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The Patternmaker and the Tide

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Neil Mach

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“In my previous murals, I had tried to achieve a harmony in my painting with the architecture of the building. But to attempt such a harmony in the garden of the Institute would have defeated my purposes. For the walls here were of an intricate Italian baroque style, with little windows, heads of satyrs, doorways, and sculpturesque mouldings. It was within such a frame that I was to represent the life of an age which had nothing to do with baroque refinements -- a new life which was characterized by masses, machines, and naked mechanical power. So I set to work consciously to over-power the ornamentation of the room.”

ArtArchitectureMachineryDetroitMechanicsDiego RiveraMuralsDetroit Institute Of ArtsFrescoes
Book:My Art, My Life
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“As [William] Valentiner noted in his uncompleted memoirs Remembering Artists, [Diego] Rivera’s [Detroit Industry] murals rooted the Detroit Institute of Arts to the many-faceted jewel of its central court because of the harmonious, fertile relationship between "the industrialist" and "the artist." Rivera remarked to Valentiner how especially struck he was that "Edsel had none of the characteristics of the exploiting capitalist, that he had the simplicity and directness of a workman in his won factories and was like one of the best of them." Their relationship was like the murals themselves, a superb expression of pluralism, toleration, and empathy for the other, and of a cosmopolitan sense of all the Americas, not just of the United States of America or Detroit alone.”

ArtBusinessDetroitDiego RiveraMuralsDetroit Institute Of ArtsFrescoesEdsel FordWilliam Valentiner
Author:John Dean
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“While working in California, I met William Valentiner and Edgar Richardson of the Detroit Institute of Arts. I mentioned a desire which I had to paint a series of murals about the industries of the United States, a series that would constitute a new kind of plastic poem, depicting in color and form the story of each industry and its division of labor. Dr. Valentiner was keenly interested, considering my idea a potential base for a new school of modern art in America, as related to the social structure of American life as the art of the Middle Ages had been related to medieval society.”

ArtUnited StatesIndustryDetroitModern ArtDiego RiveraMuralsDetroit Institute Of Arts
Book:My Art, My Life
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“I spent the two and one-half months between my meeting with the Art Commission and the beginning of my actual mural work in soaking up impressions of the productive activities of the city. I studied industrial scenes by night as well as by day, making literally thousands of sketches of towering blast furnaces, serpentine conveyor belts, impressive scientific laboratories, busy assembling rooms; also of precision instruments, some of them massive yet delicate; and of the men who worked them all. I walked for miles through the immense workshops of the Ford, Chrysler, Edison, Michigan Alkali, and Parke-Davis plants. I was afire with enthusiasm. My childhood passion for mechanical toys had been transmuted to a delight in machinery for its own sake and for its meaning to man -- his self-fulfillment and liberation from drudgery and poverty. That is why now I placed the collective hero, man-and-machine, higher than the old traditional heroes of art and legend. I felt that in the society of the future as already, to some extent, that of the present, man-and-machine would be as important as air, water, and the light of the sun. This was the "philosophy," the state of mind in which I undertook my Detroit frescoes.”

ArtIndustryMeaningMachineryDetroitDiego RiveraMuralsDetroit Institute Of ArtsFrescoes
Book:My Art, My Life
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“The art of Alasdair Gray is as original and as creative in its conception and execution as his novels, short stories, plays and poems. Sadly, this is a view that is not widely shared, otherwise this piece would be being written by a professional art historian, our galleries would be rich with Gray's works, and his international reputation as a muralist in his native land would be as secure as that of Diego Rivera in Mexico and John Singer Sergeant in the USA.”

MuralsAlasdair GrayMuralists
Book:Alasdair Gray: Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography
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