“Friends of Diego” Newsletter

October 2026

Dear Friends of Diego,

 

Had some Diego Rivera research loose ends to resolve so I took a one-week expedition to NYC.

 

Rachel Remick at MoMA guided me through Frida and Diego: The Last Dream; which closed September 12. The museum setting was based on the set for the opera, which had run concurrently at the Metropolitan Opera. She reminded me that I had helped her with a paper on Pan American Unity when she was an undergrad at Cal. Lately, we had an on-going conversation about two photographs from the MoMA show. The first was a picture of Diego and Frida in Ralph Stackpole’s sculpture yard. MoMA had inadvertently quoted an incorrect citation invoking the GG Bridge. Then Rachel asked me for a citation on this photo, which I had ascribed to Ansel Adams. The reason I thought this escaped me. This is when the mural was only 3 panels wide in early June 1940. The mural size was expanded to 5 panels wide soon after this photo was taken, which helped date it.

 

Diego had been picked up at the airport on June 5th by Tim Pflueger and Albert Bender, Ansel Adams patron. They may have gone directly to the fair, where Adams was curating the photo exhibit. The Ansel Adams Trust couldn’t furnish an attribution for this photo and suggested going to the Center for Creative Photography, which has all of his thousands of negatives. But their on-line finding aid was not specific enough to track this photo down.
It turned out that after 30 years of investigations; I’m just forgetting stuff. After a session at the CCSF Rivera archives, there was the citation. Artsource’s Tessa Wilcox had jumpstarted the Rivera collections with an assortment of photos in 1995. My late Rivera partner Julia Bergman’s citation recorded it as being by Ansel Adams. Julia’s still giving.
 
 

Isabel Hawkins, PHD astrophysics, Exploratorium Scientist emeritus, and 2018-2022 Fulbright US Global Scholar  will be giving a talk at CCSF on: 

Living with the Stars on Day of the Dead

 
on Oct. 14, 2026, 7-9 pm, in CCSF’s  Harry Britt Building, Room 140, on Frida Kahlo Way. She has asked me to do a 10-minute introduction on the Pan American Unity mural. Isabel has done research on Mayan cosmology and their invention of Zero. There will be a Day of the Dead altar.

 

Years ago, I related my “Binary Stars” metaphor about Diego and Frida to her. They were a couple of stars bound by a profound gravity which caused them to revolve around each. The forces were equal and opposite; there was no villain nor victim. Obviously, the forces that bound them were greater than the forces that wanted to rip them asunder. Cleverly, Isabel offered the cherry atop the metaphor; Diego was the “Red Giant.”

 

Shout out to my pal Donald Cairns, the 5-year-old boy in the lower center of the mural. Emmy Lou Packard’s son turned 91 on September 27. She was Diego’s primary assistant. (I had previously written about the genesis of the little boy figure when I wrote about Johnny Cumming.)

 

While in NYC, I went to the iconic Met and had a coffee with Maria Castro, their Jacques and Natasha Gelman Associate Curator. Maria and Jay Oles co-curated SFMOMA’s Diego Rivera’s America (July 22, 2022-January 3, 2023), which featured our mural. She also worked on the Matisse show which closed September 27. SFMOMA’s free Roberts Family Gallery, where our mural had been displayed, currently has a wonderful piece Giant Arc by Jacob Hashimoto.

 

The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection is currently on display in Santander, Spain. The controversy over Mexico’s national patrimony and the Collection’s owners continues.

 

There was an undercurrent in operation on this trip. Walking to my terminal at SFO, out of the corner of my eye I caught an Isamu Noguchi piece called Figure and stopped to relish it. In NYC I walked the High Line to the Whitney Museum. Visitors were encouraged to use the exterior stairs between floors to enjoy the City views. I entered one floor and ran into a large grouping of Noguchi’s. A special treat was to see Jay DeFeo’s The Rose, which my buddy art conservator Anne Rosenthal had worked on.

