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Diego Rivera, Man, Controller of the Universe, 1934. Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, Mexico, by Lucienne Bloch.
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This mural a recreation of the mural <i>Man at the Crossroads</i>, which had many parts including: society women drinking alcohol, pictures of STDs (sexually transmitted diseases), Leon Trotsky, and a Lenin portion which depicted communism. All of these pictures in this mural represent the state of the world in the 1930s. The man in the right section of center of this mural is Lenin, a balding man with a mustache and bearded chin, clasping the hands of a black American, a white Russian soldier, and a worker.

Credit: Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, Mexico, photograph courtesy of Fred Buch

In the 1930s, Unity House opened a new building that included duplicates of murals that Diego Rivera had originally painted for the R.C.A. building in New York. (John D. Rockefeller had cancelled Rivera's commission and destroyed the murals, which included an image of Vladimir Lenin, for being too radical). The Rivera murals, minus two that lampooned Mussolini and that thus might antagonizing Italian members, were lost when the Unity House administration building burnt down in 1969. Today, another copy, hangs in the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.

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