Frozen Assets

The fresco “Frozen Assets” from 1931, by Diego Rivera:

I’ll leave the explanation and commentary to the official site on his work: here. The middle panel is Depression-era emergency sleeping arrangements; the bottom panel is a bank vault.

Rivera painted Frozen Assets shortly after he came to New York for the first time. The skyscrapers in the upper panel include, from the left, the one-year-old Daily News Building, the still-under-construction RCA Building, the two-year-old Chrysler Building in the background, the brand-new McGraw-Hill Building, and the one-year-old Empire State Building in the background. That’s about as up-to-date as you can be, especially since his purpose was not exactly to celebrate the new towers.

We had our office in McGraw-Hill for a while in the mid-90s. It’s a great and underrated building, seen here by Berenice Abbott in 1936 for her “Changing New York” project: