The Controversial History of the Coit Tower Murals
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From KQED. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. I know the Transamerica Pyramid and the Golden Gate Bridge are probably the real symbols of San Francisco. But there is something about Coit Tower. Every time I glimpse it high on its hill, I know exactly where I am. And over time, it's become a monument not to any one person or thing, but to San Francisco itself.

One major reason for that, the New Deal murals that line the inside walls. Frescoes that depict our people, our mistakes, our conflicts, our triumphs. We're joined this morning by historian Robert Cherney to reflect on his new book, The Coit Tower Murals. That's all coming up next, right after this news.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. The murals of Quaid Tower were the work of a large team of artists who conceptualized the palette and style under a remarkable set of influences.

It's hard to choose a favorite for me among the individual murals. A grim but powerful depiction of a strike nestled next to a 30s era homeless encampment, the glory of California agriculture, a hopeful look at railroad and maritime logistics.

This art is special and the story of its creation is fascinating. Here to share it with us, we're joined by historian Robert Cherney. His new book is The Coit Tower Murals, New Deal Art and Political Controversy in San Francisco. He's also the author of San Francisco Reds, Communists in the Bay Area, 1919 to 1958,

and Harry Bridges, labor radical, labor legend, of course, about the waterfront leader. Welcome to the show, Bob. Thank you. Thanks for inviting me. So for people who haven't been to Coit Tower, and again, I'm sure we'd both recommend going to Coit Tower if you haven't been, but if you haven't, can you describe the type of art that someone would see walking into the tower? Yeah.

Well, if you've never been in there, it's really spectacular. You walk in the door and you're immediately facing a mural that takes up an entire wall.

And the entire ground floor is covered, all the walls on the ground floor are covered with these spectacular, bold, colorful murals. And the stairway to the second floor is also covered with murals. The second floor has more of them. And they are intended to depict life in this area as of 1933-34.

So it depicts industry, agriculture, city life in general, and also recreation and home life. It's an attempt to cover all aspects of what it would have been like to be here at that time. Yeah.

And people are probably aware that the Works Progress Administration, you know, a part of FDR's New Deal, employed artists and, you know, the actual institutional mechanisms by which that was done differ. And there's a few of them. This particular set of murals actually has an even more special history as kind of the first of these big arts programs. Yeah.

That's exactly right. When Franklin Roosevelt took office as president in March of 1933, the country was in the midst of the Great Depression, the most serious economic contraction of the 20th century. Unemployment had reached probably a third of the entire workforce. It wasn't quite that bad in San Francisco, but it was also very serious here.

And one of the things that Roosevelt and his advisors set out to do was to both provide relief to the unemployed and also try to bring about economic recovery. And they did provide relief to the unemployed through providing work. This wasn't just a handout.

It was work. You worked for one of these New Deal agencies and you were given a salary. And you, in most cases, were working on some kind of infrastructure, which was also a part of a stimulus for the economy in general. It included artists. The very first New Deal arts project was created in December of 1933. It was called the Public Works of Art Project.

And it was intended to be very short-lived. It was going to get the starving artists through the winter. Even more starving artists. Yes, to get them through the winter. And so it was set to expire on April 28th of 1934. So a very short-lived program.

And yet within that very short time frame, they created these spectacular works of art at Coit Tower and at several other places in San Francisco and all across the country. And this then was a prototype for later New Deal art programs. And there were three more New Deal art programs that came along afterwards. But this was the prototype for all of those later programs. I mean, one of the things that's fascinating

fascinating about this particular piece is it's so monumental in scale that it required these frescoes required a lot of artists to complete them but they had to kind of come to some sort of agreement about how they would at least harmonize right all their different styles so like how did they do that and was it that they were actually drawing on some larger set of influences that influenced them all

Well, yes. They were given some instructions from Washington, and it was the most general instruction. It said, depict the American scene, past or present. And what the American scene meant was, don't do classical allegories. Don't do dramatic episodes from the past, but concentrate on everyday life.

Because that's the kind of art that most Americans are going to be able to understand. One of the objectives of these New Deal art programs was not only to provide work to artists, but also to democratize art, to make art accessible to large members of the public. And the Coit Tower murals really epitomize that.

that objective because they, you can just walk in, you don't have to pay a penny to walk into Coit Tower, and you're immediately surrounded by this spectacular, bold artwork.

