Art: Rivera in California

The great Giotto painted himself into one of his murals at Padua as one of a crowd of penitent sinners. Last week the art world learned that Giotto’s chief living disciple has also painted himself into a mural, not as a sinner, for he is a Communist and does not believe in that sort of thing, but as an artist at work.

On view last week at San Francisco’s California School of Fine Arts was the latest wall work of Mexico’s Diego Rivera, famed, fat and 40. As you look at the tropicolored mural, 45 ft. by 35 ft., your eye is immediately drawn to a focal point — Muralist Diego Rivera’s plump posterior squashed comfortably down on a plank. The whole picture epitomizes some of the arts and industries of the U.S. Upon a great scaffolding several artisans are at work besides Diego Rivera, who is painting a huge central figure, symbolical of them all. Rivera holds in one hand a tin plate for a palette, in the other a brush. The scaffolding ingeniously subdivides the space into six panels.

The upper left panel contains a row of gas-collectors atop a smelter. Below are a sculptor (Ralph Stackpole) and his assistants at work. Below these are machinists. In the upper right panel, an airplane flies above a group of toiling sleelworkers. Below is an architect’s drafting room. Directly below Rivera’s self-portrait, talking over the work in progress, stands a group of three. Buttonholed between Timothy Pflueger and Arthur Brown Jr. (architects) is the donor of the fresco. William L. Gerstle. A modest little man in a derby hat. Mr. Gerstle appears to be awaiting the news that the architects have not been able to keep inside the original estimates. Rich Mr. Gerstle is president of the San Francisco Art Association, also of Apollo Consolidated Mining Co. and of Alaska Commercial Co.

A “find” ten years ago, Diego Rivera now enjoys the honors which the world only occasionally is pleased to heap upon a living genius. Officially the trumpets were sounded in his praise two years ago when the Fine Arts Medal of the American Institute of Architects was given him for his work in Mexico City’s National Preparatory School and Ministry of Education (TIME, May 26, 1929). A huge, roly-poly man, he sometimes works 16 hours a day. Once he exhausted himself, fell off his scaffold, split his head.