Someone There Was Who Didn’t Love A Wall

In our December, 1977, issue Roy Bongartz described the splendid hoopla that developed when the revolutionary Mexican muralist Diego Rivera went to work for American capitalists—particularly the bitter run-in with the young Nelson Rockefeller when the painter decided to put the face of Lenin into a mural for Rockefeller Center. Now several readers have reminded us that what came to be known as the “Battle of Rockefeller Center” drove essayist E. B. White to poetry in The New Yorker . The year was 1933, and the poem was entitled “I Paint What I See, a Ballad of Artistic Integrity”: