Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco's Public Murals - Hardcover

Lee, Anthony W.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520211332 ISBN 13: 9780520211339

Publisher: University of California Press, 1999

Synopsis

The boldly political mural projects of Diego Rivera and other leftist artists in San Francisco during the 1930s and early 1940s are the focus of Anthony W. Lee's fascinating book. Led by Rivera, these painters used murals as a vehicle to reject the economic and political status quo and to give visible form to labor and radical ideologies, including Communism.

Several murals, and details of others, are reproduced here for the first time. Of special interest are works by Rivera that chart a progress from mural paintings commissioned for private spaces to those produced as a public act in a public space: Allegory of California, painted in 1930-31 at the Stock Exchange Lunch Club; Making a Fresco, Showing the Building of a City, done a few months later at the California School of Fine Arts; and Pan American Unity, painted in 1940 for the Golden Gate International Exposition.

Labor itself became a focus of the new murals: Rivera painted a massive representation of a construction worker just as San Francisco's workers were themselves organizing; Victor Arnautoff, Bernard Zakheim, John Langley Howard , and Clifford Wight painted panels in Coit Tower that acknowledged the resolve of the dockworkers striking on the streets below. Radical in technique as well, these muralists used new compositional strategies of congestion, misdirection, and fragmentation, subverting the legible narratives and coherent allegories of traditional murals.

Lee relates the development of wall painting to San Francisco's international expositions of 1915 and 1939, the new museums and art schools, corporate patronage, and the concerns of immigrants and ethnic groups. And he examines how mural painters struggled against those forces that threatened their practice: the growing acceptance of modernist easel painting, the vagaries of New Deal patronage, and a wartime nationalism hostile to radical politics.

About this title

About the Author

Anthony W. Lee is Assistant Professor of Art at Mount Holyoke College.

From the Back Cover

"Anthony Lee is quickly emerging as a key figure for a whole new generation of scholars. This book on Diego Rivera is significant not only for the notable new insights it yields, but also for the disciplinary shifts that it signals. Deftly written yet replete with a density of engaged meaning that inspires critical admiration, this new look at Rivera will remain an important stimulus in the field for quite a while."—David Craven, author of Diego Rivera: As Epic Modernist

"Microhistory at its best, Painting on the Left explores the fascinating and complex status of public murals in San Francisco during the early twentieth century. Lee's book is a rigorous and nuanced historical analysis of the murals, their patrons, and their publics (both real and imagined). In his finest moment, Lee reads Diego Rivera's three great murals in San Francisco, illuminating the motivations of their American patrons in hiring this foreign artist and demonstrating how Rivera's challenge to the decorative function and legible style of public murals dovetailed with radical politics." —Cecile Whiting, author of A Taste of Pop: Pop Art, Gender, and Consumer Culture

"This was a moment when painting mattered! In a deeply divided society, public art was a vector for contestation about what it was to be an American, a committed citizen, a moral being. With care and subtlety, and in fascinating detail, Lee shows how art, especially mural painting, became for a time the primary medium for the brokerage of power in the city of San Francisco itself. We see the murals afresh, we decipher the intense, sprawling, diversifying energies which shaped their now stilled surfaces. We might wish, these days, for a public art of similar consequence."—Terry Smith, author of Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America

"Anthony Lee's Painting on the Left raises discussion of art and politics in Depression America to a new level. His persuasive and original interpretation of mural painting in the San Francisco Bay Area, grounded in scrupulous research, relates pictorial choice to the complex interests of local elites, labor organizing, and Communist politics at this turbulent period of San Francisco's history. The analysis of politics is nuanced and satisfying, and it matches with an equally sophisticated address to pictorial form. The writing, too, is fluent and vivid. Here is one of those relatively rare books that fulfills the promise of the Social History of Art." —Andrew Frank Hemingway, Reader in the History of Art, University College of London

From the Inside Flap

"Anthony Lee is quickly emerging as a key figure for a whole new generation of scholars. This book on Diego Rivera is significant not only for the notable new insights it yields, but also for the disciplinary shifts that it signals. Deftly written yet replete with a density of engaged meaning that inspires critical admiration, this new look at Rivera will remain an important stimulus in the field for quite a while."—David Craven, author of Diego Rivera: As Epic Modernist

"This was a moment when painting mattered! In a deeply divided society, public art was a vector for contestation about what it was to be an American, a committed citizen, a moral being. With care and subtlety, and in fascinating detail, Lee shows how art, especially mural painting, became for a time the primary medium for the brokerage of power in the city of San Francisco itself. We see the murals afresh, we decipher the intense, sprawling, diversifying energies which shaped their now stilled surfaces. We might wish, these days, for a public art of similar consequence."—Terry Smith, author of Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco's Public Murals

By Anthony W. Lee

University of California Press

Copyright 1999 Anthony W. Lee
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520211332


Chapter 1
When Murals Became Public

We begin at the fairgrounds of the city's 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition, or PPIE (Fig. 1.1). As its official title suggests, the exposition celebrated the opening of the Panama Canal; it also marked San Francisco's rebirth after its virtual destruction in the 1906 earthquake and fire. The fair must have been dazzling: seventy-six city blocks of triumphal arches, towers, arcades, fountains, and columns, not to mention the myriad gardens and, at one end, a huge artificial lagoon kept meticulously blue. It also included thirty-five murals of monumental size, painted on canvas. They decorated the major arches, outdoor courts, and gatewaysacres of colorful forms; gigantic figures on broad, flat surfaces; dramatic gestures and glistening bodies in complex arrangements, all overhead. A visitor crossing the vast fairgrounds could, with each step, spot a painting. Because of their size and ubiquitousness, the murals were much discussed, as if they represented a new kind of art.

