A monumental fresco by famed Mexican painter Diego Rivera missed its first chance at widespread public viewing in San Francisco when the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939-40 ended as the ever-expanding work was still in progress.
It has taken 80-plus years for “Pan American Unity” to get a second chance at a major showing, but now the fresco — by far the largest portable painting by the once-controversial Mexican muralist — is scheduled to go on display this summer at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
On Monday, June 28, the 1,600-square-foot panoramic work will be unveiled and hang for three years in the free Roberts Family Gallery on the ground floor gallery at the museum’s Howard Street entrance.
“The Diego Rivera mural was probably the most stellar artwork created at the World War II-era exposition held on Treasure Island,” said Anne Schnoebelen, vice president and historian for the Treasure Island Museum. “Rivera was notorious and a celebrity, and to see him there painting the mural was a major draw.”
To get from the exposition to its new home at the world-class museum required a lengthy layover at City College of San Francisco. There, after spending 20 years in storage, in 1961 the massive work was installed on the back wall of the lobby of the college’s Diego Rivera Theatre.
The fresco — essentially a mural painted on fresh plaster — was done in large panels and eventually measured 74 feet wide and 22 feet tall. It was commissioned by a partnership of the exposition, a rival to the 1939 New York world’s fair, and the federal Works Progress Administration. It was purposefully made to be portable so that it could be moved to City College, where it was planned as the focal point of a new library to be designed by famed San Francisco architect Timothy Pflueger. But the library never was built, and the fresco was never given the display it was promised.
Still, Rivera fans, art tourists from around the world and New Deal historians have managed to find it, tucked inside a dimly lit concrete theater building of proletarian design. That traffic, though, is sure to be minor compared to the summer crush expected at SFMOMA.
“When SFMOMA offered to borrow the mural, the thing that sold me is when director Neal Benezra told me, ‘That mural will never ever be little-known again,’ ” recalled Will Maynez, a retired City College employee who runs the Diego Rivera Mural Project and writes about Rivera at riveramural.org.
“Pan American Unity” — shortened from Rivera’s own title of “The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on this Continent” — is one of three Rivera frescoes in the city. It is by far larger and more complex than the Rivera fresco at the San Francisco Art Institute. That painting, in the school’s Diego Rivera Gallery, has been in the news since the possibility was raised to sell it for $50 million to keep the struggling art school afloat.
Rivera at work on the fresco was the marquee attraction of a 1940 exhibition called “Art in Action” at the Treasure Island exposition, which featured a number of painters, sculptors and other artists creating work while the public watched.
The concept was developed by Pflueger, who recruited his buddy Rivera to be its focal point. Fair goers who wandered in could watch as Rivera built a complex world that combined ancient Aztec rituals with the newly completed Golden Gate and Bay bridges, along with depictions of celebrities including actors Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard, Rivera himself and his wife, artist Frida Kahlo.
The goal was also for Rivera to complete the fresco before the exposition closed in September 1940, but it did not work out that way.
“The fair closed but he just kept coming back until it was finished,” said Schnoebelen.
On Dec. 1, 1940, when Rivera declared he was finally done, 1,000 vehicles lined up with their passengers waiting to see what The Chronicle described as a “vast super colossal and possibly slightly dizzying fresco mural.” After a two-day free showing, it was disassembled, packed in crates and held in a storage shed until the new theater was constructed at City College, where it has resided for the past 60 years.
It has taken three years for an international crew of scholars, conservators and engineers to prepare the fresco for its move downtown.
“A lot of research and technical prowess has gone into analyzing this move,” said Maynez. “And Diego would love that so much of that technical prowess came from graduate engineering students in Mexico City.”
It took seven round trips to truck the fresco to SFMOMA. When it comes back after the loan, it is destined for a new home: a long-planned new theater building at City College.
But construction of that building is delayed, with a firm completion date unknown.
“If it has to go back into storage, it will be a crime,” said Maynez. “But the mural is going to last 200 years, and this is my watch.”
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