San Francisco Will Spend $600,000 to Erase History

[David Lockmiller]

The New York Times published an opinion today on the order for destruction of an accurate historical artwork.

San Francisco Will Spend $600,000 to Erase History

The depression-era historical mural is located at George Washington High School that is less than two miles from where I live.

The San Francisco school board reached a unanimous decision on Tuesday night (June 25, 2019) to spend at least $600,000 of taxpayer money to destroy it.

Victor Arnautoff, the Russian immigrant who made the paintings in question, was perhaps the most important muralist in the Bay Area during the Depression. Thanks to President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, he had the opportunity to make some enduring public artworks. Among them is “City Life” in Coit Tower (San Francisco).

His freshly banned work, “Life of Washington,” does not show the clichéd image of our first president kneeling in prayer at Valley Forge. Instead, the 13-panel, 1,600-square-foot mural, which was painted in 1936 in the just-built George Washington High School, depicts his slaves picking cotton in the fields of Mount Vernon and a group of colonizers walking past the corpse of a Native American.

“This is a radical and critical work of art,” the school’s alumni association argued. “There are many New Deal murals depicting the founding of our country; very few even acknowledge slavery or the Native genocide. The Arnautoff murals should be preserved for their artistic, historical and educational value. Whitewashing them will simply result in another ‘whitewash’ of the full truth about American history.”

[I agree with the school’s alumni association.]

“At the time, high school history classes typically ignored the incongruity that Washington and others among the nation’s founders subscribed to the declaration that ‘all men are created equal’ and yet owned other human beings as chattel,” Robert W. Cherny writes in “Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art.”

Over the past months, art historians, New Deal scholars and even a group called the Congress of Russian Americans have tried to make exactly that point.

Such appeals to reason and history failed to sway the school board. On Tuesday, the school board voted unanimously to paint them over.

Arnautoff was interrogated in 1956 by the House Un-American Activities Committee for drawing a caricature of Vice President Richard Nixon.

[I would suggest reading many of the New York Times Comments Picks on this opinion piece published by the New York Times today.]