radical writings on painted walls

8/6/2019 Radical Writings on Painted Walls

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108 Left History 7.1Mamdani terms the commonality of Africa (3 1) need be so imp ortant today asan intellectual subject. On the contrary, integrating Africa and lor its constituentparts into world history and de velopmen t seems a more im portant project thanever. We need to beware African exceptionalism! I suspect, however, thatMamdani and I would largely agree on what is now needed - democracythat is tied in to expanding opportunities for security, development andaccumu lation through the broad population who se rights cease to be arbitrary,key emphasis on the transformation of the African countryside and thedemocratisation of local government but in conjuncture with the creation of aneffective and consistent national state system. "In the absence of a widerstrategy of political change and social transformation, the empowerment oflocal commun ities can be of only limited an d temporary significance." (2 17)Bill FreundUniversity of Natal

Radical Writing on Painted WallsAnthony W. Lee, Painting on the Left. Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, andSan Francisco$ Public Murals (Berkeley: University of California Press,1999).

Whe n it comes to modem art of the Americas, perhaps no single artist hasbeen such a constant point of reference and praise for liberal and leftistscholars than Diego Rivera. From such mod erate assessmen ts as those of DawnAdes and La urence Hurlburt to the exp licitly leftist positions of David Cravenand Alicia Azuela, art historians have viewed Rivera's monumental murals,their patronage, and their reception as touchstones for assessing the criticalpotential of art to participate in the major political struggles that occurredbetween the world wars. Such a tradition extends back to the heated andimpassioned belief of contemporary writers in the twenties and thirties whosaw cultural policy as part and parcel of left-wing political practice, howeverambivalently such a position was embraced by the Com munist Party and otherfactions of the left. (Trotsky's celebratory assessm ent of Rivera come s to mindas a prominent e xample.) Certainly there are other exam ples of critical artistsbefore Rivera; but the complexity and contradiction of Rivera's work (not tomention the uproar that seemed to surround every mural he produced forcapitalist patrons in the U nited States) continues to draw more attention to thisartist than to others as a means of exemplifying how art can actually functionwithin a broader radical political process. If there ever was an iconic leftist artproduction, then Rive ra is your man to explore its potential and its limitations.Or so it would seem. But Anthony Lee, in his new volume on public


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110 Left History 7.1and politics . actually meant in mural practice." (x viii) Such a straightforw ardpresentation of his larger project go verns the rigorous analysis of archival andvisual material in Lee's book.Lee begins this analysis seemingly far from the radical politics of leftistartists and activists by focusing on the first major public mural comm ission inpost-earthquake San Francisco, the thirty-five murals at the Panama PacificInternational Exposition. While murals had existed in the city before the 1906earthqu ake, virtually all of these mu rals had bee n destroye d by the fire that hadfollowed the cataclysmic event. Further, the number and complexity of thedesign scheme as coordinated by New York-based artist Jules Guerin madethese murals a focal point of critical discussion and attention, thus raising themto the new claim of being truly " public art." It is the constru ction of this public(as opposed to the actual audience) in the press and the presumption o f a publicby specific artists that interests Lee here. In analyzing this public, the authorbegins to lay out the major issues and tensions in San Francisco that will becontested territory for the next forty years of art making and politics. "Isuggest that the ambiguous but palpable order at the fair - the 'harmoniouseffect' of prescribed colors and com positions in the murals - had its corollaryin another order outside the fairgrounds proper. It arose from a politicalstruggle during San Francisco's reconstruction, when specific patrons - heexposition's - ought to use large-scale painting to advance their partisan viewof governance and social welfare. The murals became 'public art' because o ftheir relationship to that partisan effort, thereby beginning a decades-longaccommodation of artistic and political practices." (3 ) While Lee pushes thetransparency of imagery to politics here, he convincingly argues that thesubordination of the individual artists to the architecture of the fair meant thatthe murals were incorporated into the architectural program but also theideological projections of the patrons. The m urals became decorative suppo rtsfor the architecture which in turn fram ed the usual display of comm odities andtechnologies at world expo sitions.But however tame the m urals at the fair were, they nevertheless formed aparticularly crucial precedent for the reception and production of artsubsequent to the closure of the fair and the en d of W orld War I. Crucial to Leeare two components of this developing history: first, the introduction of amural curriculum at the C alifornia Sch ool of Fine Arts, a relatively new scho oldesigned to create a generation of home-grown talent to rival the usualimpo rtation of artistic culture from oth er cities in the East; and seco nd, the riseof new patrons in the city who extended their notion of corporate control toinclude the idea of corporate "responsibility" towards the culture of the city.Both the development of artists trained in muralism and the potential for amarket came from the po pular reception and discussion of the proper role ofmurals or public art for a mo dern city that began with the success of the muralsat the fair. So prior to Rivera's arrival in San Francisco, the city already had:


