“Friends of Diego” Newsletter

December 2024

Scott Atthowe installing Louise Bourgeois’ sculpture Crouching Spider on the Embarcadero, San Francisco, 2007.
Dear Friends of Diego,

As we commemorate Diego Rivera’s December 8th (1886) birthday, we bid goodby to Scott Atthowe, one of the best friends Diego’s Pan American Unity mural ever had. Our thoughts go out to the family, friends, and to the employee-owners of the company that he founded. It was an honor to be invited to Atthowe’s company holiday party.

We first met Scott in 2004, when his company installed the 14-ton Olmec Head replica at City College. In conjunction with the opening of the new DeYoung Museum, the late Harry Parker III, then director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, had brokered this gift from the Mexican state of Veracruz for City College. He confided that Atthowe was always his first choice to move fine art.

In 2011 we enlisted Scott, art conservator Anne Rosenthal, and the late structural engineer Jim Guthrie to start assessing the logistics of moving the Pan American Unity mural. Since 1999 I had known that the mural would have to be moved, eventually. The Getty Conservation Institute’s Francesca Pique in a one-day assessment had alerted me that the mural, which was in very good condition, could last hundreds of years; its current home, the Diego Rivera Theatre, wouldn’t. She encouraged us to do a more thorough analysis. Previous discussions about the inadvisability of moving the mural were rendered moot. Scott was adamant that the mural could be safely moved.

A group of outside patrons led by Herb and Nylda Gemple proposed making a new, stand-alone home for the mural and funded the assessment through contributions to the Foundation of CCSF (Diego Rivera Account). Chancellor Don Griffin offered space on CCSF’s western reservoir. In the excitement I hadn’t thought this project out very well. There was no revenue stream associated with the mural. How would we maintain a stand-alone building? The crisis over CCSF’s accreditation made fundraising unfeasible and the project died quietly. However, this led to the idea of the mural being showcased in the (still) long-awaited new Performing Arts Center.

The team investigated and we stopped when it became necessary to actually do messy exploratory coring of the concrete wall. Scott then promised me that he wouldn’t retire until the mural was successfully moved. He was true to his word.

In 2017 SFMOMA made an offer to CCSF to borrow the mural. This is the singular best thing that has ever happened for the mural. The team selected by SFMOMA to move the mural included Scott and Anne Rosenthal. (Scott could have easily been the model for John Brown in the mural.) The moving team included Sheedy Crane and the brain trust from UNAM, a consortium of expert Mexican art conservators, mechanical engineers, and technologists. In 2019 we had a wonderful conference in Mexico City to kick off this SFMOMA-led collaboration. Getting the steel-framed mural removed from its attachment to the theatre lobby wall was the most perilous part of the project. Bryan Cain, now Atthowe’s CEO, said, “This is…harder than anything I’ve ever been involved in.” The team solved all of the logistical problems without damage to the masterpiece. After a two-and-a-half-year display at SFMOMA, where 600,000 patrons enjoyed the mural, it is now back at CCSF in storage. The earliest the new PAC will be up is three years from now: groundbreaking is tentatively scheduled for Spring 2025 and the scheduled duration of the project is tentatively set at 30 months (per CCSF Facilities).

SCOTT ATTHOWE (1944-2024)

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing on October 31st of Scott Atthowe, our founder. He was an early pioneer of specialized art-handling and shipping, founding Atthowe Fine Art Services in the 1970s. He built a small trucking company into an internationally acclaimed full-service business renowned for excellence. His company provided good jobs, always including full healthcare, to a skilled staff mostly comprised of artists. It also pioneered green practices, at one time having the largest solar array in Oakland on one of its warehouses. As an innovative thinker, inciteful mentor, and generous donor, he was an important part of the San Francisco/Bay Area arts community.Before retirement, he realized his dream to sell his company to its employees. With unwavering dedication to his values and a tenacious will to stay the course, he left his employees a wonderful, thriving business organized as a California Worker-Owned Cooperative. His legacy of leadership and excellence continues to touch a great many people. We are endlessly grateful for his life-long commitment and his generosity, and we are honored to carry his legacy into the future.

