Tag: murals

Arman Manookian

Born in Constantinople, the capital city of the Ottoman Empire in May of 1904, Arman Tateos Manookian was an Armenian-American painter known for his oil paintings and murals of Hawaiian scenes. He was the eldest of three children born into an Armenian Apostolic Christian family in Istanbul who held their status and affluence despite the taxation and political dominance of the Islamic Turkish Pashas.

Arman Manookian’s initial education was acquired at the Catholic school of Saint Gregory the Illuminator, a branch of the Armenian Mekhitarist Brotherhood of Venice. During his early life, the hostilities against the Armenian Christian minority in Turkey increased until it became a genocidal rampage that led to more than one million deaths by 1918. On April twenty-fourth in 1915, Manookian’s eleventh birthday, six hundred local men, many of them writers, intellectuals and politicians, were rounded up and murdered; five thousand more men were dead within weeks. 

Manookian’s father, Arshag Manookian, had fled to France to escape the genocide; however, Arshag died in 1917 of the Spanish flu, a victim of the epidemic contracted and spread by returning French soldiers. Manookian, now in his mid-teens, took over the heavy burden of the family’s printing and publishing business in Constantinople. His mother eventually sold the business and gave Manookian a large sum of money that enabled him to sail aboard the “Re d’Italia” to the United States. He arrived at New York City’s immigration entry point, Ellis Island, on the twentieth of April in 1920. Manookian then traveled to Providence, Rhode Island where he lodged with his mother’s relative, Leo Stepanian who had an umbrella business. 

Recognized for his early artistic talent, Arman Manookian was given a 1920 state scholarship to study at Providence’s Rhode Island School of Design. He took the required first-year courses and, in 1921, focused on Commercial Illustration which he passed with high marks. By 1923, Manookian began listing his skills as a lithographer. He enlisted in the Marine Corps on the eighth of October in 1923, under the fraudulent claim that he had United States citizenship, to serve in the U.S, forces and achieve a new American identity. Manookian was assigned in November of 1924 to Major Edwin North McClellan of the Historical Division of the Marine Corps, whose project was a history of the Corp’s participation in World War One.

After he presented his recent sketches of military exercises in the Puerto Rican island of Culebra to Major McClellan, Manookian became the official illustrator for McClellan’s historical articles. The completed epic history would eventually contain over one-thousand pages of articles, not including their notes, and more than one hundred illustrations by Manookian. Many of these illustrations are currently housed in Washington DC’s Marine Historical Center. During his service in the Corps, Manookian created several portraits of Major McClellan’s family members as well as cover illustrations for “Leatherneck” magazine, instituted as the official Marine Corps publication in 1920.

When McClellan received a new posting at Pearl Harbor, Arman Manookian went with him to Hawaii. It was his stationing at Hawaii that transformed Manookian from an illustrator to an artist with an idealized historical and mythological view of the islands. He created many illustrations to accompany McClellan’s new historical writings on the Hawaiian islands that were later published in “Paradise of the Pacific”, a periodical promoting Hawaiian tourism and investment. A short profile of Manookian, in which he describes the Hawaiian islands as the mid-Pacific gardens of the Gods, was published in a 1927 issue of “Paradise of the Pacific”.

Discharged from the Marines in 1927, Manookian decided to remain in Honolulu. He filed a Marine Corps waver of transportation to the United States and began working as a illustrator for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. The opening of the Honolulu Academy of the Arts in April of 1927 gave Manookian the opportunity to hear lectures and attend programs that expanded his knowledge of both art and Hawaii. In 1928, he relocated to Makiki, a short distance from the Academy, and became a member of the Honolulu Artist’s Association. Manookian gave up using tempera paint at this time and focused on colorful oil paints in bold, flat areas without varnish or subtle gradations. This color sense reflected memories of his childhood and adolescent exposure to the myriad colored forms of the Byzantine world.

Arman Manookian’s portrayal of Hawaii, like Gauguin’s view of Tahiti, was an idealized vision of an Eden that never really existed except in the imagination of its Colonial inhabitants. Although his work presented the ecstatic vision of an artist, Manookian often secluded himself from others and had begun to increasingly experience mental lows. After the stock market crash of 1929, the  tourist-based Hawaiian economy began to falter and his mural commissions, based on the development of new buildings, began to slow. Manookian’s last mural commission was in December of 1930 for architect Louis Davis’s Waipahu Theater.

