I was born in Detroit and return to visit family once or twice a year. Each visit I make the short pilgrimage to the Detroit Institute of Arts. There were times I spent my whole visit to the museum in the pavilion that houses Diego Rivera’s great mural: “Detroit Industry.”
I spent time in Mexico and I also worked in the Rouge Plant, at one time the largest factory in the world, also known as the Dearborn Stamping Plant, at least the part I worked in was called that. The Rouge Plant is the subject of Rivera’s mural. Rivera painted it in 1933, forty years before I worked there. In 1973 the plant looked almost exactly as Rivera painted it. It’s been much sanitized and brightened since.
From my mother’s house in East Dearborn you can hear the foghorns (are they really foghorns?) of the ore freighters coming in off the Detroit River to deliver iron to the steel mill at the Rouge.
I'm not including a photograph of the Rouge here because none can contain it, in my opinion. But here are some numbers: 93 buildings, 16 million square feet of factory floor space, 100 miles of interior train tracks. At its height 100,000 people worked there and a car rolled off the assembly line every 49 seconds.
I remember walking out of my shift as a marvelous escape, as if from a huge underground cavern. Some nights, I worked the afternoon shift, I ran to my car as if behind me some powerful invisible force might pull me back into the place.
Frida Kahlo, Rivera’s much younger and now much more famous wife, hated Detroit. She resented that Edsel Ford, who had commissioned the murals, gifted them a Model T and not a Lincoln Continental. She also suffered a miscarriage during this time, at Henry Ford Hospital. My father went there for the chemo treatments that may have bought him a couple years, but couldn’t save his life.
The painting “Henry Ford Hospital, 1932” is also called “The Flying Bed.” It lives at the Dolores Olmeda Museum in Mexico City. Kahlo never conceived after this and suffered lifelong anguish over not being able to provide Diego with a little Dieguito.
After I worked as a spot welder on the assembly line I took the money and spent the winter in Mexico City. I was twenty years old.
About thirty years after that I finished a novel about a young American scholar from Detroit who goes to Mexico to research the relationship of labor and art in the work of Diego Rivera.
Something about that novel that haunts me is that the protagonist’s father dies in a hospital bed in the living room of his house. Five years after I wrote the book my father died in a hospital bed set up in the living room of his house.
Curiously, I didn’t really know about the murals until after I had spent time in Mexico.
You should go see Detroit Industry. The paintings line all four walls a large pavilion. The feeling you have is that you are living inside Rivera’s universe.
Once I wrote these lines in an essay: “In Paris my wife and I saw an old lady get struck in the head by a soccer ball. Later that day in a small cathedral an ancient nun approached us unbidden and asked if we wished to see the Delacroix cloistered in the sacristy. Later still: why had she asked us?”
That event happened in 2003. It’s easy to remember the year because my wife and I were there celebrating our fiftieth birthdays.
The week before we visited Detroit I converted that real memory of the Delacroix into a fictional scene. The main character in this story is drawn to a church in an alpine village in France. The priest invites him into the sacristy to see a Caravaggio on the wall. I made up the painting and called it “Mary Magdalene Washing the Feet of Jesus.” The scene in this fictional story is actually longer than the memory recounted above.
In this recent visit to the museum, after I had spent time with “Detroit Industry,” I remembered writing the Caravaggio scene and asked if the museum held a Caravaggio. It does. The painting is called “Martha and Mary Magdalene.”
Though I kept the Caravaggio in my story a fiction of my own device, I did some revision on the scene after experiencing the real Caravaggio.
It was Mother’s Day and we were with our son, the first time we had seen him in a year. We had lunch in the Kresge Courtyard in the museum, an elegant space. Ahead of us in the line for food, a small girl, eight years old (?) took some cash out of her purse and paid for her mother’s lunch.
Before we left the museum my son and I checked out a special exhibit “Detroit Style: Car Design in the Motor City, 1950–2020.” We were drawn to the Chrysler 300E, 1959. It was the kind of car David Wilcox had in mind when he wrote the lines “I’m a tail-finned road locomotive from the days of cheap gasoline.” My son looked at that car and said, “Well, I guess it’s all been pretty much downhill since then.” Detroit, 1959.
So, the Delacroix to which my wife and I were mysteriously granted a private audience? I couldn’t tell you what the subject of that painting was. It was dark. I can only say that I’ll never forget the experience of seeing it.
