Hidden in a downtown skyscraper is a San Francisco art treasure: Diego Rivera's 1930–31 Allegory of California fresco. Take the elevator to the 10th floor and walk upstairs to see Rivera's depiction of California as a golden goddess offering farm-fresh produce, while beneath her gold miners toil and oil refineries loom large on the horizon. Rivera's fresco is glorious, but cautionary – while Californian workers, inventors and dreamers go about their business, the pressure gauge in the left-hand corner is entering the red zone.
Today it might seem strange that architect Timothy Pflueger would invite such an outspoken critic of capitalism as Diego Rivera to paint the mural gracing the entry to San Francisco's Stock Exchange Lunch Club (now the City Club) – but after the 1929 US stock market crash, Rivera wasn't the only skeptic of unregulated markets. The Allegory of California was his first US fresco commission, and it would be a couple years yet before his Rockefeller Center mural in New York would be denounced as communist and scrapped. Instead, Rivera and his young bride Frida Kahlo were the toast of the town in San Francisco, and started a mural movement that continues here today.