During this slow period, Manookian was living downstairs in architect Cyril Lemmon and Rebecca Lemmon’s Black Point home, occasionally painting and giving art lessons. He delivered his last painting “Flamingos in Flight” to the home of interior designer Charles Mackintosh on the seventh of May in 1931. Suffering from severe depression, Manookian  drank poison on the evening of May tenth while his hosts and friends were playing a parlor game upstairs. He stumbled upstairs and collapsed in the kitchen. Taken to Queen’s Hospital in Honolulu, Arman Manookian never regained consciousness and died that Sunday evening at the age of twenty-seven. A memorial exhibition of Manookian’s work was held later in the autumn of 1933 at the Honolulu Academy of the Arts.

Notes : Major Edwin North McClellan’s massive epic “History of U.S. Marines and Origin of Sea Soldiers”, with its many illustrations by Manookian, was never published due lack of finances during the Depression. The only complete record of the work exists on microfilm as recorded by the New York Public Library in 1954. 

Author and art historian John Seed wrote an article entitled “Arman Manookian: Fragile Paradise” which was originally published in the Honolulu Magazine:  https://www.geringerart.com/arman-manookian-fragile-paradise/

John Seed also has a lecture on the life and art of Arman Manookian in an YouTube video entitled “Arman Manookian: An Armenian Artist in Hawaii with John Seed”. 

Freelance writer Chris Gibbon wrote “The Ghost of Manookian” for the November 2021 issue of “Flux: The Current of Hawai’i”. This short biography can be found at: https://fluxhawaii.com/the-ghost-of-manookian/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Private Arman Manookian, Marine Corps Boot Camp”, circa 1923, Vintage Print

Second Insert Image: Arman Manookian, “Maui Snaring the Sun”, 1927, Ink Drawing, Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii

Third Insert Image: Arman Manookian, “Early Traders of Hawaii”, 1927, Oil on Canvas, Honolulu Museum of Art

Fourth Insert Image: Arman Manookian, “Pele”, Gridded Study for “Pele” Painting, Colored Pencil and Pencil on Paper, 21.9 x 29.8 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Arman Manookian, Untitled (The Mat Weaver), 2003, Oil on Canvas, 76.7 x 60 cm, Honolulu Museum of Art

 

Hon-Chew Hee

The Artwork of Hon-Chew Hee

Born in Kahului on the Hawaiian island of Maui in January of 1906, Hon-Chew Hee was an American muralist, watercolorist and printmaker. An educator in both China and Hawaii, he founded the Chinese Art Association in 1935 and the Hawaii Watercolor Society in 1962. 

From the age of five to fourteen, Hon-Chew Hee lived with his parents in Zhongshan, Guangdong, China, where he was trained in the art of Chinese brush painting. In 1921, Hee returned to Hawaii where he continued his elementary education. He began his art education in United States in 1929 as a part-time student at the California School of Fine Art, now the San Francisco Art Institute. Completed during this period was Hee’s earliest known painting, “Spring in Southern San Francisco”, an exercise in the Western techniques of light, color and composition. Hee had the opportunity to study fresco painting under Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, who had been encouraged by sculptor Ralph Stackpole and collector Albert Bender to visit San Francisco.

From 1929 until the beginning of World War II, Hee lived in San Francisco where he founded the Chinese Art Association. He entered his work in various exhibitions during this period. For the 1937 second annual National Exhibition of American Art, Hee presented his “Waimea Canyon”, a colorful canvas depicting the natural reddish canyon located on Kaua’i Island. For the March 1940 opening of New York’s Schoenemann Galleries on Madison Avenue, he had a solo exhibition of forty-three watercolors and drawings that received favorable reviews.  Single figure studies dominated this show, among these was his “Sleeping Chinese Boy”.

Hon-Chew Hee registered for the military draft in October of 1940. In October of 1945 in Honolulu, he married Marjorie Yuk Lin Wong who earned her degrees in medicine from Columbia University and the University of Hawaii. At this time, Hee was employed at the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard and taught painting classes at the Nuuanu YMCA. The painter and printmaker Isami Doi was also teaching at the YMCA and instructed Hee in the art of wood engraving. In 1948, Hee entered his artwork, which included the “Farmer’s Blessing”, in the July non-jury exhibition at New York State’s  Woodstock Gallery.

