The Cosmos Loved Us:
Julia Bergman, Will Maynez, and the Diego Rivera Collection

Words by Becky Alexander

Despite its having been moved once before, moving the mural again was no small feat. Each of its ten gargantuan yet delicate panels (collectively described by museum project manager Paco Link as “a 70-foot eggshell”) had to be ever-so-carefully removed from the wall and gently lifted by crane onto a flatbed truck. In the truck, they rested on wire rope isolators: shock-absorbing coils that were custom-designed to cushion whatever jostling the potholes of San Francisco had to offer. Too large and fragile for daytime traffic, the panels traveled one by one in the dead of night—strange-looking, tarp-covered monoliths creeping down the city streets at five miles an hour. The panels were flanked by anxious vibration-monitoring engineers and led by a car outfitted with a pole the exact height of the mural, ready to identify any power lines that might inadvertently lie in its path. Each seven mile journey from college to museum took an hour and a half.

Performing ultraviolet photography of the mural panels. Image: Katherine Du Tiel

Preparing to remove panels from Pan American Unity from the wall in the Diego Rivera Theater at SFMOMA. Image: Katherine Du Tiel/SFMOMA

Despite its glacial pace, this physical move was the speedy part of the project. Before the physical move came the years of planning and the array of experts: conservators, art handlers, and a team of specialists at National Autonomous University in Mexico City, who built a full-scale prototype of a mural panel and bolted it to a wall so they could practice cutting it free again. Before that came something even slower, quieter, and less well-defined: a gradual building of the momentum around Rivera’s mural that was needed to give it this moment in the sun. This was driven in no small part by Will Maynez and Julia Bergman, a remarkable pair of indefatigable momentum-builders.

Julia was interested in the mural first. In 1989, when she was a librarian at City College of San Francisco (CCSF), there was talk of moving Rivera’s mural into the new library the school was in the process of building. Pan American Unity had been envisioned for a CCSF library from the start, but building material shortages of World War II intervened, and the library it had been slated for was never built. In the end, the mural didn’t end up in the 1989 library either, and yet the possibility of it doing so had been enough to get Julia hooked. As she put it in a 2010 interview:

"I thought okay, I want to find out anything and everything I can about the mural, the whole history of it, the stories that are embedded there. I’m a librarian–I’ll just go and buy all the books about our mural and put them in the collection, and that will bring some attention, again, to the mural. What did I find? Nobody had written anything about our mural! It was really shocking to me. And that started me on the project of my life, if you will–to build the Rivera Collection."

As Julia got started on the Project of Her Life, she turned first to the obvious sources–books on Rivera and Mexican Muralism, period newspaper clippings covering his time in the U.S.–but as one search led to another, rabbit holes led to rabbit holes, and she found herself ferreting out more elusive and far-flung repositories of history. The first of these was the papers of renowned San Francisco architect Timothy Pflueger. Pflueger, who often brought in artists to decorate the interiors of the buildings he designed, was a fan of Rivera’s, and had been instrumental in bringing him to the U.S. for multiple mural projects, Pan American Unity included. Pflueger was not only an architect for some of the buildings at the World’s Fair and the driving force behind its Art in Action attraction, he was also City College’s architect. He hoped to fill its new buildings with some of the work produced through  Art in Action, Rivera’s mural first and foremost. In other words, he was central to the story of the City College mural and Rivera’s time in San Francisco, and his papers represented a key piece of that history. Julia managed to track Pflueger’s archive to his nephew John (who, incidentally, was himself an architect, like both his uncle and father before him). John invited Julia to visit him in Glen Ellen, CA. As Julia recalled:

On his property he has a quonset hut, and in the quonset hut one can find the Pfueger archives. Except, it’s in old, falling-apart, rotten, cardboard boxes, rolls of architectural drawings all rolled up on the floor, everything covered with you-don’t-even-want-to-know… bat guano or something? I mean as a librarian I just was aghast. But I have to give John credit–he did know where his uncle Timothy’s major file on Rivera in 1940 was. And he basically brought it out during one visit that I was there. And there in front of me were handwritten letters. Diego Rivera’s handwritten letter accepting the offer to come to San Francisco… practically a day-by-day chronology of all of the events in 1940. That made my heart stop.

As Julia recognized, it was not just the collection that was valuable, but John’s custodianship, and willingness to share.  “We owe a debt of gratitude to John Pflueger for being willing to share that with us,” Julia said, then paused, adding ruefully, “but I do worry about that quonset hut.” (The collection has since moved into more archivally sound storage at the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft library.)

