While Frida Looks on

Just before we left for the San Francisco airport on Monday, we got the chance to see one of the two remaining Diego Rivera murals in the city, his "Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on this Continent," which is commonly known as the Pan American Unity mural.

Located in the lobby of the theater building at the City College of San Francisco Ocean Avenue campus, the mural is two stories tall and about 70 feet wide. It includes many details, which you can see on the mural project's website, but I couldn't help zeroing in on this part near the center of the mural.


In this part, Rivera painted his wife, the artist Frida Kahlo, representing her working at an easel, while he plants a ghostly looking tree with another woman, who is, the mural brochure tells us, Paulette Goddard, married at the time to Charlie Chaplin.

Meanwhile, two children look on. The brochure says the little girl was painted from Rivera's memory of a child he saw in Mexico... and I know I am probably reading into this, but doesn't she look like what Frida might have looked like as a child? And her eyes appear to be riveted on the Rivera-Goddard tree-planting action.


The brochure insists that Rivera and the "other woman" are merely planting a tree that symbolizes love and life. It then dryly says, "When asked later why he depicted himself holding hands with [Goddard] in the mural, Rivera answered, 'It means closer Pan-Americanism.' "

So Rivera painted himself transgressing, at least mildly, with another woman, in the presence of his wife at two different ages.

Guess I spent too much time at the Walker's Frida Kahlo exhibit earlier this year.