NYT Reaches High to Praise Diego Rivera's DIA Murals

The latest review of the DIA's widely lauded exhibition of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo has a read-that-again comparison.

"The 'Detroit Industry' frescoes are probably as close as this country gets to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel," Roberta Smith writes Saturday in The New York Times.

Smith, the paper's art critic since 1986, describes the Rivera Court murals as "monumental and awe-inspiring:"

They form an unusually explicit, site-specific expression of the reciprocal bond between an art museum and its urban setting, and Rivera considered them one of the pinnacles of his career.

The visiting culture writer is equally impressed by the four-month exhibit of the time Rivera and his wife spent here in 1932-33 while he painted the 27 frescoes. The DIA presentation is a "celebration of this exemplary museum’s hard-won independence."

With “Detroit Industry” just down the hall, the show functions as a giant frame that illuminates Rivera’s frescoes to stunning effect. . . .

Rivera takes up most of the room — as, tall and bulky, he did in real life — but Kahlo emerges in the final galleries as the stronger, more personal and more original artist. . . .

Her work is everything Rivera’s art is not: small in size and suffused with personal emotion and existential torment. If Rivera’s frescoes are a kind of cathedral and also a colossal period piece, Kahlo’s small paintings are portable altarpieces for private devotion and a high point of Surrealism that speaks to us still.

Smith's linkage of Rivera's murals to Michelangelo’s ceiling at the Vatican doesn't sway one local admirer of both masterpieces:

@APStamm @robertasmithnyt I've seen both and I'm going with the Sistine Chapel. But, they are a treasure.
— Micheline Maynard (@MickiMaynard) April 4, 2015

Broadcast journalist and former Detroiter Don Gonyea of NPR, who also tweets about the Sistine Chapel reference, calls it "a line I wish I'd written."