Had a wonderful meeting with Meg and Betsy Partridge at SFMOMA. They are photographer Rondal Partridge’s daughters. Imogen Cunningham was their grandmother and Dorothea Lange their godmother. They renewed permission for me to use Rondal’s photo of Diego inventing our mural, my late partner Julia Bergman’s favorite. Julia had purchased a copy of the photo and hoped to use it as the cover photo of a book we planned. Betsy has just finished a children’s book about the Golden Gate Bridge and is working on a new book about Emmy Lou Packard.

Work continues on the photogrammetry website for the SFAI mural, which will be hosted on the Stanford server very soon, as is the site dedicated to Pan American Unity‘s photogrammetry shoot.

Julia Bergman and I first met Henry Ramos in Mexico City in May 2006 at Dra. Guadalupe Rivera Marin’s “Encuentro Internacional de Pintura Mural (International Encounter of Mural Painting).” Henry had helped her organize the event along with Mural Arts Philadelphia. The friendship between the recently departed Ann Rockefeller and the late Guadalupe Rivera was a great reconciliation of the two families driven apart over the Rockefeller incident. A great friend to our work and a believer in saving the stories, Henry relates how the reconciliation happened: https://www.mauerkunst.com/folk-treasures-of-mexico/.

Art conservators Anne Rosenthal and Kiernan Graves report that the Victor Arnautoff murals at the old Palo Alto Medical Clinic have been restored. When the building restoration is complete, it will become the Palo Alto History Museum.

Michael Owen, a former CCSF student who helped facilitate my research at the Ira and Leonore Gershwin Trust as their archivist, has a new biography out, Ira Gershwin, A Life in Words.

There is a documentary being created about Alejandro Murgia, past Poet Laureate of San Francisco. Here is a link outlining the very compelling work and soliciting help in funding it.

Abrazos,

Will

There is some redundancy as we try to make every newsletter stand-alone.

September 2024

Art Conservators: (L to R) : Kiernan Graves, Anne Rosenthal, Ellie Ohara, Ria German-Carter.  Photos: Will Maynez

Dear Friends of Diego,

[NOTE:  Shaping San Francisco will host Art & Politics: Will Maynez Interprets Diego Rivera on Wednesday, September 25 at 7:30 pm, 518 Valencia St., San Francisco, 94110.]

August 21st (and 22nd), the mural got an intervention while in storage at City College. I got to see my dear friends the art conservators and got the left-overs from our sumptuous dumpling lunch. All in all, a very good day. Joining us for lunch were Bryan Cain, CEO of Atthowe, which moved the mural and years ago our 14-ton Olmec head (soon to be relocated on CCSF’s campus), Michelle Barger, SFMOMA Head of Conservation, and David Funk, SFMOMA Director, Exhibitions and Program Management. David, as a student at CCSF, was a docent for the Pan American Unity mural. The mural is getting the professional care it merits. The back of each fresco panel had a gray “panel mount” attached to it to strengthen it and to facilitate transporting and ultimately mounting the panels on to a supporting frame for display. The “panel mount” effectively doubled the weight of each mural panel. The reddish racks holding the stored mural panels are anchored to the floor of the old Diego Rivera Theatre lobby.

Lead conservator Kiernan Graves of Site & Studio Conservation, LLC. wrote me:

“After Pan American Unity was moved into storage, the conservation team removed the protection and inspected the surface for any signs of damage. There were a few tiny areas (about 1mm sq) where the sacrificial repair material was lost. The team stabilized and in-painted the areas.”

Soon some members of the team will be working on the 1932 Victor Arnautoff murals at what was the Palo Alto Medical Clinic:

When Palo Alto Medical Clinic—the oldest of the three historic physician groups affiliated with the Palo Alto Medical Foundation— formed in 1930, the idea of doctors working together was so revolutionary that some thought it to be anticompetitive, or even communist. Palo Alto Medical Clinic was not only one of the first physician groups in the country, but also one of the first in the region to offer a specialist in obstetrics and surgery, and a pediatrician who also happened to be one of Palo Alto’s first female physicians.