Records, if not recent memory, should have reminded visitors that wall paintings already existed in the city, most notably in the several dozen gaudy, opulent Barbary Coast bars and restaurants as well as in libraries, churches, and drawing rooms. But virtually all of them had been consumed by the great fire. Few, moreover, garnered the sophisticated critical attention that greeted the exposition murals.1 These new paintings seemed to contain higher, nobler ambitions than their predecessors and aspired to be "public art." For one young critic, however, "the mural paintings as a whole [were] not so fine as either the architecture or the sculpture."2 They seemed constricted by the exposition's decorative demands, which forced them into an ornamental role that diminished their artistic power and kept them "limited to a palette of five colors, in order that the panels should harmonize with the larger color scheme." What dreary sameness, he complained.

1.1
Contemporary retouched photograph of Panama Pacific
International Exposition, 1915. Whereabouts unknown.

The critic was Sheldon Cheney, best known for his two books, Primer of Modern Art (1924) and Expressionism in Art (1934), and for his writings of the late 1930s that were in dialogue with those of Alfred Barr and Clement Greenberg. In 1915, however, Cheney was a virtual unknown. His was a minority opinion, and other critics countered, dismissed, or ridiculed it in their own appraisals. "Color and design impressive in a studio might, when placed beside vigorous architecture, become weak and pale," one of them wrote.3 Thus the best murals intentionally "harmonized with the general plan of the Exposition." "All other Expositions have been almost colorless," explained another. The PPIE, in contrast, sought to achieve "absolute rightness of shade and tint" everywhere, including its murals.4 But even in praising the murals, the critics voiced the underlying assumption that they did

not really stand on their own as forceful artistic statements. Nevertheless, whole books were given over to detailed descriptions of the mural paintings; newspapers editorialized at considerable length about them; and the many guidebooks devoted their only color reproductions to them.5

Though Cheney generally stood by his criticism, he must also have felt the precariousness of his stance as a dissenting critic, for he qualified it, explaining that "the most significant thing of all is the wonderfully harmonious and unified effect of the whole, that testifies so splendidly to the perfect co-operation of American architects, sculptors and painters."6 His ideas appeared in a small, affordable guidebook published by an exposition subsidiary to explain the new paintings to their new public.

The critics' responses introduce the arguments germane to San Francisco's first public murals. A soon as the murals were identified as an ennobled public art, their suitability for that role became the focus of considerable debate. Of central concern was the issue Cheney had raised: the murals' fit with their architectural setting, their harmony, unity, and coherence vis--vis their surroundings. The critics well knew about the special, provocative problem of murals, which, unlike easel paintings, belong to a wall and its decorative environs. But they found that the murals at the PPIE belonged all too well; too much unity and consistency was as problematic as too little. Cheney's claim that the "dominant note artistically is harmony ," if it reads like a description, also encapsulated his criticism.7

Why did it matter that the murals were, or were not, independently interesting? What issue did Cheney's art criticism address in its peculiar, hermetic way? In this chapter I suggest that the ambiguous but palpable order at the fairthe "harmonious effect" of prescribed colors and compositions in the muralshad its corollary in another order outside the fairgrounds proper. It arose from a political struggle during San Francisco's reconstruction, when specific patronsthe exposition'ssought to use large-scale painting to advance their partisan view of governance and social welfare. The murals became "public art" because of their relationship to that partisan effort, thereby beginning a decades-long accommodation of artistic and political practices. Cheney hinted at the murals' political dimension years later when he wrote of murals by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (the French painter whose works were the apparent model for the exposition panels):

The coloring and disposition of forms both indicate a possible fear of upsetting an equilibrium attained instinctively rather than through conscious knowledge of dynamic values. There is here none of the vigor or intensity

of Orozco or Rivera. Perhaps it is Expressionism at its lowest intensity, in its most delicate manifestationat a time when expression would seem, on its emotional side, to demand drive and strong contrast.8

"Low intensity" resulted when Puvis's academicism ("conscious knowledge") and "loyalty to the wall" compromised the vigor of his artistic ideas. Playing to the wall's rigid flatness meant too readily acceding to an imposed order; thus even Puvis, dead since 1898, could be indicted in the context of Progressive Era San Francisco. What murals needed was "drive and strong contrast," an energetic expression like that in the works of some radical Mexican artists.

But I anticipate a comparison that Cheney could not make in 1915, for Rivera's work, which appeared in the Bay Area some fifteen years later, could not serve as a proper foil to the public murals of the Panama Pacific International Exposition. On the fairgrounds, Cheney could only point to the new murals' unsuitability and awkwardness, his sense that they belonged to a much larger framework. The pages that follow establish how murals became "public art" precisely in attempting to mediate between the exposition where they were installed and the city outside. I look closely at the instability of this connection, the particularity and political nature of the vision, and the deeply ambivalent response.

The Exposition of the New City

"In the art of the Exposition," Cheney wrote,

the great underlying theme is that of achievement. . . . So the ideas of victory, achievement, progress and aspiration are expressed again and again: in the architecture with its triumphal arches and aspiring towers; in the sculpture that brings East and West face to face, and that shows youth rising with the morning sun, eager and unafraid; and in the mural paintings that portray the march of civilization, and that tell the story of the latest and greatest of mankind's triumphs over nature.9

The phrase "again and again" tells the story. For if the PPIE and its murals were texts to be read, they in effect presented "again and again" the same text. Such texts gave the practicing critic little to do unless he were simply a babbling iconographer or a highly paid popularizer. (If "the writer did not pretend to a power of artistic discrimination, there would be little excuse for preparing the guide.")10

The exposition lasted nearly a year, from February 4, 1915, to December 4, on an artificial marina on the city's northern shore.11 It was, like virtually every world's

1.2
Frank du Mond,  Westward March of Civilization  (detail), 1915. Oil on canvas.
San Francisco Public Library/Asian Art Museum.