So that's one of the contextual factors. But another one that's very important for Coit Tower is the influence of Diego Rivera. Diego Rivera was a Mexican muralist, probably the best-known artist in the country, in the world, in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He'd done some of his murals in San Francisco before this.

He had created a big mural in what was then the Stock Exchange Tower. It's now the City Club. And another very large one at what was then the California School of Fine Arts. It was later the San Francisco Art Institute.

Both of these are now city landmarks. And they really are good examples of Diego Rivera's style. Bold, colorful murals in earth tones depicting a lot of ordinary people doing ordinary things but in this spectacular way. And that was an important influence on the artists as well. All of the artists at Coit Tower knew these works by Rivera.

And many of them had watched him at work. Some of them had been his assistants. And one of them, Victor Arnatoff, had spent two years as Rivera's assistant in Mexico. So they were well familiar with this technique. And Rivera's technique was the one that they adopted at Coit Tower, which was fresco. Fresco means that you paint on wet plaster.

And it's a very complex process because you have to first get some wet plaster in front of you. And so there's a plasterer who's a part of this process. And you can only work on about a square foot at a time because once the plaster dries, you're done with that. And so you apply pigment to wet plaster. The pigment is mixed in with water. Mm-hmm.

with distilled water, and then applied to the wet plaster. And when it dries, it becomes a part of the wall so that the colors actually remain extremely bright. They don't fade in the way that sometimes oil paintings fade. And so you see that when you go to Coit Tower today. You walk in and the colors are really, they just jump right out at you.

Of course, also very much complicates preservation and conservation down the line, right? It's not like you can just take them out and refinish them, right? You've got to do everything like in situ. That's exactly right. And there was a problem at Coit Tower by the 1950s.

Because these are painted directly on the plaster, people would carve their initials into them, if you can imagine that. There are photographs of some of these murals by the 1950s where people had just carved their initials into the plaster. And so there was a major, major restoration project done then. And there's been some additional restoration that's had to be done since then. Yeah.

Diego Rivera's style obviously influenced these artists. But Rivera and Frida Kahlo, his wife, were also like well-known left-leaning figures as well. Did the politics, was the politics shared? Did the politics seep in? Like, what do you think? Well, Rivera had been a member of the Mexican Communist Party.

But he was expelled in 1929, I think for leftist tendencies. I'm not really quite sure why he was expelled. But he didn't accept the party line and he was expelled. And I think it was expulsion from the Communist Party that allowed him to get a visa to come to San Francisco to do the murals here. And his murals here really don't show his politics in the way some of his Mexican murals do.

Nonetheless, he always considered himself a communist with a small c. He was very much on the left. And some of the artists at Coit Tower were probably on the left themselves. I've done a lot of research, as you mentioned, on the Communist Party in the Bay Area.

So far as my researches indicate, there was only one member, one of the artists there was a party member. But there may have been a few others that were certainly aware of the presence of the Communist Party in the Bay Area because it was a very visible presence. You know, the Communist Party only had about a thousand members in the Bay Area at that time, but they could turn out

10,000 people in voting for supervisor. They could turn out 3,000 people for a protest against unemployment. And they had a newspaper that was available all over the city. The Western Worker. The Western Worker. It was available all over the city. So the Communist Party was a very visible presence in 1933-34, and it shows up in some of the murals, not surprisingly. Yeah.

We're talking about the murals inside Coit Tower with Bob Cherney, Professor Emeritus of History at San Francisco State University.

of the new book, The Coit Tower Murals, New Deal Art and Political Controversy in San Francisco. He's written more broadly on left history here in the area, including the books San Francisco Reds, as well as Harry Bridges and Victor Arnatoff and the Politics of Art. Arnatoff, one of the...

of the murals. We'd love to hear from you. If you visited Coed Tower and you've seen the murals, do

Do you have a favorite work or like a favorite piece of the murals that's spoken to you? What's your reaction been to the murals overall? You give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. Of course, you know, the email it's forum at kqed.org and social media is blue sky Instagram or KQED forum there. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned.

