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notes on Rivera fresco at GGIE 1940 by Emmy Lou Packard

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There were eight or ten assistants to grind color, enlarge the sketches on the rough plaster wall, apply the plaster and do the black and white underpainting over which Rivera applied the color. In the beginning stages, Irene Bojus, a Hungarian painter, and Mona Hoffman (a San Francisco painter, former pupil of Hans Hoffman) gave able and devoted assistance, along with Arthur Niendorf, Holmes Coates and others. Matt Barnes, who was since become one of San Francisco's most noted painters (he committed suicide while ill in the hospital several years ago) was the chief plasterer, aided by Niendorff.

Mona Hoffman became very ill, and Irene Bojus went to Mexico, shortly after my return to Sanfrancisco in August. (I had been in New York desperately looking for a job, after the death of my husband in an automobile accident) Rivera put me to work immediately, underpaint-ing, and paid me out of his meager funds until Pileuger could get me officially on the payroll. He had just started the upper left-hand section of the mural, and and made me paint from my childhood memories of Mexico, some of the scenes inside the courtyards shown in that section. He stressed the importance of memory in a mural painter, to increase the visual vocabulary. Arthur Niendorf and I remained the chief painting assistants throughout the rest of the mural. Niendorff painted much of the accurate architectural detail required for the tile scenes of San Francisco. Rivera required very accurate research, photographs and drawings from source material of all such details as the Ford motor, the wooden Indian, Shasta Dam, the wine press, [[strikethrough]]/the flying machine of Netzalhualcoyotl, and others. [[/strikethrough]]

The fresco was painted in the Art Building (on Treasure Island) which was designed for, and is still being used as, an airplane hangar. The mural occupied one whole side of the Art-in-Action section of the building, and opposite it was a huge mosaic being put together under the Direction of Herman Volz (a WPA project). In the center was gigantic redwood log which was being carved into a totem-sculpture with a double-edged woodsman's axe by Dudley Carter. Rivera was fascinated by this, and shows two views of it in the mural. There were other, smaller, art-in-action projects going on around this centerpiece: stone sculpture, painting, weaving, printing, ceramics, and so on.

Thousands of Fair visitors filled the building every day. The mural scaffold was high enough above the crowd so that the public could not talk to Rivera, but quite a few people who had "influence" with someone, or who just crept in somehow, would from time to time interrupt the work. One little old man, a Sunday painter, used to come regularly one a week and spend hours talking with Rivera about grounds, media, old master techniques. Always patient with working people, interested in painting, Rivera would talk with him for hours, though he continued to work on the fresco as he talked.

cont'd.