Will’s employment at City College brought him to the mural as well, but even more circuitously. Although originally trained as a painter, he had been working at CCSF as a physics lab manager for 18 years before a fruitless search for photographs of the mural to put up on the wall of a City College dining hall led him to contact Julia, who was serving as the chair of the college’s Works of Art Committee. Julia suggested she could underwrite new photography of the mural as long as Will agreed to join her committee. (Will: “She drove a hard bargain!”) Will said yes, and a decades-long “partnership in all things Rivera” was born.

Julia and Will win Art Deco Society Award
Photo courtesy of Will Maynez

Like a pair of buddy movie detectives, Will and Julia embarked on expeditions that were part diligent research, part travel adventure. In 1999 they took their first of several trips to Rivera’s home base of Mexico City where they interviewed Rivera’s daughter, Guadalupe Rivera Marin, made the circuit of Rivera’s murals, and visited the archives of the Centro Nacional de las Artes to track down copies of the political articles Rivera had published in the tabloid Hoy in 1940 (which Will later translated into English). While reading Hoy, Will managed to stumble across the (perhaps?) answer to one of their long-standing questions about the mural’s imagery, the meaning of the number “666” printed on a matchbook resting on a table depicted in the mural. (How and why did the sign of the beast make it into Pan American Unity??) Hoy was advertising “666” brand cold medicine–was this is what the matchbook referred to? Later in the day Julia stopped by a pharmacy and found a box of the medication (now, of course, itself part of the Rivera Collection). On a break from their research the duo climbed to the top of the Pyramid of the Sun in the Pre-Columbian city of Teothuacan outside of Mexico City. At the end of their days of research they sat on the roof of their hotel drinking Tequila.

Julia and Will’s talent has not just been for dogged historical sleuthing, but also for people. Under the mantle of the “Diego Rivera Mural Project” they advocated and fundraised for the mural, brought a Fulbright scholar to CCSF, created a docent program for students, built the mural a website, and got it 3D photogrammetrically scanned. By sharing their infectious enthusiasm, they made the kind of human connections that make things happen.

Julia and Will in Teotihuacan, Mexico
Photo courtesy of Will Maynez

One of these connections was with Donald Cairns, the little boy depicted in the mural. Julia and Will knew that Emmylou Packard, Diego Rivera’s primary assistant and secretary while he worked on Pan American Unity, had spent the last 25 years of her life researching–but never writing–a history of Rivera’s time in San Francisco. (Julia: “Emmylou just held all of this material close to her bosom and wouldn’t let anybody help her with it. She needed a librarian, she needed a secretary, she needed a ghost writer, and she didn’t have any of those things.”) Before she died, Emmylou donated her personal archive to the Archives of American Art, but when Julia spent a CCSF spring break in DC looking through all 13 as-yet-unorganized boxes of it, it became clear that while there were tantalizing fragments of book research mixed in with the rest of Emmylou’s papers, most of the book material was simply not there. A few years later however, Julia saw a note in an article on Rivera indicating that the material was with Packard’s son Donald in Philadelphia. Julia contacted Donald and he agreed to let her look through everything he had and copy what she wanted. Over the course of two separate spring breaks (spring break weeks were clearly productive times for the development of the Rivera Collection), Julia flew across the county, rented a photocopier, and set up shop at David’s kitchen table, photocopying hundreds of pages of material–“extraordinary primary source material that doesn’t exist anywhere else,” as Julia put it. Donald and his wife Kathé were generous with Emmylou’s material, and Will and Julia were generous right back. According to Will, “The Cairns auction off a ‘Will Maynez tour of the mural’ each year to the 30 highest bidders as a fundraiser for their Unitarian Church in Walnut Creek. We will always be in their debt.”
 

Original sketch of the central lower panel of Pan American Unity by Diego Rivera, 1940.

Diego Rivera shaking hands with Timothy Pflueger, 1940. Courtesy San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.

Once an archival collection has made its way into an institutional repository, a certain smoothing out and flattening of its history inevitably takes place, at least to the untrained eye. The stories told by a guano-covered banker box in a quonset hut in Glenn Allen, CA are condensed into a single line of text in a finding aid, with the road trip that a curious librarian took to get it there perhaps nowhere to be seen, an invisible story hidden behind the larger historical tale. It’s easy to miss not only the labor–extraordinary and ordinary–that goes into the collection and organization of an archives, but also the twists and turns of history, the painstaking collecting and tireless sleuthing required to identify and save what might otherwise be lost, and make it findable for others. It’s easy to see end results–publications, exhibitions–without seeing the processes–the archivists, librarians, physics lab managers, nephews, sons, daughters-in-law, and the spring breaks filled with rented photocopiers on kitchen tables.

