Dear Friends of Diego,

 

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.

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.)

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.

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