Several artists associated with Lake Chapala attended the 1939-1940 San Francisco World’s Fair, also known as the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island.
Screenshot from San Francisco World’s Fair “Art in Acton” (Orville Goldner movie)
The star Mexican attraction at the Fair was Diego Rivera. As his contribution to “Art in Action,” Rivera designed and executed a mural titled Pan American Unity. This magnificent mural is now housed at the City College of San Francisco. Rivera’s only documented direct link to Lake Chapala is his visit (from Guadalajara) for a day in 1938, accompanied by French surrealist Andre Breton. But Rivera and his wife, Frida Kahlo, may have visited the lake on other occasions. In her personal library, Frida kept a copy of Village in the Sun, the Ajijic-based book by ‘Dane Chandos,’ perhaps a gift from either author Peter Lilley or Ann Medalie.
In addition to Rivera, other artists linking Lake Chapala and the San Francisco World’s Fair include, in alphabetical order:
Painter and actress Irene Bohus (1913-1985) was sharing a house with muralist Diego Rivera on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco in 1940. Rivera planned to include a portrait of Bohus, who was assisting him, in the “Art in Action” mural, but she left him before he had finished, so Rivera painted another of his assistants, Emmy Lou Packard, instead. A decade later, Bohus exhibited a drawing of Lake Chapala in her 1953 solo show in Mexico City.
Architectural photographer Esther Born, best known for photographing modernist homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and other famous architects, documented the Golden Gate International Exposition (1939-1940) in photos. A decade earlier, Born had traveled to Mexico to photograph architect-designed modernist homes in Mexico, including Villa Ferrara in Chapala.
Cinematographer Orville Goldner (of King Kong fame) made a series of four short, silent, color movies at the Golden Gate International Exposition. These films include footage of Diego Rivera painting the Pan American Unity mural, and of other artists demonstrating their varied techniques. They also feature the Mexican pavilion at the Fair. The movies, now in the San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive, can be viewed online. Thirty years later, Goldner and his wife lived for a time in Ajijic.
John Langley Howard (1902-1999), whose father was the architect behind the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, and many other major projects in California, was one of a group of artists commissioned in 1934 to paint murals in the Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill overlooking San Francisco. Howard later exhibited at Treasure Island. In 1951, Howard and his second wife, sculptor Blanche Phillips Howard, traveled to Mexico, where their year-long stay included time in Ajijic.
Painter and muralist Louis Ernest Lenshaw (1892-1988) had studied art in San Francisco and undertook commissions for the Works Progress Administration in the city in the 1930s, including one in the County Hospital Children’s Ward. At the Golden Gate International Exposition, Lenshaw, who knew Ann Medalie, worked on murals for the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939-1940. He visited Chapala in the late 1940s or early 1950s while spending several months living and working in Guadalajara.
Noted California abstract artist Robert Pearson McChesney (1913-2008), together with a score of other artists, helped paint several large murals for the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939-1940. McChesney and his second wife, sculptor Mary Fuller (1922-2022), lived in Ajijic and San Miguel de Allende in Mexico for a year in the early 1950s. Though best known as a sculptor, Mary Fuller McChesney also wrote short stories, poems, art history articles and several detective novels using the pen name “Joe Rayter,” including Stab in the Dark, set in the 1950s’ Guadalajara art scene.
Some biographies of Israeli painter and muralist Ann Sonia Medalie (1896-1991) claim she worked as Diego Rivera’s assistant at the World’s Fair in San Francisco “in 1939.” But Rivera was not in San Francisco until the following year. Medalie had lived in San Francisco for several years, and assisted sculptor Sargent Johnson (1888-1967) and Hilaire Hiler (1898-1966) on murals in the city’s Maritime Museum, and Miguel Covarrubias on the “Pageant of the Pacific” map murals now displayed in the de Young Museum. Medalie is not included on the list of Rivera’s assistants compiled by art historians at the City College of San Francisco, but likely met Rivera at that time. She became good friends with both Diego and Frida. Medalie painted in Ajijic for six months in 1944, when she exhibited at a group show at the Villa Montecarlo in Chapala, with Sylvia Fein, Jaime López Bermudez, Otto Butterlin, Ernesto Butterlin (“Linares”), and Betty Binkley. Several of Medalie’s Lake Chapala paintings were published in Modern Mexico and shown in Mexico City.
Novelist John J. Mersereau (1898-) grew up in California and studied at the University of California. His mystery novel Murder Loves Company (1940) is set at the 1939-1940 San Francisco World’s Fair, and is an interesting portrait of life in California at the end of the 1930s. Mersereau and his wife ‘retired’ to Ajijic in about 1960 and lived there for more than a decade.
Max Pollak (1886-1970) is best known for his portrait etchings. His etchings of Lake Chapala are believed to date from the mid-1930s, and include “Mexico: Papayas on Lake Chapala” and “Mexico: Weeping Willow on Lake Chapala.” Pollak settled in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1937, and exhibited at the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939.
Print maker Charles Frederick Surendorf (1906-1979) exhibited at the 1940 Golden Gate International Exposition. His intricate linoleum block prints have been favorably compared in quality to the much-acclaimed work of Thomas Hart Benton, and in 1959 Art Digest called him one of the top twenty-five woodblock artists in the world. Surendorf first visited Lake Chapala in 1963, and revisited the area with his family five years later, when he made the preliminary block print sketches in Ajijic for carving a series of printing blocks back in California.
Several chapters of Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village offer more details about the history of the artistic community in Ajijic.
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Tony Burton’s books include “Lake Chapala: A Postcard History” (2022), “Foreign Footprints in Ajijic” (2022), “If Walls Could Talk: Chapala’s historic buildings and their former occupants” (2020), (available in translation as “Si Las Paredes Hablaran”), “Mexican Kaleidoscope” (2016), and “Lake Chapala Through the Ages” (2008).