After a period of study at the Art Students League in New York, Hee traveled in September of 1949 aboard the luxury liner Ile de France to Le Havre, France. He stayed in Paris for a three-year study program with Fernand Léger and Andre L’hote, both French Cubist painters, and German painter George Grosz, best known for his 1920s Berlin scenes. Hee adopted the techniques of Cubism for his 1952 “Coffee Hour” by the use of colored blocks as sections of the coffee machine. However, his work always retained a sense of realism in its use of Eastern and Western concepts that were overlaid with traditional Chinese line-work.

Upon his return to Hawaii, Hon-Chew Hee settled in Kāneʻohe, the largest of the communities on Kāneʻohe Bay of O’ahu Island, his home for the rest of his life. Hee completed six murals fot the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts as well as a set of murals for the Inter-Island Terminal of the Honolulu International Airport. He created commissioned murals for the Manoa Library, Enchanted Lake Elementary School, Maui’s Pukalani Elementary School, the Hilo Hospital, and Kauai Community College.

Hon-Chew Hee died on the island of O’ahu in 1993. The Hon-Chew Hee Estate Foundation established a scholarship in 2009 for residents of Hawaii pursuing a degree in the fine arts. Hee’s work can be found in many private collections and such public institutions as the Hawaii State Arm Museum, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the National Taiwan Museum and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. 

Second Insert Image: Hon-Chew Hee, “Coffee Hour”, 1952, Oil on Canvas, 61 x 76.5 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Hon-Chew Hee, “Waiting”, Date Unkniown, Oil on Canvas 40.5 x 30.5 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Hon-Chew Hee, “Serigraphs”, 1973, Portfolio of 30 Serigraphs, Edition of 500, Publisher Hon-Chew Hee Studio

Dunbar Dyson Beck

The Paintings of Dunbar Dyson Beck

Born in Delaware, Ohio in 1903, Dunbar Dyson Beck was an American painter, muralist, educator, and designer of both interiors and exteriors, as well as theatrical sets and costumes. He studied at Northwestern University in Chicago before earning his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Yale University in 1926. Beck was invited to teach at Yale during the following academic year. In 1927, he won the prestigious Prix de Rome for his painting “Adoration”. This scholarship enabled Beck to spend three years studying at Rome’s American Academy and travel extensively  in Europe and Africa to study traditional arts. 

Upon his return to New York in 1930, Beck taught at Columbia University and then at Cooper Union’s School of Art. He began to receive several important commissions for altar paintings, murals and portraits. Beck painted a mural in 1934 for the lobby of New York City’s Radio City Music Hall. He also received a commission from Theodor Steinway to execute a gold-leaf decorative frieze on the side of a custom Steinway piano for President Roosevelt’s White House. Beck’s decoration represented the five musical forms indigenous of America: a New England barn dance, a lone cowboy playing a guitar, the Virginia reel, black field hands singing, and an Indian ceremonial dance.

Dunbar Beck’s commissioned work in New York included both mosaics and murals for the Rockefeller Center on Fifth Avenue, as well as, murals for the 1939-1940 World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows- Corona Park. In the late 1930s, Beck met Eleanor McClatchy, president of the McClatchy publishing company, who recognized his talents and encouraged his relocation to Sacramento, California  where he could live and work. McClatchy became Beck’s most important patron with commissions ranging from stage sets for Sacramento’s Eagle Theater to design work for the Sacramento Bee, the fifth-largest newspaper in California.

In the 1940s, Beck painted a series of eight paintings which focused on the theme of prize-fighting. These works were inspired by an unpublished play of unknown origin entitled “TheNational Ring”. In these works, Beck created the presence of a boxing match with his dramatic placement of compositional elements and his use of theatrical lighting effects. He used architectural elements, diagonal perspectives and concentric circles to create movement; his figures, with their raised fists and muscular arms, are highlighted as it they were spotlit for an unseen audience. Similar to the fight scenes painted by George Bellows, anticipation and emotional tension in Beck’s work are emphasized as details are minimized. 

