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Meanwhile, there has been a resurgence of interest in the mural, thanks in part to a wealth of archival material Bergman has spent much of the last decade assembling for the college library. Among the prized documents contained in the archive are letters, memos, contracts, and diaries belonging to Rivera and his artist wife, Frida Kahlo (who were famously remarried in San Francisco in December 1940 after divorcing a year earlier).
Perhaps most intriguing are dozens of hours of oral histories donated by the estate of artist Emmy Lou Packard, Rivera's chief assistant on the mural. With unanticipated encouragement from persons connected with Rivera, including the artist's daughter, Guadalupe Rivera Marin, what began as a quest to fill in the blanks about the mural's quirky history at the college has turned into perhaps the definitive resource on Rivera's San Francisco experience. "There's enough here for a book or two," says Bergman. "The question is whether I'll have time to write it."
Painted on a grand scale in the manner of the Italian Renaissance masters, Pan American Unity depicts a melding of pre-Columbian Mexican artistic themes with North American motifs of modern engineering marvels, merging a panorama of the Bay Area with scenes from the Valley of Mexico. Rivera painted the mural from June to November of 1940 as part of a program called "Arts in Action," which allowed fairgoers to observe him and other artists as they worked.
It was his third stint in San Francisco. In 1930, sculptor and painter Ralph Stackpole, who had been commissioned to create sculptures at the Stock Exchange and who had been a fellow artist with Rivera in Paris during World War I, had suggested to Pflueger, the Exchange's architect, that Rivera paint a fresco at the building. The following year Rivera returned to paint the Art Institute fresco, titled The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City.
The most celebrated Mexican artist of the 20th century, Rivera imbued his works, which are viewed as icons in his native country, with leftist and revolutionary themes. But unlike some of his earlier murals, the one he produced for the fair is of a decidedly milder tone. Having arrived in San Francisco with little more than a concept of "Pan American Unity" as the subject, Rivera spontaneously included topical events and people he met here in the piece.
"There's an almost zany quality about the mural, compared to some of his earlier work," says art historian Anthony W. Lee of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and a former instructor at UC Berkeley. As Rivera painted the mural, Germany had already conquered most of Europe, Stalin was still allied with Hitler and Mussolini, and Rivera was intent on doing his part to nudge the United States into the war against Germany and in defense of the Americas.
Using scenes from Hollywood movies, including three involving Goddard from Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, Rivera attacked the tyranny of the Axis powers. A figure of Stalin holds a bloody ax in an obvious reference to Trotsky's assassination. There's a man sitting at a table wearing a "Wendell Willkie for President" button in honor of the Republican nominee who opposed President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940, a nod to Willkie's "One World" theory of international cooperation. But there is little of the satiric edge found in some of Rivera's Mexican murals featuring U.S. subjects. Instead, the mural pays homage to American icons such as Henry Ford, standing above his V-8 engine, and Thomas Edison, shown with his phonograph and light bulb.
At the urging of his patron, Pflueger, Rivera arrived intending to finish the mural by the fair's end in September. But as Pflueger's plans for the library expanded, so did the mural. Rivera and his assistants worked two months beyond the Exposition's close to complete the work. On the Sunday after Thanksgiving -- two days after an "invitation only" unveiling for the city's social elite -- more than 30,000 people streamed to the island to see the mural before it was packed away.
After Trotsky's murder, Rivera moved between Treasure Island and his quarters on Telegraph Hill accompanied by a bodyguard. Yet, there is nothing to suggest that security concerns deterred the A-list of literati and other celebrities who kept the artist company during his stay, including writer Aldous Huxley, actor Edward G. Robinson, and the voluptuous Goddard.
A man of limitless sexual proclivities, Rivera was rumored to have included the actress among his conquests during his stay. (He was famous for keeping a list of his liaisons and rating the women he slept with by denoting either a plus or a zero.) Emmy Lou Packard, his young assistant, recently widowed at the time, "took pride in saying she was the only woman close to Rivera whom he never succeeded in getting into bed," recalls her son, Donald Kairns.
If Rivera's San Francisco experience was high drama, the final act was shared with Kahlo, whose haunting self-portraits (not to mention scandalously tempestuous relationship with Rivera) have -- long after her death in 1954 -- helped her attain cultlike status.
Having divorced Rivera in 1939 for "artistic differences," Kahlo nonetheless put in a brief appearance in San Francisco before leaving for New York. There, before returning to remarry him in a municipal judge's chambers at City Hall, she wrote letters to her friend and confidante Packard, brooding over Rivera's health and a book deal that his second wife, Guadalupe Marin, had signed with an American publisher, which Kahlo deemed money-grubbing. "She is absolutely a son of a bitch," Kahlo wrote in a letter that is part of the college archive. "Everything she does is so low and dirty that sometimes I feel like going back to Mexico and [killing] her. ... Sometimes I wonder why Diego could stand that type of wench for seven years."
