Antique

Diego Rivera recreated his Rockefeller Center mural for Mexico City's Palacio de Bellas Artes. Man, Controller of the Universe shows a worker at the crossroads of industry, science and the competing political ideologies of the time — capitalism and communism.

It's been called one of the great rivalries of the art world — a clash between egos, riches and ideologies. In the spring of 1932, capitalist (and prolific collector of Mexican art) Nelson Rockefeller hired Mexican painter and staunch socialist Diego Rivera to paint a mural for the lobby of the newly erected Rockefeller Center in New York City. Sketches were drawn and approved, but when reporters leaked that Rivera had added an image of Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, a battle began.



Diego Rivera, seen here in 1933, works on a panel of his mural in the lobby of Rockefeller Center.

In the end, the painting was destroyed, ideological differences hardened and the two families lived with a legacy of animosity. But now the daughters of the two men have teamed up to leave the past behind and preserve not only their fathers' legacies, but the art they both loved. Guadalupe Rivera Marin, 90, and Ann Rockefeller, 80, aim to raise $3 million each to build individual galleries in their fathers' names at the Mexican Museum, set to break ground at a new and bigger site this year in San Francisco.
In the dining room of her Mexico City home, Rivera Marin recounts meeting Ann Rockefeller in the 1980s. She says the two took an immediate liking to each other. They had much in common — after all, they were both daughters of famous fathers. During that meeting, Ann Rockefeller told Rivera Marin that as a young girl she didn't want the family name — she wanted to make it on her own.

"In that sense," Rivera Marin says, "I was exactly, more or less, the same, you know? I never [wanted] to be the daughter of Diego Rivera, and I always [wanted] to be myself and to have my own life."

Rockefeller says she never harbored ill feelings toward Rivera Marin. "Between us there were no wounds."
Andrew Kluger, chairman of the museum's board, calls the collaboration a "peace-making motion." "They just decided, 'Let's put it aside,'" he says. "'That's the old men; this is us.'"



Nelson Rockefeller examines a painting at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1939. Rockefeller was 23 when he hired Diego Rivera to paint a mural in the newly built Rockefeller Center.

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