Diego in his San Angel studio, 1936, Unknown photographer
Dear Friends of Diego,
Scapegoating creeps up like noxious weeds through cracks in our historical foundation. We’ve had laws on the books against Blacks, Chinese, Japanese, LGBTQIA+, Mexicans, Native Americans, and others. Today’s tumultuous times are uncannily reminiscent of the economic uncertainty of the 1930’s. In the early 1930’s to “save” American jobs the United States deported a half million to one million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. In those far-away days, there were still others who would pick crops. Many Mexican-American U.S. citizens deported involuntarily, still await due process. Looking for opportunity, my grandparents migrated to El Paso over a hundred years ago. El Paso had only become part of slave-state Texas 70 years before in a suspect election. I can only wonder the path my family’s lives would have taken if we had been involuntarily deported, denying us that opportunity. Our government’s deportation scheme was and is as arbitrary as Mexico City airport’s “customs lottery” that dictates whether your incoming baggage gets inspected.
In 1932 while painting at the Detroit Institute of Art, Diego Rivera initially helped financially facilitate a Mexican voluntary repatriation, but soon he realized that opportunities in Mexico were no better than in Detroit. Now Mexicans were coerced to leave. (In those days you would at least know to which country you’d be deported.) Rivera would remain in “artistic exile” from the US from 1933’s Rockefeller incident until he returned in 1940 to paint Pan American Unity at the Golden Gate International Exposition. His two visits to San Francisco bracket all his working time in the US. This 1936 portrait seems like he was ready to return to the US to paint murals. Perhaps, even another one in San Francisco.
1935 was a particularly significant year. San Francisco Junior College (now City College of San Francisco) and the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA) were created and continue to serve our community. For these institutions, ninety years has been a generous start. However, George Gershwin’s now-treasured opus Porgy and Bess opened on Broadway in October to lackluster reviews; the music was not traditionally operatic and the cast was Black. Depressed, aspiring painter George escaped to Mexico in November and encountered Diego and Frieda (and artists Isamu Noguchi, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Roberto Montenegro, Miguel Covarrubias, and composer Carlos Chavez.) He admitted to being a little politicized by the encounter. Sometimes, we have the luxury of not having to know what’s going on in the rest of the world, or even in our own country.
That year the Nazi government decreed the Reich Citizenship Law and the “Law for the Protection of the German Blood and Honor.” The new laws ensured that only the right people were voting citizens; it was fascist redistricting. Voting soon became passé, since the outcome was pre-ordained. In Germany, Nazi thugs, “who didn’t need no stinkin’ masks,” disappeared people off the street, at work, and from their homes. More efficient strategies were on the horizon and camps were hastily being built.
In March the German cruiser ship Karlsruhe sailed into the Bay between the towers of the GG Bridge under construction. It tied up at San Francisco’s pier 37. The San Francisco Chronicle complained that “San Francisco’s reception to the German cruiser was marred yesterday morning by a communist inspired half-hour strike…” Fear of communism drove many agendas. Officially, communism was perceived as a greater threat than fascism, an implicit endorsement of authoritarianism. This sentiment made for some strange bedfellows, but none stranger than Stalin and Hitler becoming allies in August 1939. (As Diego Rivera pointed out in Pan American Unity, totalitarian leaders come in all political stripes.)
On March 2, a German marching band led Nazi sailors goose-stepping down Market Street toward the Civic Center. Worthy of a Hieronymus Bosch painting, this spectacle culminated in ceremonies at City Hall. John Guttman‘s photo, The News Photographer, has been etched in my mind for decades. It is a succinct visual statement of where we stood in 1935.
After fleeing Nazi Germany to San Francisco in 1933, Guttman captured local street scenes and documented the 1934 Waterfront General Strike (with the National Guard as strikebreaking “muscle”.) This image shows how “legitimate” the Nazi regime was. Many San Franciscans of German descent basked in a resurgence of pride after the punitive stigma of losing WWI. (The Friends of New Germany would disband this year, but the German American Bunds would surface the next year. Here is an interesting essay on “Nazism in California.”) San Francisco mayor Angelo Joseph Rossi, whose office was adorned with a portrait of Mussolini, Hitler’s ally, welcomed the visiting Germans and was serenaded the next day along with a crowd of 500 by the band at his 2466 Union Street home. It appears that an Italian flag separated the American banner from the Nazi standard in City Hall.
The News Photographer, John Guttman, 1935
(As Rivera worked on Treasure Island on Pan American Unity, women’s clubs with German membership railed against the mural, likely for his unflattering depiction of Hitler. On August 31, 1940, the SF Chronicle reported “Rivera Mural: Club women don’t like it.” A better cover for fascists sympathetic to the Nazis, “The America Firsters”, sprung up in September 1940. It would have a shorter life as Hitler and Mussolini declared war on the US on December 11, 1941. Now, you couldn’t find an “America Firster” anywhere, except for Charles Lindbergh, who was too famous to be able to hide. The invocation of “America First” in recent years belies an ignorance of the historical baggage that term carries.)