Another of Julia and Will’s archival “coups,” as Will puts it, the result of 15 years of looking, was the tracking down of some of Rivera’s copious, unpublished notes for his autobiography My Art, My Life. The notes have still not been made public, but Will and Julia were granted permission to travel to Canada and go through them over the course of three days in a “windowless room” making their own hand-written transcriptions, each looking at half. It was the kind of thing that is so much better done with someone else–not only someone so deep in the subject matter that they know what to look for (Will: “We were the only ones we would trust to read the other half”), but someone with whom to share the excitement of each little discovery, each newly-answered historical question. For Will and Julia, having a co-conspirator helped keep the Rivera Project fun, and having a project to work on over the years helped keep both of them going at difficult times in their lives (each ended up as caretakers for their respective partners). As Will said, “This is a bond that’s hard to quantify, but signified everything we had to know about each other.”

In May 2017, SFMOMA approached CCSF’s interim Chancellor about the possibility of borrowing the mural for a couple of years, who in turn came to the already-retired Will for his take on the proposal. SFMOMA would pay for and oversee the mural’s conservation and move. The mural’s visibility would increase tenfold overnight. Its stay at SFMOMA would be accompanied by a major exhibition, Diego Rivera’s America, featuring more than 150 of Rivera’s paintings, drawings, frescoes, and large-scale film projects of his murals. Will responded enthusiastically and the plan went forward. The whole thing has been incredibly gratifying for Will, and clearly tons of fun as well. He has had the chance to share his deep knowledge with new audiences, and to be involved with the mural’s move every step of the way. According to Will, “It’s been the greatest adventure of a lifetime.” And yet there’s a bittersweetness there too–Julia Bergman passed away in 2017. She didn’t get a chance to see the mural’s big move, and won’t get a chance to see it make its way back into a new home at City College in a new performing arts center that, if all goes according to plan, will be constructed to house the work. The center will eventually (fingers crossed), be the spacious home the mural has always deserved. Will misses Julia, but he says he still feels her presence, still has the sense that she “has his back” from the beyond. Julia leaves a legacy that includes the Rivera Collection and so much more: an adventurous, generous life full of friendship, world travel, and volunteership that included building schools and libraries in the mountains of Pakistan. Will sees their years of collaboration as full of grace and of serendipity: “People would ask, ‘How do you do it?’ Julia and I knew better than to take any credit, the cosmos loved us and showered us with favors. We just had to be grateful.” 

Preparing, removing, transporting, and installing the mural at the Roberts Family Gallery at SFMOMA. Image: Katherine Du Tiel/SFMOMA

Visually, the mural is cacophonous, jam-packed, an explosion of imagery. Created in a highly-charged political context with World War II raging, Rivera’s mural advocates for unity within the North American continent. It shows Mexico and the United States as culturally and artistically different, yet complementary, and stronger together. Rivera himself was a politically controversial figure throughout his life, as an on-again-off-again Communist with great ambitions for artistic success in capitalist America. The mural is filled with the full diversity of his influences, beliefs and political ideals. Indigenous Mexican artisans sculpt clay, craft metal, and weave, while Americans (often recognizable friends and colleagues of Rivera’s) carve wood, paint, and draw up architectural plans. In the lower right the huge fist of America’s military might grabs hold of fascism’s dagger-clutching hand, stopping it in its tracks. In the center, Rivera sits beside his then ex-wife, the remarkable artist and force of nature Frida Khalo, but holds hands and plants a tree with a current love interest, actress Paulette Goddard.  At the center of it all is the enormous, incongruous amalgamation of Latin American spiritual identity and North American mechanical power, the Aztec Goddess of Death and Earth Coatlicue, merged into an American auto plant stamping machine.

As politics change, as artistic movements come and go, what a mural means and how it looks to its viewers continues to shift as well. Pan American Unity depicts history, but like all public art, it also serves as a backdrop to history as history unfolds. Murals, if they last long enough, persist through ever-changing political and artistic landscapes, sometimes celebrated, sometimes neglected, sometimes becoming a point of pride or of controversy–perhaps managing to last long enough to be, at one point or another, all of the above. Pan American Unity spent the years from 1940-1961 in storage. Even after it was put on display at City College, it spent many years largely ignored. Will and Julia took on the mantle of advocacy from CCSF faculty member and mural enthusiast Masha Zakheim, who they called “John the Baptist” for being a “voice in the wilderness when nobody at CCSF seemed to care about the mural.” And Will hopes to pass that stewardship on to a future generation as well. “We’re just links in the chain, this mural’s going to go on long after us,” Will says. “It’s kind of an act of faith.”

Becky Alexander is an Archivist for the San Francisco Art Institute Legacy Foundation and Archives. Her writing on small corners of Bay Area art history (such as painter Joan Brown's open water swimming practice and the ghost that haunts the San Francisco Art Institute's bell-less bell tower) can be found as part of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive online exhibition, Orbits of Known and Unknown Objects: SFAI Histories/Matrix 277.