It’s not uncommon for a painting by famed Mexican artist Diego Rivera to command a sizable price tag when put up for auction. “Mercado de flores (Mujer cargando un niño)” sold for $190,500 during a Sotheby’s art auction Wednesday, and it wasn’t even the most expensive Rivera piece sold that day.
What makes this piece more unique than most, though, is how it ended up on the doorstep of Hall of Fame pitcher Waite Hoyt in 1951.
Tim Manners, co-author of Hoyt’s memoir “Schoolboy: The Untold Journey of a Yankees Hero,” said details of a friendship between Hoyt and Rivera aren’t clear, but it likely started when Hoyt provided Rivera with tickets to Ebbets Field to watch him pitch while with the Dodgers in 1932. Manners said from what the Hoyt family recalls, Rivera shipped Hoyt the painting almost two decades later in 1951 as a thank you gift for the tickets. Rivera was famously married to painter Frida Kahlo. He died in 1957. Hoyt kept the painting until his death in 1984.
Hoyt would frequently visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art during his playing days for the New York Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers. Manners said it’s why Hoyt felt compelled to meet Rivera in 1932 when the Mexican artist worked in New York on a mural at Rockefeller Center named “Man at the Crossroads.”
“I just think it’s so odd because who would think that a baseball player of that era, any era, would be interested in art to connect with somebody as different from you as Diego Rivera in 1932,” said Manners, citing Rivera’s Marxist political views as a primary reason against their unlikely friendship.
Hoyt, winner of 237 games and a three-time World Series champion with the Yankees, including as a member of the vaunted 1927 team, said in his memoir that he wondered if he would have been more at peace had he attended art school rather than becoming a pitcher.
“I was happier painting than I ever was pitching,” Hoyt said in the book.
Hoyt with several of his own works. (Photo courtesy of Tim Manners)
Hoyt’s love for art only increased following his playing career. Hoyt and Manners devoted a chapter (Art of Baseball) in the memoir specifically to the pitcher’s passion for art.
According to Manners’ item description for Sotheby’s: “Long interested in art, Hoyt’s creative pursuits began when his wife Ellen gave him a numbered watercolor set, which he quickly discarded in favor of painting freehand. He later studied with noted Cincinnati painter and baseball fan, Robert Fabe, after phoning Fabe and asking if he would like to get together to talk about painting and baseball. Within a matter of months, Hoyt gave a one-man exhibition and sold 39 of his 40 works.”
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(Top image: Sotheby’s)
