Diego's Apprentices - Jack Hastings, Clifford Wight and the making of the Marx House fresco

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16 November 2023

Join author & historian Andy Friend for a fascinating insight into the history surrounding the Marx Memorial Library's fresco.

Jack Hastings, an aristocrat with Plantagenet forbears, and Clifford Wight, son of a Swindon railway fitter and his wife, first met in October 1930 as part of Diego Rivera’s team painting a fresco in San Francisco.  Five years later their combined efforts produced ‘The Worker of the Future Upsetting the Economic Chaos of the Present’ at Clerkenwell Green.   This talk will explore how the project came about, how it was received and the artistic and political journeys that proceeded and followed from it. 


Andy Friend is the author of Ravilious & Co: The Pattern of Friendship (2017) and John Nash: The Landscape of Love and Solace (2020), both published by Thames and Hudson, and co-curated their accompanying touring exhibitions. He is currently writing a new history of the Artists’ International Association which will be published by T&H in 2025.