A New Age for Artists

A NEW AGE FOR ARTISTS: THE BIRTH OF THE NEW DEAL ART MOVEMENT AND THE POLITICAL CONNOTATIONS OF THE COlT TOWER MURALS Timothy Rottenberg Prior to 1934, public art did not exist in the United States ofAmerica. Occasionally, paintings by individual artists would achieve success and break out of the art gallery and private commission sphere into the public eye, but visibility was not widespread. With the construction of Coit Tower in San Francisco, the creation of the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) in ‘934, and the unemployment of artists due to the Great Depression, a unique synchronistic moment came about when the birth of public art in America was forged. For the first time in American history, the PWAP gave artists the opportunity to reflect local and national politics through their own political lens using a medium that was meant for mass consumption by the public.i In January of there was nothing exciting about the San Fran cisco skyline. The city’s two tallest buildings stood at a stout 435 feet, and lay inconspicuously in the valley of the financial district, dwarfed even by the seven natural hills of San Francisco that surrounded them. With the Golden Gate and Bay bridges only in the earliest stages of construction, San Francisco lacked architectural individuality. Appropriately, Lillie Hitchcock Coit, a wealthy and eccentric San Francisco resident, desired beautification for the city she so admired. Despite having been born in Maryland and living in France for a number of years, the allure of the I believe this thesis to be wholly original in the field of historical study on the Public Works Administration as it related to the field of public art in America. Although its conclusions can at times seem like common and previously established theories relating to Depression era art, no study as in depth and specific has been done that I was able to uncover in my research. I have attempted to take the history surrounding a minor monument in San Francisco and apply it to the broader historical themes of the rise of the working class and the evolution of the rights and abilities of mankind. 170 Timothy Rottenberg City by the Bay led Coit to refer to it as her “soul city.”2 Upon her death in 1929, she left one third of her fortune, an amount totaling $u8,ooo to the city of San Francisco, specifically for “the purpose of adding to the beauty of the city which I have always loved.”3 The city’s board of supervisors first met in early 1931 to decide what to do with the newly bequeathed sum of money. Not surprisingly, the bureaucratic minded group of officials proposed the use of the funds for the construction of a roadway around Lake Merced.4 After protests from the executors of Coit’s estate, the city agreed to create a Coit Advisory Committee, which conspired to find a use for the funds more in accordance with Coit’s intentions. Citing Coit’s attempted purchase of Pioneer Park earlier in her life, the committee agreed to set aside the open space on top of Telegraph Hill for the construction of a memorial. Arthur Brown Jr. was selected as the architect and told to work within the confines of a $125,000 budget. In an attempt to craft the greatest memorial possible with such limited funds, Brown Jr. drew up plans for a “simple fluted shaft” using the relatively inexpensive building material ofreinforced concrete. During this planning phase, an election year in San Francisco brought a new mayor and new legislation that transferred control ofthe tower project back under bureaucratic control. Brown re-modeled his tower into an even simpler form of shaft, making it “stronger, more massive, and more primitive,” all while cutting costs.6 Strong support from the former advisory committee, which still main tained the final say on how Coit’s funds were spent, kept the concept of the tower alive. It may or may not be coincidental that businessman Herbert Fleishhacker, instrumental in creating the Coit Advisory Committee, chair of the committee himself, as well as personal friend of architect Arthur Brown Jr., had a “considerable financial interest” in the Portland Cement Association, which supplied the 5,000 barrels of cement and 3,200 cubic yards of concrete for the project. 7 By 1938 Fleishhacker’s shady dealings in other fields were uncovered and brought to trial, and he finished the year bankrupt and disgraced.8 Having finally traversed the winding road of bureaucracy, design, and preparation, construction of the Telegraph Hill memorial, known henceforth as Coit Masha Zakheim, Colt Tower Son Froncisco: Its History ond Art. (Volcano: Volcano Press, 2009), 5. Ibid. Ibid. Brown and Jeffrey T. Tilman, Arthur Brown Jr.: Progressive Clossicist (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005.), 2. 