Art: Artists on Parade

Like New York’s World’s Fair, San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition started this year with an apparently bad handicap: lack of access to such foreign art collections as last year’s show (valued at $20,000,000) of Italian old masters. To make up for this loss, the Fine Arts Palace on Treasure Island added contemporary European, Mexican paintings; a collection, unique in the U. S., of South and Central American art assembled by Dr. Grace McCann Morley, director of the San Francisco Museum of Art. Also added was the most complete exhibit of photography ever shown in the West (including an entire room given to the photographs of California’s Edward Weston); a much-improved collection of U. S. paintings, going back to Colonial times, brightened with such talked-about contemporary works as Peter Blume’s The Eternal City, Thomas Benton’s Susannah and the Elders.

But the main attraction in the Arts Palace is a 20-ring show called “Art in Action.” Architect Timothy L. Pflueger, the show’s dynamic director, thought it up.

Like a zoo, the mammoth Main Hall (where engineers have installed an anti-museum-fatigue invention: two pyramid-like seats topped by Beniamino Bufano’s sculptured animals, penguin and bear) encloses a large central pit, where, hacking away at a huge granite head of Leonardo, stands Sculptor Fred Olmsted. Helen Forbes works on an egg tempera. Dudley Carter, ex-logger and machinist, hews away mightily on 20-foot redwood sculptures with a double-bitted ax. German-born Herman Volz and 16 assistants work on a huge mosaic. All around the hall, busy as mud-daubers, miscellaneous painters, sculptors, weavers, pottery workers get on with their jobs while the visitors watch.

The show’s star performer, famed Mexican Muralist Diego Rivera, perched in a rooftop studio, last week went to work on sketches for his big fresco (22 ft. ½in. by 44 ft. 3 in.) at the north end of the Fine Arts Palace. Commissioned for the new San Francisco Junior College library, the fresco counterposes the old Mexican Indian God Quetzalcoatl against a steel stamping machine (with the same outline, even to breastlike appendage), Mexican pyramids and tropical scenery against U. S. skyscrapers, traditional Mexican serpent against conveyor belt.

Rivera gets excited in discussing his mural. It is meant to demonstrate his theory of Pan-Americanism. “American art,” he declares, “has to be the result of a conjunction between the creative power of mechanism of the North and the creative power of the South coming from traditional, deep-rooted Southern Indian forms. It is interesting that the two inventions which most aided the U. S. industrial revolution, the telegraph and steamship, were perfected by two artists, highly important in their day, Morse and Fulton. Thus the artists led off the industrial revolution and now that the revolution has reached the saturation point, industry is leading the trend back to art. Conditions for the perfectly functioning machine are precisely the same needed for perfect art. . . . Americans (workers as well as designers) are expressing artistic genius through beautiful machines. They don’t know that they are artists any more than the old Mexican pottery workers know that they are.”