Have communicated with the Art Institute of Chicago about a specific erratum in the exhibition catalog’s chronology about Frida’s actions in May 1931, a pivotal month on which I have focused. The recent exhibition Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds was a peek into an idiosyncratic touchstone in Frida’s life, while she and Diego were estranged. Mary Reynolds and her partner Marcel Duchamp took Frida in after she was hospitalized in Paris in early 1939. Duchamp will have a retrospective next year at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Frida’s world is always a rich source of intrigue. The Casa Roja, the Kahlo family home after they left the nearby Casa Azul, is slated to open September 27 as a museum. There is some controversy at the Casa Azul, after long-time former director Hilda Trujillo Soto has leveled accusations of pages missing from Frida’s diary, which have turned up in the US. At the Museo Dolores Olmedo, repository of the biggest collection of Frida’s painting, there is talk of its re-opening next year and a controversy over a plan to move the collection to Parque Aztlán in Chapultepec. Meanwhile the Frida Kahlo Foundation offers handmade, museum-quality reproductions, with a “free Certificate of Authenticity.”
Recently, I’ve had a weekly series of very enlightening Zoom sessions with Luis-Martin Lozano, our Fulbright scholar at CCSF in 2001 and an acknowledged authority on Diego and Frida. He’s been Director of Mexico City’s Museo de Arte Moderno. It’s been a master class, revealing stories and insights unavailable to me. We have talking points but seldom get to them as our conversation meanders along its own natural stream.
Luis-Martin and Juan Coronel Rivera, Diego’s grandson, were authors of Taschen’s Diego Rivera: The Complete Murals. In 2007 my late Rivera partner Julia Bergman and I worked with the authors on the 35-page section about Pan American Unity. Noted photographer Rafael Doniz re-shot all of Rivera’s works for the book. A major coup for City College was that in Taschen’s 2008 website ad for the 800-page book, it was open to our mural.
In June, Benedikt Taschen and Max Hetzler visited San Francisco and were referred to me by Luis-Martin. Over a couple of days, we were able to see Rivera’s Allegory of California at the City Club, hosted by The Empire Group’s Martin Brown and Sherri Nordwall, and we visited Rivera’s Pan American Unity in storage with the help of Jasmine Kaw. We also visited SFMOMA, the Legion of Honor, and the “Ray and Charles Eames” show at the Transamerica Pyramid. (Mr. Taschen also published Luis-Martin’s Frida Kahlo. The Complete Paintings.)
(L-R: Max, Will, Benedikt), Photo: Jasmine Kaw
We were not able to get access to the SF Art Institute’s mural. However, encouraging words are coming out about the future of the site. “California Academy of Studio Arts to Open on Former SFAI Campus.” The entities working on the project have been determined. SFMOMA is currently presenting People Make This Place: SFAI Stories. My buddies, longtime SFAI librarians and archivists Jeff Gunderson and Becky Alexander, are keeping the SFAI Legacy Foundation + Archive going to preserve this irreplaceable information.
If you’re around San Francisco, don’t miss the free Max Ernst exhibit at the Transamerica Pyramid ground floor garden.
Seldom do we get the opportunity to follow a single, 96-yearlong thread in Diego’s story. Luis-Martin and I have started a discussion about this painting, Tehuantepec Costume (1929), a Rivera portrait of 19-year-old Áurea Procel. Featured in SFMOMA’s 2022 Rivera exhibition (along with her full-length portrait), it will soon be leaving San Francisco and going to the MFA Houston and then on to the Tate in London as part of Frida: The Making of an Icon / January 18–May 17, 2026.
“Please do not reproduce without permission.”
Áurea Procel had a phenomenal, but short 45-year life as a doctor and diplomat, dying the year after Frieda. Married at 23, she was widowed not long after. Her border crossing profile listed her as 5’4″, blond, blue-eyed, and fair; a coloring which ran in her family. Painted by Diego the year he married Frieda; she was in Frieda’s address book. Like Frieda, who had wanted to be a medical doctor and was three years older, Áurea passed herself off as younger.
Alfred Honigbaum, a local art collector, purchased the portrait directly from Rivera in Mexico in March 1929. It was shown at San Francisco’s Galerie Beaux Arts in January 1930. In late 1930 just as Diego and Frieda first arrived in San Francisco, the piece was among sixteen by Rivera loaned by Honigbaum to the Legion of Honor for a Diego Rivera exhibition (November 15-December 25, 1930.) In this exhibition it was titled Feast Day Costume. The painting, now called Tehuantepec Costume, was included a year later in Rivera’s show at MoMA (December 23, 1931-January 27, 1932). Diego had hit the big time and his one-man exhibition at MoMA was second only to Matisse. This was the most definitive benchmark of the Mexican artist’s stature. In November 1935, the newly opened San Francisco Museum of Art had an exhibition of Mexican art including Tehuantepec Costume and Rivera’s Flower Carrier, donated by SFMOMA founding patron Albert Bender. What has been curious is Honigbaum’s lack of documented connection with Bender, who was also a friend of Rivera. Both had funeral services associated with San Francisco’s Congregation Emanu-El, but any other connection is unknown to me. (No correspondence came up in the OAC Bender papers, nor at the Archives of American Art. However, Bender had offices at 311 California and Honigbaum at 334 California, literally across the street from each other. Could this be like the complex, arm’s length relationship between Brooklynites George Gershwin and Aaron Copland?)