What was under the plain white walls

December 15, 2019 8:36 AM

In the 1930s, a series of WPA-style murals were painted on hallway walls at the San Francisco Art Institute. Some time later, they were painted over. (Perhaps not too much later, because when recently rediscovered, they had up to 12 layers of wall paint on them.) Eighty years later, the Art Institute is now uncovering the murals. (Meanwhile, elsewhere in San Francisco, another 1930s-era mural will potentially be destroyed.)
posted by beagle (19 comments total)

Washington pretended he owned human beings and was an active participant in the genocide of native peoples. I don't think the mural glorifies him - it tells the truth of how he gained wealth and power: by the blood of those he oppressed.
posted by 1adam12 at 8:42 AM on December 15, 2019

We have many beautiful 1930s murals in San Francisco. Most famously, several by Diego Garcia. I love the WPA murals painted up at Coit Tower and out at the Beach Chalet.

The Washington High mural story is super frustrating and I imagine will dominate this conversation. I think it's good art and deals responsibly (for its time) with the subject matter it's portraying. I also understand how high school kids wouldn't want this oppressive shit around them all the time. I'm hoping someone comes up with a reasonable solution.
posted by Nelson at 9:35 AM on December 15, 2019 [5 favorites]

A reasonable solution could be to move the mural to a museum. I know it's possible - the Brooklyn Museum has a set of murals that were previously in a housing project in Williamsburg which had been painted over and then uncovered, much like the other murals in the link.

And those are the ones I'm thinking of. Why were they painted over?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:56 AM on December 15, 2019 [4 favorites]

Yes, why would an art institute destroy art?
posted by Kirth Gerson at 9:59 AM on December 15, 2019

Destroying some art may be appropriate; I don't much give a shit what happens to the mass produced Confederate soldier sculptures, for instance. But that's because they are of limited artistic merit and were intentionally political, racist monuments. The murals at Washington High are more complex; as the linked article says

Yet mural supporters argued the “Life of Washington” mural isn’t an honorific monument, but a historic fresco — one that depicted the first president as a slave owner as well as someone culpable in the massacre of Native Americans in the Westward Movement.

I think moving it to a museum makes sense, but last I read the politics of that would be difficult. Folks want a victory against racism and to be heard. I think right now the murals are covered up and there's a series of lawsuits and possibly even an SF ballot initiative. It'll be years before it is resolved.

The mural just found at the Art Institute is the Marble Workers by Frederick E. Olmstead, who also worked on the Coit Toiwer murals. There's another article about it from October. Olmstead also helped with Diego Garcia's mural at the Art Institute. It's kind of astonishing that the Marble Workers was painted over; apparently no one took it seriously enough to want to keep it.
posted by Nelson at 11:06 AM on December 15, 2019 [7 favorites]

My high school in Chicago has many of these. In the 1980s when I was there, they were basically ignored. But people since then have discovered more of them (67 in total!), hidden away. And some were painted over. There's a huge fire screen with an Art Deco image of a Native American head in the auditorium, too. I can't find a link to a great gallery of them, but in the '90s it was established on a National registry:

https://livingnewdeal.org/projects/lane-tech-murals-chicago-il/

http://gapersblock.com/ac/2009/01/26/out-of-the-lunchroom-lane-tech/
posted by SoberHighland at 11:10 AM on December 15, 2019 [1 favorite]

Thanks for the post. I'm in a rush, but it goes to show that we NEED organizations like this to keep artwork in its proper protected place. It needs to be recognized and publicized by hardworking people. The murals in my school were obvious. Even in the cavernous 1930's lunchroom, there were these enormous paintings of ancient Greece, etc. Splattered with food for decades. In plain sight, big, beautiful paintings, but they were just... there. No one knew anything about them, they were just "old paintings in the school" like wallpaper. Up and down the halls, they were everywhere, ignored in plain sight. It's astonishing to think about, but as a kid, we even thought they were cool, but basically ignored them, or just used them as landmarks to navigate the enormous, four-story building.

