In 1927, Diego Rivera was sent to Moscow by the Mexican Communist Party to sit on a platform a few seats down from Stalin and view celebrations of the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution. While there, he produced a small watercolor sketchbook that followed an ordinary family joining the parades, beginning with simple, bland figures in washed-out beiges, but introducing symphonic compositions of navy blues and martial blacks and dynamic ovals in concert with the waving red banners and the glory of the crowds. He was also introduced to two American men who were touring Europe to learn about currents in contemporary art, and in 1929, one of those Americans, Alfred H. Barr Jr., was appointed the Museum of Modern Art’s first director and invited Rivera to stage a one-man show. In 1931, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, oil money matriarch and patron of the museum, bought Rivera’s Moscow sketchbook for $2,500 to help finance the artist’s trip to New York, where he constructed eight “portable murals,” including one of the Mexican revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata, and another of an Aztec jaguar knight stabbing a conquistador in the throat with a stone knife. The jaguar knight mural ended up in Northampton, Mass., at the Smith College Museum of Art, while Zapata stayed at MoMA but was stored away out of sight. Eighty years later, five of the eight murals have been reunited on MoMA’s second floor, and you can see them for only 25 bucks, and maybe another two bucks for a postcard of Zapata. Read More