Depression-Era Murals of the Bay Area

Depression-Era Murals of the Bay Area
Author: Nicholas A. Veronico, Gina F. Morello, Brett A. Casadonte, and Gilda Collins
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 96
Release: 2014
Genre: History
ISBN: 146713144X

The San Francisco Bay Area's art community was thriving until the Great Depression strangled commerce in the 1930s. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal art programs brought relief to many talented but financially strapped artists. Their legacy, and that of the New Deal, adorns the walls and halls of many public spaces throughout the region. Murals cover the lobbies of the Coit Memorial Tower, the Beach Chalet, and the Aquatic Park Bathhouse (today's San Francisco Maritime Museum) and decorate many public schools and post offices. Today, almost all of this wonderful art can be viewed by the public, free of charge.

Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art

Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art
Author: Robert W. Cherny
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2017-03-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0252099249

Victor Arnautoff reigned as San Francisco's leading mural painter during the New Deal era. Yet that was only part of an astonishing life journey from Tsarist officer to leftist painter. Robert W. Cherny's masterful biography of Arnautoff braids the artist's work with his increasingly leftist politics and the tenor of his times. Delving into sources on Russian émigrés and San Francisco's arts communities, Cherny traces Arnautoff's life from refugee art student and assistant to Diego Rivera to prominence in the New Deal's art projects and a faculty position at Stanford University. As Arnautoff's politics moved left, he often incorporated working people and people of color into his treatment of the American past and present. In the 1950s, however, his participation in leftist organizations and a highly critical cartoon of Richard Nixon landed him before the House Un-American Activities Committee and led to calls for his dismissal from Stanford. Arnautoff eventually departed America, a refugee of another kind, now fleeing personal loss and the disintegration of the left-labor culture that had nurtured him, before resuming his artistic career in the Soviet Union that he had fought in his youth to destroy.

Depression-Era Sculpture of the Bay Area

Depression-Era Sculpture of the Bay Area
Author: Nicholas A. Veronico
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 96
Release: 2017-08-07
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 1439661782

The Great Depression was a terrible blow for the Bay Area's thriving art community. A few private art projects kept a small number of sculptors working, but for the majority, prospects of finding new commissions were grim. By the mid-1930s, Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal program had gathered steam, and assistance was provided to the nation's art community. Salvation came from the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which employed thousands of artists to produce sculpture for public venues. The Bay Area art community subsequently benefitted from the need to fill the then-forthcoming Golden Gate International Exposition (GGIE) with sculpture of all shapes and sizes. As bad as the Depression was, its legacy more than 80 years on is one of beauty. The Bay Area is dotted with sculpture from this era, the majority of it on public display. Depression-Era Sculpture of the Bay Area is a visual tour of this artistic bounty.

Painting on the Left

Painting on the Left
Author: Anthony W. Lee
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 1999-04-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780520219779

During the 1930s San Francisco's most ambitious public murals were painted by artists on the left. In this study, Anthony Lee shows how these painters, led by Diego Rivera, sought to transform murals into a vehicle for their rejection of the economic and political status quo and their support of labor and radical ideologies, including Communism. In addressing these subjects, the mural painters developed a new imagery, based on the activities of the city's laboring population - its efforts to organize, its protests, its strikes.

San Francisco Street Art

San Francisco Street Art
Author:
Publisher: Prestel Publishing
Total Pages: 96
Release: 2009
Genre: Graffiti
ISBN:

A must-have for any street art enthusiast, this book presents the most mind blowing examples of renegade creativity in San Francisco. San Francisco's vibrant street art scene exists in areas off the city's well-worn tourist paths. The alleyways and hidden side streets of the Haight, the Tenderloin, and especially the Mission district's Clarion Alley offer unexpected treats to visitors lucky enough to stumble upon them. For more than five years, photographer Steve Rotman has obsessively documented this scene as it evolved on walls, sidewalks, billboards, fences, doors, and other public spaces. Culled from thousands of images, the result is a collection of work that attests to the artists' personal and stylistic diversity, from Mars1's robotic depictions of alternate universes which reflect the local counterculture spirit, to Neck Face's whimsically ghoulish creatures that serve as a testament to entrepreneurial hipsterdom, to Bigfoot's friendly green primates inspired by the area's rich graffiti culture. San Francisco's charm as an international destination also causes foreign artists to contribute to the street dialogue--Brazilian duo Os Gemeos, Londoner D*Face and German painter Dome have all graced the city's walls with their unique points of view. An enterprising photographer, Rotman has forged relationships with many of these often-reclusive artists, allowing him access to some of the lesser-known corners of the street art world.

