On Topic: Art and commerce, not always peanut butter and jelly

Commerce - the engine that turns the world, as author Ayn Rand would tell us - hasn't always sat comfortably next to art - the vision that aspires to tell us if the world is rotating in the best direction.

On the website of the Detroit Institute of Arts, you can watch a black-and-white film clip from the early 1930s of artist Diego Rivera painting what became known as his Detroit Industry murals. His head bobs as, his arm outstretched, he strokes his brush across the wall, his Woody Woodpecker-styled jet-black hair spiking out behind in rhythm.

He's concentrating on his work at hand. But he also perceives issues and questions that others were only just starting to ask of business and industry.

The colorful murals are part of current show at the DIA, focusing on work by Rivera and Frida Kahlo, who had come to Detroit with her husband.

(Kahlo was pregnant and miscarried during their stay. She later created a frighteningly surrealistic vision of the event for one of her paintings.)

For his murals, Rivera researched his topic for the first three months of their stay by visiting area factories and foundries, making sketches and in the company of a Ford Motor Co. photographer whose pictures he'd later use for reference.

The result was as revelatory as it was unsettling to its viewers then and now. The artist - a contradiction himself, being a Socialist with a capital 'S” who pocketed commissions offered by capitalist benefactors - explored the frequently differing world views held by employer and employees.

As war planes fly overhead, workers are depicted executing dangerous work, backs bent and arms straining, as they shield their eyes from the blast of furnaces, are bathed in a green light cast by the formaldehyde with which they're working to make plastic, labor on elaborate assembly lines or, wearing sinister goggles, prepare poison-gas bombs for the military - images that would've echoed in the memories of many those 1930s observers who had lived through World War I.

Bosses were shown as aloof. Unwelcome middle-class gawkers - auto manufacturers at the time permitted open tours of their factories - are mocked, represented as then-popular newspaper comic-strip characters.

Rivera also wanted to show that good could flower from these efforts, so alongside one arch an infant is shown receiving a vaccination.

How did those 1933 audiences respond? Let's be go with mixed. Indeed, some demanded the murals be whitewashed over entirely. The Detroit News in an editorial called the work 'foolishly vulgar,” 'coarse,” and 'unfair” to the city, its workers and the DIA.

You may have read about the DIA's recent troubles - another example of the sometimes rough working relationship between commerce and art. For a time it seemed the museum's fate was to be sacrificed for Detroit's fiscal mistakes, its great treasures to be sold off to help the municipality out of bankruptcy. But the state of Michigan, foundations and donors raised some $816 million to snatch the museum's ownership away from the city.

Here in Iowa, it was only four years ago that a proposal in the Iowa House of Representatives would have obliged the University of Iowa to put on the auction block its Jackson Pollock 1943 'Mural,” valued then at $140 million, to raise money for scholarships.

The distinction between assets and art, for some of the bill's proponents, was unclear or not worth noting. But to be fair, that was at a time when several universities and colleges were selling off artwork - for the UI to do so wouldn't have been unique.

Support of art by companies and the state goes back well before Shakespeare's time. It's just that they don't always walk hand in hand or see the same destination. And maybe they shouldn't.

' Michael Chevy Castranova is enterprise editor and Sunday business editor of The Gazette. (319) 398-5873; michael.castranova@thegazette.com