The world, however, is not a kind and pretty place. Outside the now censored halls of this one high school, is an ugly, violent, bigoted country. If those who can't deal with images on a wall are upset now, wait until the real world intrudes.
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
From the NY Times; SAN FRANCISCO — More than $8,000. That was the amount John Ashcroft’s Justice Department spent on blue curtains to cover up the busty Spirit of Justice statue and her bare-chested male equivalent, the Majesty of Law, in the department’s Great Hall in 2002. The Victorian move against the Art Deco sculptures spurred a thousand lampoons. “A blue burqa for justice,” my colleague Maureen Dowd memorably called it. In The Harvard Crimson, a young Pete Buttigieg wrote, “It seems odd that an infant is supposed to feed on them, and a grown man is expected at some point to behold them, but for a period in between we feel the need to see to it that no child ever sees a breast.”
I wonder, then, what Mr. Buttigieg, now on the presidential
campaign trail, would make of the San Francisco school board’s unanimous
decision on Tuesday night to spend at least $600,000 of taxpayer money not
just to shroud a historic work of art but to destroy it.
By now stories of progressive Puritanism (or perhaps the
better word is Philistinism) are so commonplace — snowflakes seek safe space! —
that it can feel tedious to track the details of the latest outrage. But this
case is so absurd that it’s worth reviewing the specifics.
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, in which the
artist painted himself standing in
front of a newspaper rack
Conspicuously missing the mainstream San Francisco
Chronicle and packed with publications like The Daily Worker.
Arnautoff, who had assisted Diego Rivera in Mexico, was a
committed Communist. “‘Art for art’s sake’ or art as perfume have never
appealed to me,” he said in 1935. “The artist is a critic of society.”
This is why 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.
“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.”
In other words, Arnautoff’s purpose was
to unsettle the viewer, to provoke young people into looking at American
history from a different, darker perspective. 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.
“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.”