Support for Forum comes from Broadway SF and Some Like It Hot, a new musical direct from Broadway from Tony Award-winning director Casey Nicholaw. Set in Chicago during Prohibition, Some Like It Hot tells the story of two musicians forced to flee the Windy City after witnessing a mob hit. Featuring Tony-winning choreography and an electrifying score, Some Like It Hot plays the Orpheum Theatre for three weeks only, January 7th through 26th.

Tickets on sale now at broadwaysf.com. Support for Forum comes from Earthjustice. As a national legal nonprofit, Earthjustice has more than 200 full-time lawyers who fight for a healthy environment. From wielding the power of the law to protect people's health, preserving magnificent places and wildlife, and advancing clean energy to combat climate change, Earthjustice fights in court because the Earth needs a good lawyer.

Learn more about how you can get involved and become a supporter at earthjustice.org.

Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We're talking with Bob Cherney, historian here in the city, about his book, The Coit Tower Murals, New Deal Art and Political Controversy in San Francisco. Of course, we'll take some of your calls and comments during the hour if you've been to the Coit Tower Murals. What do you remember about them? The number is 866-733-6786. Forum at kqed.org.

You know, one of the fun things in this book is getting to know a little bit about the artist community in San Francisco during this 1930s period. And there is sort of a particular area. It's kind of right by the Transamerica Pyramid. It'd be like kind of at the foot of the Transamerica Pyramid that a lot of artists live. Can you tell us a little bit about that artistic community and what they were up to there? Sure.

Well, in 1933-34, the Transamerica Pyramid was far in the future. And the building on that site was called the Montgomery Block, often just called the Monkey Block. It dated back to gold rush days.

very old building, and it had a lot of artist studios. It had become a center of kind of a rundown part of town, rents were low, a lot of artist studios in the Montgomery block and in the block north along Montgomery Street, north of Washington. Again, a somewhat rundown area.

Lots of artist studios in the buildings along that block and along Washington Street there as well. A real center of a kind of bohemian subculture, an artistic subculture. They had their own gallery there. They had cheap Italian restaurants nearby where you could, even a starving artist, he'd get a decent meal.

Wine was always available, even though prohibition was in effect up until late 1933. And it was an easy walk from there to what was then the California School of Fine Arts, where many of these artists had been students. Almost all of them, right? Had some relationship to the place? Almost all of the Coit Tower artists had some relation to the California School of Fine Arts. Some of them were faculty members.

Almost all of them had been students if they weren't faculty members. And so they kind of clustered in that area. It was an easy walk from one to the other and from both of them to Coit Tower. It's just a little all part of the same neighborhood. That's fun.

So let's talk a little bit about the actual sort of creation of this work as people essentially line it out and have developed the sketches and then they need to like create the frescoes. We talked about the actual like painting style. When did it actually get finished? Like how when did this thing open? Like what kind of happened there?

Well, the goal was to finish by April 28th because that's when the money ran out. And the large majority of them did finish by then, but the ones dealing with the largest amount of wall space had to take longer. And the overall director was Walter Heil, director of the local district public works of art project, also the director of the de Young Museum.

And he was able to get some state relief money so that those artists who hadn't finished by April 28th could get finished. And all of them were done by June, early June or so.

Most of them were done by the middle of May. And it was only the largest ones that had to go past April 28th. Some of them were done as early as early April, and you can even see some photographs of some of them that were pretty much done by the end of February. They were working fast. I mean, they knew they had a deadline, and they were working fast. Right.

And yet within the different works, and of course each artist had submitted sketches, but they could take some liberties as they went along in the completion of the work. There were some elements, particularly around the politics that were embedded in these murals, which then generated some substantial controversy that kind of delayed the opening. Oh, absolutely right. Right.

One of the artists, Clifford White, who was actually a British subject, and I don't quite know how he qualified for work relief, but I think the rules were perhaps a little bit lax. He had worked as an assistant to Rivera, and he put...

Very late in this project, he was given the assignment to put something over the west windows and over the east windows because that hadn't been part of the original design plan. But somebody late in the project said, put something up there. And so over the west windows, he put three symbols. He put a dollar sign at the south end to symbolize capitalism.