fair before, a spectacle for modern industry and technology.12 Late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century expositions generally synthesized contemporary understandings of tourism as a modern pilgrimage, used the language of progress to promote consumerism, and interpreted capitalism as an economic system that advanced learning and material well-being.13 The critic, like the tourist, entered the PPIE in search of a variety of material and intellectual wonders and knew what kind of response was appropriate. "The Palace of Machinery holds three lessons for the observer," wrote one: "the state of man's inventions at the present moment, the increasing displacement of coal by hydro-electric plants and liquid fuels, [and] . . . the changing direction of invention toward devices for human betterment."14

But in the murals, meaning seemed most manifest and mechanical. In the two long horizontal panels of Frank du Mond's Westward March of Civilization (one panel is shown in Fig. 1.1, of which Fig. 1.2 is a detail), human betterment is linked to the settlement of California, pictured as a procession of the state's historical luminariesthe Franciscan monk Junipero Serra, the Spanish explorer Juan Bautista de Anza, the writer Bret Harte, the painter William Keith, and others. The painter evidently read Hubert Bancroft's History of California and, like that encyclopedic work, structured the mural as a time line from the discovery to the conquest, settlement, and governance of the state and the development of its culture.15 The figures march toward the outstretched arms of Queen Califa, a newly

christened mythological figure standing for California. Her full youthful form had important local meaning, her youth signaling a long life ahead, her amplitude the economic resurgence of San Francisco itself. She is both the endpointthe goal toward which historical momentum has tendedand the sign of a new history about to commence, the recognizable (embodied, allegorized) place where a new civilization can begin.

That kind of argument is continued in William de Leftwich Dodge's Atlantic and Pacific and The Gateway of All Nations , where the Panama Canal's opening is heralded as another step in California's history. Like du Mond, the painter makes his case with two long processions of figures. In one panel, inspirational muses lead ox-drawn wagons; in the other, cranes and dredges dig the new canal. In the first, the herculean figure Labor links Atlantic and Pacific culturesa familiar story of European immigration and settlement in America. In the second, Neptune leads "the fleets of the world," presumably to the city's new ports.16 Together, the panels assert San Francisco's natural and historical right to the bounty brought through the Panama Canal and link the city to the frontier West of the nineteenth-century imagination. They turn economic potential into the stuff of allegory and picture recent developments as progressordained and inevitable.

These paintings are not far from the typical fare of turn-of-the-century expositions, and the critics had no difficulty understanding them. ("The artist is tediously careful to make his meanings plain," Cheney wrote.)17 If Puvis was a stylistic touchstone for the painters, so too, probably, were Emanuel Leutze, whose famous Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way shows pioneers headed toward the San Francisco Bay, and, possibly, Thomas Crawford, whose equally famous bas-relief Progress of Civilization , in the Capitol in Washington, uses a mix of historical and allegorical figures to make a similar case for civilization's forward march. The exposition murals resorted to conventional classical motifs and a standard academic vocabulary to represent the activities and visualize the aspirations of exposition organizers. They made legible the master narratives of the exposition.

The sheer repetition of meaning in the exposition and its murals would most likely have been read without comment had it not seemed a compensation foror, worse, a contradiction ofthe city outside. Unlike the fair, with its blocks of material splendor, the city itself hardly looked reborn. With remarkable tenacity, the official guides compared the two: the palm-lined avenues and wide fairground boulevards looked like those proposed for the new streets just outside the front gates; the fair's system of courts, promenades, and centers resembled the collection of axes radiating from San Francisco's new Civic Center; even an exhibit called Underground Chinatown in the "Zone," the exposition's amusement area, invited fairgoers to visit an ethnic enclave to witness the opium smokers, gamblers,

1.3
Perham Nahl, Poster for Panama Pacific International
Exposition, 1915.

slave girls, and hatchet murderers said to have existed in old Chinatown and resurrected for tourist shows in the new.18 Only the murals could be said to have no real corollary outsideone of the reasons for their special status. Indeed, why else would San Francisco's Republican leadership underwrite a debated landfill on the city's northern shore, permit the docks on the city's eastern perimeter to expand south to China Basin, or develop an expensive ferry and train system linking the city to the northern and eastern settlements along the bay? Why would it initiate tunneling through two of the city's highest hills to open up the northeastern and southwestern districts to residential subdivisions? Such development, the guidebooks said, had occurred haphazardly before the earthquake and now proceeded in earnest, as if the rebuilding of the city properly vied with fair preparations. The exposition's official poster, by Perham Nahl (Fig. 1.3), leaves unclear whether the distant skyline is that of the PPIE or the new San Francisco. Because the herculean effort the poster depictsto excavate and revealis pertinent to both exposition and city, the picture can collapse the two wish images into one.

These emphases and promises are remarkable burdens for an exposition, already under considerable pressure because of its mission to exhibit "progress." The fair was, after all, a temporary ensemble; it was a sign of a much more inclusive, exhaustive reconstruction to comean interpretation that the organizers took care to spell out for fairgoers. For this purpose they prepared the gossipy handbooks and the tourist guides already mentioned, and they erected highly visible placards at each of the main courts, major works of sculpture, and mural decorations to explain the allegorical and symbolic links between the individual works of art, the organizers' cultural expertise, industry's rationalized thinking, and San Francisco's urban development. The exposition not only signaled "progress" but also embodied it as the intellectual and material space permitted by larger enlightened efforts.

San Franciscans had rarely seen such a wealth of printed materials, most hyperbolically proclaiming and interpreting the city's recent achievements. Visitors with maps and guidebooks must have found the fair an often numbing experience. Each intellectual, cultural, or scientific display was touted for its monumental size and import. And although organizers initially worried about amassing enough works of fine art to fill the huge pavilion, "on the opening day of the Exposition it was found that the Palace of Fine Arts, far from having too little material, had too much. . . . The consequence was that a new building had to be erected."19 It did not matter that world's fairs regularly featured such plenitude. The organizers of San Francisco's exhibition left to others the task of putting the display into perspective.

