In a light-filled, two-story Cow Hollow home, a pair of ethereal eyes gaze from a pastel canvas.
The otherworldly stare belongs to Aurea Procel — and to Diego Rivera, who painted the young woman’s likeness in the 1929 portrait, “Tehuantepec Costume.” The hypnotic work will soon be on the move, most likely in December. Yet the portrait’s fate could change even sooner if its 90-year-old owner dies before the portrait goes to an exhibition in Houston.
“This story is not about me, but about the painting,” said the trustee of the Rivera masterpiece, who wishes to remain anonymous regarding the work hanging above her bed.
She began calling the portrait “the Mexican Mona Lisa” in the course of her extensive research on the painting’s subject and its original owner, Alfred Honigbaum, who bought the painting directly from Rivera in 1929.
The executor holding the photo of Alfred Honigbaum, who bought the painting of Áurea Procel directly from Rivera in 1929. The photo of Honigbaum is by Dorothea Lange. Photo by Julie Zigoris.
Procel accomplished much in the 45 years of her short life, becoming the first female Mexican doctor and a staunch feminist. She was 18 — turning 19 — at the time Rivera painted her portrait, which could have made it a birthday gift.
Rivera’s inscription in elegant, looping cursive on the canvas appears to provide further evidence: It reads Para Aurea Procel (For Aurea Procel). She is dressed in traditional costume, the huipil of lace encasing her face a symbol of femininity that identifies her as a Tehuana.
“He’s sort of in la-la-land when he paints this,” said Will Maynez of the Rivera portrait. Maynez serves as a longtime guardian of and expert on the Rivera mural “Pan-American Unity,” currently in storage at the City College of San Francisco. “He just married Frida, and he just got kicked out of the Mexican Communist Party.”
Rivera painted a second, much larger, portrait of the same woman in 1929, titled “Tehuana (Aurea Procel),” with a more traditional look. This may have been the painting originally intended for Honigbaum during his visit to Mexico, but he forked out $500 to buy the smaller one instead.
“If Alfred had taken the big, rustic one, the more refined sensibility of the tastes here at the time would not have been as receptive,” said the trustee. “This is just polished enough that it creates a sensation.”
Sensation, indeed. A San Francisco Examiner article from 1930 calls the portrait the “most striking of all” the art in Honigbaum’s extensive art collection on display at the Galerie Beaux Arts with its “simple and masterful composition” and “jeweled light.”
The article lovingly describes Procel’s face as “a perfect oval, almost like an olive, set in absolute vertical balance […] The eyes, the brows, the lips are adjusted in horizontal or vertical rhythms.”
Indirect family connections to the original owner have led Procel’s portrait to hang in Cow Hollow. Now it’s the trustee’s job to ensure the painting finds a new — and appropriate —permanent home.
In the meantime, the painting will go on tour to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston for the exhibition “Frida: the Making of an Icon,” opening in January 2026, followed by the Tate Modern in London.
Honigbaum made his fortune as a packer of dried fruits when the world couldn’t get enough of them. The wealth lining his pockets soon afforded him a hobby customary to early 20th-century magnates: art collecting.
In charge of his company’s foreign sales, Honigbaum had the opportunity to travel the world for his trade, and one of his favorite destinations was Mexico.
“To my very good friend,” reads an inscription to Honigbaum on a black-and-white line drawing signed by Diego Rivera in 1936. Honigbaum’s collection also includes photographs inscribed by Frida Kahlo, images by Tina Modotti and Dorothea Lange and artworks by Roberto Montenegro.
The dried-fruit purveyor remained a childless bachelor his entire life, creating a complex line of inheritance after his death.
The striking portrait of Aurea Procel — the painting, arriving in 1929, landed before he did — marked Rivera’s entry into the American creative consciousness. Ideally, it would remain in the Bay Area.
Diego Rivera has always had a special connection to San Francisco. It’s the only American city he visited twice, and it bookends the time Rivera spent working in the country. “He has a lot of good friends in the city,” Maynez said. “He invigorates the local scene, to the benefit of everybody.”
While New York City infamously destroyed his Rockefeller Center mural, San Francisco celebrates three large-scale pieces of Rivera’s public art: City College of San Francisco’s “Pan-American Unity,” City Club’s “The Allegory of California,” and the former San Francisco Art Institute’s “The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City.”
When the Rockefeller Center mural was obliterated, the muralists at Coit Tower in San Francisco stopped working in protest. “He was revered here,” Maynez said of Rivera. “He got the place going.”