He put the blue eagle of the National Recovery Act, the best-known symbol of the New Deal, over the center window. And over the north window, he put a hammer and sickle and the slogan, Workers of the World Unite. What could go wrong? What could go wrong? Well, as Victor Arnatoff said at the time, it's kind of like waving a red flag in front of a bull. And Clifford Arnatoff supposedly told him, well, you know, I'm not afraid of that. But

The architect of Coit Tower, Arthur Brown Jr., was in there as the artists were cleaning up in early June and he saw this and he hit the ceiling.

And he told Walter Heil and he told the head of the Parks Commission, you got to do something about this. And so at that point, there were telegrams back and forth between San Francisco and Washington. What do we do about this? What do we do about this? They locked up the tower at the end of June. They kept people from going even going up there. They whitewashed all the windows so nobody could see inside.

And then there were some long deliberations by the Arts Commission and the Park Commission as to what do we do about this. And so the Arts Commission appointed a special committee to go take a look. And the committee suggested that the

that the designs over the windows didn't fit with the rest of the artwork. Which is kind of true, actually, right? Which is kind of true, yes, it certainly is, because they were all symbolic, whereas the rest of the art is very representational. So, you know, they did have a point there. They didn't want to say, we're censoring the politics. They wanted to say, this is just not in keeping with the rest of the artwork. Right.

And so at some point, while the tower was locked up, they were broken out because that's the only way you can deal with a fresco mural. You can paint it over, but it's still there underneath because it's in the plaster. Mm-hmm.

So I had an opportunity to talk with some of the people who did one of the later conservations. And they said that they took all the paint layers back to the original in that area to see if those original things were still there. Nope, nope. Just bare plaster. They'd broken out the plaster and repainted it. And so the tower stayed locked up until April 28th.

even though all of the work had been essentially finished several months before. And when it opened...

There were no visible hammers and sickles anywhere because there had been two more in addition to the one over that west window. One of the artists, Bernard Zocheim, had put in a Western worker newspaper. Zocheim's mural shows people reading newspapers, all kinds of newspapers. And one of them was the Communist Party newspaper, which had a little hammer and sickle in it.

John Langley Howard had also included a Western worker newspaper in his mural. And after it opened, the hammer and sickle in Zotkheim's mural kind of got blurry. So you couldn't really see what it was. And the whole banner in Howard's mural had just been painted out. Howard later said it looked like they'd just taken house paint and covered it up.

I mean, it's an interesting... When I was thinking about these murals, I'm thinking about the response that people continue to have all the way into the 1950s to the political messaging. Was it really the hammer and sickle, or was it that Rivera's style was also associated with Rivera's politics, right? And that there were also, you know, like the strike scene that I mentioned at the top was

I mean, it's a pretty grim scene. There's a lot of workers. They do not look happy. Was it also just that thematically it matched up more with Workers of the World Unite than with The Dollar Sign? Oh, I think that's right. But when you look at all of the murals...

There's really only one where that kind of a political statement jumps out at you. That's John Langley Howard's mural. It's the one you're talking about. And I don't think they're strikers. If you look at the Western worker newspaper that one of them's carrying, it says something like all out for May Day. So that's,

They may have been intended to be strikers or may have been intended to be mayday marchers or unemployment protesters. At any rate, it's a very dramatic depiction of some angry workers. And that very same mural in the center depicts a homeless family. Yeah.

panning for gold, which some of the unemployed people ended up doing. But it's a family living in a tent, cooking over an open fire, washing their clothes in the stream. And there's a wealthy family up in the corner of

Getting out of a chauffeur-driven limousine. Really striking from the perspective of 2025. Oh, it was especially so as well in 1933-34. John Langley Howard later said that he was consciously presenting propaganda, but that he later concluded it doesn't work to do that in a mural of this sort. Ah, interesting.

We have a bunch of comments coming in from listeners. This one's fun. It's a really interesting point. You're going to love this one. A listener writes, I love Coit Tower, such an iconic part of the city skyline. You're right. And has great views of the bay. The murals inside just add to how special a landmark the tower is. I love looking at all the newspaper headlines. They're like a peek into that precise moment in time. So what were the newspaper headlines? What was going on at that moment?

Well, the artists were to depict contemporary life and several of them used newspaper headlines to depict contemporary life. Bernard Sondheim did the most. Half of his mural consists of people reading newspapers in a public library.

