![]() Diego was 20 years older than Frida, but her father thought the marriage would be a good deal. In her early twenties, she married Diego Rivera in spite of her mother’s disapproval. As if all this was not enough, she had a turbulent marriage, and also miscarried, causing her a serious hemorrhage that kept her in the hospital for weeks. ![]() ![]() This was the "philosophy," the state of mind in which I undertook my Detroit frescoes.The atmosphere in her parents’ house was also very tense, lacking love, and as she later described it “very, very sad”. 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. ![]() That is why now I placed the collective hero, man-and-machine, higher than the old traditional heroes of art and legend. 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. I walked for miles through the immense workshops of the Ford, Chrysler, Edison, Michigan Alkali, and Parke-Davis plants. 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 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. He is filled with an urge to go home and write something that is fresh and new and has in it the honesty of these pictures. He has to make his writing better, to keep going. He feels an appetite growing within him for something bigger, better, more meaningful. He finds himself coming back again and again to stand in front of the same pictures, reading about the couple's life, the passion they shared for their art, for workers' rights, for each other. Theirs, he suspects, was not an epic love story like Diego and Frida's. He thinks about how long he's been moping about Sandrine, and it makes him feel embarrassed, self-indulgent. There is something about the grief in her eyes that won't let him look away. He stops before a perfect little painting in which she has pictured her spine as a cracked column. Fabien barely notices the crowds that cluster in front of the pictures. He finds his emotions gripped by the paintings, the huge, colorful canvases by Diego Rivera, the tiny, agonized self-portraits by Frida Kahlo, the woman Rivera loved. “But now, inside the gallery, something happens to him. Such achievements led Rivera to regard Detroit’s industry as the means of transforming the proletariat to take the reins of economic production.” Kahn, the architect of Ford’s factories, subsequently constructed hundreds of factories on the model of the Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan, which was the epicenter of Ford’s industrial acumen as well as a world-wide symbol of future technology. By the 1920s and ‘30s, nearly every industrial country in Europe and Latin America, as well as the Soviet Union, had adopted Ford’s engineering and manufacturing methods: his highly efficient assembly line to increase production and reduce the cost of automobiles, so that the working class could at least afford to own a car his total control over all the manufacturing and production processes by concentrating them all in one place, from the gathering of raw materials to orchestrating the final assembly and his integration, training, and absolute control of the workforce. “Rivera’s admiration for Stalin was equaled only by his admiration for Henry Ford.
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