The WPA was not the only entity commissioning work. The Art in Action program hosted by the 1940 season of the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island in the SF Bay invited Diego Rivera to design a mural for the SF City College. As in his mural for Rockefeller Center, Rivera’s politics got in the way until 1961 when it was finally installed in the college’s performing arts center. Now it is newly installed SF MoMA and though I had seen the install in progress the wow factor is all the more thrilling as it’s now complete. It is in impeccable condition and it takes the handy guide they have prepared to really dial in on the many referents to the topic of unity. Frieda Kahlo is front and center. She was with Rivera in SF while he was working finding her way in her own work. It is a masterpiece-a marriage of art and life. (That’s Paulette Goddard wife of Chaplin holding hands with Rivera practically under Frieda’s nose in the third panel. Pan American unity he said👀)
Rivera In San Francisco
A thrill to see two panels from Diego Rivera’s Pan American Unity mural series made originally on Treasure Island in 1940 in front of a live audience being installed at SF MoMA. Chief Curator Janet Bishop tells me all of the 5 oversized panels are being transported in the wee hours to avoid traffic and disturbance. A joint project of the much beleaguered SF City College and the museum they will reside in a special Snohetta designed corner gallery. Opens early this summer and will be on view for at least a couple of years Rivera had in mind that all the peoples of North and South America would therein be represented. As events roiled Europe soon to spill over to the west, perhaps this was a hope and dream more than a reality. Still its majesty bespeaks a commonality we seek even today.
An unusual and poignant image of Frida in pain comes to auction
Frida Kahlo underwent something like 40 surgeries to correct the cascade of physical ailments (possible spina bifida, polio, a horrendous bus collision which had driven an iron handrail into her pelvis) which tormented her but which gave her paintings, often made from her convalescent beds, a very particular vantage point and haunting quality. (Kahlo also worked with mirrors to serve as the limbs she was not able to mobilize). This photograph, which I’d not seen before, was sold at Sotheby's—as part of a Nickolas Muray collection— for 28,000 dollars.
Muray is the Hungarian born US based photographer with whom she had a decade long affair. He was married four times, Kahlo almost as many (counting the re-marriage to Diego Rivera, whom she considered her true soul mate.) but they stayed close. Frida in Traction, was taken in 1940 when Muray visited her in the hospital in Mexico, and goes tight on Kahlo’s face which allows the uncertainty of her gaze—will this surgery be the answer?—full measure. Is she accepting or fearful? The folded white cloth around her famous unibrow signifies a moment when Kahlo was incapable of facing down her legacy of pain through her art. But works made that same year which include necklaces which cut into her neck and make her bleed and hearts which are ex-corpus, show she was the eternal phoenix. Muray once wrote to her that he wished he could find “the secret how to make you well again so you could sing, and smile, love and play again as I have seen you before in the bright sun or in the dark night.” As a document of one of those times when she was not able to vanquish her pain, it is unforgettable.
Photo by Nickolas Muray; © Nickolas Muray Photo Archives