And so those newspaper headlines range from the conflict in Austria in February between the left and the right through various kinds of New Deal agencies and the –

including a reference to Benjamino Buffano's statue, which people were talking about should be moved back to public view. Victor Arnatoff had only one visible headline in his mural about the gangster John Dillinger stealing from the police. And Arnatoff put...

put it in his mural, but he also actually saved that newspaper. It was an actual newspaper headline. That newspaper is still in his papers at the Archives of American Art. Oh. Um,

Freddy Vidar put in comments about the New Deal in a newspaper in his mural, and also about Hitler and about some events in Paris. So they were using newspapers to depict contemporary life in the way that the rest of their murals show contemporary life. If you look at all the murals on the ground floor, they all show people at work.

Or people without work in the case of the homeless people. But they're all examples of everyday life but working people. And if you then go upstairs, it's ordinary people at leisure.

taking part in recreation and athletics and home life. So again, it's all an effort to show what life was like in the Bay Area at that point in time. And it still does. I mean, it still makes you really aware. There are several of the artists included references to the New Deal. The most, the

The best-known symbol of the New Deal at that time was a blue eagle for the National Recovery Administration. And it appears in at least three of the murals. Right. On, like, the agriculture, right, it's on one of the boxes. A box of oranges. California oranges. Right. And it's on a bag of sugar in the manufacturing mural. It's on a newspaper in the newspaper publishing mural. God, I love the agriculture one. I mean, maybe everyone does. I mean, it's so...

pastoral and sweet, you know. So beautiful. Another listener writes in to say, what's the history of Coit Tower itself? Wasn't it or wasn't it supposed to be a memorial to firefighters? Why is it such a San Francisco landmark because of its location? Well, it's often been said that it's a monument to firefighters, but it's not. It was when Lily Hitchcock Coit was quite a...

well-known San Franciscan. As a young woman in Gold Rush era, 1860s, 1850s, she was very taken by the volunteer firemen. We didn't even have a public fire department at that time. There were only volunteer fire companies. And she was kind of adopted as a mascot by one of those volunteer fire companies.

When she died, she died a very wealthy woman, and she left a lot of money to the city for two purposes. One of them was to memorialize volunteer firemen. That was done by statues, a piece of statuary, several figures, in Washington Square by Haig Patigian. So that's that part of her bequest to the city. Mm-hmm.

The other part of her bequest to the city was a pile of money to, quote, beautify the city. And so a committee was established to figure out how do we do this. And what they decided was to put a monumental tower on top of Telegraph Hill, the highest point on the northern part of the city. And it was designed as a memorial. The official name is the Lily Hitchcock Coit Memorial Tower.

And some people have said it looks like a fire hose, but I think that's purely coincidental. Projection. I think that the architect, Arthur Brown Jr., would be very upset by anyone saying that. So it was purely just to be beautiful. Yes. Yes, exactly. I think that might be one reason why I like it so much relative to, you know, the Transamerica Pyramid or the Golden Gate Bridge, because it feels like...

I don't know. It's out of step with everything else. Like it does seem like it is. It's just meant to do something else or be useless and beautiful. I think that's exactly right. And in addition to housing those spectacular murals,

You can go all the way up to the top, and you have spectacular views all around the bay from the top of the tower. And so a lot of people do that. I think that there's probably more people that go to Coit Tower for the views from the top than go to see the murals. And to me, that's just a little sad because I'd like to have it the other way around. Why not both? Why not both? You know, I mean, especially because they, in fact, also painted the views out of the windows. Right.

Some of the murals are intended to show what you would see if you were looking out from that point, especially the ones in the elevator lobby. The Otis Oldfields mural really shows what it would be if you were standing at that point and there were no walls around and you were just looking straight out at the bay.

And similarly, the one opposite, Moya del Pino, is looking the opposite direction towards some of the industrial buildings along the north waterfront. So that was supposed to be just exactly what you would see if there were no tower there. That's beautiful.

We're talking about the murals inside Coit Tower and the politics and art of them. We're joined by Bob Cherney, professor emeritus of history at San Francisco State, also author of several books, including San Francisco Reds, Communists in the Bay Area, 1919 to 1958, Harry Bridges, Labor Radical, Labor Legend, and Victor Arnatoff and the Politics of Art Institute.