Dr. Russell V. Lee, who commissioned Arnautoff, had socialized with Diego Rivera when he was in San Francisco in 1930-31 and it seems their politics and social concerns were in sync.

(The following information is excerpted from: https://www.paloaltohistory.org/russel-va-lee.php. But, many links to my research from ten years ago, are now dead. This is the “Achilles Heel” of storing information digitally.)

In the 1930s, Lee was an early critic of Nazi Germany, sometimes sheltering war refugees in his own home.  After Pearl Harbor, he served as a major, colonel and chief of preventive medicine in the Air Corps, as well as the personal physician for the U.S. Secretary of War.  As part of his duties, he travelled to every fighting front in the war, an experience he called “exceedingly interesting.”

But support for group practice was not Lee’s only controversial belief.  He was an early advocate of the prevention of venereal disease, actually writing the legislation for California’s VD law that would establish a California bureau to fight sexual diseases.  He even managed to usher it into law, lobbying the state legislature with $8,000 he had won in a high-stakes poker game. Lee was also an early backer of legal abortions, the right to die, birth control and drug legalization.   

SF Chronicle, Sunday January 25, 1931

These Palo Alto murals are an example of Diego Rivera’s first visit bearing fruit for artists, almost immediately.  Medicine would be a theme that would be the subject for Bernard Zakheim at UCSF and for Diego Rivera in Mexico. Here is a link to a video about Dr. Russell and Dorothy Lee’s other donations to the city of Palo Alto.

A generous benefactor has donated a 1941 letter, which solicited funds for the expansion of the Pan American Unity mural. The expansion would have tripled the size of the mural and would have been painted on site. However, the proposed Grand Library to house the mural was never built and Diego was never to return to San Francisco.

Cultural Heritage Imaging posted their photogrammetry shoot of our Pan American Unity mural on the Stanford website. Now, doing similar work on the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) Rivera mural, they have a preview video in which I’m interviewed. The Stanford website with all the SFAI imaging results isn’t public yet, but I’ll post the link on the website when it is. Much historical documentation has come from the SFAI crew, Becky Alexander, Jeff Gunderson, and Zoya Kocur, who have added many insights. If you watch the video, look for the “Easter Egg” they added after the credits. Tip of the hat to CHI’s Carla Schroer, Mark Mudge, and Marlin Lum for leaving this record of another Rivera mural for posterity. Work continues on exploring the logistics required to open the mural to the public.

716 Montgomery, Diego and Frida’s 2nd floor residence on their first 1930-31 visit to San Francisco, is up FOR SALE.

Paul A. Juley, 1867-1937, photographer (1931), AAA

20 years ago, my late research partner Julia Bergman and I toured it. A photo of Diego and Frida in front of a fireplace, rested on the mantle of that fireplace. I revisited it recently with Michael Gschwend, the agent selling it, and Collier Gwin of the adjacent Foster-Gwin Gallery at 712 Montgomery. Collier initiated a very interesting conversation about artist Parker Hall, who occupied the residence after Diego and Frida had separately left. We talked about the two fresco murals that Hall left on the walls about the US renaming the city from “Yerba Buena” to “San Francisco.” Besides leaving a mess of papers and photos, Diego left a calling card, two fresco portraits painted directly on the wall. We came upon the probable location. Untitled [Head of a woman] and Untitled [Head of a miner], were authenticated, removed from the wall, and donated to SFMOMA in 1999 by Carl James. They are not currently on display, but were part of SFMOMA’s exhibit Diego Rivera’s America (July 16, 2022–January 3, 2023).


John Weatherwax described the interior in his short story “The Queen of Montgomery Street.” The backyard opened as 27 Jessop Place (now Hotaling Place) and was sculptor Ralph Stackpole’s work yard. Other sculptors used the space. It was featured in a shoot by his son Peter Stackpole in Life magazine (October 1940, ART, page 79). Today that space is the private Villa Taverna. Our late friend, Charles Fracchia, wrote a book, When the Water Came up to Montgomery Street. There are squiggly lines on Hotaling, which represents the edge of the Bay in the old days, which is depicted in one of the Parker Hall frescoes.