Settled in Sacramento, Dunbar Beck made many contributions to the local art scene, among which were the Sacramento Art Deco Society and the Sacramento Public Library Program. He also served as set designer for the Sacramento Civic Theater and became an architectural preservationist for the Sacramento area. Beck was a juror for exhibitions held at Sacramento’s Kingsley Art Club and completed murals and mosaics for local churches. He executed fourteen oil paintings depicting the “Stations of the Cross” and a series of stain glass windows for St. Rose’s Chapel in South Sacramento. Beck also executed work for churches in New York, Texas and Pennsylvania. 

Dunbar Dyson Beck died of cancer, at the age of eighty-three, in February of 1986 at a Sacramento convalescent home. In addition to his work in prominent public places, Beck’s work is housed at Smith College and in private collections. His 1934 portrait of American architect William Adams Delano resides in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

Notes: The Sacramento Public Library in collaboration with the Sacramento Art Deco Society has a YouTube video, entitled “Dunbar Dyson Beck: Renaissance Master of Poverty Ridge”, that is narrated by local historian Bruce Marwick.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Dunbar Dyson Beck”, Date Unknown, Vintage Print

Second Insert Image: Dunbar Dyson Beck, “Palais des Papes, Avignon”, 1928, Watercolor on Paper, 31.8 x 23.8 cm, Private Colledtion

Third Insert Image: Dunbar Dyson Beck, “Self Portrait”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, Crocker Art Museum, Sacrament, California

Bottom Insert Image: Dunbar Dyson Beck, “Allegory of Charity”, 1925, Oil on Canvas, 132 x 104.1 cm, Private Collection

Saturnino Herrán Guinchard

Saturnino Herrán, “Our Ancient Gods”, 1916, Museo Colección Blaisten, Mexico City, Mexico.

Born in July of 1887 in the city of Aguascallentes, Saturnino Herrán Guinchard was a Mexican painter of indigenous Mexican and Swiss descent. One of the pioneers of Mexican Modernism, he was also an educator, muralist, book illustrator, draftsman, and a stained glass colorist. Herrán was the first Mexican artist to envision the concept of totally Mexican art; he also laid the foundation for the development of its muralist movement.

In 1901, Saturnino Herrán began his studies in drawing and painting at the Aguascallentes Academy of Science where his father was a Professor of Bookkeeping. He studied under Chlapas classical painter José Inés Tovilla and Severo Amador, a painter known for his Mexican Impressionist and Modern work. After the death of his father in 1903, Herrán and his mother relocated to Mexico City where he  worked to support his mother and studied at the city’s Academy of San Carlos. At the Academy, he studied under Mexican Symbolist painter and printmaker Julio Ruelas; Catalan painter, sculptor and draftsman Antonio Fabres; and painter Germán Gedovius who taught color, composition and chiaroscuro, the use of strong contrasts between light and dark.

An outstanding student in his courses, Herrán’s work was strongly inspired by the European theories of modern art which included Greek and Roman aesthetics and naturalism, the depiction of objects with the least possible amount of distortion. Strongly drawn to Mexican art, he united this cultural heritage with his academic European training to create work that would produce a spiritual experience. Herrán’s first figurative works were presented as allegories of nature and Spanish mythology; he also painted scenes of working people in everyday life.

Saturnino Herrán painted using the techniques drawn from the cultures of Spain, including the Catalonian area, and Europe. He preferred dynamic imagery, balanced colors, and strong contours. Herrán used blurred background colors to create ambiance and used free brushwork over drawings to capture variations of light. Through his refined draftsmanship and use of color, he combined drawing and watercolor to produce naturalistic works, a technique he adapted from Spanish painters.

By 1908, Herrán had gained recognition within the artistic community and was receiving awards and scholarships. In 1909 at the age of twenty-two, he was appointed a Professor of Drawing at Mexico City’s National Institute of Fine Arts; among his pupils were the future fresco muralists Diego Rivera and Roberto Montenegro Nervo. In 1910 Herrán, along with painter Jose Orozco, founded the Society of Mexican Painters and Sculptors which, in opposition to the official art exhibition at Mexico’s 100th anniversary of independence, staged an alternative exhibition of purely Mexican art. In this exhibition, Herrán presented his “The Legend of the Volcanos”, a canvas triptych depicting figures of an Indian prince and a European princess.