 

So, on a Saturday I went out to the Isamu Noguchi Museum in Queens with my Brooklyn friends Dan and Eun Yung, late of the Bay area. The museum had an exhibition, Noguchi’s New York. Later we caught a movie at Lincoln Center. That night a video of the Met Opera’s staging of El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego opera was televised outdoors for free. It will screen on PBS on Sunday October 18.
Isamu was a guest at the party thrown for George Gershwin in Mexico in November 1935. In 1929 Isamu had done a bronze bust of the composer. Isamu was Frida’s lover for 8 months in 1935-36 and their common positions straddling cultures because of their parents’ different ethnicities has fascinated me. Clare Boothe Luce was aghast at the recuerdo she had commissioned from Frida. At Luce’s request Isamu painted out her name in the inscription of Frida’s The Suicide of Dorothy Hale. Isamu and Dorothy had also had a relationship during which they rode around in Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion car.

 

Got to meet my friend Zoya Kocur on another visit to MoMA. She had been in charge of all things Diego Rivera at the SFAI. The ripples from the school’s closing extended coast to coast.

 

Construction proceeds on the Diego Rivera Performing Arts Center. As you cross the street, you will be looking directly at the mural. The mural will be installed next year. The theater is scheduled to be completed in late 2028. The nearly 9-foot-tall St. Francis of the Guns will have a front row seat for viewing the mural.

 

Frida’s first affair with photographer Nick Muray is poorly chronicled. All accounts have them meeting in Mexico through the intercession of artists Manuel and Rosa Covarrubias. However, the Covarrubias’ were in Paris at the time; I have been surprised that no one has checked. My version has their meeting in late May 1931 in NYC at 18 East 48th Street as Frida wrote in one of her last letters to Nick in 1938. So, I paid a pilgrimage to the site, just 5 blocks down 5th Avenue from MoMA. My version of the story precisely dates when the 23-year-old Frida, not yet married two years to Diego, assumed her agency and flew cross-country for a blind date.

 

Had to visit the Rockefeller Center ceiling mural by José María Sert, an ardent fascist and fan of Francisco Franco. Diego was expelled for adding a face of Lenin to his mural and was replaced by Sert, whose circling airplanes on the ceiling might be construed as celebrating the bombing of Guernica.

 

There are some interesting new findings on Diego Rivera’s first Mexican mural, The Creation, long-thought to be an encaustic, before Diego turned to fresco. However, our Mexican mural friend Sandra Cetina Ocaña found no beeswax, a main ingredient in an “encaustic” work. Even long-held “facts” can be revisited.

 

The required maintenance of art works is a recurring theme. In San Francisco’s Mission District, using a Community Challenge Grant, there are plans to restore six murals. Diego Rivera’s stone relief sculpture at Estadio Olímpico Universitario is set to be restored. Stanford University has reached a twenty-year milestone of digitally preserving art. For us the coup was having Stanford host a Virtual Preservation of “Pan American Unity” .

 

Abrazos,
Will
[There is some redundancy as we try to make each issue stand alone.]

June 2026

George Gershwin by David Alfaro Siqueiros, 1936
Dear Friends of Diego,
 

MTT, Maestro Michael Tilson Thomas, a San Francisco musical legend, has passed away. I don’t know if he ever saw Pan American Unity. But he is part of the mural’s story.

In 2007 I came across an internet blurb that intrigued me. Composer George Gershwin had encountered Diego Rivera and Frida in Mexico in November 1935. Their connection was a complete surprise to me. The evidence was a postcard Gershwin had sent from Mexico City’s San Ángel Inn to a friend Mabel Schirmer in NYC. In the postcard George mentioned that Diego had shown him the newly finished Palacio Nacional murals. The postcard had gone from Mexico City to NYC and was then in Houston. The owner was not a fan of Diego Rivera because he’d had an encounter with Paulette Goddard, Charlie Chaplin’s wife. She couldn’t give me an image of the post card because she had gifted it. To MTT. The SF Symphony conductor was a devotee of George Gershwin. The postcard had traversed time (over 70 years) and space (over 5000 miles) and was now two miles away. MTT’s staff very graciously sent me this digital copy.

