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notes on Rivera fresco at GGIE 1940 by Emmy Lou Packard

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But if "important" people came, so he had to stop work, & let each one put his stroke of paint on the mural and waste valuable painting time, he would sometimes throw a temper tantrum that would send his assistants scurrying out of throwing distance. These diatribes were usually carried out in French, which seemed always to be the language he could get angriest in. He would shout, swear kick the wall and scratch deep gashes in the wet plaster. We couldn’t really blame him, as it meant the lost time had caused the plaster to dry too much, which meant that 18 hours' work or more had to be removed from the wall and done over the next day. He frequently worked from about 12 noon until five the next morning, sometimes putting in 24 to 36 hours at a time.

Frida Kahlo arrived from Mexico in September. She was not feeling well, and spent several weeks in St. Luke's hospital, under the care of Dr. Leo Eloesser. Although they were divorced at the time, Rivera was deeply concerned for her, and very attentive. Every day, before work, I would drive him out to the hospital to see her. She made a short trip to New York, to testify at a trial or suit brought by Guadalupe Marin. She was very angry about the suit, and wrote me very funny letters saying what she'd like to do to Guadalupe. She also begged me to see that Rivera didnot work too hard, and that he take care of his eyes (he had a chornic eye infection, for which he was taking sulfanilimid). (There was always between them a deep affection and sympathy which lasted until her death in 1954. After her death, he told me he never thought it possible for him to miss someone so much.) When she came back from New York, they were remarried. They made a spectacular couple, she in her Tehuana costume, he huge and bear-like in a rumpled tweed suit and blue workshirt.

Rivera disliked the occasional social events, parties, dinners and such, that he was required to attend. But Frida would treat him as if she were his small mother, undress him, push him into the bathtub, and after a couple of hours of pleading and threats, (he was tired, and would always fall asleep in the warm bathwater) get him out of the tub, dress him and get him to the party, usually two or three hours late.

Rivera was violently anti-Stalin at this time. He told me stories which he claimed were the experiences of his friends or himself, which sounded very much like the kind of activities decried by Kruschev in his famous cult-of-personality- speech. Trotsky was then living in Mexico, where he came at Rivera's invitation. Rivera phoned me early one morning, at my family's home in Berkeley, to say "Mataron al viejo!" I understood this to mean that Trotsky had been assassinated. When I went to work that day, there was a double guard around the mural, as Rivera was afraid of attacks on himself by "Stalinist agents". There were no such attacks, but he continued to feel that his life was in danger. He told me that Trotsky had become angry with him because Trotsky thought that the advent of Marxist socialism in the world would mean and end to

cont'd.