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Blueprint for scaffold for California School of Fine Arts, January 29, 1931, used by Diego Rivera for the execution of his mural The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City.


Scaffolding Blueprints


Author
Jeff Gunderson 

Decade

1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s


Tags

Architecture Food Murals Painting



Diego Rivera arrived in San Francisco in November 1930 to execute his first murals in the United States. He completed a set of three on this, his first visit: one at the Pacific Stock Exchange, another at the Stern family home in Atherton, and the third at SFAI. The style and progressive politics of Rivera and other Mexican muralists had become influential in the United States, and despite setbacks (anti-Communist sentiment was running high), school leadership was able to procure a visa for Rivera so that he could come to San Francisco and create a large mural on one wall of the school’s gallery.

 JG 


Slideshow ︎︎︎


 

This photograph of a 1927 tapestry exhibition shows the original wall of the Antique Room, where Rivera’s mural would soon live. Note the original lighting fixtures. There were similar fixtures throughout the school but most have since disappeared. These, however, currently hang in Studio 16B. In the 1930s, the country was mired in the Depression, with Herbert Hoover still president and the New Deal not yet on the horizon. Rivera’s work was part of an artistic and cultural movement that grew out of the Mexican Revolution and resonated with the Depression-era political climate in the United States. Rivera’s early sketches for the mural contemplated using the gallery’s south wall and incorporating its large, round window... ...but he ended up settling on the north wall. As you can see in this sketch, he thought of using a woman as the central figure. But after completing the Pacific Stock Exchange mural earlier that spring with a female central figure (based upon SFAI alum and Wimbledon winner Helen Wills), Rivera decided to highlight the blue-collar laborer in the final rendition of The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City. Rivera said: “The fresco I painted in the San Francisco School of Fine Arts seems to me to express exactly the objective situation which produced it and to contain, technically, all the possibilities of mural painting; and, since it was executed in a technical school of the plastic arts, these, naturally, had to be its first functions.” —from Diego Rivera’s Portrait of America (New York: Covici-Friede, 1934) Rivera’s mural was both part of and further inspiration for an ongoing proliferation of mural painting at the school and in the city. As soon as the new Arthur Brown–designed building on Chestnut Street opened its doors, faculty and students began to turn its walls into canvases. Ray Boynton’s 1926 encaustic mural at the corner of the courtyard commemorated the California School of Fine Arts’ first fifty-six years (1871–1927). Boynton also taught mural painting in the 1920s, and some of the murals in the Anne Bremer Memorial Library are his. Mural/fresco classes continued throughout the 1930s, led by Ray Boynton, Victor Arnautoff, Ralph Stackpole, and visiting artist Maurice Sterne. Studio 9 was set up with removable paneling specifically to accommodate these classes. Photo: Ansel Adams. A set of rounded lunette frescoes was commissioned by philanthropist Albert Bender for the walls of the Anne Bremer Memorial Library; they were completed by Victor Arnautoff, Ralph Stackpole, Ray Boynton, and Frederick Olmsted. Student frescoes created by individual artists and as group projects were painted around the school, including one of farm life by Una McCann (1913–2013) that covered one wall of the cafeteria (now Studio 26). Una McCann at work on her mural. Una McCann was the only woman to be allowed on the site of the Bay Bridge during its construction, where she made a series of drawings. In 1940 she assisted Diego Rivera with his Pan American Unity mural at the Golden Gate International Exposition. Another of McCann's drawings of the construction of the Bay Bridge Frederick Olmsted (a grand nephew of the landscape architect) studied with Ralph Stackpole at the California School of Fine Arts and also completed a set of murals at the school: one in the library, and this one, completed in 1935 in what is now Still Lights Gallery. In 1934 Olmsted was part of the team of artists that worked on the WPA-funded murals in Coit Tower. Later, as a biophysicist at the Cleveland Clinic, he developed the prototype for the pacemaker. The mural was painted over in the 1940s and is one of SFAI's "Lost Frescoes" that have recently been rediscovered. This photograph of the cafeteria (from a college catalog) was taken by Ansel Adams. The cafeteria (now Studio 26) featured a student-painted mural with scenes of students playing horseshoes, fencing in the courtyard, playing the piano, studying, and engaging in a big group hug; most importantly, it featured the cafeteria staff, with Grace “Morty” Morton front and center. Morty’s cafeteria, and home, “never had a door locked to an artist who was hungry or needed a bed or a glass of wine.” Prominently placed in what became known, of course, as the Diego Rivera Gallery, the mural has sometimes been a source of controversy. Folklore had it that Director Douglas MacAgy decided to cover the mural with a false wall during his tenure (1945–50), but this photograph of a 1948 student Spring Exhibition, along with other pictures from the same period, is evidence to the contrary. It seems instead to have been Director Ernest Mundt who obscured the mural with a false wall and drop ceiling in the 1950s. Photographs of the gallery in 1954 and 1955 show the drop ceiling installed while Director Ernest Mundt was in charge. Mundt will forever be linked to his dismissal of Hassel Smith, which led to the resignations of faculty members David Park and Elmer Bischoff in January 1952. Another image of the drop ceiling obscuring the Rivera mural c. 1955. Another photo of the gallery showing the mural partially covered in the 1950s. It has always been assumed that Rivera’s mural was completely uncovered following his death in 1957, when Gurdon Woods was the director. However, student Patrick Ducey’s 1968 photograph (a recent addition to the SFAI archives) shows that a curtain was used to cover the mural. It is unclear when the curtain was installed, how it was used, or when it was removed. In the early 1980s, students thought that the red badge on the shirt pocket of Rivera’s worker had originally included the Communist hammer and sickle, and that the symbol had been painted over. One night, using a lift to reach this portion of the mural, they painted a hammer and sickle onto the badge. This action coincided with the Detroit Institute of Arts photographing the mural for its publication on Rivera. Consequently, the volume included the students’ addition, with an explanation that Rivera’s “left-leaning politics is evident in the hammer and sickle he painted on the worker.” In 1991, conservators Will Shank and Molly Lambert worked on the mural. They reported that Rivera’s original red badge had never included the hammer and sickle, and that the students had used toothpaste for the symbol, which was easy to remove. “That gesture makes clear some wonderful qualities about SFAI; students were both playfully irreverent and deeply reverential, yet also caring enough not to damage the original.” —David Jelinek SFAI students have never been intimidated by the majesty, size, and magnitude of Rivera’s mural and enjoy using it for site-specific pieces. Examples include Rigo’s 036-1990 in the City (1990s)... ...and Bob Linder's opposite wall mural with a billboard-size advertisement for the Art Academy. In 2002, Ben Wood (BFA, 2003) projected this stereoscopic video installation opposite Rivera’s The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City. Wood’s video homage to Rivera features faculty and staff—including George Kuchar, Richard Berger, Fred Martin, Jeremy Morgan, Carlos Villa, Tony Labat, John Davis, Jeff Gunderson, Pete Stanwood, Alex Casco, Dan Tiffany, Laetitia Sonami, Charles Boone, Meredith Tromble, Ann Chamberlain, Bill Berkson, Larry Thomas, Jack Fulton, Craig Baldwin, Ruth Beames, and Jesse Drew, along with a rotating student as the central figure (replacing Rivera’s heroic blue-collar laborer)—illustrative of the “importance of maintaining a focus to educate and work together.” While revered by many, Rivera’s mural has also been the backdrop for criticism, most recently in 2015 by installation artist Alejandro Almanza Pereda, who obscured the mural with dozens of fluorescent lights.

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