This postcard unlocked a new world. When I mentioned the postcard at a mural talk, Jean Strunsky confided that she had information to share and invited me to visit. She and her late husband Michael Strunsky ran the Ira and Leonore Gershwin Trust, a block away from SFMOMA. Michael Owen, a former City College library student, was their archivist. Their collection included more postcards, letters, and a Tehuana dress Gershwin had purchased with Frida’s help. George painted a portrait of his dear friend Emily Paley in the dress.

Later, prior to sending the collection to the Library of Congress, the Trust invited me over and privately shared with me copies of color pictures of the 1935 Mexico trip that George had taken. In return, I annotated the locations and people in the photos. Here is Frida modeling the dress in one of several pictures George took of her.

Library of Congress, 1935. Permission: Ira and Leonore Gershwin Trusts.
 

George Gershwin first met Diego in 1932 on a specially chartered car of a train going from NYC to Philly. The passengers, including composers Aaron Copland and Carlos Chavez, were headed to the premier of the Mexican composer’s symphonic ballet, H.P. (Horsepower) for which Rivera had designed the sets and costumes. According to Lucienne Bloch’s journal Frida was ill and couldn’t make the trip to Philadelphia, though photos seem to show her there. According to Lucienne, Diego, Frida, and George had sodas together in 1933 after a concert of her father’s, Ernest Bloch, music in NYC.

 

George Gershwin ultimately ran into Diego and Frida in Mexico. The October 1935 Broadway premiere of Porgy and Bess was poorly received by the music critics, the score was not operatic, the cast was Black. A dejected Gershwin escaped at the suggestion of his cousin artist Henry Botkin, who had taught George to paint. Gershwin serendipitously checked into the San Ángel Inn, across the street from Diego and Frida’s studios. They spent time together and gathered along with Isamu Noguchi, Miguel Covarrubias, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and others at a party for Gershwin hosted by socialite Estrella Elizaga. (Isamu had done a bronze bust of George Gershwin in 1929. In 1925 Miguel Covarrubias had done a Gershwin caricature for his book, The Prince of Wales and Other Americans.) In a 2018 phone interview from Wales, the late Cynthia Boissevain, Estrella’s daughter, told me that George played and sang Porgy and Bess for the guests. Though it was past her bedtime, the 11 year old Cynthia watched from the stairs. She directed me to their house on Paseo de la Reforma, where the party had taken place. (Photo of a grown-up Cynthia with Diego about 11 years later.)

 

In 1937 at a Beverly Hills party hosted by actor and avid art collector Edward G. Robinson to honor composer Igor Stravinsky, Gershwin met Paulette Goddard. He wrote to Emily Paley on March 16, 1937:

“Gladys [Robinson] sat me next to the most glamorous & enchanting girl in the west. Paulette Goddard. She is a really exciting creature. Gladys knows my taste better than I thought. The whole evening was grand, what with those pictures, Stravinsky, Miss P.G….”

Immediately smitten, they had a brief encounter. But four months later he was dead from an undiagnosed brain tumor. (Sadly, MTT died from brain cancer.) In 1937’s Shall We Dance movie; Gershwin’s long-time friend Fred Astaire sang “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” to Ginger Rogers. The bittersweet song, written near the end of George’s life, reportedly refers to his feelings for Paulette. Gershwin had encouraged Paulette to go to Mexico to get her portrait painted by his friend Diego Rivera. She would not make it there until May 1940, but the visit irrevocably changed Diego’s life. (Below: That’s Nieves Orozco as the “attendant.” The other portrait is being painted by Irene Bohus. )

UPI/Bettmann Newsphotos, NY

Divorced from Frida in late 1939, Diego was reportedly slated to marry artist Irene Bohus or his model Nieves Orozco (whom I interviewed). His infatuation upon meeting Paulette (he and Gershwin were not the first, nor the last) caused him to burn those two marital bridges. Paulette, however, was just passing through. So Diego remained single by default.