6 Ibid. 7Zakheim, Colt Tower, io. “Finished Fleishhacker,” Time, November 7, 1938. Ex POST FACTO 171 Tower, began in January ‘933, four years after the death of Lillie Hitch cock Colt. Despite its beginnings as a purely architectural work, those most greatly affected by the construction of Colt Tower were the local artists of San Francisco. From the moment ground broke on the construction site at Pioneer Park, the sleepy artists’ community, historically around Telegraph Hill, was given a huge and rude awakening. The planned 210- foot tower, combined with the 288-foot elevation ofTelegraph Hill itself, was to be an imposing landmark towering over everything in its vicinity. This of course was exactly what the planners had in mind. The pleas of the local artists, including a petition ironically signed by many of the painters who later worked in the tower’s lobby, did nothing to halt the construction of the looming monument. The socio-economic change brought to the neighborhoods surrounding Telegraph Hill by the coming of the tower is best summed up in this passage from artist Eleanor Sully’s memoir, “Remembering Telegraph Hill”: The Hill as we used to call it (some people still do) was our private is land, lapped by the currents ofthe city but remote from them. We were a small, self-sufficient society bound together by love ofeach other and of painting, sculpture, literature, theater and the views. .. No one had much money, but food was cheap and Spediacci’s grocery at the top of Union Street carried customers on credit until somebody sold some thing or went to work for the WPA.9 The coming ofthe tower completely transformed these artists’ idyllic lifestyle. By turning their pseudo-communal paradise into a tourist attraction, Coit Tower drove local housing costs through the roof and forced the artists to start working or move out. One visionary woman, Mrs. Cecilia Bowlby-Gledhill, owner of the local “Dead Fish Café,” wandered out drunk and alone to express her feelings for the newly completed tower with a loaded weapon.ro While Sully remembered it as a shotgun, the Los Angeles Times declared it differently in the following statement, “Mrs. Honore Cecilia Bowlby-Gledhill, daughter ofan English admiral and kin of British nobility, was given a thirty-day suspended sentence in municipal court today for having fired a pistol at the new Coit memorial tower.”u Either way, the distaste of the local community for the new behemoth in the neighborhood was adequately expressed. Both aesthetically and economically, the local artists were strangled by Eleanor Sully, “Remembering Telegraph Hill,” The North American Review 268 (1983): 15-17. °lbid. “Kin of Nobility in Court for Pot Shot at Tower,” Los Angeles Times, November 23,1933. VOLUMEXX 2011 172 Timothy Rottenberg the arrival of the tower in their neighborhood. Like any liberal-leaning and activist-oriented social circle, the artists of Telegraph Hill chose to put up a fight before being run out oftheir homes, and organized for the purpose of obtaining work from the government. Headed by Bernard B. Zakheim, a Jewish-American artist who had just returned to San Francisco from working in Paris, the artists of the city corralled each other’s support, and pocket change, with the inten tion of sending a letter to Washington informing them of the desperate state of the artist in San Francisco. Much to their surprise, the artists received a positive and detailed response from the White House in only four days. Unbeknownst to them, Washington was already at work creating jobs for artists not only in San Francisco, but across America. In one ofthe truly synchronistic moments in history, forces in Washington had already worked for a few months to outline a plan for artist relief across the Nation. Inspired equally by the burgeoning New Deal and the 19205 public art movement in Mexico, artist George Biddle wrote to his old college friend President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and implored him to support public art in America. With Roosevelt’s nod of approval, Edward Bruce, a lawyer/businessman/painter who also happened to be a lobbyist in Washington, took up the mantle of forging an American public art renaissance. His realistic business sense and strong personal drive to assist the arts led to the creation of the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP). The PWAP, which took place a full year and a half before the famed and massive Works Progress Administration (WPA), was an experimental pilot program that tested the waters for federal support ofthe arts in America. Despite only existing from December1933 until June1934, Bruce’s PWAP employed hundreds of artists around the country, as well as administered the massive undertaking that became the murals of Coit Tower. Essentially, a perfect storm had brewed in San Francisco in early 1934.

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