A Vision of Cincinnati: the Worker Murals of Winold Reiss

Summer/Fall 1993 A Vision of Cincinnati 81 A Vision of Cincinnati: The Worker Murals of Winold Reiss Daniel Hurley actual tasks. A few were young and muscular, but the majority reflected the great cross section of society. Some were middle aged, some were old. Some were skinny, some In July 1972, the Southern Railroad were overweight. All were quite ordinary. The result was a announced its intention to purchase the all-but-unused grittier, more realistic, and ultimately more engaging view Union Terminal Concourse, tear it down, and redevelop of the people who built Cincinnati. the land as part of a modern piggy-back freight operation. This is not to say that Winold Reiss, the The plan seemed to spell disaster for the fourteen murals artist, did not carefully craft the scenes he photographed. dedicated to Cincinnati's workers which had lined the con- Emil Weston was one of the four workers pictured in the course for forty years. Ironically, this crisis ended not in American Rolling Mill (Armco) mural. In 1988, almost the destruction of the murals, but in their elevation to a sixty years after the base photograph was shot, Weston still new level of influence on community consciousness. recalled with awe Reiss's methodical approach the day he At their new home, the Greater Cincinnati visited Armco.2 First, the artist surveyed the various indus- International Airport, this group of fourteen murals wove trial processes of the plant and decided to focus his study themselves into the everyday experience of millions of on the dramatic process of pouring molten iron into a Cincinnatians and out-of-town travelers.1 If the Concourse mold. At that moment the workers were active and the had remained standing, they would have remained locked process created a shower of sparks. away from public view for fifteen long years. But the In addition, Reiss carefully selected four enduring popularity of this artistic endeavor was grounded workers from the pool of men who worked in that area of in more than accessibility. Their power and durability rests the plant. Reiss determined, according to Weston, that "a on original vision of their creator. tall, muscular man" by the name of Swope would be the Originally the worker murals were a distinct central figure. Weston, who was taking the temperature of part of the larger effort by the Terminal architects, the molten iron, and a Mr. Rendering who is shown work- Fellheimer and Wagner, and its interior decorator, Paul ing the wheel on the bucket, were physically much smaller, Cret, to enliven the interior. In the Concourse, they pro- and meant to stand in artistic contrast with Swope. posed a series of murals on the wall spaces above and Although Reiss worked to stage this scene dramatically, he between the gates honoring the industrial workers of worked with real people and recorded them going about Cincinnati. The architects asked two foreign born artists, the tasks that they performed every day. Pierre Bourdelle from France and Winold Reiss from The reality Reiss perceived and recorded Germany, to submit proposals for the concourse mural with his camera on the factory floor was the truth he project. worked to depict in the completed mural. Most of the Bourdelle submitted sketches rooted in his murals are based on a single photographic image, although imagination of how workers ought to look. He projected several combine elements from two or even three pho- these figures against a thin screen of information about the tographs. important industries of Cincinnati. The result was a series But even at the level of detail, the continuity of sketches of young, muscular males working in settings between original image and completed mural is often star- that vaguely suggested soap making and machine tool tling. For example, the Andrews Rolling Mill photo manufacture. The effect was a glorification of idealized reveals a small triangular shadow cast on the factory floor workers. by a hot piece of metal being dragged by two workers. Winold Reiss began from a radically different Even that shadow survives as a triangle of violet colored point of departure. He personally visited at least seventeen tiles in the finished mural. Cincinnati factories to photograph real workers performing The development process from original base Daniel Hurley is the founder Emmy and a national Iris for of Applied History WKRC-TV. Associates, a Cincinnati based consulting firm. In 1988 he wrote and co-pro- duced "Working in Mosaic" which won a regional Queen City Heritage of two artistic techniques. The human images are rendered in tile, while the background areas are treated as large masses of frescoed concrete — concrete that has the color added while it is still wet. Background shapes such as shadows, are outlined, or silhouetted, in tile. Craftsmen at the Ravenna Tile Company headquartered in New York implemented Reiss's plans. Photographs of the oil painting were enlarged to full size (20 feet by 20 feet) and then cut