Google Honors Diego Rivera's 125 Birthday

Notice Frida (or are there two Frida's?) in the lower right corner.

Portrait of the Artists as a Young Couple

A portrait of Frida and Diego in San Francisco from Vanity Fair (September 1931): pg. 63.
Peter A. Juley & Son, photographic firm.
Juley, Paul, 1890-1975, photographer.

Image taken in 1930 or 1931. Details about the print available at Smithsonian American Art Museum Photograph Archives Catalog.

50th Anniversary of Diego Rivera's Death

According to the Virtual Diego Rivera Web Museum website 24 November 2007 was the 50th anniversary of Diego Rivera's death. The museum has a fantastic Adobe Flash video of Frida and Diego on its homepage.

Both Frida and Diego's last paintings are of watermelons. It is heartbreaking to see the images side by side.

Frida Kahlo, Sandías con leyenda: Viva la vida”(Watermelons with legend: The life lives), 1954

Diego Rivera, Watermelons, 1957

Frida and Diego at Cathay House restaurant

The Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco (formerly the Museum of the City of San Francisco) posted this news clipping and photo from San Francisco Life on their website. It pictures Frida and Diego in the Cathay House restaurant 718 California Street at Grant Avenue in March 1941.

Cathay House restaurant is still in the same location, San Francisco's Chinatown. Unfortunately online reviews call it a disappointing tourist trap. It is a fantastic building - view images.

Did Frida turn heads in her native attire or even then were San Franciscans unfazed by unique characters?

Pablo Picasso Earings

I've uploaded the video La Real Frida Kahlo to the blog from YouTube. Watching it I realised that I've never actually seen "live" footage of Frida. Notice in the closing sequence she is wearing the hand-shaped earings that Pablo Picasso gave her as a gift. Diego Rivera depicts here in these earings in his The Pan American Unity mural at the City College of San Francisco. She wears these same earings in Self Portrait Dedicated to Dr Eloesser 1940 (pictured right).

If you visit the Museo Frida Kahlo in Coyoacán, Mexico you can see one of these earings, discovered in a storage box in 2005, displayed in a glass case in her painting studio. If I recall correctly it is cracked - missing a finger.

The Mural Maze

This week the Financial Times published The Mural Maze, an article by Jane Urs-Smith, about the murals of San Francisco and centering around Diego Rivera. A brief mention of Frida Kahlo in the final paragraph.

The article includes a helpful list of mural touring links.

Ure-Smith concludes by advocating for the relocation of Diego's "Pan American Unity" mural from its obscure location at City College to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art if they can find the space.

"On my last day, I sped down the freeway to City College’s Ocean Avenue campus to revisit “Pan American Unity” (1940), the third Rivera work in San Francisco. Arriving with what I thought was 10 minutes to spare, I found the theatre locked and in darkness. An assistant to the dean of arts eventually let me in but not before she’d lectured me about burglar alarms and cops and how she took the rap every single time – but what did a selfish soul like me care?

I didn’t. Instead, I felt annoyed that this magnificent 22-metre work – a call for American solidarity in the face of the growing threat of fascism, with Hitler, Frida Kahlo and Charlie Chaplin among its characters – is locked away in a dusty campus theatre lobby and only available to the public for two or three hours a day. Unlike most frescoes, this one is on 10 moveable panels. If San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art has a big white space to spare, that’s where this Rivera should be."

The mural maze
By Jane Ure-Smith
Published: November 2 2007 17:05 Last updated: November 2 2007 17:05