist Painted America's Greatest Mural Cycle — and an Auto Baron Paid for It

In 1932, in the middle of the Great Depression, one of the world’s most famous artists came to Detroit to paint the walls of a museum. He was a committed communist. The man who paid for it was the son of Henry Ford. Out of that unlikely pairing came what many consider the finest mural in America.

The artist was Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist, and he arrived with his wife, the painter Frida Kahlo. The Detroit Institute of Arts’ director had the idea; the funding came from Edsel Ford, president of Ford Motor Company. The only instruction was to depict Detroit and its industry.

Rivera spent months at the Ford Rouge plant and other factories, sketching machines and workers. He called the subject the “Great Saga of Machine and Steel.” Originally hired to paint just two walls, he talked Edsel Ford into letting him cover all four sides of the museum’s central courtyard — 27 fresco panels in all, painted by Rivera himself between 1932 and 1933.

When the murals were unveiled, the reaction was loud. Critics called them everything from un-American to sacrilegious, and some Detroiters demanded the panels be painted over. Edsel Ford publicly stood by the work, and it survived. Today the Detroit Industry murals are considered Rivera’s masterpiece, and the room they fill is a National Historic Landmark.

Their survival was tested again more recently. When the city of Detroit went through bankruptcy in the 2010s, there was real fear the museum might have to sell off its art. A rescue deal saved the collection — murals and all. Stand in the center of that court today, surrounded on four walls by Rivera’s workers and machines, and it’s hard to imagine Detroit without them.