This exhibition of work by Mexican artists made a strong impression on lawyer Jose Vasconcelos who was to become the Secretary of Education of post-revolution Mexico. He realized that painting was not only for the elite but could in the form of murals reached a wider audience. Herrán was among the first artists commissioned by Vasconcelos to do mural paintings. In August of 1911, he completed his first large-scale fresco mural in the auditorium of Mexico City’s School of Arts and Crafts. This work by Herrán would serve as a model for future muralists in the 1920s and 1930s. 

In 1914, Saturnino Herrán, at age seventeen, was commissioned to create a triptych of fresco panels glorifying Mexican heritage for the walls of Mexico City’s Palace of Fine Arts which also housed the National Theater. He completed a small 101 x 112 centimeter oil study of one panel. From this small study, Herrán  was able to complete the larger fresco wall panel, “Our Ancient Gods” in 1916, two years before his untimely death.

For this work, Herrán abandoned his earlier bright colors in favor of somber, earthly colors with muted nuances. He used West Mexican men for his models  due to their strong indigenous and ethnic facial features. He particularly chose local men around the Pre-Columbian archeological site of Xochicalco because of their strong Mayan, Teotihuacan and Matlatzinca ancestry. The warriors are portrayed lean and lithe with firm muscles; they stand in poses with a slight tension of impending action, caught in a balance of action and inaction.

The figures and objects in the fresco are heavily outlined with strong, thick and bold, black lines. Herrán used similar line-work in the illustrations and graphic work he had previously executed for books, magazines and stained glass panels. “Our Ancient Gods” contains images appropriate to elite members of Pre-Columbian society: among these are gold earrings, red feathers and leather sandals. Herrán’s extensive use of indigenous motifs, powerful style, and cultural richness elevate the figures in his fresco to a high godlike status. 

A representative of both the Art Nouveau and the mural art movements in Mexico, Saturnino Herrán Guinchard, at the age of thirty-one, died suddenly from a gastric complication in Mexico City on the eighth of October in 1918. 

Notes: An extensive article written by Deborah Dorotinsky Alperstein on Saturnino Herrán’s mural at the School of Arts and Crafts, its removal and relocation, and its restoration can be found at: http://www.dezenovevinte.net/uah2/dda_en.htm

Second Insert Image: Saturnino Herrán, “Alegoría”. 1915, Watercolor and Gouache on Paper, 34 x 21 cm, Museo Nacional de la Acuarela Alfredo Guati Rojo

Third Insert Image: Saturnino Herrán, “Study for Nuestros Dioses (Our Ancient Gods)”, 1915, Figures on the Left Panel

Fourth Insert Image: Saturnino Herrán, “Alegoria de la Construcción”, 1910, Oil on Canvas, 114 x 62 cm, Decorative Border for the School of Arts and Crafts, Mexico City

Bottom Insert Image: Saturnino Herrán, “La Ofrenda (The Offering)”, Study on Paper, 81 x 138 cm, Museo Nacional de Arte de la Cludad de Mexico

Charles Dean Cornwell

The Artwork of Dean Cornwell

Born in Louisville, Kentucky in March of 1892, Charles Dean Cornwell was an illustrator and muralist who was a dominant presence in American illustration during the first half of the twentieth- century. He began his professional career at the age of eighteen as a cartoonist for the Louisville Herald. In 1911, Cornwell found employment with the art department of the Chicago Tribune and began studies at the Chicago Art Institute where he studied under educator and painter Harvey Dunn, a prominent student of illustrator Howard Pyle and a member of the Brandywine School collective.

In 1915, Dean Cornwell traveled to New Rochelle, New York, well known for its established art colony, and studied under Dunn at the Art Students League in New York City where he eventually developed his own light-imbued style. In 1918 in Chicago, Cornwell married artist Mildred Montrose Kirkham, who also studied at the Chicago Art Institute. They had two children; however, due to Cornwell’s constant extramarital affairs, they separated after a few years but never divorced.

Possessing a strong work ethic, Cornwell often worked seventeen hours a day and through the entire week. His illustrations appeared in nearly every major publication in the United States including Redbook, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping. In 1926, Cornwell signed a long-term contract with Cosmopolitan for an annual salary of one-hundred thousand dollars, equivalent to over a million dollars today.

