Pan American Unity,
a mural by Diego Rivera,
currently on view at SFMOMA.
When I first saw The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on This Continent—more commonly known by its nickname, Pan American Unity—I resisted it. Like its full name, the mural sprawls loudly and excessively across more space than one can easily take in at once. And much in the manner of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the Blake project it faintly echoes in its title, Rivera’s fresco seeks at once to inflame and inspire, to mystify even as it instructs.
I grew up on the beautifully composed, finely appealing Diego Rivera mural that occupies one wall of a ground-floor studio in the San Francisco Art Institute. Designed to fit exactly into its nave-like space, that geometrically perfect work is both intricately detailed and readable as a whole. The full-height center panel, with its multiple platforms stacked one above the other, shows Rivera himself—from the back, as usual—supervising the painting of another mural, as men in suits confer over plans beneath him. Horizontal dividers serve as realistic shelves (Rivera is sitting on one of them) as well as divisions between parts of the mural (his legs dangle from one segment to the next, as do those of his helpers). Yet one of these “shelves” cunningly transcends the limits of the center section, extending left and right into the mural’s two side sections and becoming the firm dividing line between their symmetrically shaped, narratively distinct upper and lower panels, each depicting a different kind of labor. Meanwhile, the painting’s vertical dividers imitate wooden beams which, when they reach the bottom of the picture plane, run below it and turn into supporting struts painted on the white wall. The whole thing is at once a triumph of trompe l’oeil and a tribute to the art-making room in which it hangs.
Compared to that familiar image, this huge thing hanging at SFMOMA comes as a shock. Recently transported from the City College of San Francisco, where its host building is undergoing a two-year renovation, the mural doesn’t really belong in the space to which it’s been relocated. But then, it never really belonged anywhere in a permanent way. It was painted at the Golden Gate International Exposition held at Treasure Island in 1940, as part of a series in which the public could come and see artists at work. The artwork was never intended to remain there, and would have made no sense if it had. (Treasure Island, a manmade attachment to Yerba Buena, midway across the Bay Bridge, is as close to a non-place as you can find in the Bay Area.) But the building for which it was designed, the Pflueger Library at the City College, was not completed on time, and it was not until twenty years later that the ten concrete rectangles on which the fresco is painted were ultimately taken out of storage and installed at the college. Even then, they came to rest in a new performing arts building and not the originally intended library. And now, as of July, they have been propped up in a lower-level, temporary-feeling space at SFMOMA.
The good news is that the public has free access to this space, and has been using it. Every time I’ve been there, schoolchildren and family groups, tourists and natives, old people and young ones representing ethnicities of all varieties have flocked through the glass doors to look at the enormous, diagonally posed image. It’s so big you never feel crowded out; you just wait for people to move along, and in the meantime you look at a different section. Since you can never stand back far enough to see the whole thing at once (it measures twenty-two feet high by seventy-four feet across), it doesn’t really matter that there are always other human bodies potentially blocking your view. In fact, given the number and size of the human bodies in the mural, the ones assembled in front of it just seem like icing on the cake.
It would probably be possible, if you were an expert historian and iconographer, to identify most of the dozens of faces that appear in this artwork. The major exceptions are the indigenous Latin American figures in the lefthand panel: they are clearly meant to represent whole cultures or ways of life rather than any particular individuals. But once I had passed them, moving from left to right, I easily recognized George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Frida Kahlo, Adolf Hitler, and Charlie Chaplin—and that was just at first glance.
I could see that the female swimmer doing a backward swan dive high in the sky had to be somebody famous. (She turns out, Wikipedia informs me, to be someone called Helen Crlenkovich, a champion Croatian-American athlete from San Francisco.) And clearly the man holding the plans in the lower-right of the center panel was intended as a specific architect; it’s Timothy Pflueger, in fact, the designer of the planned library. I recognized a sinister Edward G. Robinson peering out from the lower-right corner of the fourth panel, not far from where Chaplin appears next to a globe-twirling Hitler in an obvious allusion to The Great Dictator. And I felt I should recognize the beautiful woman in a white dress who was holding hands with a partially hidden Rivera, right next to where his wife, Frida Kahlo, stood with her paintbrush. So I was not surprised to learn that this was Paulette Goddard, with whom Rivera had a passionate affair during the time she was married to Charlie Chaplin. (If you’ve seen Chaplin’s Modern Times, you’ll remember her in her role as “A Gamin.”) Further research indicated that some of the other faces and figures belonged to Simón Bolivar, John Brown, Thomas Jefferson, Heinrich Himmler, Benito Mussolini, Emmy Lou Packard, Joseph Stalin, Frank Lloyd Wright, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Samuel Morse, and Albert Pinkham Ryder.
How many of the people flooding into SFMOMA to look at this picture will recognize all of those faces? Or indeed any of them? And does it matter? In the end, I think not.
This is an artwork that grows on you the more you look at it. The same things that caused me to resist it at first—its loudness of color and theme, its visual confusion and intensity, its overwhelming tendency to engulf the puny viewer—are the things I ended up appreciating most. And it was even possible, when I stood back, to see that it shared some of the appealing geometrical qualities I had always loved in my Art Institute favorite.
The five panels that make up the fresco (each consisting of two concrete blocks stacked one above the other) are visually distinct and at the same time fluid at their edges. There is a continuous narrative sweep from left to right, but each panel also introduces a different group of characters bound by a new central focus. A loose symmetry governs the odd-numbered arrangement, with the indigenous “makers” who sculpt, paint, cook, dance, and play music in the first panel mirroring the painters, inventors, embroiderers, and fabricators portrayed in the fifth. The female swan-diver appears not once but twice, in panels two and four, facing opposite directions on either side of the mural’s central image, which shows a human (or human-like) head encased in a giant machine.
The lower levels of each panel are mainly close-ups, whereas up above, in the background, we are treated to distant aerial views of urban and rural landscapes. Various representations of life-sized laborers and their implements of labor appear throughout, accompanied in a few cases by the oversized heads of Mayan-style or Aztec-style gods. This merging of the human, the industrial, and the demonic reaches its apogee in that dominant central image, which depicts a bald-headed, bear-clawed goddess (the Aztec Goddess of Life, apparently) intertwined with an enormous steel-colored stamping press.
Every square foot of every panel, I would guess, repays detailed, repeated examination. Still, the sum is greater than the parts. You may not be able to take in the mural all at once, but you can sense its full presence—despite your confusion and distraction, despite your uncertainty about all its references and meanings.
Or maybe I don’t mean despite, but because of. This Rivera is a lesson in not being on top of things. If we (by which I really mean I) can learn to take it on its own terms, this Marriage of opposites just might be capable of training us to live with, and even love, that which we’ll never fully know or understand.
Wendy Lesser is the founding editor of The Threepenny Review and the author of Scandinavian Noir, You Say to Brick, The Amateur, and ten other books.