Frida was brutally interrogated by the police in the wake of Leon Trotsky’s assassination in August 1940. She was a “suspect” because Trotsky had lived in her Casa Azul and because she and her sister Cristina had unwittingly had the assassin Ramon Mercader over for lunch. The police probably didn’t know Frida and Trotsky had been an item. Alarmingly, the police accused, that since she was divorced from Diego and her father was German, that she wasn’t even a Mexican. Being a German national passing herself off as Jewish was not a good combination at the time. Diego feared for her safety in a country not unfriendly with the Nazis. On August 26, 1940 she was expeditiously naturalized a Mexican and applied for a visa. Her confidant Dr. Leo Eloesser had told her to come to him in San Francisco and a fragile Frida showed up in early September 1940.

Shortly after Frida arrived she was checked into St. Luke’s Hospital on Valencia. Diego orchestrated a liaison for her with Heinz Berggruen, his translator and chauffeur, to keep her engaged while he finished the Pan American Unity mural at the Treasure Island fair. It was still not half painted. On December 8, 1940, his 54th birthday, Diego re-married Frida in San Francisco’s City Hall. But their pre-nups stipulated that they would no longer be lovers. From papers Julia Bergman and I located in Canada, this stipulation was observed. There would be no infidelity because that was not part of the “deal.” (This was the last research trip Julia and I ever took. She passed away in 2017 after a 20 year friendship/partnership.)

Prior to this time Frida had only two solo shows. The first in late 1938 at the Julian Levy Gallery in NYC might have been influenced by Gershwin, who supported Levy’s film program. (Has anyone ever come across the colored drawing of Frida, which George said that he did?) The other show in early 1939 in Paris was supposed to have been managed by Andre Breton, but was botched and only salvaged by Marcel DuChamp and Mary Reynolds. Breton had met Frida when he came to visit Trotsky in Mexico and he wanted to foist her off as a Surrealist. She famously replied, “I don’t paint my dreams, I paint my own reality.” Frida’s only solo show in Mexico came shortly  before she died.

Frida’s early access to the limelight came mainly through Diego. Edward G. Robinson bought four of Frida’s works in 1938, but only under duress. Diego forced Robinson to buy them to acquire his own work as related to me by David and Karen Crommie, who interviewed Robinson as part of their first ever documentary on Frida. It was clear that Dolores Olmedo only bought Frida’s work under the same duress. The two women did not not like each other. (The Museo Dolores Olmedo has recently re-opened with its major Frida holdings.)

Earlier, Diego was “married” and had children with two other woman artists in Paris, Angelina Beloff and Marevna, who have been relegated to footnotes in his life story. Might the same fate have awaited Frida, if she and Diego hadn’t remarried?

On June 11, 1940 Frida had written Diego just after he arrived in San Francisco that she was being treated badly in Mexico because she wasn’t one of the upper tier of famous artists and above all because she was no longer his wife. (Escrituras, Raquel Tibol)

    ”…todas la demás gentes me tratan como su basuda desde que no tengo el honor de pertenecer a la élite de los artistas famosos y sobre todo que no soy tu mujer.”

If Porgy and Bess had instead enjoyed a better initial reception, history’s trajectory would have enscribed a different arc. Gershwin wouldn’t have gone to Mexico to run into Rivera and to later offer his suggestion to Goddard. In fact he would not have met Goddard if he had not exiled NYC for Hollywood. His brain tumor might have been diagnosed earlier. We would have had more of George’s music. Diego might have married Nieves. (Bohus had shown up in San Francisco pregnant by Diego, immediately disqualifying herself.) History’s outcomes balance on a knife-edge. Instead, we have Frida becoming a global phenomenon. Although he does not appear in the mural, George Gershwin’s pivotal role in our story is almost like a deus ex machina in a Greek play, an off stage agent driving the story.

