The Paradise was
indeed an Eden for anyone trying to extricate himself from the claustrophobia
of Irish Catholicism. It wasn’t until I went back in 1980 to bury my brother (and
attend the First Detroit / Montreux Jazz Festival) that I discovered, through a
Bicentennial plaque, that this venue for the colored bands, their gigs
separated by “B” westerns, was originally Orchestra Hall.
It was put up in
the ‘20s to keep the Polish pianist-conductor of the Detroit Symphony from
defecting back to Warsaw—as a protest against the shabby acoustical nightmares
the penny-pinching Grosse Pointe squirearchy was condemning him to conduct in.
No less a personage than Pablo Casals adjudged the Paradise-to-be the best
space to play in North America.
But in that
use-and-flee mentality that creates so many pockets of dereliction in the U.S.
man-made environment, Orchestra Hall was abandoned to the “coloreds” about the
time of the 1943 race riot. Still, to us, playing hooky from high school, to
see Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford, Earl “Fatha” Hines was an
exotic alternative to the Lawrence Welkitude of our quotidian lives.
And then there was
Cranbrook, the dream of Detroit News publisher George Booth, his visionary
scheme for raising the taste of his region with an artists’ colony like the
legendary one outside Helsinki where Sibelius, Saarinen and several visual artists
rubbed shoulders to psych up their muses. It was just beyond Rackham, in the
svelte exurb of Bloomfield Hills.
There I saw my
first real architecture—the splendid Jugendstil-turning-to-Art-Deco work of
Eliel Saarinen.
In 1983 the Detroit
Institute of Arts held a major exhibition celebrating 50 years of Cranbrook. I
have never seen a show that made me at one and the same time so thrilled and so
depressed. Cranbrook staff included Harry Bertoia and Zoltan Sepeshy, and its
grads numbered designers Charles Eames, Jack Lenor Larsen, Florence Knoll,
Herman Miller. Such a chrestomathy of high-class creations was a
once-in-a-lifetime thrill to savor.
But the sad part
was equally evident. George Booth’s “Arts and Crafts Movement” inspired
idealism that had almost no contact with Detroit’s contribution to world
culture, the automobile. In 1985, when DIA mounted its “Automobile and American
Culture” retrospective, it became obvious that Cranbrook had had no impact on
civilizing the automobile as artifact and sociological phenomenon.
Its best “products”
became interior decorators for the Fortune 500. Booth wanted to make inroads on
kitsch. But even Eero Saarinen’s General Motors Tech Center, which so levitated
me when it first went up—with water sculpture by Alexander Calder, a landmark
logo by Antoine Pevsner, and a stunning chrome steel hanging staircase in the
Styling Center (one of the great commercial spaces in the history of our
architecture)—even the Tech Center now leaves me with the taste of ashes in my
mouth, especially after having visited the Toyota main factory, in Toyoda-shi,
outside Nagoya.
The contrast
between the Toyota factory (floors so clean you could do surgical procedures
without fear of contamination) and the noisome, cluttered, adversarial pits I
worked in while going through college (Chrysler / Hamtramck: Lincoln Mercury;
Fisher Body / Cleveland) is, alas, the difference between a traditional culture
that has mastered the disciplines of mass production and a tradition-busting
culture that takes out its spite on the objects being made. (At Fisher Body,
there was a morning ritual of jamming a bolt in the assembly line so it would
break down long enough for us to have a leisurely smoke.)
Which brings me to
Diego Rivera. We had a marvelous history-of-art prof at U. of Detroit who knew
his blues, as in collars. He told us, for our first assignment, to go to the
DIA and wander around until we finally found somebody who—made us feel new. And
write a thousand words about why “It Had to Be You.”
In my
blacks-could-do-no-wrong phase (Paradise Theater aura prevailing), it had to be
John Quincy Adams Ward’s “The Freedman,” a bronze of a slave breaking his
shackles.
I had circled the
great “Detroit Industry” mural by Rivera for an hour, trying to get up enough
intellectual energy to tackle it. But I wasn’t up to it. Too big. Too epic. Too
damn good to begin with.
But in the
intervening 40 years, I’ve never failed to begin and end a DIA visit with yet
another savoring of Rivera’s masterpiece. I think of it as “the Edsel that
worked.” Ford the First’s son, with the canny counsel of Dr. William
Valentiner, faced down the sneers and poisoned arrows of the self-righteous
Grosse Pointe fortune hunters who were “outraged” to let a commie do a mural in
their museum.
But Ford stuck by his guts. (Unlike Nelson Rockefeller, who “hiya fellaed” Diego for a Rockefeller Center mural, then caved in when Diego wanted to do it his way.) the most exemplary patron of Diego in the United States was the great (and scandalously underknown) San Francisco architect Timothy Pfleuger, who hired Rivera to do murals in the lunchroom of the Pacific Stock Exchange. That’s like inviting Daniel Ortega to lunch at the Reagan White House. But all those S.F. stockbrokers grimly grin—and occasionally bare it—for the hoi polloi Rivera buffs to behold.
But once again,
back to Coleman Young’s Detroit. The white wealthies have all fled to the
burbs, cussing the day that Detroit went black. Discontinuity City. And as much
as I love the luminous Rivera mural—as much as I dig Diego—none of my past at
the automobile factories is contained in that mural.
Rivera’s
romanticized image of the autoworker is a Mexican peon in American overalls—his
dream of a revolutionized Mexico projected onto the hapless then-ununionized
autoworkers. “There’s no Walter Reuther. No Doug Fraser.”
In fact, “Detroit
Industry” is an artifact with very little connection, if any, to the realities
of making autos in Detroit. It’s another Cranbrook. Another Paradise theater.
Isolated oases. Discontinuities.
Indeed, the more I
think about the big three in Mexican murals (Rivera, Siqueros and Oroszco), the
more I’m depressed about how little impact their public art has had on
humanizing modern Mexico. Every wetback who crosses the Rio Grande is an
art-lover lost to a failing economy. For a revolution that started in 1910—with
the mural movement booming in the 1920s and 1930s—there seems precious little
positive impact.
What we have here
is the long and feisty life of an Hispanic Picasso. And just as the clarity of
PP’s socialism kind of fuzzed out in the bright light of the Cote d’Azur, so
Diego’s revolutionizing seems more bohemian that political.
Maybe it wasn’t as
hard growing up in Detroit as I’ve tended to think. It’s a lot tougher world
out there these days, with Beirut, Belfast, Soweto and other dead ends
reminding us how intractably incorrigible we humans tend to be, even when the
best artists try to civilize us.
From Welcomat:
After Dark, June 18, 1986
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