Years ago, I was called in to look at the muted remnants of a fresco in a building being refurbished on the corner of Hotaling and Washington. The heavily damaged fresco seemed to have been a communal effort of several artists in the 1930’s. By using a mister, I was able to get the colors to pop out long enough to take a picture. It was my guess that the central figure was Amelia Earhart. The remnants were covered with Plexiglas and left in place in the condo, whose windows look out directly on the Transamerica Pyramid. (In the old days the windows would have looked out on to the “Monkey Block.”) The unit may have been occupied by Rivera’s assistant Clifford Wight, who assisted Rivera on his first San Francisco murals. He painted at Coit Tower, where he reportedly added a controversial Hammer and Sickle, which were painted over later. Old 1930’s directories have him living in the building, but the apartment designations give no clues as to which was his. Frida painted a portrait of his wife Jean Wight early in 1931, somewhere in these buildings. With so many artists living in proximity, they visited each other across the rooftops. We went up on the rooftop but were unable to find the now-blocked skyline behind Jean Wight in her portrait.

Here is the contact information for those who might be interested in the property:

Michael Gschwend
Senior Vice President

KIDDER MATHEWS

101 Montgomery Street, Suite 2800, San Francisco, CA 94104

T 415.229.8908 | C 415.265.2822 | LIC NO 01406626

michael.gschwend@kidder.com | kidder.com

In the latest telenovela installment about who has rights to the very lucrative Frida market: Cristina Kahlo: ‘They have turned Frida into a brand’ | Heraldo USA

On a last happy note: Happy Birthday, Donald Cairns (September 27, 1935). Donald is the five-year-old boy kneeling in the lower center of the mural. He is the son of Emmy Lou Packard, Diego Rivera’s principal assistant on Pan American Unity.

Saludos,

Will

March, 2024

Dear Friends of Diego, 

As I watch the mural being de-installed, it is hard to believe that the mural’s 30 month stay at SFMOMA is over. Many on this team worked on installing the masterpiece. The world-class, multi-talented team is exactly what the mural merits. From the heady day of its unveiling, the mural has been showered with love by the over 600,000 visitors who have stood in awe of Rivera’s brilliance. After 80 years the mural finally got the exposure, it deserved. To put the number of SFMOMA visitors in context, a little history.

 

 Upper Panel 1 being lowered. Photo: Will Maynez

 

Almost immediately after his arrival on June 5, 1940, Rivera decided to make the mural much larger by adding two panels at either end to those 6 panels he had contracted to paint.

Rivera’s contracted for this 6-panel mural. Photo: Ansel Adams, c. June 5, 1940

 

Seven weeks later, on July 25 Rivera had the scaffolding taken down to unveil the full-scale sinopia preparatory drawing on 10 panels. [Note: the lower edge of the mural is 14′ off the ground. Pflueger planned to mount the mural over the books in the new library’s reading room. Unfortunately, this would have made the mural visually inaccessible, and tours would have been difficult in a quiet reading room. At the Golden Gate International Exposition’s “Art in Action” program, since Diego was 30′ above, Miné Okubo demonstrated at ground level how to paint a fresco (at 2:12). In the sinopia drawing, Rivera had not yet included Timothy Pflueger in the lower center. Trotsky had not yet been assassinated, so the bloody murder weapon was not in Stalin’s hand.]

Sinopia drawing c. July 25, 1940. Unknown GGIE photographer. 

 

If he started painting his fresco by July 29 after the scaffolding was re-erected, Diego would have only painted half the mural on September 29, when the GGIE’s second season closed. Now, Rivera and a small crew worked in the dank airplane hangar and painted the second half of the mural without an audience. They had a small hot plate to keep their hands warm against the chilly fall weather on the bay. 