Bret Harte

Bret Harte
Author: The Book Club of California
Publisher: Wentworth Press
Total Pages: 78
Release: 2019-02-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780469859869

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Art Deco San Francisco

Art Deco San Francisco
Author: Therese Poletti
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2008-09-03
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781568987569

The Castro Theatre, the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Headquarters, 450 Sutter Medico-Dental Buildingthesemasterpieces of San Francisco's Art Deco heritage are the work of one man: Timothy Pflueger. An immigrant's sonwith only a grade-school education, Pflueger began practicing architecture after San Francisco's 1906 earthquake. While his contemporaries looked to Beaux-Arts traditions to rebuild the city, he brought exotic Mayan, Asian, and Egyptian forms to buildings ranging from simple cocktail lounges to the city's first skyscrapers. Pflueger was one of the city's most prolificarchitects during his 40-year career. He designed two major downtown skyscrapers, two stock exchanges, several neighborhood theaters, movie palaces for four smaller cities (including the beloved Paramount in Oakland), some ofthe city's biggest schools, and at least 50 homes. His works include the San Francisco Stock Exchange, the ever-popularTop of the Mark, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, and the San Francisco World's Fair. It is a testament to his talentthat many of his buildings still stand and many have been named landmarks. Therese Poletti tells the fascinating story of Pflueger's life and work in Art Deco San Francisco. In lively detail, she relates how Pflueger built extravagant compositions in metal, concrete, and glass. She also tells the story behind the architecture: Pflueger's commissioning and support of muralist Diego Rivera, his association with photographer Ansel Adams and sculptor Ralph Stackpole, and his childhood friendship turned to adulthood sponsorship with San Francisco Mayor James "Sunny" Rolph Jr. Beautiful archival photography mixes with stunning new photography in this collection of a truly Californian, but ultimately American, story.

Society of Six

Society of Six
Author: Nancy Boas
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2023-09-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0520919777

Six plein-air painters in Oakland, California, joined together in 1917 to form an association that lasted nearly fifteen years. The Society of Six—Selden Connor Gile, Maurice Logan, William H. Clapp, August F. Gay, Bernard von Eichman, and Louis Siegriest—created a color-centered modernist idiom that shocked establishment tastes but remains the most advanced painting of its era in Northern California. Nancy Boas's well-informed and sumptuously illustrated chronicle recognizes the importance of these six painters in the history of American Post-Impressionism. The Six found themselves in the position of an avant garde not because they set out to reject conventionality, but because they aspired to create their own indigenous modernism. While the artists were considered outsiders in their time, their work is now recognized as part of the vital and enduring lineage of American art. Depression hardship ended the Six's ascendancy, but their painterliness, use of color, and deep alliance with the land and the light became a beacon for postwar Northern California modern painters such as Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud. Combining biography and critical analysis, Nancy Boas offers a fitting tribute to the lives and exhilarating painting of the Society of Six.

The Bohemians

The Bohemians
Author: Jasmin Darznik
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2022-04-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 059312944X

A dazzling novel of one of America’s most celebrated photographers, Dorothea Lange, exploring the wild years in San Francisco that awakened her career-defining grit, compassion, and daring. “Jasmin Darznik expertly delivers an intriguing glimpse into the woman behind those unforgettable photographs of the Great Depression, and their impact on humanity.”—Susan Meissner, bestselling author of The Nature of Fragile Things In this novel of the glittering and gritty Jazz Age, a young aspiring photographer named Dorothea Lange arrives in San Francisco in 1918. As a newcomer—and naïve one at that—Dorothea is grateful for the fast friendship of Caroline Lee, a vivacious, straight-talking Chinese American with a complicated past, who introduces Dorothea to Monkey Block, an artists’ colony and the bohemian heart of the city. Dazzled by Caroline and her friends, Dorothea is catapulted into a heady new world of freedom, art, and politics. She also finds herself falling in love with the brilliant but troubled painter Maynard Dixon. As Dorothea sheds her innocence, her purpose is awakened and she grows into the artist whose iconic Depression-era “Migrant Mother” photograph broke the hearts and opened the eyes of a nation. A vivid and absorbing portrait of the past, The Bohemians captures a cast of unforgettable characters, including Frida Kahlo, Ansel Adams, and D. H. Lawrence. But moreover, it shows how the gift of friendship and the possibility of self-invention persist against the ferocious pull of history.