While the PPIE stood as a replete, integrated metropolis, San Francisco had hardly rebuilt with the same thoroughness or order. The major projects were less than halfway along, and while some of the city's streets resembled those of the fair, others were mere sketches for future arteries. Some major buildings stood, finished on bare lots; others were under construction; still others existed only on paper with site preparation just begun. The massive Beaux-Arts Civic Center, for example, could boast only one building completedan auditorium finished in January 1915, the opening of the PPIE; all the other structures were barely under way. The grid system of the new city extended into the Richmond district and the new Sunset district, but in these neighborhoods, as elsewhere in the city, completed structures alternated with others just balloon framed or with large sand dunes.20 Although elaborate plans existed to tunnel through two hillsides to lay track for a municipal railway, the bores had not yet been drilled in the hard rock.21 Indeed, when Nahl drew his official exposition poster, his representation suggested, more accurately than he probably intended, the distance between the rudimentary con-

struction taking place outside the fairgrounds and the finished city, a fantasy imagined as an indistinct skyline.

Decorative Thinking

With the actual city backdrop incomplete, exposition organizers imposed their own reading of the reconstructionits centralization, order, and scope. The murals fit this reading not only in their sober, edifying narrative quality but also in their homogeneity of form and consistency of color, their adherence symbolically to a methodical urban arrangement. Jules Guerin, the exposition's chief of color and decoration, was certainly no stranger to large-scale decoration efforts. Born and raised in Saint Louis, he studied painting in the Paris studios of Jean-Paul Laurens and Benjamin Constant, returning afterward to New York, where he gained both a reputation as a painter of large ensembles and election to the prestigious National Academy of Design.22 He must have been given early access to most of the fair's architectural and grounds plans, for his 1912 drawing of the exposition accurately represents its grand layout. At about the same time, he seems to have determined on an overall visual logic for the faira static effect produced by polychrome Venetian colors and surface patterns. He specified every detail. "I wonder how many visitors down there know," a guidebook asked, "that the very sand they walk on has been colored." The chief of color had ordered every last grain painted pink, naturally.23 Guerin's tastes even dictated the major landscape scheme.24 In keeping with the strong Mediterranean theme, for example, he imported old-world palms and lush florasome 70,000 Dutch rhododendrons; 2,000 Japanese azaleas; 6,000 pansies; and 10,000 veronicas, African agapanthus, and Brazilian cineraria.25 The colors and clustered forms of the plantings blended with the architectural details "without jar or break."26 The ensemble produced an overall image of a prosperous Pacific coast city-state.27

The decorative program of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago some two decades before had established the visual language of a serious, culturally elevating classicism. That language was taken up enthusiastically at the PPIE because it continued the imagery already associated with reconstruction. In the new city pictured by Maynard Dixon as early as 1906 (Fig. 1.4), only weeks after the earthquake and fire, Greek temples and pavilions rise on a hillside protected by an androgynous genie. Although Dixon himself had been trained, not in the academy, but in the Wild West mold of Frederic Remington, his view of a new city in old-world garb stemmed from a myth of cultural inheritance subscribed to by a gen-

1.4
Maynard Dixon, Hope of the City , cover for Sunset
magazine, 1906. Collection of the California State
Library, Sacramento.

eration of city patrons (led by the fabulously wealthy Phoebe Apperson Hearst). It provided for them a morally elevating rhetorical framework for debates about reconstruction, suggesting metaphors and allegories to structure them.28 The benefits of this vocabulary are sufficiently clear. "The whole spirit here," wrote Cheney of the exposition's architectural program, "is one of seriousness, of dignity, of permanency."29 He did not mean this satirically, though it could well have been taken that way. At any given moment, the city looked temporary and disorderlythe reconstruction proceeded in starts and fitsbut was given permanence and order at the fair.

In 1911 an artist named Edward Mitchell produced an official image for the fair (Fig. 1.5) that rearticulated Dixon's motifs. This time, however, the major visual elements of Dixon's work have been readjusted to represent the developments hoped for in the reconstruction. The dream city, no longer an imaginative projection, stands in the distance, more carefully articulated than in Dixon's version.

1.5
Edward Mitchell,  On the Road of a Thousand Wonders , 1915. Collection of the author.

The genies, now male and female, no longer cradle the city, which has begun to take on its own energetic form; but they seem exhausted by earlier efforts. The opening of the Panama Canal and the attendant revitalization of San Francisco's economy are shown in explicit detail. The maps make the link between the canal and the city eminently clear. The rest of Californiaindeed, the rest of the Pacific coast and its many competing portsis omitted. A neoclassical image of rigor and stability implied the eternal hierarchical order of economic relations for San Francisco, and the PPIE artists readily took up the suggestion.30

Like so much else at the fair, Guerin's mural painters were imported, primarily from New York. Seven came from Manhattan, an eighth from London, and only the ninth, Arthur Mathews, was a San Franciscan.31 For the thirty-five "official" murals (as opposed to those commissioned by participating states and nations in individual pavilions), the chief of color outlined as early as 1912 the edifying iconographic program and consistent coloristic plan I have already noted.32 It caused

no end of difficulty for some of the painters, and reports suggest that many had to repaint the final layer in San Francisco, after their canvases had been glued in place, under Guerin's watchful eye "to make sure that they did not conflict with one another."33 Cheney had strong reservations about the resulting blandness of their works, and the overwhelming homogeneity of the fairgroundsthe countless blue agapanthus and veronicas, the ubiquitous pink sand, the repetitive golden domes and pearly towerssuggests why he might have been dismayed. Nothing distinguished the murals, nothing provided resistance or a counter to them. They were not so much framed by their architectural and decorative surrounds as absorbed by them.