At its peak, when it was all-boys until 1971, there were nearly 8,000 students at a time. When I went in the mid-'80s it was boys and girls, and around 5,000. Gargantuan place that had machine shop, a working foundry (!!! kids pouring molten metal into packed-sand molds!) shop, wood shop, and we even hand-set moveable type for our yearbooks in the print shop! They printed the yearbooks in the school, though they were bound somewhere else. More types of shop, too. I think we were the last high school to do this. Very old-school place. The place was built in the Depression as a technical school, so boys could get jobs in industry upon graduating.
posted by SoberHighland at 11:27 AM on December 15, 2019 [9 favorites]

Got a chance to go to Venice for first time last year. They showed us a wall that had a gorgeous Medieval painting covering the the entire wall except for the lower left. Where (IIRC) a few hundred years ago they just cut a regular sized doorway to the next room. Values change. Quite a lot sometimes.
posted by aleph at 12:19 PM on December 15, 2019 [1 favorite]

they just cut a regular sized doorway to the next room.
Similarly a doorway was cut through the lower part of Leonardo's Last Supper, but it only took away a piece of the tablecloth and some feet (including those of Jesus).
posted by beagle at 12:28 PM on December 15, 2019

Sorry to hear it.
posted by aleph at 12:36 PM on December 15, 2019

Even in the cavernous 1930's lunchroom, there were these enormous paintings of ancient Greece, etc. Splattered with food for decades. In plain sight, big, beautiful paintings, but they were just... there. No one knew anything about them, they were just "old paintings in the school" like wallpaper.

If it was a 1930s lunchroom, then my hunch is that they were WPA works. They may even be listed at the web site at that link there.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:47 PM on December 15, 2019

Recent masterwork hung unnoticed over kitchen cooking hotplate for decades.

Christ Mocked, by the 13th-century Florentine painter Cimabue, had hung for decades above a cooking hotplate in the open-plan kitchen of a 1960s house near Compiègne, north of Paris. It had never attracted much attention from the woman, in her 90s, or her family, who thought it was simply an old icon from Russia. It might have ended up in a bin during the house move this summer had it not been spotted by an auctioneer who had come to value furniture.
posted by aleph at 1:07 PM on December 15, 2019 [1 favorite]

I have a hard time understanding why the best response to problematic historical art is to eliminate it, in situations where you can alternatively put a big placard next to it explaining the context and story of the art. When I grew up, it seemed like people were outraged by the whitewashing of American history, and excited by the prospect of making common knowledge out of the violence and inequity in it, rather than eager to hide it.

It's fascinating that you can recover a mural which has been painted over twelve times!
posted by value of information at 1:50 PM on December 15, 2019 [4 favorites]

"...and excited by the prospect of making common knowledge out of the violence and inequity in it"

Perhaps that's the reason. People not wanting to deal with *that*/people not wanting to deal with that *now*/people who disagree the "inequity/etc" even *happened* (or really was a good thing it did, or...). Hard to say.
posted by aleph at 3:00 PM on December 15, 2019

I have a hard time understanding why the best response to problematic historical art is to eliminate it, in situations where you can alternatively put a big placard next to it

Because kids resembling the people in the murals have to walk past them every day. The big bright pictures are what registers, not the small type on an adjacent plaque.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:49 PM on December 15, 2019 [8 favorites]

For reasons of "offspring might go to that school next year" we visited Washington recently. Seeing the murals up close clarified for me that multiple viewpoints (barring those of jerks and racists) have something to them.

They are clearly works of art, and important ones worth preserving and viewing. The artist clearly intended to speak truthfully about the treatment of African-Americans and Native Americans in the early U.S.

At the same time, I can easily imagine how stressful and hurtful it could be for African-American or Native students to see pictures of their ancestors being killed and enslaved every single time they walked into their own school. A school named after a President who owned slaves and killed Indians, along with a statue of the man right in the middle of the foyer containing the murals. And a school which, due to San Francisco's de facto segregated schools, has very few African-American and Native students in the first place.
posted by feckless at 5:17 PM on December 15, 2019 [4 favorites]

Other options included covering the mural with panels, which would cost up to $825,000, or obscuring it with curtains, which would have cost up to $375,000.

Uh, OK.
posted by bongo_x at 1:48 AM on December 16, 2019 [2 favorites]

Shame some of us are not allowed to see them because of regional policies!!!!!
posted by Burn_IT at 5:53 AM on December 16, 2019

Painting over a mural should be a crime, I'll never understand the need to cover up art with artless wall paint.
posted by GoblinHoney at 9:13 AM on December 16, 2019