Dean Cornwell illustrated the novels of authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Pearl S. Buck, W. Somerset Maugham, and short story writer Edna Ferber. He also illustrated posters to support the United States war efforts in three major conflicts, the Korean War effort and both the first and second World Wars. Through his career, Cornwell  did advertising for hundreds of companies including General Motors, the Pennsylvania Railroad, Goodyear, and New York Life; he also illustrated ads for such products as Coca-Cola, Seagram’s Gin, and Palmolive Soap. 

Deciding to dedicate the rest of his career to mural painting, Cornwell  traveled  to London in 1927, where he apprenticed to the painter Sir Frank William Brangwyn for a three-year study of mural painting. He assisted Brangwyn in a series of murals, including the British Empire Panels designed for the House of Lords. These panels, begun in 1925 and completed in 1932, were not hung in the Royal Gallery of the House of Lords as intended. Considered too lively and colorful, the panels were housed in a specially built hall in Swansea. 

The most renowned of Dean Cornwell’s murals is the Los Angeles Public Library’s  twelve-panel “History of California” which encircles the Grand Rotunda. Painted on linen canvases and finished in 1933,  the forty-foot tall panels took five years to complete. Cornwell, having used all the funding after two years, took on illustrative work to finance the project to its completion. His other murals include, among others, those for the General Motors exhibition at the 1939 World’s Fair, New York’s Hotel Warwick’s Raleigh Room, the Easter Airlines building (now 10 Rockefeller Plaza), Boston’s New England Telephone headquarters building, and the William Rappard Center in Geneva, Switzerland.

Cornwell lectured and taught at New York’s Art Students League. From 1922 to 1926, he served as the president of the Society of Illustrators and was elected into its Hall of Fame in 1959. Cornwall was elected in `923 into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician and achieved full status in 1940. He served as President of the National Society of Mural Painters for four years beginning in 1953. Charles Dean Cornwell died at the age of sixty-eight in New York City on December 4th of 1960. A collection of his papers, correspondence, sketches, scrapbooks and photographs are housed in the Archives of American Art located in the Victor Building in Washington, DC. 

Note: A very extensive article on Dean Cornwell, complete with family history, can be found at the PulpArtists website: https://www.pulpartists.com/Cornwell.html

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Dean Cornwell in Studio”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Inset Image: Dean Cornwell, “Study of a Boy, for Water Mural”, 1927-33, Pastel and Charcoal Pencil on Paper, 58.4 x 38.1 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Dean Cornwell, Los Angeles Public Library”, 1933, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Dean Cornwell, “Study of a Boy, for Water Mural”, 1927-33, Pastel and Charcoal Pencil on Paper, Dimensions and Location Unknown

Gerald Mast

Gerald mast, Clare Middle School Murals, 1938, Right Central Panel of Four, Clare, Michigan

Born in Topeka, Indiana, in 1908, Gerald Mast was a painter, graphic artist, designer and educator. He studied at the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, and at Detroit’s School of Arts and Crafts, under modernist painter and educator John Carroll, who was associated with the Ash Can school artists. As an educator, Mast taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and was a Professor at the College of Architecture and Design of the University of Michigan at Grand Rapids from 1948 until his death in 1971. 

Gerald Mast was a member of the Works Progress Administration,   a New Deal federal agency which, from 1936 to 1943, carried out public works projects from building and road construction to public art projects. He produced murals for the Franklin Settlement in Detroit; the Bronkema Center in Grand Rapids; and the Harrick Public Library in Holland, Michigan. Executed in 1938 at the Detroit Institute of the Arts over a period of two years, his best known murals  are the four large panels installed in the now Middle School of Clare, Michigan. 

Mast’s four large, vertical panels, each twenty feet in height by eight feet in width, are installed on the north wall of Clare Middle School’s auditorium. The murals show agriculture, academics, the local trades, and the oil and gas industry, all of which were unique to the area when Mast arrived to complete his work; these mural received restoration in 2004. 

