A Favorite Painting, 39

Victor Arnautoff, Coit Tower Mural-- Street Scene, c1934

Coit Tower in San Francisco was built in 1933, and, in an early New Deal art project, 26 different artists were commissioned to develop murals for the interior walls of the tower. In the 1930s, there was a strong push throughout the arts community towards realism, with a particular emphasis on the importance of documenting the effects of the Great Depression, often in support of certain political positions with respect to what might be done about the problems it engendered. The muralists of that generation often followed the lead of the highly political Mexican painter Diego Rivera, and that influence, along with a strong commitment to documentary realism, is evident in this particular panel by Victor Arnautoff. It clearly celebrates the "common man" as opposed to the elites (maybe including Mrs Coit, who bequeathed the money to build the tower in the first place), depicting how hard they work and their lack of pretension with respect to what they wear, how they interact, and their taste in entertainment. But there is also a hint of something that suggests more broadly defined horizons for these denizens of the city by the Bay: the inclusion of the Daily Worker and The Masses on the newstand rack. Is this a signal from Arnautoff that the common man is ready to revolt, or merely an acknowledgment that such examples of the radical press were widely available and read during that era? Considering that Arnautoff was a supporter of Rivera, whose own mural in the newly built Rockefeller Center was destroyed by Nelson Rockefeller because it included a likeness of Lenin, I rather suspect the former. But then, the two possibilities are hardly exclusive of one another. The emerging documentary tradition (which would flower in the films of Pare Lorenz; the photography of Walker Evans, Dorothy Lange and so many others; the writing of James Agee and even John Steinbeck; the Living Newspapers on stage, etc.) certainly embraced a progressive perspective, perhaps inevitable in the face of the economic and political questions that arose from the great collapse. At any rate, the works in Coit Tower serve as a great reminder of how seriously such questions were debated, even within the arts, during that time period.