Curator, Leah Dickerman: You're looking at a large-scale presentation model that the architect’s office, Raymond Hood’s office, made for presenting their vision of the Rockefeller Center building complex to their patrons and to the public.
David Rockefeller, Jr. Rockefeller Center appears in two of the panels that Rivera made for the 1931 exhibition – Pneumatic Drilling and Frozen Assets. At the time Rivera was working on them, Rockefeller Center was still under construction.
Leah DIckerman: When Rivera’s depicting images of Rockefeller Center, he’s not working from the building complex itself. He’s working from other things. We have a leaflet that he was given from the architect’s office that he grids and scales up as an image source, but it's likely that he also worked from architectural presentation models of Rockefeller Center.
It is a moment in which there's a huge construction drive going on in New York City. Buildings are being put up one after another on the New York skyline. And Rockefeller Center is the biggest building initiative of them all.