A Day in the City

 Bob and I went into San Francisco today to meet friends at SFMOMA (the Modern Art Museum) to see the new Diego Rivera exhibit.  It was fun to get on BART and ride into the City, then walk to the Museum.  We shared a latte while we waited for our friends to come.  The exhibit was not terribly crowded so we could easily move from painting to painting and read the placards.  With more than 500 paintings, murals and sketches, it is the biggest collection of his work ever shown.  The way it was displayed was outstanding, with videos of his biggest murals dominating whole rooms and the painting hung on beautiful sheets of hardwood.  But overall, I can’t say I liked his work.  His hollow eyed peasants portrayed such sadness in many aspects of their lives that it depressed me.  Not even the paintings of mothers and children had any life in them at all.  His politics played into his art.  I don’t think he was a very nice man (perhaps I came with that impression from the movie “Frieda”), but his painting tells of an unhappy man looking at the dark side of life.  

After we’d seen enough, we were invited back to our friends’ condo for more conversation and a delicious late lunch.  It was an elegant table and a most delicious lunch of air fried salmon served on a bed of tasty lentils and a salad with oranges and avocados.  We laughed and told stories and heard what we’d each been up to in the last year.  The afternoon sped by and soon it was 5 o-clock and time to go.  We took a Lyft ride to BART, riding through the Tenderloin district on the way back Civic Center Station.  It was depressing and made me wonder whose responsibility it is to solve the intractable problem of homelessness and drug addiction.  The hopelessness of the people was overwhelming.  The area around the BART station had so deteriorated since I’d been there before the pandemic, I wouldn’t feel safe going there after dark.  I wondered how an artist would portray the homeless and the terrible political division in our country these days?  What would Diego Rivera have seen and painted these days?

Returning home, on this lovely day, I thought how special this day was and how very fortunate we are.