This new book is The Coit Tower Murals, New Deal Art and Political Controversy in San Francisco.

We'd love to hear your questions, your comments about Coit Tower. It is so iconic. I do feel like less people have visited it than maybe have visited some of the other icons of the city and the area. But if you have, give us a call. 866-733-6786. Or I'm also loving your emails. Forum at KQED.org. You can go on Blue Sky, Instagram, or our Discord. We're KQED Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more right after the break.

Support for Forum comes from Broadway SF and Some Like It Hot, a new musical direct from Broadway from Tony Award-winning director Casey Nicholaw. Set in Chicago during Prohibition, Some Like It Hot tells the story of two musicians forced to flee the Windy City after witnessing a mob hit. Featuring Tony-winning choreography and an electrifying score, Some Like It Hot plays the Orpheum Theatre for three weeks only, January 7th through 26th.

Tickets on sale now at broadwaysf.com. Support for Forum comes from Earthjustice. As a national legal nonprofit, Earthjustice has more than 200 full-time lawyers who fight for a healthy environment. From wielding the power of the law to protect people's health, preserving magnificent places and wildlife, and advancing clean energy to combat climate change, Earthjustice fights in court because the Earth needs a good lawyer.

Learn more about how you can get involved and become a supporter at earthjustice.org. Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We're joined by Bob Cherney, historian, author of the book, The Coit Tower Murals, New Deal Art and Political Controversy in San Francisco. Listener Sabina wants to talk about her favorite mural. It's

She writes, my favorite mural has to be the 10-foot mural in the front of Coit Tower. It captures so much going on that I could just spend hours looking at it. There are newspaper boys, a robbery, shops, tourists, and so much more. So who painted that one? What's going on with that one?

I think that's a reference to the Victor Arnatoff mural, which faces the south window. City life. It looks out over the city. All of those murals on the ground floor are situated according to the world. So that one looks out at the city and its city life. It has a newspaper boy selling a newspaper to Victor Arnatoff. And the newspaper boy is his son, Michael, who's handing off the newspaper.

On the opposite side, there are two well-dressed men robbing a third well-dressed man in broad daylight at the foot of the financial district. I think it might be Arnatov's comment on life in the financial district. And up above that, there's an automobile wreck.

in front of the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange, which I think might be a stock market crash. But it's just full of people. It almost feels like one of those, like, you know, in the magazine for children highlights, you know, they'll have like 10 wacky things going on in there. Like, it's almost like the elite art version of that, you know, where literally every time you kind of

you focus in, you see something like that was... that's just unexpected or that, you know, it seems like it was...

waiting there for you. Like, you know, even the reference to Charlie Chaplin and City Lights. Oh, exactly right. No, it's such a complex mural. I think every time I've gone to Coit Tower, I see something new in one or another of the murals. They're just that complex that no matter how many times you see them, there's always something new. Yeah. And even, you know, we mentioned earlier this particular intersection at which many artists work.

were living and working, kind of their life world is right there. That's the Montgomery and Washington gets memorialized in this city life as well. Yes. Montgomery and Washington is not only the center of that arts community, it's also the far northern end of the financial district. So it's where the financial district comes up against that old arts community. I mean, still kind of

It still is a little bit. Exactly right. Let's bring in a caller. Let's bring in Nicole in Sausalito. Welcome, Nicole. Good morning.

Hey, good morning.

in putting all the artists together because Walter Heil had barely just arrived in California to take over the museum. And he really wasn't very knowledgeable about the artist community of San Francisco. So my grandfather was part of the...

committee that put together, that helped Walter Heil to put this together. And something needs to be told also about the Art Commission, which had just been created in 1932 to protect the accesses and to make sure that the accesses of the bridges were beautiful because they were being built. And

The problem was that our commission had to approve any changes to a public building. And that sort of came in the way of getting the projects done very quickly. So because they needed approval because they were being changed with the murals.

So all of the meetings to approve the drawings of these murals were actually, the last ones were done at my grandfather's house on Chestnut Street. Oh, wow. How fun. And so he had all the artists. Yes? Oh, I was just going to ask you if you had a favorite moment in the mural or a favorite, you know, besides your grandfather's depiction, which is also very fun, but just something that's going on in the murals that you love.

