San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art has been celebrating Diego Rivera, who was considered the greatest Mexican painter of the 20th century, since the day it opened in 1935.
Paintings by Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo helped establish the museum’s international collection, then housed on the fourth floor of the Veterans Building in the Civic Center.
Now the museum’s collection includes 70 Rivera artworks. Plus, on view currently, the restored 1,628-square-foot mural “Pan American Unity” that Rivera and his assistants created in 1940 at the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island.
Is there room, and reason, to put more on exhibit? Well, what better choice than Diego Rivera to explore one museum’s resolute goals of diversity, equity and inclusion.
“It could not be more relevant today,” declared guest curator James Oles, who organized the retrospective “Diego Rivera’s America,” recently opened at SFMOMA. “Because of his utopian belief in the power of art to change the world, Rivera is an essential artist to explore anew, from a contemporary perspective.”
The exhibit, running through Jan. 2, covers Rivera’s career from the 1920s to the mid-1940s, offering what the museum calls “the most in-depth examination of the artist’s work in over two decades.” It boasts 150 of his works, from the familiar “The Flower Carrier,” one of the museum’s prize holdings since 1935, to wall-size projected images of three murals.
The artwork and posted text are full of surprises and insights. At the exhibit entrance, nine framed drawings of hands, studies for Rivera’s 1922 mural “Creation,” look like sketches from the Renaissance. Then, next to the projected image of the entire work is Rivera’s comment: the mural was “too metaphorical for the masses.”
Another gallery shows how Rivera, over and over, conveyed the nobility of everyday work in paintings such as “The Grinder” and “The Tortilla Maker.” As simple and heartfelt as these images may seem, Oles said they represent “a political statement.” In the mid-1920s, wealthy Mexicans, potential buyers, would not think of tortilla makers as subjects for art.
In a sidelight, here are re-created costumes from Rivera’s 1932 ballet collaboration with composer Carlos Chavez titled “H.P.” The leading character, “Horsepower,” was a hybrid of man and machine. Despite featuring a dancing tobacco stalk and bunch of bananas, “H.P.” closed on opening night in Philadelphia. (Among the characters Rivera sketched was a bright red dancing gas pump.)
Murals made Rivera famous, but his much smaller works — book and magazine illustrations — also have impact. On display is his stylized image of a parade in Moscow’s Red Square on the cover of the March, 1932, edition of Fortune magazine, that beacon of capitalism. It contrasts with his cover for Survey Graphic magazine for May, 1931, depicting a U.S. worker and a Mexican farmhand shaking hands across the “border/frontera.”
This same “Proletariat” gallery recounts the most controversial episode of Rivera’s career. In 1932, he was hired to paint a mural in the new RCA Building at the heart of New York’s Rockefeller Center. The Rockefellers approved his sketches for the scene, featuring an industrial worker at the center.
As Rivera began painting the mural in 1933, “his theme became more openly subversive,” the exhibit text reports. The central worker seemed to be flanked by a choice of brutal U.S. capitalism or rational Soviet socialism — with an image of Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin. The Rockefellers, worried about losing building tenants, demanded that Rivera remove Lenin’s portrait. When he refused, he was fired and the unfinished mural was chipped from the wall.
Rivera’s completed murals fared better. The exhibit details his first commission in San Francisco in 1931, titled “Allegory of California,” in the Pacific Stock Exchange building on Montgomery Street, now known as the City Club. On display are plans and sketches as well as a 7-foot-tall study of Helen Wills Moody, a top-ranked tennis player and long-time Bay Area resident, who would represent “California womanhood” in the mural.
Many of Rivera’s works have become familiar, even iconic images — although Frida Kahlo has been catching up to him in recent years. Still, the Museum of Modern Art exhibit, both wide-ranging and well-focused, offers discoveries for even devoted fans. Among them:
- Rivera’s “Portrait of Frances Ford Seymour and Frances De Villers Brokaw” (1941) depicts actor Henry Fonda’s second wife, who was the mother of Jane and Peter Fonda. The girl in the portrait, with a lap-full of calla lilies, was her daughter from a previous marriage.
- Oakland could have gotten a pair of 100-foot tall Diego Rivera mosaics if his 1931 proposal for the façade of the Paramount Theatre had been accepted. Two colorful plans are displayed, including a swanky couple in evening dress and scenes from popular movies. Instead, architect Timothy Pflueger turned to artist Gerald Fitzgerald in his office to design the mosaics.
- Rivera’s “Allegory of California” mural at the Pacific Stock Exchange Luncheon Club was one of his least controversial, but he said it had a message for club patrons: “What they eat and what enriches them are the products of the toil of workers and not of financial speculation.”
- After Rockefeller Center obliterated Rivera’s mural “Man at the Crossroads” from the wall of the RCA Building in New York in1934, he re-created it at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City. The new title: “Man, Controller of the Universe.” This time, Lenin made it into the picture.
Contact Robert Taylor at rtaylorsf@aol.com.
‘DIEGO RIVERA’S AMERICA’
Through: Jan. 2
Where: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., S.F.
Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday-Tuesday; 1-8 p.m. Thursday.
Admission: $29-$37; free for visitors 18 and younger (timed reservations are recommended)
Contact: Tickets, COVID guidelines and more information is at www.sfmoma.org.