For Cheney, the pleasures of allegorical mural painting resided in his own ironic sense of the opaque relation between the meaning of a particular painting and the exposition's grander narratives.34 Allegory should permiteven encouragepainters to destabilize meaning. The limits imposed by the exposition's narratives and the decorative program should frame imaginative invention, not close it off. Faced with the PPIE murals' decided lack of invention, their lack of expression and expressiveness, Cheney complained about the rigor of Guerin's order, the obedience it demanded. To be compelling, allegorical painting requires slippage, the display of wit and ingenuity that belong to individual artistic performance. Painterly invention needed, in part, to work against ideology.

My description of the exposition's ideological work has edged slightly into satire, comparing, for example, the high seriousness of the paintings' arguments about progress and rebirth with the evidence of disorder and incompleteness in the city itself. Even the exposition's more sympathetic critics were tempted to lapse into a similar tone. They noted, for example, that some murals seemed not to fit the purported meanings recounted in the placards and guidebooks. Speaking of a no-longer-extant panel, one complains: "It doesn't help much to know that the middle figure, with the upraised arm, is Inspiration with Commerce at her right and Truth at her left. They might express almost any symbols that were related to beauty. And the symbolism of the groups at either end seems rather gratuitous. They might be many other things besides true hope and false hope and abundance standing beside the family."35 The critic, who clearly had read the official written texts, practically verbatim, is dismayed at the apparent gap between word and image. Instead of giving proper form to the exposition's master texts, the murals seemed to obscure them, for the allegory was too indistinct and the figures were too generic. Truth could be Commerce; Commerce could be Truth (how the exposition committee would have relished that!). But for the viewer, the ambiguity only made the murals' edifying language seem inappropriate. What critics wanted

instead was an iconographic program more in keeping with the theme of reconstruction. Whereas the allegorical mode falsely abstracted and universalized experience, reconstruction seemed to warrant a radically contemporary particularization: "Those murals suggest what a big chance our decorators have in the themes that come out of our industrial life. They've only made a start. As mural decoration advances . . . we ought to produce men able to deal in a vigorous and imaginative way with the big spiritual and economic conceptions that are associated with our new ideals of industry."36 The pallid scenes had little to do with the vigorous industry that required an energetic style and a progressive form of depiction.

The criticism of the exposition's murals is that of observers at most twentieth-century world's fairs, even critics in official pay. On the one hand, the paintings are asked to be texts when they would rather be paintings; on the other, the paintings' rhetoric poorly accommodates the ideals and fantasies of a modernizing society.37 Ultimately, the murals did not connect the exposition to the city in a convincing wayor perhaps they connected it only insofar as they reflected the prescription of its organizers. A patron class was trying on an argument based on allegorical order and visual consistency, and the effort to turn ideology into painting was all too visible.

The New Patrons and Their Public

What have been the keys thus far in examining the advent of murals as a public medium? First of all, we have needed to describe the specificity of place, the exposition itself, where we can reasonably describe viewers as constituting a "public" and can understand critics as endeavoring, sometimes mightily, to explain the murals to them. But second, those murals seemed to gain significant public stature only because of their relation to the debate about urban and economic renewal. They addressed an unknown body of viewers whose attentiveness to larger civic developments was nonetheless assumed. And third, we have briefly considered the conventional vocabulary of the paintings themselvestheir moralizing, allegorical classicismdeeply bound up with conceptions of inherited culture and the ennobling rhetoric of reconstruction. These are among the basic coordinates of this or any social history of San Francisco's early murals. But the particular relationship between thembetween physical space, the nature of the debates about governance, and the visual language of the paintingsremains volatile, made all the more so by this thing called a "public." An audienceeven one so apparently disparate as the exposition'sand a public are never the same thing. The audience

is an actual body whose specific composition can be counted and distinguished from that of other audiences. The public, by contrast, is a representation , invoked to give an audience meaningful form; it is an imaginary body "organized and made effective."38 Who, specifically, was served by this effort? And what was the point of conjuring this public to stand witness in the first place?

The PPIE's major beneficiariesits organizerswere San Francisco's first "aristocrats" and their heirs. Pioneers who had capitalized on the gold rush boom, they had used their wealth in the largely unregulated climate of San Francisco politics to control the city. Their family names are legend: Spreckels, the sugar and shipping clan; Fleishhacker, the lumber and paper business family that, by the time of the earthquake, had become bankers; Crocker, the great railroad magnates; and so on.39 Historians often see them as a disparate, competing group, but after 1906, these families joined forces to promote common commitments: to protect the private control of public services and utilities; to dismantle labor organizations, particularly the Union Labor Party; and to eradicate radical political pockets in the city's rougher neighborhoods. During reconstruction, progressive politicians began to criticize the old guard's aristocratic control and to demand reforms. Led by the iconoclast James Phelan, they succeeded in several efforts between 1911 and 1915the years when PPIE preparations were in full swingto gain control of public services.40 They encouraged voters to approve a municipal railway in downtown San Francisco, for example, where the privately owned United Railroads had held a monopoly.41 They made headway in establishing public ownership of the water supplywhat would eventually become the Hetch Hetchy system (San Francisco had been served by the private Spring Valley Water Company).42 They brought complaints against the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, with its near-monopoly of city power, and eventually secured a series of rate cuts. As a result of the Progressives' relentless criticism, the embattled aristocratic faction, united in its economic interests, acted cohesively to protect them. Several among its ranks invested heavily in private utilities and transportation companies in an effort to stave off reforms.43

The San Francisco Progressives' demands for public services and for political reform were not celebrated in the PPIE, for the exposition committee took a different view, enlisting the murals as exponents of their own definition of the "public good," and in so doing initiating an important link between the murals and the public. Although wall painting per se had little currency in the cityas Cheney's amnesia about earlier mural work attestsit did have meaning for this committee.44 William H. Crocker emulated the cultural philanthropism of his uncle Edwin Bryant Crocker, who had amassed a huge collection of paintings and old master drawings during a European grand tour and bequeathed them to the art gallery in

