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Coit Tower at 75  

By Mark Johnson, Professor of Art SFSU, member CFA

Coit Tower is an odd symbol.  Originally commissioned by Lillie Hitchcock Coit as a memorial for fallen firemen, and sometimes likened to a fire hose nozzle or worse, it is widely recognized as an art deco tourist destination for the incredible view it proffers of the San Francisco Bay and its big bridges.  But it is in the history of the progressive potential of art that Coit Tower finds its meaning as a true beacon of inspiration - not for the view it provides of the landscape – but for the murals the visitor finds inside its lobby and stairwell.

Coit Tower’s murals were painted by a group of Bay Area artists in the early days of 1934, when the nation was grappling with the economic impact of the Great Depression, and the city was defining itself as a center for union organizing.  The Longshoremen’s effort to bring fair hiring practices led to a waterfront work stoppage, and marches along the Embarcadero.  During the Police’s ensuing crackdown, several protestors were shot and killed, and a huge funeral march of maybe 40,000 men down Market Street was followed by a General Strike.  At virtually the same moment that this was fomenting, the murals in Coit Tower were being envisioned.

The proposal to create murals in Coit Tower was made by the artists themselves, initially suggested by an ad hoc group of artists that had organized to promote progressive agendas.  The fledgling Artists and Writers Union included painters like Bernard Zakheim and poets like Kenneth Rexroth.  Among their first actions, they cheekily telegraphed President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to propose that artists might play an important role in the developing New Deal.  And they received a reply that is no less astonishing today than it likely was to them seventy-five years ago: President Roosevelt responded with a telegraph of agreement, commissioning murals for the new Coit Tower.

Roosevelt had already learned of the potential of art to play a public role from his friend, artist George Biddle, who had witnessed the contemporary murals covering many walls in Mexico City.  Muralist Diego Rivera had already become an inspiring model in San Francisco following his 1930 visit there, where he created important works about agriculture and industry for the Pacific Stock Exchange and an image of the worker as a giant at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute).  Rivera also employed some local Bay Area artists as his assistants, introducing them to Renaissance fresco techniques involving painting into fresh plaster.  Although Rivera did not contribute directly to the murals at Coit Tower, his inspiration can be felt as one first enters its lobby where the visitor is confronted by a mural by Ray Boynton of a pair of eyes that stare straight at you – often claimed to be Rivera’s vision.

Among the most astonishing aspects of the murals is their medium; with the exception of Jose Moya Del Pino’s oil canvases in the elevator lobby, most are buon fresco.  Many of the artists had no experience with fresco before embarking on this project.  Buon fresco is essentially a communal practice, requiring specialists in plastering as well as painting, and careful holistic planning for what can be accomplished every day.  That so much space was covered in so few days is staggering, and suggests the long sleepless hours that were involved (5 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily, by one account). The murals represent a collective effort that parallel the organizing on the street, and prefigure contemporary public art involving community collaboration and partnership.

The murals at Coit Tower are a masterpiece of American Scene painting, a moment in American art where the depiction of common people and regional life was at center stage.  The murals include images of individual workers by Clifford Wight, factory and agricultural scenes by Ralph Stackpole and Maxine Albro, depictions of sport and leisure on the second floor landing by Edward Terada and Jane Berlandia, and complicated narratives by John Langley Howard, Victor Arnautoff and Lucien Labaudt.  Many of these are breathtakingly brilliant.  Labaudt’s mural up the circular staircase, mirroring the steep incline of Powell Street, is a marvel of compositional sophistication; insider views of Eleanor Roosevelt and local artists are hidden in sidewalk crowds.  Arnautoff’s mural is similarly complicated with urban vignettes: it features a traffic accident, a pickpocketing, and a newspaper stand offering leftist literature including the New Masses and The Daily Worker.  The two most controversial of the murals were a small representation of symbols including a hammer and sickle by Wight that appeared above the west wall windows that was ultimately destroyed, and Zakheim’s library – that fortunately was not.  Zakheim’s crowded library scene provided portraits of several of the artists, some reading newspapers of contemporaneous news events – home foreclosures, worker strikes, and the destruction of Rivera’s own Rockefeller Center mural, posed before bookshelves offering provocative ideas including the obviously relevant writing of Karl Marx.  But my personal favorite is the spectral mural of John Langley Howard.  It is a study in contrasts that includes a broken down Model-T of a down-and-out family, that appears as the antithesis of the nearby luxury limousine of the visiting boss – whose pet poodle provides a stark contrast with the family’s starving pregnant bitch.  The rising tide of workers standing together also shown here is nowhere more powerfully summoned in American art.

In spite of the contrived controversy surrounding the murals – Coit Tower was locked down with chains as word spread about its imagery, after it was first surrounded by the Artists and Writers Union for protection – it soon became the model for the new Federal Art Project of the WPA.  Soon, murals and other public art were being commissioned for communities throughout the United States.  San Francisco has an important cache of these, including the murals at The Mother’s House at the Zoo painted by Dorothy Pulcinelli and Helen Forbes, those at the Beach Chalet lobby by Lucien Labaudt, and Anton Refregier’s incredible suite for the Rincon Annex Post Office.  This last commission, even more controversial than the first at Coit Tower, brackets the WPA’s commitment to art – a legacy that has still not been matched in American cultural policy.

The great Bay Area writer Tillie Olsen noted that 1934 was a unique time, when artists were cheered by labor for their shared commitment to struggle.  Today, these murals by diverse artists confirm for us that art is never really about money, even though the auction and gallery marketplace sometimes highjacks notions about its value.  Instead, art is about the best of our human spirit.  And the murals at Coit Tower stand as a monument to a vision and experimental, collaborative process where art engages with society as a reflection of outrage and hope, struggle and successful intervention.  The murals at Coit Tower remind us that art can show that tomorrow can be better and fairer than yesterday.

http://www.docspopuli.org/articles/AtWork.html