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Reviews 11 1one of the few institutionalized mural programs; a dominant critical line on theimportance of murals - hey were essentially decorative or were meant to flowsmoothly with and support their architectural setting; a small but growingartistic population of muralists including the two leading figures of RayBoynton and May nard Dixon; and a number o f patrons ready to use muralismto legitimize their beneficence and ratify a d ominant m unicipal culture.Rivera's arrival in 1930 changed the terms of the critical debate andintroduced a prominent new group of patrons, and it was with these changesthat murals in San Francisco began to become more closely linked to left-wingpolitics and labour struggles. Further, Rivera introduced a significant newaesthetic, one that did not emphasize the decorative or subordinate role ofmuralism to its architectural environment. Lee analyses these newdevelop men ts by looking at Rivera's tw o major comm issions of the Allegory ofCalifornia (1930) in the elite space of the City Lunch Club at the stockexchange and the Making a Fresco (193 1) in the San Francisco Art Institute.As mu ch as his later work in D etroit under Fo rd or his mural in New York forRockefeller, these projects immediately presented the contradiction of a leftistartist painting for decidedly capitalist patrons. It was in the context of debatesaround the content, form, and patronage of the murals that very differentconstituencies began to lay claim to public art.Lee is at his best when he brings together the ideological, aesthetic, local,and international conflicts that accompanied Rivera's murals, especially hisAllegory of California. In a thorough review of the popular and criticalcommentary, Lee identifies how the descriptions of Rivera even before hearrived tended to the anti-radical and racist, attitudes that came into conflictwith Rivera's work and experience in San Francisco which emphasized theimportance of ethnicity and leftist politics. Rivera thus pointed to factorswhich the newsp apers in their boosterism fo r the rampant capital developmentin the city were not eag er to acknow ledge. As the Depression had begun to hitthe city, anxiety was expressed in many quarters about the multiethnicimmigrants coming to the area and concomitant fears of competitive labourmarkets. Rivera and his mu ral stirred up renewed and racist concern about theeffect "outsiders" had on a local economy in crisis.But Rivera was more than a cipher for general debates on an unstablelabour situation. Artists and g allery ow ners also publicly voiced their concernabout the lack of oppo rtunities for local artists and the development of an artproletariat labouring in a decorative style in the extreme econom ic conditionsof the D epression. Rivera, for them, represented not only an outsider but alsoan artist connected to the elite who were denying a livelihood to local andincreasingly radical artists. True to the contradictions in his own biography,Rivera became a focus of Red-baiting from liberal and right-wingconstituencies, putting the trio o f patrons led by b usinessman Albert Bender inthe precarious position of defending Rivera's commission to local art


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1 12 Left History 7.1constituencies and against the criticisms of, among others, the stronglyreactionary Hearst press. As a result, Rivera the artist could be folded intovarious rhetorical caricatures: Rivera the migrant Mexican peasant worker,Rivera the class traitor, Rivera the tool of the capitalist, Rivera the"Communist" bearer of Bolshevik revolution. Lee convincingly shows thatthese debates defined the meaning of art to San Francisco as much as anyspecific output by the artist himself.But what of the mural? The Allegory of California is a massive andfragmented work that combines the various industries and histories ofCalifornia, all seemingly unified by a nude female allegorical figure broadlymodeled on the California sports star Helen Wills Moody. In his carefulattention to the image - and L ee is systematic in unpacking the com plicatedformal maneuvers and iconographical details of the artists he covers - heshows how the serp entine com position nev er jells. That is to say, the im ages ofworkers participating in mining, agriculture, and technology fill thecomposition completely but never convincingly come together to form awhole. Local critics accustomed to a very different kind of m ural attempted todescribe its decorative effects but cam e up short in an analysis of the content,pointing to segments of the w hole but not a synthesis of the parts. For Lee, thisindicates the success of Rivera's agend a, for wh ile the artist was painting in aprivate space, he was not about to choose a subject and form that naturalizedan ideology of a harmoniously w orking landscape, benevolently organized bycapital. Rivera instead emphasized conflict and ambivalence. The artist painteda thoroughly worked natural world that has no "nature." That he chose thissubject at a time when California was seeing a consolidation of agribusiness,a control of ethnic migrant workers, and a nostalgia for a rural past onlyaccentuated his overt if subtle critique. (One might com pare this mural w ith,e.g., the works of JosC Maria Velasco, one of Rivera's teachers who paintedgrand vistas of the harmonious union of Mexican nature with Mexicanexploitation of the land. Velasco's images have no such signs of conflict oruncomfortable juxtapositions a n 4 in fact, rarely even get close enough to theirsubjects to show a worker.) As indicated in L ee's footnotes, Rivera was not thefirst to mark the tension between a natural world and a capitalist one, and inthis sense he followed a broader critical tradition extending from Constable'slandscapes of England d uring enclosure and the Im pressionist depictions of anurbanized Paris. San Franciscans accustomed to different views of nature an dmural techniques had no critical vocabulary with which to thoroughly analyzethis image. As a catalyst for future work, the mural transformed large-scalepainting in the Bay Area.