Sacramento that bears his name. Michael de Young earned fame as a critic of theater and art (the original, principle interest of his paper, the Chronicle ) and established an impressive collection of art and artifacts in a city museum. These men ensured that public art became an important element of an ambitious City Beautiful movement. Fleishhacker, who eventually assumed the position of parks commissioner, made that office extremely influential to those ends.45 Indeed, the exposition organizers continually invoked wall painting as a public benefit to counter criticism and defend their own benevolence.46

In the exposition organizers' plans for a decorative program of murals, we witness a political investment in wall painting as a substitute for political reform. The paintings became "public" precisely when they were inserted into a debate about the scope and focus of reconstruction as envisioned in the exposition. As its president, Charles Moore, declared, the exposition was "not designed for the greater glory of individual architects, but for the enjoyment and intellectual stimulus of the people."47 The fair's various architects and artists submerged their egos and united their efforts in "common service" for the public; and the public itself assuredly possessed the necessary sensitivity to the "co-operative idea that will not be lost." These are grand claims, but as always, the public remains a discursive category, whose existence was tied to arguments made for and against it or, as proclaimed by the PPIE's emissaries, benefits that were said to be provided for it.48

It did not occur to San Francisco's philanthropic exposition committee to ask actual fairgoers to ratify their projects. For them what mattered was that a public was present in theory to review the claims that the fair and reconstruction represented a public good. The murals' testimonial role underwrote Guerin's attitudes toward mural work. The painters he chose began their panels in New York studios with the expectation that they would not remain in San Francisco but would have an afterlife elsewhere. The finished works were shipped to the exposition as if they were large Salon canvases, given final touches to make them harmonize with each other and the fairgrounds, placed in their assigned niches, taken down when the fair had run its course, and either sent back or stored.49 No collective judgment on them was expected, nor was their "success" scrutinized, since they were primarily fulfilling a demand from above.

These murals, called upon to link the utopia of the PPIE with San Francisco and naturalize the private control of reconstruction and civic services by insisting upon work for the public good, did so in an esoteric language that most of the fair's visitors seem not to have understood. The critics recognized that the exposition audience preferred some murals to others, but if in the aggregate the murals were to be made an official statement, viewers did not comprehend it, despite the help of placards and guidebooks.

1.6
Frank Brangwyn, Primitive Fire , 1915. Oil on canvas.
War Memorial Building, San Francisco.

We cannot recover the larger audience's "real" response to the murals, but we can gauge its force and quality by discerning how it affected the official writers in the PPIE's pay. According to the critics who observed the exposition's audience, it responded intensely to only one set of murals, by the British painter Frank Brangwyn. Brangwyn was charged to paint a series of panels for the Court of Abundance, a eulogy to fecund nature. The painter was to fill in the tall niches to suit this theme. Unlike the other official muralists, he had not studied in Paris, was not a member of the National Academy, and did not belong to Guerin's New York group.50 A Welshman born in Belgium, he had studied primarily in England and

1.7
Frank Brangwyn, Industrial Fire , 1915. Oil on
canvas. War Memorial Building, San Francisco.

had earned a reputation as much for his etching as his painting. His strongest affiliation was with the Royal Academy in London, and he would gain a modicum of fame in later years when his murals replaced Rivera's at Rockefeller Center in New York. But in 1915 he by no means held the status of a provocateur.

Brangwyn's paintings seem to speak the fair's official language, with eight panelstwo each devoted to earth, air, fire, and waterthat suggest, through comparisons, the benefits of collective effort and industrial progress.51 In Figures 1.6 and 1.7, for example, Brangwyn juxtaposes the crude processes and communal interests of Primitive Fire with the efficient labor and controlled blaze of Industrial

Fire . In the first, a community of men and women gather around a thin column of smoke, nurturing a small flame with bundles of wooden sticks and tree branches. In the second, a huge kiln fire is stoked by muscular men, producing such immense heat that the figures, even the women, can strip to the skin. Such harnessing of nature's power was an expositional commonplace.

The earliest guidebooks' discussions of the exposition's murals pay no special heed to Brangwyn's panels, describing them as they described the others. But in the guidebooks produced after the fair had opened and critics had rubbed elbows with the crowds, there is a notable change. For the critic Eugen Neuhaus

Brangwyn's canvases are a veritable riot of color, full of animation and life. They are almost dynamic. There seems to be something going on in all of them, all the time, and one hardly knows whether it is the composition, the color, or the subject, or all three, which gives them this very profound feeling of animation. . . . Seen from a distance, their effect at first is somewhat startling, owing to their new note, not reminiscent in the very least of the work of any other . . . painter. . . . There is every indication that it gave the artist the utmost pleasure to paint them. This spirit of personal enjoyment . . . is contagious, and disarms all criticism. . . . His pictures are not intellectual in the least, and all of the people in his pictures are animals, more or less, and merely interested in having a square meal and being permitted to enjoy life in general, to the fullest extent.52

Whereas Cheney complained about the general blandness of the PPIE's murals, Neuhaus proclaimed Brangwyn's vitality. The figures move, the colors dance, the compositions dazzle. If other mural painters were constrained by the intellectual and narrative bases for exposition work, Brangwyn seemed simply to discard them. His work was "not intellectual in the least."

Other writers noted a similar freedom in Brangwyn's colors and figures:

The canvases are bold, free, vast as the elements they picture. They need space. . . . Their rich reds, purples, yellows, browns, greens and indigoes are the hues of autumn skies, the falling leaves of hardwoods, the dense foliage of pines, colors of the harvest, of fruit and grapes, of flowers, and of deep waters. The men and women in them are primeval, too, of Mediterranean type, and garbed in the barbaric colors in which Southern folk express the warmth of their natures. . . . In striking contrast with the light and ethereal quality of the allegorical murals . . . these paintings are rich to the point of opulence. There is an enormous depth in them. The figures are full-rounded.

