Record details

• generalData.authorNameInListings

  Josep Maria Sert (1874-1945)

• generalData.title

  American Progress (Sketch for the Rockefeller Center mural)

• technicalData.measurements

  32 x 64 cm

• technicalData.description

  Oil on laid paper

• technicalData.complementaryDescription

  "American progress" was one of the murals that Sert created for the decoration of Rockefeller Center. John D. Rockefeller's initial idea was to create a center, the core of which should be an opera house, but due to the Great Depression, the project was reduced to a commercial and office complex. In order to make the building more attractive to potential tenants, the commission in charge of decorating the entire Rockefeller Center entrusted the murals of the great hall to the artists Franck Brangwyn, Diego Rivera, José María Sert and Pablo Picasso. It seems that the latter refused to submit a preliminary sketch, so it was eliminated. The theme chosen by Rockefeller for the murals was the dominance of the human being over modern civilization, and the instructions to follow were: The paintings had to be done in black, white and gray. This new humanism that exalted the values of always encouraging to start the idea of progress paralyzed by the crash of the year 29 was consistent with the modernist and noucentist postulates of Sert. He was entrusted with the four canvases on which he had to express the new mastery of the human being over the material world: power, will, imagination, genius. These four compositions are a prelude to those he will perform a few years later at the League of Nations in Geneva. Both sets are part of his most important public work, and they are the ones that gave him fame and international status, and make him one of the most important muralists of his time. In these works, the artist expresses the march of the human being on earth, the perennial struggle and conflict in which being a man consists, the history of his efforts and his most spectacular successes: industrial progress, the development of medicine , the tribute to the anonymous victims of slavery and the enthusiasm for peace. Strength and power are emphasized through the grandiose phallic symbols of converging cannons, immense crumbling columns, false idols, skyscrapers emerging from the clouds, cyclopean blocks, and compact tumult. The apology for American progress, the personal plastic discourse, the grandiloquent symbolism, the chaining of figures of various scales and the scenographic conception tinged with romanticism aroused such admiration among the public and clients who commissioned five more murals from him in 1940, between them the flat sky of the great hall. There he will represent Time by means of three gigantic figures striding over the columns that support the ceiling: Trained with Benito Mercadé and Pere Borrell, Sert was a member of the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc, and later a disciple of A. of Riquer. In 1900 Torras i Bages commissions him a large mural decoration for the Vic cathedral, of which he presented sketches and preparatory canvases in 1905 and 1907 in Barcelona and Paris, of which this piece is an example. Through his exhibitions abroad, he soon acquired extraordinary prestige among the French and English aristocracy, for whom he made sumptuous decorations. In 1908 he decorated the Sala dels Passos Perduts of the Palau de Justice in Barcelona, and in 1910 he presented the mural decoration of the ballroom of the Marquis d'Alella (Barcelona) at the Autumn Salon in Paris and he decorated the music hall of the princess of Polignac in Paris. Two years later he exhibited an important set at the Salon in the French capital. In the following years he worked for Queen Victoria Eugenia (Santander) and Robert Rothschild (Chantilly), and exhibited individually in London, at the Agnew Hall.