Well, I like one of them, of course, which is the one with the newspapers, because as was said, the headlines showed the progress of the Works Progress Administration, and one of them has the names of the people who were on the committee, and my grandfather's name is on one of those newspapers. It's truncated to D-U-N-C-H.

I love that. Bob, you want to talk about anything? I mean, obviously, Nicole brought a lot to us. Thank you so much for that. Yes, thank you very much. I hope that maybe you will set down all of this as a memoir and make sure that the public library has it for the future. I think it's really interesting. Yes, you've covered everything. Once you mentioned your grandfather's name, I immediately thought of those two places where he appears in the murals. But you've covered all of that. Thank you very much. Yeah.

I love just, you know, this this idea of a sort of collegial moment in which all these different artists working in their own ways are united essentially by the impossibility of finding other work, but also by, you know, a set of people who tried to bring them together. And, you know, there's.

It's not evidence for all of the ways in which they talked about how they were going to do this in a cooperative way. Some of their oral histories do suggest that. They suggest that there was some kinds of discussions ahead of time about who's going to do what and where each topic is going to appear in the building.

some indication ahead of time that they all agreed that they would work with Diego Rivera's palette and that they would all do representational art and that they would follow the style of Diego Rivera. It seems that there were discussions of that sort ahead of time. And also that they followed one of Diego Rivera's

which was to try to situate the art to the real world. So that, as I said, Arnatov's mural faces the city. It's city life. It faces a city. Ralph Stackpole's mural is about manufacturing and industry, and it looks out over the northern waterfront. He depicts a cannery, the northern waterfront at the...

It had one of the largest canneries in the country? In the world. Yes. Later, the Del Monte cannery at the time it was built was the largest cannery in the world. And so you can look at Stackpole's mural and turn around and look out and there it is.

The mural on agriculture faces the east windows. You can't see the agricultural heartland of California from there, but that's the right direction to look. So, you know, that, again, is a reflection of some of Rivera's patterns of placing his work in reference to the real world. I also loved your descriptions in the book, too, of the other way that the artists worked together, which was...

Yeah.

No, they all seemed to work together really well. And there was some concern at the outset that if you put this many temperamental artists into one place in close quarters, that there would be a disaster. But it turned out that they were able to work together in a very collegial way. Not only did they have lunch together, but they painted each other in their murals.

So, you know, they were convenient models to be sure. But Lucien Lebeau and Ralph Stackpole appear in several of the murals. And some of the artists put their own children in the murals. So Arnatov put his son Michael. Zakhim put his daughter Ruth. Otis Oldfield put both of his daughters in his mural.

Audrey writes in to say that her favorite mural is panel two, the street scene. It goes over the doorway. Most wonderful depiction of the streets of San Francisco in one painting. A hundred little stories can be found about what times were like from the point of view of the streets of San Francisco. Fascinating morning conversation. I just finished a film called Rock Paper Paint Art of the People and Coit Tower Murals and Diego Rivera introduced mural art to San Francisco.

Fascinating. Let's bring in Stephen in San Francisco. Hi. This is Steve Somerstein. I'm a professional photographer and physicist. Back in 2019, I was contacted by an art dealer, Albert Neiman, who had the cartoons for Bernard Sackheim's murals. And he had contacted me so we could photograph them

Stephen, by cartoon, do you mean just like the kind of sketches or the kind of, or do you mean something more specific than that?

No. These are the... If you understand in the art world what a cartoon is... I do not. ...a cartoon is used by Michelangelo. When he painted the Sistine Chapel, he first sketched it on paper. It

in one-to-one real time, and then you put it on the mural wall, and you punch little holes in it to mark out how you're going to draw the painting on the actual wall. So those paper exact replicas of the artwork exist today for Zach Hines' murals. And, you know,

I had no idea about that. Where are they now? Well, as of 2019, Albert Nieman, who lives, I think, in Berkeley,

the art dealer, had those cartoons. And he may have sold them or he may still possess them at this point. I have the photographs of all of those cartoons. And so you can see the actual artwork as the artist designed it originally before he actually painted it on the wall. Well, that's really interesting because...