into two foot squares and distributed to individual craftsmen. Under the direction of Reiss and company owner, Paul Heudeck, the Ravenna workers could choose from over 8,000 shades of tile, to implement the vision. These two foot square sections were pasted face down on heavy brown paper, organized, and shipped to Cincinnati. Heudeck and Reiss came to Cincinnati to supervise their installation on the walls of the Concourse personally. Many commentators refer to the murals that once graced the Union Terminal Concourse as the "Industrial Murals." It is more helpful to think of them as the "Worker Murals." Whether taken individually, or as a total body of work, Reiss's thematic interest is clear — portraying the factory workers of Cincinnati with dignity and respect. In the worker murals, machinery and tech- Figure 1 nology are secondary, providing the backdrop and context 3 photo to completed mural included four principal steps. for the human images. And by concentrating on ordinary First, Reiss enlarged the black and white photographs and workers, Reiss clearly opted to ignore and exclude the drew a grid over the images. This gridded image became owners and managers of the businesses. The only person the roadmap guiding all later steps. Second, he developed in the worker murals dressed in a business suit is the piano charcoal and crayon studies of each of the human figures player in the radio mural. in the photograph. Some of these sketches went through Reiss's bias for ordinary people is consistent several stages of refinement, including, the first experi- throughout the Union Terminal murals. The Rotunda mentation with color. Third, Reiss developed small water murals portray frontiersmen and farmers, roustabouts and color sketches that began the process of translating the packet boat captains, railroad engineers, and construction black and white images into color. Fourth, Reiss executed laborers. Only in one place did Reiss depict political and oil paintings about one third the size of the final murals. economic "leaders." He sandwiched them on the cramped These, like the original base photographs, were gridded walls of the relatively narrow passage between the and numbered to indicate the color families of glass tiles Rotunda and the concourse originally called the "checking that Reiss wanted the craftsmen to work within. lobby." Clearly, Reiss placed his priorities with ordinary The architects had originally proposed that people performing everyday tasks. He strove to present the murals be executed as oil paintings on canvas. Reiss con- them sympathetically, as strong, dignified contributors to vinced them — at the price of a cut in his personal commis- society. These workers were responsible for the contem- sion — that working with glass mosaic tiles would be more porary strength of Cincinnati. 4 effective. Not only would the murals be more durable, but It is ironic that at the very moment that that artistically mosaics would be more brilliant. Reiss was planning and executing his tribute to The final murals are, in fact, a combination Cincinnati's workers, the United States began its long Most of the murals are based Credits for the illustrations in on a single photographic this article are listed on image, although several com- page 96. bine elements from two or even three photographs. (Figure #1) Summer/Fall 1993 A Vision of Cincinnati 83 plunge into the Great Depression of the 1930s. Just when existed in the early 1930s. Although many of the featured the murals were completed and dedicated, America's industries had deep roots in Cincinnati's nineteenth centu- industrial workers faced the prospect of unprecedented ry economy, Reiss presented the workers and the factory hardship and challenge. processes as they existed in his day. None of the murals Local boosterish literature never tires of pro- look back to the origins of soapmaking or machine tool claiming that Cincinnati's diversified, locally owned, econ- manufacture. omy withstood the Depression better than one-industry cities like Detroit and Pittsburgh. But Cincinnati was far from "depression proof." Between 1929 and 1933, the year the Terminal opened, unemployment rose from 5.9 percent to 30.4 percent, and underemployment rose from 5.2 percent to 17.9 percent.5 The local trend matched the national averages almost perfectly. In selecting which industries and workers to feature, Reiss had to make choices about what to include and what to exclude. The photos, preliminary sketches, and water color studies saved by his son, Tjark Reiss, clearly show that Winold Reiss seriously considered a mural featuring stone workers and another focused on watchmak- ing. In fact, a water color study featuring Gruen Watch Company suggests the artist not only played with alternative subjects, but also an alternative, more abstract, artistic style.6 From the perspective of the 1990s many people looking at the murals think Reiss was trying to depict Cincinnati's industrial history.

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