The two outer murals in the auditorium are dominated by a woman on the left panel and a man on the right panel. The nude woman,  holding a sheet in front of her, is standing before scenes of prosperous agriculture; the nude man, also holding a sheet, is seen standing before scenes of buildings and oil wells. The right central panel depicts scientists in front of classical thinkers. The left central panel depicts athletes, musicians, children, and nurses, with farmers and agricultural goods in the foreground. All of the subjects in the murals display unsmiling, grim determination.

Gerald Mast exhibited his work at the Detroit Institute of Arts from 1943 to 1963; the Great Lakes Exhibiton of 1938; the Rhode Island School of Design; Indianapolis’ Herron Art Institute from 1930 to 1964; and the National Ecclesiastical Exhibition in Birmingham, Michigan, among others. Executed under the WPA program, Gerald Mast’s 1938 ceramic sculpture, “Sea Nymph” is installed at the University of Michigan. 

Gerald Mast died on August 10, 1971 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The Smithsonian Museum’s Archives of American Art contains his correspondence and writings, family photographs, several sketchbooks and loose sketches, exhibition catalogues, and writings, which include his manuscripts for “Egg Tempera” and “Philosophy of Art”. 

Insert Image: Gerald Mast, Untitled, 1964, Lithograph on Paper, Edition of 35, Private Collection

Edgar Flores (SANER)

Murals and Paintings by Edgar Flores (SANER)

Edgar Flores was born in 1981 in Mexico City, where he is currently based. As a child he developed an interest in drawing and Mexican muralism and began expressing himself through graffiti in the late 1990s. In 2004, Flores received a degree in graphic design from Universidad Autónoma de México. His work has been exhibited in galleries worldwide including Barcelona, Berlin, London, New York and Mexico City. In 2014 he had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Luis Potosí in Mexico.

Dean Cornwell

Two Murals by Dean Cornwell, The Raleigh Room of the Warwick Hotel, 68 West 54th Street, New York City, 1937

Dean Cornwell was an American illustrator and muralist. His oil paintings were frequently featured in popular magazines and books as literary illustrations, advertisements, and posters promoting the war effort. Throughout the first half of the 20th century he was a dominant presence in American illustration. At the peak of his popularity he was nicknamed the “Dean of Illustrators”.

In 1937 William Randolph Hearst commissioned Cornwell to create murals for The Raleigh Room, the restaurant inside his new residential hotel. Cornwell complied with a series of scenes of the life of Raleigh, depicting the explorer-courtier throwing down his cloak over a mud puddle for Queen Elizabeth, receiving a charter from her, and landing on Roanoke Island. After Cornwell had completed the murals, however, he and Hearst disagreed about compensation, and in revenge, the artist added obscene elements to the paintings, including an Indian with bare buttocks and men urinating on both Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth. Fortunately, he painted out these elements once the dispute was resolved. Over time the murals darkened, but they were brilliantly restored in a renovation in 2004.

DELeast

Street Art by DELeast

ALeast was born in 1984 in Wuhan, China and is currently based in Cape Town, South Africa. He studied Sculpture at the Institute of Fine Arts and began making art in public spaces in 2004. His murals can be found in cities around the world including the U.S., Switzerland, Namibia, France, Israel, Australia and China.

The dark imagery found in DALeast’s art is undeniably captivating, woven with intricate detail while focusing on the simple subjects in his pieces. Each of his pieces of art is created using paint to look like thousands of metal shards are coming together to form beautiful shapes, often animals or humans. Within every piece of DALeast’s art, a pop of color observed in the background brings his subject to life. This allows him to focus on the intricacy of his technique while delivering his final product. The use of fractured imagery and contrasting backgrounds serve to give his art a breath of energy and soul that can sometimes be lost in art with a more somber subject matter.

A majority of DALeast’s art utilizes animals as the subject matter. In many of his works, less pronounced line work in the background serves as a shadowing effect for the images illustrated in the forefront. The overall artistic effect of utilizing a dark base while simultaneously highlighting in fragmented, brighter lines is to make the images appear to leap off the wall or canvas; It is the artist’s skillful layering of lines that leads the viewer to be able to visually interpret the image in many different ways.

Jared French

Jared French, “Lunchtime with Early Miners”, 1938, Mural in the Plymouth US Post Office Building in Pennsylvania, New Deal Public Works of Art Project

Nudity was to be avoided, and Treasury Department Section Director Edward Bruce was emphatic about this point. “Anybody who wanted to paint a nude ought to have his head examined!” he declared. Bruce’s officials were quick to advise artists to remove or tone down anything that might be deemed risqué. Once again, however, depictions of Native Americans proved to be an exception to the rule. Artists who specialized in figurative art could portray muscular, nearly naked Native Americans in poses deemed inappropriate for whites.

