Dear Friends of Diego,

A friend recently convened a group interested in local artist Antonio Sotomayor. The Bolivian-born artist had come to San Francisco in 1923 and had gotten a job as a dishwasher at the Palace Hotel. But he was soon “discovered” and became the hotel’s artist. The group included art historians from Grace Cathedral and Treasure Island, an art conservator, two scholars from the Bancroft Library, and owners of pieces by Sotomayor. My connection with Sotomayor dates back to December 2006 when Lynn Wagner, the daughter of Mona Hofmann, a Rivera assistant and friend of Sotomayor, gifted City College her mother’s remaining papers, which I picked up in Los Angeles. Lynn is the seven-year-old girl sitting and drawing in upper panel 4 of the Pan American Unity mural. She shared an anecdote that Diego would buy her “good” watercolors on the condition that she spent the money on things her mother wouldn’t approve of. Her mother didn’t approve of the pact, but she had a close relationship with Rivera. He wrote the “Queen of Sheba” near her mural image and gifted her a 1930 self-portrait lithograph, signed twice. This was the crown jewel of the treasures we received from the late, very generous Lynn.

Mona and her husband had commissioned a Richard Neutra Hillsborough house and had Sotomayor paint El Tigrero in the house. In 1934 Mona had assisted Rivera at Bellas Artes, when he recreated the destroyed Rockefeller mural; the original was smashed to pieces in the middle of the night on February 10, 1934. She was the first assistant to Rivera on Pan American Unity,  but had to leave for health reasons. She would be treated by Dr. Leo Eloesser, Frida’s doctor and confidant. In a marvelous coincidence, when I got home from the meeting I received a call from a local realtor, who had come across a Sotomayor painting in a Pacific Heights house she was selling. Several of us were able to see this piece.

Sotomayor was part of the Bay area artistic community drawn to Diego Rivera upon his arrival in 1930. The photo below is indicative of Diego Rivera’s influence.

Johnny Cumming

In a second coincidence, the memory of Johnny Cumming was invoked. In 2007 Marshall McLennan had contacted me to take exception with the attribution of the little boy in the lower center of the mural as Donald Cairns, Emmy Lou Packard’s son. Marshall insisted he was the figure and told me a story about Johnny Cumming. The artist was rooming at Marshall’s grandmother’s boarding house on Leavenworth and assisting Diego at the fair on Treasure Island. One day Johnny took Marshall to the fair. Rivera asked Marshall to model  as the figure of the boy in the drawing below. However, later when it was time to model for the portrait in the mural, it was Donald Cairns who got the gig. Rivera added the figure of architect Timothy Pflueger, where the surveying instrument is to the right of sculptor Dudley Carter. The red grid allowed the scale drawing to be enlarged to full size.