By the time Rivera left town after the completion of his second mural,Making a Fresco (193 ) , critics and aud iences alike had seen a definite shift inmuralism as a public art. Rivera's role was still ambivalently discussed, butother factors more completely linked his work and others to growing radical


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Reviews 113constituencies. By the early thirties, critics were commenting on theincreasingly multiethnic audiences at art show s and that these audiences werealso from different classes. Leftist cultural critics coming together around thenew leade r of the local Com mu nist Party, Sam Darcy, as well as the continuingresponses from the right could both begin to construct this new aud ience as a"public." Darcy's policy of a un ited front well before such a policy wasconsolidated internationally in the Pop ular Front and attempts to achieve spacefor artists to contribute to the CP agenda meant that leftist artists began toscrutinize Rivera's mu rals and their techniques in order to adapt them to theirown attempts to comm unicate with the working classes. Agitational imagerybegan to appear in CP publications, union pamphlets, and additional murallocations. These new attempts taking off from Rivera came together withleftwing labour politics in the city in one of the m ost famous an d successfulconfrontations between labour and capital in San Francisco, the Big Strike of1934.The history of the Big Strike from the point of view of the labourorganizers and unions involved is well known. From May to July, strikingworkers formed a coherent mass and virtually shu t down comm ercial activityin the city, controlling activity down to which groceries could stay open. WithDarcy and Harry Bridges, radicalizer of the local InternationalLongshoremen's Association, in the lead, labour deman ded wages and controlover working conditions that capital was unw illing to m eet. Culminating inmassive demonstrations and the funeral for two workers slain in the so-calledBattle of h n c o n Hill, the strike showed the strength of a united front as wellas its fragility as the strike collapsed under political and economic pressurefrom the managerial elite. But im portant for Lee is that this major strike effortalso had a significan t cultural effect. Specifically, in the year of the strike, som eof the most prominent left-wing San Francisco artists were simultaneouslyinvolved in radical politics and the completion of the murals in the newlyopened Coit Tower. "The remarkable feature of 1934 was that working-classdissent created the conditions in which the leftist Coit Tower murals could bepainted and read. The links between the tower and the waterfront strike weresimply too dangerous to ignore." (159) While one could debate how"dangerous" a mural can be, Lee nevertheless details how the controversysurrounding the strike actions and the mural imagery forms a significantcom pon ent of the history of the left and culture in the interwa r U.S.

Lee tells the almost daily dev elopments of the C oit Tower comm ission andthe strike actions in breath-taking prose. The artists had prominent leaders intwo imm igrants to the city, Victor Arnautoff and Bernard Zakheim. Arnautoffsupervised the work on the tower and the mural program was conceived byZakheim. Since the patrons held a censoring power over the project, theybelieved that the prom otion of local artists in the heart of the Depression couldbe controlled 'and used effective ly to promote a generic civic pride and,


