The new San Francisco Museum of Art had recently opened on the fourth floor of the city's War Memorial Veterans Building with a tiny collection when, in March 1935, a founding trustee named Albert M. Bender wrote to his friend, the artist Diego Rivera, in Mexico City. Bender had donated 23 Rivera works on paper as part of his foundational gift and now, he said, the accession committee "would like one of your pictures." He asked Rivera to send him "a representation of your work at its finest and best" that Bender would then donate.

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San Francisco

Pompeii beckons. Frozen in time when it was engulfed in volcanic ash and debris from Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, then rediscovered in 1748, this ancient Roman town has fascinated the public ever since. Before the pandemic intervened, tourists were limited to 15,000 at a time, lest the site be overrun; now reopened, it is selling timed tickets and keeping attendance even lower.

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When Clarence H. White staged and shot "The Ring Toss" in 1899, he was on a mission. Eleven years earlier, George Eastman had introduced his Kodak camera for the masses, and many people were seduced by its slogan, "You Press the Button, We Do the Rest." They avidly captured everyday scenes, sent the camera off to Kodak for processing, and enjoyed the snapshots that came back.

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Norfolk, Va.

Like the U.S. itself, American art is woven from many strands, with the biggest and brightest threads inspired by French, British and Italian traditions. A new exhibition at the Chrysler Museum of Art gives weight and luster to a different aesthetic influence: "Americans in Spain: Painting and Travel, 1820-1920" explores the many ways American artists like William Merritt Chase, Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins and John Singer Sargent learned from the art, architecture, landscapes and people of Spain.

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In the ocean of federal relief provided to America's unemployed during and after the Great Depression, paying visual artists to create art was perhaps the most innovative wave then and among the most remembered now. With salaries from the Works Progress Administration and related agencies, thousands of men and women made paintings, sculpture, posters, photographs and, most notably, murals that decorated post offices, schools, hospitals, courthouses and other public buildings across the country.

By most counts, New Deal programs produced more than 2,500 murals, though records are incomplete. Worse, in the decades after the programs ended in 1943, many of these murals were moved, painted over, neglected or destroyed.

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