The fruits, flowers and grain hang heavily on their steams [sic ]. The trees bear themselves solidly. The colors, laid on with strong and heavy strokes, fairly flame in the picture.53

The murals are so bold and colorful that the very architectural framing seems to constrain them. "They need space"; they require a different kind of viewing format. Only then will the extraordinary coloring and full-volumed figures be appreciated. As another critic proclaims:

To do justice to the great Brangwyn murals . . . one should stand under the central arch, first to the south and look eastward at the feast of color in the Primitive Water picture. Then face westward; go no nearer, and look upon the vivid wonderful line work and the master-hand in the picture Air Controlled. Then down half way to the east center of the colonnade and look toward Fire Controlled and Water Controlled; then down the north side and see Primitive Fire and the Fruits of the Earth. There is a feast of color at each turn; long distances, shadowy lights and shifting clouds and figures instinct with life. . . . In passing close to the pictures look away, because on near view they take on in some respects an air, almost grotesque, so heavy is the line, so high the color, so intense the shadows. It is a pity that it is possible for any one to be within less than twenty feet.54

By PPIE standards, these descriptions are veritable high-water marks of attention, and they are the only exceptions to the critics' normal language. Whereas the other official murals failed to transcend Guerin's prescriptions through inventiveness, Brangwyn's did precisely that, displaying a real painterliness. Although the writers recognized the differences and tried to express their surprise, they also grasped at ways to describe the panels when clearly their regular habits of looking and writing did not apply. The paintings did not lend themselves to either an iconographic or an allegorical reading. They are congested, too full of figures, colors, and landscape elements. They seem to lack order, hierarchy, and clarity and to refuse all the dictates of Guerin and the exposition committee. Their meanings are obscure, or at least much more obscure than the official descriptions. Narrative ambiguity and material sensuality seem important components of their powerful difference.

Neither the murals' strangeness nor the critics' failings would have mattered if the crowds had not somehow been responding to the artistic differences of these works. And for reasons not entirely clear to the critics, the audience was rapt. In taking stock of the larger reaction, the various writers all pointed to the murals'

figures and tried to pin down what they perceived in these works as a resistance to allegory. The result was a list of qualifying phrases"primitive," "instinct with life," "primeval," "barbaric"that conjured a sense of the figures' pulsing vitality and suggested, in so doing, their refusal to participate in a narrative. They remain too physical, too sensuous (see Plate 1). In insisting on the sheer materiality of bodies, the murals disallow signification. All the writers, moreover, were intensely aware of the conditions of viewing and of the intensity with which the audience examined the murals. The last of the three long excerpts I have quoted, by the writer Katherine Burke, implicitly acknowledges this awareness. Burke attempted to negotiate the viewing space, moving about the court, pitting one perception of the panels against another from a different viewpoint. Turn this way and that, she says, but stay back, at least twenty feet. And why? The second passage, by the critic Ben Macomber, addresses this problem directly. The space in which the murals hang is too cramped. It is not simply that the architecture is obtrusive but that too many people crowd the court, pushing past him and taking up space, and he cannot obtain a proper view. "People are not going in to see them as they should," he complained.55 They got too close, causing a commotion, not following the mode of viewing prescribed by the placards. And what about the murals is so compelling? Neuhaus tries to tell us. Brangwyn "charms thousands of Exposition visitors" because his figures' vitality is "contagious."56 Viewers "can almost feel the effort of [the woodmen's] lungs" in one panel, and in another can sense "the tang of the harvest season."57 The crowds seemed to project themselves onto the painted figures. Taking their cue from Brangwyn's evocative handling of the "primeval" "Mediterranean type," the crowds tried to inhabit those bodies.

The reaction to Brangwyn's murals suggested to the official critics that visitors to the PPIE, particularly the local audience that stood repeatedly before the large murals, were neither completely taken in by, nor necessarily interested in, the aggrandizing material in the official panels. They seemed to have preferences, and they flocked to one set of murals over the others. The official critics tried to relate this preference to a painterly hedonismthose intense colors, the congested compositions, the nonintellectual quality of the painted surfacewhich seemed to separate Brangwyn's work from the others'. But we can also read their stuttering descriptions as evidence that they did not really know why the audience was so interested. Those bodiesthose unidealized, coarse bodieshad something to do with the response, the critics said, for in the end, the actual audience was not interested in reading the official statements of the PPIE. The other murals, full of muscular physiques and aquiline profiles, simply failed to attract them in quite the same way.

Cheney found the murals breathtaking, and he offered the highest praise he could muster: "Ultra-learned critics will tell you that they fail as decorations, since they are interesting as individual pictures rather than as panels heightening the architectural charm. . . . It is better to accept them as pictures, forgetting the set standards by which one ordinarily judges mural painting. . . . There are no conventional figures here personifying the elements, but scenes from the life of intensely human people."58

The exposition committee took stock of the critical reaction and, when the fair concluded, saved du Mond's two large panelsand all of Brangwyn's. The others were given little care, and most are now badly damaged or lost. The lesson learned was an important one. One segment of San Francisco's leadership had wanted to use traditional, hackneyed academic painting to address the public, and the public responded with indifference. The palpable quality of that indifference now mattered, especially if the "public" was going to be enlisted as the beneficiary of cultural work. The public imagined for the murals proved ephemeral. The real audience had its own tastes, and if painting was to re-express specific private interests as a public good, it had better do so with greater force.