Some of the original sketches, not the full-size ones, but the original sketches, all exist at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in the Achenbach collection there. And they're a really valuable source of information about the murals.

If you are willing to share your photographs, I'd suggest that you give some to that collection because it would really fit with what they do. We can put you in touch. We can put the two of you in touch after the show. Thanks so much, Stephen, for sharing that. I also have to share the sad news that Albert Nieman died in April of 2020, so we're not exactly sure where the art itself has gone. One thing we should talk about, Bob, is...

After this, these artists went on to do, and other artists, Bay Area artists, went on to do other big murals in the city and other places. You know, for example, one listener, Donna, writes in to say, I was just in the Beach Chalet recently and saw the 36, 37 murals. The pencil outlines were still visible. Is this true of any other murals? Talk to us a little bit about some of the other places where this art got installed.

Well, these artists produced – the artists at Coit Tower produced about 100 other New Deal art projects, especially in this area, but really all across the country. They did post office murals. They did school murals. They did an amazing variety of public art. The Beach Chalet is an outstanding example of that. That's Lucien Lebeau's work.

George Washington High School has a spectacular collection of New Deal art by Victor Arnatoff, Lucien Lebeau, Ralph Stackpole, and Sergeant Johnson, who was one of the most interesting sculptors of the New Deal period. The Maritime Museum has a number of New Deal art projects, none of them by Coit Tower artists.

The zoo, the mother's building at the zoo, has mosaics murals and painted murals inside that were done entirely by women. I think it's the largest New Deal art project in the country done entirely by women because women were pretty much absent from public art before the New Deal came along. But after 1933, a lot of women

Became trained in how to do this kind of art and started doing other New Deal art projects all over the country. There's at least some mention that the women who worked on the Coit Tower murals in this fresco style were like the first at least known women artists working in frescoes.

That's what one of the art critics at the time said. She said it was the first time in history, meaning all of human history, that women were doing this kind of work. And I've been trying to figure out if that's an accurate statement. One of the women at Coit Tower, Maxine Albro, had done subliminal.

some fresco for private commissions before this. She had gone to Mexico to watch Rivera at work and to learn the technique in Mexico. And when she came back, she had a private commission to do a fresco mural in someone's home. But in terms of public buildings, I think this is the first where we get women actively involved in creating public works of art of this scale. Yeah.

Just one more comment on public art. James writes,

Yes, indeed it did, almost. We worked very hard to save those murals at UCSF.

And they are in storage now when we're all wondering what's going to happen. It almost happened with the Rincon Center murals. They were going to demolish that whole building when it became obsolete. But it was the murals that saved the burial building. They were landmarked, both city landmark and national register. And so the murals saved that part of the building. New Deal art continues to be

endangered at various times and places. And I close my book with an argument that New Deal art tells us about our past and it should not be destroyed. If there's something objectionable about it, you can cover that part up, but you need to keep the mural itself because it's a historical artifact and we don't destroy historical artifacts.

If anyone wants to visit Coit Tower, it is open daily. The hours are 10 to 5, November to March. Free to enter, but you can pay to go up the elevator and fly.

So I would go check it out. They're so, so beautiful. We have been talking about the murals inside Coit Tower as well as the art world of the time and the politics that surrounded it. We've been joined by Bob Cherney, Professor Emeritus of History at San Francisco State, author of the book The Coit Tower Murals, New Deal Art in Provence.

political controversy in San Francisco. If you want to check out his other work...

A lot of wonderful work about labor history here. You've got San Francisco Reds, Communists in the Bay Area, 1919 to 1958, as well as Harry Bridge's Labor Radical, Labor Legend about the longtime leader of the Longshoremen's Union here on the West Coast. Thank you so much for joining us this morning, Bob. Oh, thank you for inviting me. I've enjoyed it.

Thanks to all of our callers and listeners for joining in on the conversation. The 9 o'clock hour of forum is produced by Grace Wan, Blanca Torres, and Dan Zoll. Our intern is Brian Vo. Jennifer Ng and Ashley Ng are engagement producers. Francesca Fenzi is our digital community producer. Judy Campbell is lead producer. Danny Bringer, Brandon Willard, and Jim Bennett are our

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