12 Pomegranate 1000pc Diego Rivera Detroit Industry Murals DSC05830
BCD Show & Tell Jigsaw 3 - Jan22 Cardboard & More
My final jigsaw is a 1000pc by Pomegranate – I have a large collection of 50 of these, but this will be the first I’ve actually done.
The jigsaw is a portion of the vast 1930s mural Detroit Industry by Diego Rivera, in the Detroit Institute of Art, largely funded by Edsel Ford. It is a true fresco painted 1932-3 with 27 murals, covering four walls of the courtyard at three levels. Diego Rivera, the husband of Frida Kahlo and committed communist, was given months of unfettered access to the Ford River Rouge Complex in Dearborn, accompanied by a photographer and wrought all the material he collected into this monumental and initially notorious composition. It was against a background of layoffs and industrial unrest in which five workers had recently been killed. De Rivera portrayed the worker heroically & idealistically believed that technological advances would underpin the Revolution and liberate workers from drudgery.
This scene is from the North Wall, a portion of whose main panel is used for the jigsaw. Detroit then had an advanced industrial economy, the site of the world’s largest manufacturing industry. In 1927, the Ford Motor Company had introduced many technical innovations including the revolutionary automated car assembly line. The car production was vertically integrated, able to make every component from simple materials – considered an industrial marvel. The north wall puts the worker at centre and depicts the manufacturing process of Ford's famous 1932 V8 engine. The North Wall murals are available in very high resolution on Google Arts, along with lots of information. They were also the subject of a half hour BBC4 radio programme in the series ‘Moving Pictures’, combining massive online images with in-depth analysis. Another programme I listened to recently dealt with urban blight and rewilding - this also had an episode about Detroit and its economic collapse (Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn).
artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/diego-rivera-s-detroit-...
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09mtb0b/episodes/player
The jigsaw shows the central lower half of the mural. The image has a very complex structure, with layered views of various operations through which conveyor belts weave, with rows of machines and men receding to a central vanishing point.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Industry_Murals
As usual I worked without the box image, starting with the edge and the brightest colours. The jigsaw only just fits on the portapuzzle and the pieces took more than just one jigsafe to lay out. The grid cut has the full range of standard pieces – nonesies to foursies and are fairly matte. The grid rows wander a little, producing slightly larger & smaller pieces.
I found the jigsaw quite difficult because of the complexity of the image. I asked my metallurgist husband who had worked briefly in a rolling mill as a student to explain what was going on. The main components shown are piston blocks. In the centre you can see a man doping/sampling liquid iron/steel, hot metal being cast and the great overhead conveyor belt hooks moving components to waiting men, in front men are moving trolleys with engine piston blocks. The painting has an X-shaped composition and the impossibly distant vanishing point in the centre with an echo in the channels which glow, presumably carrying molten metal.
Nautilus now do a wooden laser-cut version of the whole of the large panel on the north wall - it measures 28x11in with 609pc, and retails at $180 - which with UK postage and 20%VAT would be very pricey for me. However there is a rave review of the jigsaw and its cut on this website:
www.reddit.com/r/Jigsawpuzzles/comments/vc9dcl/just_a_bre...
12 Pomegranate 1000pc Diego Rivera Detroit Industry Murals DSC05830
BCD Show & Tell Jigsaw 3 - Jan22 Cardboard & More
My final jigsaw is a 1000pc by Pomegranate – I have a large collection of 50 of these, but this will be the first I’ve actually done.
The jigsaw is a portion of the vast 1930s mural Detroit Industry by Diego Rivera, in the Detroit Institute of Art, largely funded by Edsel Ford. It is a true fresco painted 1932-3 with 27 murals, covering four walls of the courtyard at three levels. Diego Rivera, the husband of Frida Kahlo and committed communist, was given months of unfettered access to the Ford River Rouge Complex in Dearborn, accompanied by a photographer and wrought all the material he collected into this monumental and initially notorious composition. It was against a background of layoffs and industrial unrest in which five workers had recently been killed. De Rivera portrayed the worker heroically & idealistically believed that technological advances would underpin the Revolution and liberate workers from drudgery.
This scene is from the North Wall, a portion of whose main panel is used for the jigsaw. Detroit then had an advanced industrial economy, the site of the world’s largest manufacturing industry. In 1927, the Ford Motor Company had introduced many technical innovations including the revolutionary automated car assembly line. The car production was vertically integrated, able to make every component from simple materials – considered an industrial marvel. The north wall puts the worker at centre and depicts the manufacturing process of Ford's famous 1932 V8 engine. The North Wall murals are available in very high resolution on Google Arts, along with lots of information. They were also the subject of a half hour BBC4 radio programme in the series ‘Moving Pictures’, combining massive online images with in-depth analysis. Another programme I listened to recently dealt with urban blight and rewilding - this also had an episode about Detroit and its economic collapse (Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn).
artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/diego-rivera-s-detroit-...
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09mtb0b/episodes/player
The jigsaw shows the central lower half of the mural. The image has a very complex structure, with layered views of various operations through which conveyor belts weave, with rows of machines and men receding to a central vanishing point.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Industry_Murals
As usual I worked without the box image, starting with the edge and the brightest colours. The jigsaw only just fits on the portapuzzle and the pieces took more than just one jigsafe to lay out. The grid cut has the full range of standard pieces – nonesies to foursies and are fairly matte. The grid rows wander a little, producing slightly larger & smaller pieces.
I found the jigsaw quite difficult because of the complexity of the image. I asked my metallurgist husband who had worked briefly in a rolling mill as a student to explain what was going on. The main components shown are piston blocks. In the centre you can see a man doping/sampling liquid iron/steel, hot metal being cast and the great overhead conveyor belt hooks moving components to waiting men, in front men are moving trolleys with engine piston blocks. The painting has an X-shaped composition and the impossibly distant vanishing point in the centre with an echo in the channels which glow, presumably carrying molten metal.
Nautilus now do a wooden laser-cut version of the whole of the large panel on the north wall - it measures 28x11in with 609pc, and retails at $180 - which with UK postage and 20%VAT would be very pricey for me. However there is a rave review of the jigsaw and its cut on this website:
www.reddit.com/r/Jigsawpuzzles/comments/vc9dcl/just_a_bre...