Rivera Revisited

Hayden Herrera, the standard biographer of Frida Kahlo, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera’s painter wife, recently beguiled a sellout San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Herbst audience with tales of how lovers Diego and Frida recharged each other’s muses with their reciprocal attentions. But long before Frida turned him on sexually and esthetically, Rivera had gotten up to speed in Paris by absorbing the energies of the Cubist movement, that sophisticated European reaction to the geometric planes and volumes of so-called “primitive” African sculpture.
Middle-class Diego had another reason to be charged up by folk art because he wanted to improvise his muse to influence Mexican peons in the revolutionary proletarian Mexico that began in 1910. His mature work in fact is rightly explained as a cubist realism in which the grim struggles and happy hours of the Mexican underclasses are celebrated (he hoped) prophetically.

So the show now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a kind of warm-up operation for the socialist romanticism of his best work. (There is a related show on Cubist prints and books at the Legion of Honor.) Cubism was in effect a kind of five finger exercise for what Rivera would ultimately become—the conscience of his country in the throes of social transformation.

San Francisco is the best American city in which to celebrate Rivera’s achievement. Here in 1934 he was commissioned to do a workers’ mural for the San Francisco Art Institute (800 Chestnut Street). What a lift for student artists exhibiting for the first time, to have the Diego mural blessing them benevolently from on high.

There are two other S.F. venues so adorned: City College, and, wonder of wonders, the Club Room of the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange, a commission that would seem to fly in the face of ideological impasses. While Nelson Rockefeller Jr. was lamely (and ultimately unsuccessfully) trying to cool down the hot capitalist tempers of the managers of the RCA Building deep in the heart of that tax shelter belt a.k.a. Rockefeller Center, Timothy Pfleuger was insisting that “his” artist be left free—to paint Lenin, Marx, and other commie unworthies onto his allegorical canvases. Imagine, broadminded old New York removing the controversial panels, while cosmo San Fran coolly keeps its Rivera in the most right wing eyrie in town.

Nineteen thirty-four was a big year for San Francisco public art beyond the Rivera incident. This is the golden anniversary of the Coit Tower murals; they were closed off for years and years from public view because of vandalism. Imagine the public trashing its own backyard.

Free Saturday guided tours of these savory murals are now offered, courtesy of the Guide Service of the Friends of the Free Library. If you can afford $12.95 for a major good read, fall by the Museum of Modern Art’s Book Store on Van Ness and McAllister for a copiously illustrated Frida by New York critic Hayden Herrera. The Riveras loved San Francisco and San Francisco repaid the favoritism.

(Patrick Hazard is a freelance journalist and a recent contributor to the San Francisco Business Journal. Diego Rivera: The Cubist Years will be exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art through November 11, 1984.)