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114 Left History 7.1simultaneously, provide economic relief, W hile Zakheim originally prop oseddirect references to the economy in crisis, the patrons toned this down to moregeneric themes of C alifornia: agriculture, city genre scenes, and landscapes o rseascapes of the Bay Area. But as Lee shows these themes quickly changedonce the artists began to paint the walls and the strikers increasingly controlledthe streets. Filling their walls in the way of Rivera, artists packed the sceneswith disjunctive images of classes uneasily jostling each other in the street, inthe library, and on the docks. But it would be wrong to assume that all muralsprojected a unified point of view. Even those by Communist artists did notnecessarily follow the explicit program of the CP. Rather, Lee's point is notabout a transparency between ideology, politics, and art: "The visual languageof radicalism emphasized details and parts over narrative consistency orcompositional unity. It resembled the pastiche - ts references applied in bitsand pieces, its (dis)organization marked by 'the m ere presentation' of disparatefigures and objects. In the language of radical murals, parataxis and m etonomyrule.... The discontinuity of critical realism seemed to offer an arena forworking-class self-emancipation, freedom from the constraining order ofillusion." (157) Coit Tower represented the possibility of breaking away frompredetermined orders and ideologies, not the least of which were thoserepresenting the powerful economic and political elite.But of course such a subtle history of the relationship between paintingand radical politics depends on certain kinds of documents, traces ofdiscussions, biographies, o r reviews that make the "(dis)organization" explicitand can be related to the visual traces decipherable in the images them selves.In every mural, Lee d oes not have this same kind of evidence, and it leads tocertain parts of his text where he puts an undue weight on the images to serveas a replacement. This can be seen, for example, in Lee's discussion ofZakheim's subsequent murals for the U niversity of California medical campusin the city (1936-1938). By this time, the united front of the Big Strike hasbegun to collapse and would further collapse after the Hitler-Stalin Pact of1939 and other moments in the dissolution of the left in the late 30s.Nevertheless, Lee argues that Zakheim continues to prom ote a leftist agenda,even without the supp ort of an actual leftist political base. Here h e argues thatZakheim's murals of the history of medicine in California are influenced byOrozco and his series of murals for Dartmouth C ollege. "The shift from Riverato O rozco as model signaled Zakheim's own political investment, fo r of the twoMexicans, Orozco seemed the mural painter most actively trying to givepictorial fo rm to an orthodox M arxist theory o f history." (176)Well, maybe. Tostate that Rivera might not be an equally valid model for chronologically vastmural work would be to ignore his significant work in Mexico where heconstantly projected huge spans of history, analogies between Aztecoppression and European oppression, etc. The images themselves do notprovide absolute evidence for this artistic a n 4 in Lee's terms, political shift.


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Reviews 115But such are the limitations of an im age-based art history in relation to thesocial history of art. Lee argues well in trying to interpret these gaps andlacunae in the historical evidence, and certainly does a good job in using theimages for his defense. If so me of the interpretations seem pressed, that makesthe argu ment subject to further review and d iscussion by scholars. He is to becommended for attempting the difficult task of making sense of a clearlycontradictory and complex history.In essence, Lee's sweeping saga is emb lematic of strong er currents incontemporary social art history. The social for Lee is a complex term,combining biography, iconography, institutional history, political history, andlabour history, all with an attention to explaining how and what paintingprecisely meant at a given place and given time to a specific audience. That hetakes as h is subject the cruc ial period in U.S. labour history of the pre-WorldWar I1 era is no coincidence. Rather, this period still has reson ance with leftistand labour d ebates to our own day. Lee's text thus contributes to the problemsand possibilities with which such leftism has to contend . Part of the remnantsof this leftist moment is the continued deification of Rivera as an all-importantartist. Few w ould d isagree that Rivera was significant. But L ee gives us newmaterial and a new context in which we can place the production andcontribution of R ivera. As such , his text thoroughly debun ks the notion of aniconic leftist "master" and instead show s the artist to be part and parcel of amuch m ore complex , much mo re contradictory, and hence much more realisticmoment in the cultural and political production of the left. These are actionsand politics from wh ich we can still learn.

Paul B. Jaskot,DePaul University

Fascinating Fascism in North AmericaAngelo Principe, The Darkest Side of the Fascist Years: The Italian-CanadianPress, 1920-1942(Toronto: Guernica Press, 1999);Philip V. Cannistraro, Blackshirts in Little Italy: Italian Americans andFascism, 1921-1929 (West Lafayette, Ind.: Bordigh iera Press, 1999).Much of the Italian-American community (both academic and lay) remainsfixated on the problems generated by HBO's television series, "The Sopranos,"and the pervasive image of supposed Italian-American criminality. Lessattention has been paid to another phenomenon, more disturbing even if morecircumscribed by time: the Italian Am erican community's su pport of M ussoliniand fascism . Today, one can walk into a sh op in N ew York's L ittle Italy and

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