Curator, Leah Dickerman: This enormous, dramatic drawing is a working drawing for a panel that we no longer know the location of.
I think you get a sense in this drawing how much Rivera was impressed by New York. He reported to The New Yorker that he loved the dance halls in Little Italy and that he loved Pennsylvania and Grand Central Stations and American plumbing. He said that this drawing was of the digging of the foundation of Rockefeller Center. In the background you can see that there are cranes, there’s this active construction site going on. The worker in the front and the worker on the right are using pneumatic drills.
You can see that he’s using a variety of lines here, hard lines and soft lines and he’s really trying to create a sense of motion in the image of the worker on the right you get a sense of multiple feet blurred in succession.
Drawings were a key component in his creating of the frescoes, because the plaster dried so quickly, you really had to know what you’re doing, and so he worked out the composition in drawings first, and then he would transfer it through a variety of processes.
The simplest way he would move the drawing from paper to the fresco panel, was by pinning it next to him and just looking at it as he went along.