Above is Jose Maria Sert's "American Progress, the Triumph of Man's Accomplishments Through Physical and Mental Labor" behind the front desk, which other sources have as "Labor Collaborating with Art", also known as "Man's Conquests."

This is the scene of Diego Rivera's supposedly terrible mistreatment at the hands of Junior Rockefeller.

On the focal wall of the largest lobby of the tallest building, this is the psychological locus of the entire complex, and what we have here is a puzzling mess. Look closely in the middle and you'll find a figure in a tall hat, which not only DOES turn out to be Abraham Lincoln but who is leaning on Ralph Waldo Emerson. Supposedly. And evidently it's the Muses at the right and the forces of action on the left. At one point Frederick Allen Lewis described this mural as "a man on a scaffold throwing a tree at another man on another scaffold." I'll award the brass figligee with bronze oak-leaf palm to anybody who can explain Lincoln's appearance or simply tell me what the hell is going on back there.

This was the very spot where Rivera set himself to work painting his mural called --

drumroll --

Man at the Crossroads Looking with Uncertainty but with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a Course Heading to a New and Better Future

This of course as celebrated in song and story blah blah blah and also featured in the Tim Robbins film The Cradle Will Rock with Ruben Blades as Diego Rivera, this was the mural that the Rockefellers found objectionable and destroyed. The title comes from the original Hartley Burr Alexander art program. It's funny, funny, that Diego Rivera kept the title and followed the brief, and was taking it quite seriously, or perhaps thumbing his nose at it, or perhaps having it both ways. That's the unlikely connection between Hartley Burr Alexander and Diego Rivera.

In all this controversy has - has everybody been too busy with the politics to look at the thing (as recreated in Mexico City with a pointedly different title) and imagine it in place? It's a much better composition because it has a literal middle, instead of a murky void, and because it's damned colorful, and it has an emotional center, a figure that the viewer can instantly identify with. It has butterfly crosshairs and in the bulls-eye there's Man at the Crossroads, looking like a reasonable technologically savvy proletariat, kind of fed up or trodden-down, faced with the decision between the old corrupt world and the vital new Communist world. He looks ambivalent. Y'know, I don't think Lenin's face was the real problem. The real problem was the graphic, colorful choice presented between the hopeful egalitarian Communist future on the right, and all those gas masks and urban riots and cocktailing capitalists on the left.

Mouse over the above image for some sense of what the mural would have looked like in place (and, yes, I think Sert had already been hired for the ceiling); click on the below image for a full-sized image of Rivera's 1934 Mexico City version of the same mural, significantly retitled "Man, the Controller of the Universe". Through the courtesy of Wikipedia.

Glance up and behold crypto-fascist imagery, those sorts of streamlined aircraft associated with movement and power and speed and glory of war, disappearing into the hellish cyclone of Time. Behold also the crotches of diapered giants up close and personal. Behold!

Beyond the fascism, whatever Sert gives us here is -- childish. Childlike. His vision of world politics is a fairy-tale nightmare, with knob-headed big-footed raw-boned unpredictable giants.