Analysis of Diego Rivera's Fresco "Man At The Crossroads"

Man At The Crossroads was a fresco by Diego Rivera that was painted at the ground-floor wall of the Rockefeller Center in New York City. This mural of Rivera held a lot of controversies and eventually was forced to be removed before Rivera even had a chance to complete it. Rivera ran into problems because he included communist figures in that fresco. He added Vladimir Lenin and Rockefeller was not happy with that. Rockefeller asked Rivera to remove Lenin and Rivera disagreed with that, so they ended up removing the mural.

He gets the opportunity to repaint it in Mexico City. The Fresco was renamed Man Controller Of The Universe. There is an enormous figure in the center of the mural, who looks as if he’s operating a giant machine and he appears in control of the universe, but this is clearly the crossroads. So somehow Rivera tied both names for this mural together.

Rivera tried to send a message across, “which way will the future go?”. In the early 1930’s when this was painted that was an open question many individuals had. The 1930’s was a time of tremendous strive, economic depression around the world and massive unemployment and deprivation. People looked at capitalism as the cause, there had been the stock market crash and people were starving. Could capitalism be replaced by a system that was fairer that didn’t just s Rivera was very sympathetic seem to benefit an elite of these ideas, we see this in this mural.

The centerpiece is man controller of the universe, there is a hand right in the middle holding an orb that’s reflecting in a control panel while the man is in the center as if he was controlling it. It seems like it is reflecting what looks like an X. On one part of the X it looks to be like the universe and the other one looks like bits and pieces of bacteria. On both sides of the “X” it looks like Rivera added two huge lenses that frame the figure on either side. At the top left of the mural we see “war”, soldiers in gas masks and the sky is filled with planes and what looks to be like fire. On the right, we see Moscow Russia and the communist workers. Rivera also added two huge sculptures on both left and right of the mural. These sculptures are both broken, one is wearing a cross around his neck, and the other one is headless, but you can see the Nazi sign on it. Towards the bottom of the mural, you see a whole bunch of portraits in which he added Lenin, Trotsky, and Darwin. We also see a group of “rich people” without a care in the world and looking at them is “the poor people” which seem to be having a riot outside holding signs that state “we want bread, we are hungry”. This part is interesting, in that group of rich people it was said that he added Rockefeller in there and right above of Rockefeller's head on the X where Rivera added bacteria to, it was said that was syphilis. Rivera added many individuals of different ethnic backgrounds in this mural along with Lenin holding hands with those individuals of different ethnicities. Overall this painting is illustrating a man (the guy in the center) that is surrounded by the chaos of what the world was like back then. He is surrounded by both the good and the bad and it seems like he’s trying to organize it in a way where he understands it. In a sense, we are still living in that world that Rivera painted. We are still classified as “the rich” and “the poor”. The poor nowadays still looks up at the rich, the rich that seem to have no care in the world. We are still at war with many countries, and technology continues to grow; we ask ourselves if within that growing technology, will it bring greater inequality, or will it bring us a world where everyone can be educated. This mural still signifies a lot of what is happening today.