Jared French (1905–1987), an artist who devised an unusual pictorial language to explore human unconsciousness and its relation to sexuality, could not resist testing the boundaries. In 1937, he was working on two post office murals, one for Plymouth, Luzerne County, and the second for Richmond, Virginia. For the Richmond commission, he proposed depicting a group of Confederate soldiers in various states of undress preparing to cross a stream to flee advancing Union forces. The Section advised French that the figures must be clothed. “You have painted enough nudes in your life so that the painting of several more or less should not matter in your artistic career,” wrote a Section administrator. French capitulated on the Richmond mural—he wanted to be paid after all—but as a final jab at Rowan and the Section, he did manage to paint one more nude.

Before finishing the Plymouth mural, “Mealtime with the Early Coal Miners”, French inserted into the background a male figure piloting a barge, inexplicably unclothed. The nude pilot, like the union buttons of the railcar workers, went undetected by Treasury Department officials. The offending image appeared too small to be detected in the final eight-by-ten-inch photographs, and “Mealtime” became the only example of full-frontal nudity in a United States post office.

Note: For those interested in more information on Jared French, I recommend Emily Sachar’s “Jared French’s State Park: A Contextual Study”, which was submitted for his Master of Arts degree. It includes a chapter of French’s artistic circle of friends, including his freindship with Paul Cadmus, as well as several images of French’s most notable works. The article can be found at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1289&context=hc_sas_etds

Stockholm Subway System

The Underground Art of the Stockholm Subway System

Certain stations in Stockholm’s T-Bana system, primarily along the city’s Blue Line, are singularly spectacular due to the city’s geology. Due to characteristics of the bedrock beneath the watery city, instead of boring, the metro’s stations and tunnels are simply blasted away – oddly fitting in the birthplace of Alfred Nobel. As a result, the system’s stations are grand cavernous spaces not wholly unlike certain Washington stations in scale, but, with the bedrock left exposed, they feature an eerie, cave-like atmosphere.

T-Centralen is the metro’s central station, located directly under downtown, where the system’s three lines meet. The older station, servicing the Red and Green lines, is rather utilitarian. But the connected Blue Line platforms form an extraordinary cavern covered in abstract patterns in bright blue and white designed by Swedish artist Per Olov Ultveldt in 1975.

Kungsträdgården station  takes a different tack, giving the sense of a Roman archaeological dig. Water drips down the walls behind statuary. Walking across a bridge near one entrance to the station, you look down into an overgrown garden of columns and fallen finials. The bedrock walls are left mostly exposed, hidden only by bold murals in red and green and black and white.

Solna Centrum station, farther outside the city center, is blindingly red. As seen in green and black murals along the track’s edge, Solna Centrum is meant to evoke the country’s spruce forests and the towns that harvested their lumber.

Diego Rivera

Diego Rivera, “Automotive Assembly Line”, Detail of One of Twenty-Seven Fresco Panels, North Wall, Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan

When the Mexican artist Diego Rivera arrived in Detroit in 1932 to paint the walls at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the city was a leading industrial center of the world. It was also the city that was hit the hardest by the Great Depression. Industrial production and the workforce were a third of what they had been before the 1929 Crash.

The space Rivera was given to paint was aligned on an east/west/north/south axis. Rivera utilized this architectural orientation in a symbolic way. The manufacture of the 1932 Ford V-8 at the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant is captured in the two major panels on the north and south walls.

On the north wall, Rivera captured all the processes related to the assembly of the motor. The blast furnace glows orange and red at extreme temperatures to make molten steel that is poured into molds to make ingots that are then milled into sheets. All the major processes related to the manufacture of the motor of the car from mold-making in the upper left to the final assembly of the motor on the assembly line in the foreground are accurately rendered with engineering precision.

Diego Rivera wove the processes together through the use of the serpentine conveyors and assembly lines. The composition is grounded by two rows of white milling machines that stand as sentinels in the center of the wall and march into the background to the blast furnace.