 

Francisco Eppens Helguera commented, “What always impressed me the most about Diego— he replied, after a long silence— was his capacity to work. He could paint for hours on end, with unbelievable stamina.” Diego finished and signed the 22′ x 74′ mural, 1628 square feet, on November 29, 1940, the date of an evening private viewing. How many attended is unknown, though the SFAI archives has lists of invitees. Diego’s list had Hollywood people, but who knows which ones came. In any case the numbers were modest.

 

The finished mural finally opened to the public a couple of days later on December 1:

 

“The occasion was a preview of Diego Rivera’s vast, super colossal, and possibly slightly dizzying fresco mural,” “open house a great success”, “more than 1,000 motorists,” “Silent memorial service for the GGIE…,” (SF Exam, 12.2.40, p.8)

  

So even the crowds of the public showing were modest, maybe several thousands. Perhaps, only 5,000 saw the finished mural before it was crated. The mural went into storage for 20 years. Architect Timothy Pflueger, who died in 1946 and Diego Rivera, who died in 1957, never saw the mural again.

 

Over the 60 years the mural was in the lobby of the little theater at CCSF, visitors numbered in the several thousands. Lacking signage, the mural was hard to find on campus and only die-heart Rivera fans made the long trek to City College. Even then, quite often the mural was not publicly available. College theatrical and musical performances were a modest, periodic draw. Outside school groups came at their own initiative. The mural had been woefully underappreciated and Diego’s daughter, Lupe, pointed it out, often. In 2017 when the CCSF interim Chancellor asked me to hear SFMOMA’s offer, then museum director Neal Benezra enticed me by promising that the mural would “never ever be little-known” again. He was true to his word. However, the mural’s long-term stewardship is the looming question. Even while in storage, the mural will require periodic inspections. It is imperative that protocols be put in place by the College to maintain the mural’s current pristine condition.

 

The mural’s stay at SFMOMA ended January 21, but it went out with a bang. Repeat visitors were numerous and some people said that this was their 5th visit. Having the mural publicly accessible for free was a big draw. On the last Saturday one woman told me that she left LA at 6 am to not miss another chance to see the masterpiece. Diver Helen Crlenkovich’s daughter, granddaughter, and great granddaughter came.  Daughter Bari Lee had already come by several times from Santa Cruz. (Pflueger took Rivera to see the diver practicing at the Fairmont Hotel’s Terrace Plunge, now the Tonga Room.)

 

The resurgence of the Moscone Center, just down Howard Street from the museum, was an unexpected boon. For a couple of years, a variety of professional groups came by to see the mural, while at their international conferences. The papers reported 12,000 architects came to one conference. In addition, psychiatrists, computer game developers, cyber security professionals, and others came by to see the mural during their visit to San Francisco. The mural was a goodwill ambassador for the city. The quantity of foot traffic gave the mural world-wide exposure. Thousands of students came through SFMOMA’s outreach.

 

The litigation between SFMOMA and CCSF was resolved amicably. (SFMOMA and CCSF Joint Press Statement.) The mural was prepared for the move to CCSF as conservators protected vulnerable edges with cyclododecane. This wonderful concoction eventually sublimates without leaving any traces on the mural panels. The first panels arrived at CCSF on March 9 and the whole mural is scheduled to be delivered by the end of the month.  Crated for travel, the upper panel weighed 14,000 pounds, the lower panel 6,000 pounds (per the crane operator). The mural will be in storage for an unknown period awaiting the long-delayed construction of a new home on the west campus of City College.

 

Among the visitors, each came with their own understandings and viewpoints, their own intellectual bandwidths. One of the lessons learned from the mural’s stay at SFMOMA is that every history comes with an agenda, normally advantageous to the storyteller. Two visiting young Russian couples had been taught that the USSR entered the war in June 1941. They hadn’t learned that Stalin had been allied up to that point with Hitler through the 1939 Non-Aggression Pact.  Similarly, many people here don’t know about the Nazi influence in this country, the milieu in which Diego was painting, or of the US incursion into Japan in the 1850’s, the seeds of which resulted in the war in the Pacific.
Other Rivera murals

 

I have been in regular contact with the librarians/archivists of the San Francisco Art Institute, whose historical papers had been moved in proximity to SFMOMA. Finally, word on the future of SFAI’s campus has arrived.