The New Muralists

Guerin was justified in looking elsewhere for mural painters because San Francisco had so few. Only Arthur Mathews had any practical expertise, and Guerin was hesitant to employ even him. When Mathews did not appear in New York to learn the director's iconographic and stylistic guidelines for the exposition's murals ("the concert method did not appeal to him"), Guerin gave him only a small lunette to paint (Fig. 1.8), banished to a poorly lit niche in the Court of the Palms.59 The location did not prevent the guidebook writers from seeking out the mural and lavishing attention on it, more than the piece probably deserved. Nor did it sully Mathews's reputation as a leading painter in the city. But the excess of praise pointed painfully to his status as the only local mural painter of any significance.

As Guerin well knew, San Francisco was an easel town. Its major art schools and outlying art colonies had nurtured the painting known conventionally as California Impressionism, a style of landscape painting marked by soft palettes and choppy brushwork, altogether unsuitable for the exposition's requirements. Prior to 1906 only Mathews among the city's painters had received mural commissions with any consistency, including various decorative panels at Horace Hill

1.8
Arthur Mathews, Victorious Spirit , 1915. Oil on canvas. Collection of
the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum.

Library (1896) and the venerable Mechanics' Institute Library (1900).60 After 1906 he painted murals for the private rooms of the board of directors at the Savings Union Bank (1911), the lobby at the Safe Deposit (1911), Lane Hospital Medical Library, and Children's Hospital.61 He was chosen to paint a mural for the PPIE because of his continuing work for a patron class with a bent to derivative neoclassicism. In addition, he won great favor from the exposition committee with his proposal for the reconstruction project of a Parthenon-like structure on Nob Hill that he envisioned as a new city hall.62 When in 1913 he was asked to submit sketches for a set of murals at the state capitol, Mathews offered a series of urban scenes in which temples rise on a hilly landscape near a shimmering bay.63 This dreamy utopianism, with topography resembling that of San Francisco's southeastern quadrant, certainly matched the aspirations of the PPIE committee for both the exposition and the city. For a time, Mathews was regarded as the only painter who could transform an old-world order into materials for public art.

But even in 1915 a core of younger easel painters in the city perceived Mathews as anachronistic. Although he had once been an important figure at the Mark Hopkins Art Institute, where many young artists had trained, his work and ideas had become increasingly doctrinaire.64 For example, he advocated a tradition based on the works of Puvis de Chavannes that after 1910 he had transformed into a moribund pastoralism. In addition, he turned his attention to full-scale interior design, where his few paintings were increasingly dovetailed to his own handcrafted piano cases, tables, and upright cabinets. Guerin certainly understood and approved his thinking about an ensemble, but it could hardly have impressed the new devotees of Impressionism.

In the years immediately after the PPIE a number of younger painters vied for leadership. Two of themRay Boynton and Maynard Dixonwere able to attach themselves to a specific group of patrons and, because of those connections, were commissioned to produce the largest, most important murals in the Bay Area before the 1930s. The young muralists were a mismatched pair. Boynton was urbane, highly educated, one of the few staunch supporters among the younger painters of the Francophile Mathews, and well regarded as a writer and critic.65 After studying at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, he came to San Francisco with a portfolio of accomplished paintings he hoped to display at the PPIE. His ambition was to make a career as a fine artist in the city. Dixon, by contrast, was largely self-taught and spent most of his early career as a commercial artist for the Overland Monthly , the San Francisco Morning Call , the Chronicle , and Sunset magazine.66 An early photograph of him by Isabel Porter Collins shows the cowboy identity Dixon liked to affect (Fig. 1.9), hardly anyone's image of a mural painter.

It is testimony to the limited possibilities of the art scene that two such different painters held similar convictions, most apparent in their choice of company, about the paths to artistic success. Both painters sought membership in the exclusive circle of the Bohemian Club, the oldest and most prestigious men's club in the city. Unlike most turn-of-the-century social clubs, the Bohemian Club saw itself as a meeting ground for artists and the wealthy.67 The relationship was hardly equal, and one early artist member's complaint pithily summarizes the general structure of the membership: "In the beginning, rich men were absolutely barred, unless they had something of the elements of true Bohemianism. . . . Things have changed; now the simply rich become members because it is fashionable. . . . The poor artist or literary man gets in, by hook or by crook, because he thinks he may be able to sell some of his brains to the merely rich."68 Once admitted, both Dixon and Boynton performed the duties expected of them as artist members, painting scenery for the annual outdoor plays, illustrating the works of the writer members, donating paintings to the club's venerable collection. These were the price of patronage, and for a number of years both artists seemed content to work within the club's relatively circumscribed conditions. The connections served them well, and they were able to establish reputations as leading painters, even though neither could boast a large income from the sale of his works. Within a few years of the PPIE, however, both began to break away from this semi-indentured status, staking an independent claim in wall painting.

With Boynton and Dixon at the helm, the city's public mural movement after the PPIE developed out of the aspirations of two mutually dependent groups. The patron class, associated with both the PPIE and the Bohemian Club, had contacts with ambitious young painters, witnessed the wider interest in Brangwyn's expo-

1.9
Isabel Porter Collins, Maynard Dixon , ca. 1895.
California Historical Society, Isabel Porter Collins
Collection, FN-19416, San Francisco.

sition murals, and in the ensuing years commissioned periodic public-minded displays. Young painters, led by Boynton and Dixon, recognized a void in mural talent and saw mural painting as a means to achieve status in a developing artistic community. As always, the two groupsartists and patronsneeded each other. But because they were entering a realm in which their cultural activity entailed testimony and promotion, they also needed the unpredictable, unstable public to witness their efforts. The particular visual language public murals developed, however, could not have been fully anticipated from this convergence of ambitions and needs or from the example of the PPIE.

Continues...

Excerpted from Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco's Public Murals by Anthony W. Lee Copyright 1999 by Anthony W. Lee. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520211332
• ISBN 13: 9780520211339
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 284