Ep. 14: A Prize-Winning Mural and the End of an Era

In 1949 Annette Nancarrow won a mural-painting contest at the Hotel Borda in Taxco.

Annette’s award winning mural Dream of a Boy to Become a Bullfighter. Bullfighter were one of Annette’s favorite subject matter.

Annette lived at the Hotel Borda while creating Dream of a Boy to Become a Bullfighter—it was an exciting time when she competed on equal footing with male artists. The mural was done on four large Masonite panels, using egg tempera in the style of the old frescoes as she had learned from Rivera and Orozco. It was portable so it could travel to other hotels and art galleries. She was awarded her prize by Miguel Alemán (1900-1983) himself, president of Mexico, with whom some have said she later became romantically involved.

Throughout these years of creative productivity, life with Conlon Nancarrow also continued to be rich. Nancarrow became interested in cooking and the couple grew a huge garden; he began buying up Spanish wine and cheeses. Marijuana was legal and Conlon enjoyed indulging. Expats from all over the world ended up at their table, including many, such as screenwriter Julian Halevy (originally Julian Zimet) from the motion picture business who had been blacklisted and other refugees Conlon had met when serving in Spain in the Lincoln Brigade.

Fred Vanderbilt Field (1905-2000) of Marshall Field, a fellow traveler in the Communist Party who would later marry a gorgeous woman who modeled nude for many of Rivera’s famous paintings, also dropped by for political debate. Added to the continuing gaiety of the retinue of artists that arrived for conversation and partying, the Nancarrow home at Águilas 48 was essentially a salon.

Annette with one of her paintings and Jose Clemente Orozco’s last self-portrait given to her shortly before his death in 1949.

During these golden years, Frida Kahlo gave Annette the lithograph inscribed to her with love that would, after Annette’s death, be auctioned off at Sotheby’s. Federico Cantú (1907-1989) painted her portrait. But changes were in the wind. Her friend Frida was very ill and, in the fall of 1949, Annette would receive the shocking news of José Clemente Orozco’s passing. Shortly before his death, he would give her his last self-portrait, dedicated “Para Annette.”

Annette and Conlon were not as well matched as she and Louis Stephens had been. Certainly he was a compelling man, brilliant and creative—but he was also antisocial, introspective, and focused obsessively on his music. His knowledge of music, and especially jazz, was enormous and it was great exposure for Annette’s sons, Charles and Luis. But he began to resist the social gatherings that were life blood for Annette, to lack interest in traveling and, worse, to lose interest in their sex life. For Annette, a self-described “highly sexed woman,” it was a disaster. She could not sleep well, paint, or function normally without it. Conlon’s health was failing and he became more frantic about his music. He moved permanently into his studio and began to live as a hermit.

It was a decade of change. The golden era in Mexico City that had so nurtured and stimulated Annette, and been influenced by her in return, was drawing to an end. There would never be another like it. Frida Kahlo had to be carried on a stretcher to her last exhibition in 1953 and would die the following summer. Maria Izquierdo succumbed in 1955 after a decade of declining health following a stroke. Diego Rivera died in 1957, as did Miguel Covarrubias. The spotlight that had so brightly illuminated a handful of remarkable and innovative artists blinked and grew dimmer at each passing until, finally, only the memory, the shadow, of the era lingered on in those who were left behind.

With the loss of so many friends, after two amazing decades in Mexico City, her marriage no longer viable, and her boys in boarding school in the United States, Annette rented out her house and left the city. It was time to turn the page, to begin a new era. She would continue to maintain an apartment in Mexico City where she would stay off and on for the rest of her life, but the center of her social life for the immediate future would be in Acapulco.