Thank you for the gift of your Music and the postcard, MTT.

Abrazos,
Will

April 2026

Dear Friends of Diego,

One of Diego Rivera’s recurring themes in his U.S. murals is the reconciliation of Art and Science. He knew there was a synergy in their fusion. Our long-time partners, Cultural Heritage Imaging, have just published their 3D documentation of SFAI’s Diego Rivera mural, The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City, 1931. The mural is in pristine condition. Public access awaits the infrastructure improvements to re-open the old SFAI campus.

 
Like CHI’s previously published Diego Rivera’s San Francisco Masterpiece Virtual Preservation of “Pan American Unity”, these records, archived at Stanford, leave future generations analytical benchmarks for the physical state of these two San Francisco legacies, which can last centuries. Moreover, the mural was moved and data about the logistics is available. Atthowe, the art movers, recently published a synopsis of “moving the unmovable.” Here is a link to the UNAM’s team report about Wire Rope Isolators and Real-Time Vibration Monitoring. The mural has been blessed with high-end documentation by world-class entities.
 
Hopefully, we’ll get a chance in the future to generate a similar photogrammetric record for the City Club’s Allegory of California. Logistically, it is the hardest to record because of the physical constraints of a stairwell.
 
Antonio Sotomayor

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 painted murals at Grace Cathedral near the end of his life. His nearby house was at H3 LeRoy Place, which Grace and he occupied for 40 years.  In 2013 I was invited to tour the house, which was just as he left it. There was an autographed photo of Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy and LBJ’s press secretary. Pierre’s mother Jehanne (née Biétry) Salinger was a local art dealer, lecturer, and editor of Argus Art Magazine.  Also on display was a book dedicated to Dr. Leo Eloesser by Spanish Civil War medical comrades with an inscription ala “In solidarity we stood up to our elbows in blood…” San Francisco seemed like a smaller place then and the stories often overlapped.

 

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.

 
 
Here is Rivera in 1940 with some members of The Family Club, a split off from the Bohemian Club. These are mainly artists Rivera met on his first 1930 visit. Left to Right, Standing Lucien Laubdt (Beach Chalet), Antonio Sotomayor (Grace Cathedral), José Moya del Pino (Coit Tower), Otis Oldfield (Coit Tower), William Gerstle (SFAI), artist Phil Little, architect Timothy Pflueger, seated are Diego Rivera and Charles Black (head of PG&E and Shirley Temple’s father-in-law).
 

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.

Untitled, study for the mural Pan American Unity, Golden Gate International Exposition, San Francisco, 1940, SFMOMA
 
However, this wasn’t the only important information we found. We had a picture in which most of the figures were identified, except for one. The younger man in the center of the photo was still an unknown. On a hunch I sent the image to Marshall and he confirmed that it was Johnny Cumming, who he said had “flaming red hair.” This is where I went astray. In the roster of fair employees, there was a “J.E. Cumming.” I jumped on it and followed the trail, although it turned out it wasn’t our Johnny. Beware of imposters.
 

Recently, CCSF Librarian Lisa Velarde, was contacted by a relative of Johnny Cumming and in doing research in Julia Bergman’s Rivera Collection came across the real Johnny Cumming; John Noble Cumming. As Marshall had told me years ago, Johnny died in a B-29 crash late in WWII, not quite 24 years of age. In this picture, he was 20 years old. This picture has kept Johnny Cumming alive for me. It also turned out, amazingly, that Johnny had previously known Rivera in Mexico, when the Cumming family fled China in 1934. Johnny is reportedly a figure in Man, Controller of the Universe according to his family.

 
 

N.D., Left to right: Edward G. Robinson, Ottorino Ronchi, Irene Bohus, Timothy Pflueger, James Noble Cumming, Dudley Carter, Mona Hofmann, Diego Rivera

 

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