 

“Those questions were largely answered Thursday when a newly formed nonprofit, composed of prominent local arts       leaders and backed by philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, purchased the 93,000-square-foot campus through a limited liability company, BMAI LLC, for roughly $30 million, or $322 per square foot. The property was previously valued at $40 million, sans the Rivera mural.” (SF Chronicle) Here’s an SFGATE article. The great thing is that the mural had been conserved just before SFAI closed. Once the infrastructure renewal has happened at the site, the mural will be ready to be seen. Here’s a NYT article.

 

Here is a 2016 documentary about Diego Rivera’s Detroit murals by Julio Ramos, emeritus professor at UCB. The Detroit Institue of Arts was just named the best museum in the country by USA Today.

 

Here is a link to school curriculum around Diego Rivera (an alert, not an endorsement). Our work got a plug as “this amazing website“, also offered is a scavenger hunt worksheet for out mural.

 

Frida News

 

This is a big month for Frida.  Diego y Yo (1949) just sold for $34.9M. Amazon’s Frida, which premiered at Sundance, opened this month.  Some have commented on Frida’s art being depicted with animations. It’s almost like a life drawing class of Frida. Each documentary takes a different angle and sadly San Francisco gets short shrift in this one. Given that there are a few unique stories that might have fit nicely into the work, it was a deficiency for me.  Diego left all of his and Frida’s artistic intellectual property rights to Mexico. The documentary credits are extensive, including, surprisingly, me. The Frida Kahlo Foundation claims all the other rights to Frida and is taking on Amazon products about Frida. (There has been no definitive word about whether the BBC2 will do a Becoming Frida, Season 2.)

 

Other Notables

 

The milieu that Diego and Frida inhabited is start-studded. One of Diego’s great friends in Paris was the Italian Modigliani. Tragically, Diego would be in Italy studying artists like Giotto and how to paint frescoes, when Amedeo died.

 

Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin is referenced in lower panel 2 with the cannon turrets, bayonets, and mother with dead child. Eisenstein’s forays into Hollywood let him meet Chaplin and Disney.

Sargent Johnson executed reliefs of athletes for Architect Timothy Pflueger, both at Washington High School and on the old gymnasiums at City College. Currently there is an exhibition of him at the Huntington. At City College, when the old gymnasiums were demolished, the Sargent Johnson bas-reliefs were cut out and stored on campus, hopefully, awaiting the opportunity to be repurposed.

Transitions

 

Harry Parker III has passed away. For the opening of the new DeYoung Museum in 2004, Harry traveled to Veracruz, Mexico to borrow an Olmec head for the inaugural season. While there he was offered an authorized Olmec head reproduction for San Francisco. He directed Mexico’s gift to CCSF, where it sits in the Frida Garden, adjacent to the mural. It will be relocated as CCSF’s Ocean Campus is reconfigured as the new buildings go up.

 

Michael Strunsky, nephew of Ira Gershwin, ran the Ira and Leonore Gershwin Trust in San Francisco. At a tour of the mural, his wife Jean alerted me to some interesting items they had in their collection, housed near SFMOMA.  Michael Owen, their archivist, had studied at CCSF’s Library program.  Over the years the Trust had been very generous in sharing copies of artifacts/photos and anecdotes with me. Many became integral parts of my Gershwin play. Michael Strunsky shared with me that George Gershwin was so devastated by the poor reception for Porgy and Bess that he considered giving up music to just paint. This certainly colored his encounter with a group of Mexican artists like Rivera, Siqueiros, and Covarrubias in November 1935. Soon, some of Gershwin’s musical works, like Rhapsody in Blue will enter the public domain. The Gershwin Collection is at the Library of Congress and this year’s Gershwin Prize was awarded to Elton John and Bernie Taupin.

 

 

Saludos,

Will

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