It was the 1930s. The United States was entering one of the biggest financial crises in its history, if not the biggest to date, the Great Depression. Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo began a series of stays in the neighboring country. Rivera’s fame and reputation, despite his publicly communist position, together with the fever for the rethinking of fresco art in Mexico, Muralism, seduced several American patrons who, despite their reservations about the crisis, did not hesitate, but they did struggle, in hiring that tall man, with a dissident character and without mince words to intervene the walls of their buildings.
The famous and labyrinthine couple’s first stay on American soil was in San Francisco, where they arrived in 1931. Diego had been contacted and hired by one of the most influential art patrons on the West Coast, magnate William Lewis Gerstle, who He was a generous benefactor and president in turn of the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), today one of the oldest art academies in his country, founded in 1871. Rivera was commissioned to intervene the north wall of one of the main ships of the institute.
Gerstle, moreover, was one of the men responsible for the not at all easy task of obtaining visas for Frida and Diego in the face of active governmental and social resistance due to the muralist’s political inclination, since he was an active member, although frequently with quarrels, of the Communist Party. Mexican. The anti-Rivera unblocking in the US and the green light for the entry of those destined to become icons of world art was the product of a sum of wills from the guild to power in art in that country.
The cost of his work, according to the specialized media The Art Newspaper, was 2,500 dollars at the time and, according to information from the SFAI, the Guanajuato artist took exactly one month (from May 1 to 31, 1931) to finish the execution of his mural work. The title: “The making of a fresco showing the building of a city”, simplified in Spanish as “The creation of a fresco”.
The San Francisco Art Institute itself explains the work as follows: “the mural shows the construction of a city and the making of a fresco, including the various people involved in the commission, such as engineers, artist’s assistants, sculptors, architects and workers in general. The central figure of a hard-hatted worker, depicted in outsized proportions, can be seen as an example of the status Rivera conferred on the worker and is the main theme of the mural (represented) within his mural.”
In the central part, Rivera painted a man sitting on the scaffolding, looking at the wall, with his back to the viewer, holding a palette and a brush. It is about the artist himself, who was captured together with the group of collaborators of the work in San Francisco and the group of millionaires and diplomats who made his trip to the northern country possible, including the then United States ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Morrow , another essential piece.
The complex is one of the greatest treasures that the institute has protected until now, although it recently came close to losing it.
The work will stay at home
The pandemic came to exacerbate the financial liquidity problems within the SFAI. Such was the crisis aggravated by the closure of cultural institutions to the public due to the public health problem that, according to the US press, the institute considered the sale of the piece as the only alternative.
According to the Artnet portal, on December 23, 2020, the institute’s vice president, Jennifer Rissler, sent a letter to the institute’s staff in which she excused that “all options to save SFAI are at stake” and did not rule out the “offers to assign (the rights) or sell” Rivera’s work definitively, by the way, valued at about 50 million dollars. A possible interested party, the press reported, was the filmmaker George Lucas, whose Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is under construction in Los Angeles and, it is expected, could begin operations in 2023.
However, last week it emerged that the San Francisco Art Institute received a grant of about $200,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which operates on four levels of philanthropy, including in favor of museums, arts education and preservation.
These resources, it is understood, will allow the piece to be preserved on the site and to initiate comprehensive works to guarantee its conservation, among them, the improvement of lighting and climate control to limit the possible sources of its deterioration. Likewise, The Art Newspaper indicates, for its part, the subsidy will allow a digitization work of everything related to Rivera’s mural, including the plans of the scaffolding that he used for its execution, as well as some documents on other commissions that the Mexican executed in San Francisco, including the work “Unidad Panamericana” (1940), performed in the lobby of the City College theater and which began its meticulous transfer in June 2021 to be exhibited on loan until 2023 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Currently, the nave at the San Francisco Art Institute that contains said mural is called the Diego Rivera Gallery and functions as an exhibition site for the institute’s students.
a little timeline
1926
SFAI faculty member Ray Boynton travels to Mexico to study with Rivera and suggests patron Albert Bender invite him to San Francisco.
1927
Rivera declines the offer due to the conflict of interest of having received another invitation to Moscow for the 10th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.
1929
Bender invites Rivera again, but is unable to obtain a visa for the muralist.
1930
Gerstle offers him the SFAI commission and teams up with Bender and other political players to secure the visa, including the then US ambassador to Mexico.
November 10, 1930
Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo travel to the United States for the first time.
Source: SFAI
Other murals that Rivera did in the US
“Detroit Industry Murals” (1932 – 1933) – Detroit Institute of Arts
“Unidad Panamericana” (1940) – San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (loan until 2023)
“The Man at the Crossroads” (1933) – Rockefeller Center (it was destroyed in 1934)
Visit Rivera’s mural site at SFAI: