Art: Jail Job

Down on Sixth & Greenwich Avenues, Manhattan, there was great excitement in the women’s jail last week. On the recreation roof of the House of Detention for Women, one of the best known model prisons in the U. S., a great fresco panel, first of a series depicting The Cycle of a Woman’s Life was just finished. Giggling, nudging, shrilling with excitement, the inmates in their brown-&-white-checked house dresses crowded round the small, serious artist with cries of “Ain’t it purty!”

Long on the list of WPA projects was a bright colorful mural for this Manhattan jail. Commissioner of Correction Austin Harbutt MacCormick is an avid psychologist, a firm believer in the use of color in the mental readjustment of female prisoners. So is Prison Superintendent Ruth Elizabeth Collins. She had already accepted a collection of travel posters to enliven the bleak, white-tiled corridors of the jail. So now the prisoners march to their individual rooms, the workshops and mess hall through halls burgeoning with such signs as VISIT SPAIN, TRAVEL IN INDIA, SEE SORRENTO. But both Commissioner MacCormick and Superintendent Collins felt that this was not sufficient. Chosen to paint a permanent mural with WPA funds was Lucienne Bloch.

Youngest daughter of famed Swiss Composer Ernest Bloch (TIME, April 23. 1934 et ante). Lucienne Bloch was born in Geneva in 1909. Her first ambition was to be an Alpinist. She never thought of being an artist until at the age of 11 she suddenly began illustrating “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat.” Father Bloch, delighted, bought her a paint box, later sent her to the Cleveland School of Art. In Europe she first studied sculpture with Antoine Bourdelle, then painted at the Beaux Arts, felt acutely uncomfortable with both. It was only when she went to Rome that she saw what she really wanted to do, in the gigantic frescoes of the Vatican and St. Peter’s.

Back in the U. S. she met paunchy Diego Rivera, begged his permission to grind colors, become his assistant. She worked with the Mexican muralist on his Detroit Art Institute fresco before helping him with the fresco fiasco of Rockefeller Center (TIME, May 22, 1933 et ante). It was Lucienne Bloch, as Rivera’s official photographer, who took the only pictures of the completed mural before it was ordered destroyed. A few friends call her Lucienne; a few call her Luce. She hates Lucy, prefers the simple, abrupt “Bloch.”

For the subject of her prison mural she consulted earnestly with prison authorities and inmates. The latter promptly rejected Women in Industry as “sounding too much like work.” They preferred Women in National Costume. Superintendent Collins won them over to The Cycle of a Woman’s Life.

Bloch’s cycle shows a mythical background on the edge of Long Island slums. In the back are factories, gas tanks, the towers of Manhattan. Assorted moppets, black and white, are swinging on swings, sliding on slides, building blocks, playing tag. going to school. On a bench.a colored mother shells peas, a white mother knits. Because the prisoners demanded flowers. Bloch painted in the pushcart of a flower peddler who stands often before the jail door. On a window sill she has immortalized a black mongrel kitten which, until its poisoning few weeks ago, was known to all as Coconito. Inmates have already given names to most of the children in the fresco.