On June 25, the Board of Education for the City of San Francisco voted to paint over white a vibrantly-hued 1,600-foot cycle of frescoes, The Life of George Washington. Completed in 1936 in a social-realist style by the Russian-born Victor Arnautoff (1896–1979), who was a Communist, the paintings adorn the stairs and 32nd Avenue lobby entrance of George Washington High School (GWHS), attended by some two thousand students in the city’s Richmond neighborhood.
The school board acted in accord with demands from two First Nation activists and their supporters, who for some months had contended that their adolescent children experienced “generational trauma” because the art works depicted several black slaves and a dead Native American. Adopting the hashtag #paintitdown, the anti-mural groups insisted that the Board of Education accommodate its desire for a safe space by destroying them. The events set off a furor, still in progress, pitting concerns about history, censorship, and education against demands for respect, social justice, and redress.
The school board’s drastic stance was a travesty, given the murals’ iconography and history. Sponsored under federal auspices, through the Fine Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration, the murals were one of seven ambitious New Deal-era art commissions for GWHS: an extraordinary number that attested to that campus’s unique standing as a showcase for municipal art, architecture, landscape design, and public education. In a detailed report of October 2017, the San Francisco Historic Preservation Commission (HPC) highlighted this fact, and called for the fresco cycle to receive landmark designation. In a move of political expediency and cowardice, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors tabled HPC’s recommendation (much to HPC’s chagrin), pending the outcome of the school board’s vote.
Befitting the work of an artist who had previously collaborated with the Mexican Marxist painter Diego Rivera, Arnautoff’s murals were provocative in his own time, for reasons with which the #paintitdown contingent might perhaps have identified. Although they depict the life of the school’s namesake, the “formation of personality” and his “personality in action,” as the artist put it, Arnautoff’s murals were hardly celebrations of the slave-holding president. “It is not the prissy, Parson Weemish Washington of the cherry tree,” remarked the San Francisco Chronicle’s critic Albert Frankenstein of The Life of George Washington in 1936. Indeed not.
“As I see it,” wrote Arnautoff in 1935, “the artist is a critic of society.” As the Arnautoff biographer Robert Cherny has shown, that critical stance underpinned The Life of George Washington and much of the artist’s public work. In that sense, his approach was akin to a number of other radical artists of the 1930s, such as Rockwell Kent, who embedded occasional subtle but provocative left-wing social messages into their murals. This method differed from those of more moderate New Deal muralists, whose treatment of their subjects tended to be straightforwardly affirmative and middle of the road.