Art: Muralist Team

Ten years ago many U. S. leftwing painters turned away from canvas as being too bourgeois, began to slap murals on every bare space they could find. Five years ago, with WPA’s advent, most of them got commissions to paint the walls of post offices, law courts, schools, Army posts, hospitals, customs houses. Occasionally an aroused and enraged citizenry protested on political grounds, sometimes on artistic, but the space continued to get slapped. Last week, with 215 U. S. painters competing, two Chicagoans won the largest mural commission yet awarded by the Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts: $29,000 for frescoes to decorate the new St. Louis post office. The winners: small, dark, intense Edward Millman and small, dark, less intense Mitchell Siporin, longtime friends, who last collaborated on murals for the Decatur, Ill. post office.

Muralists Millman and Siporin both studied at Chicago’s Art Institute, are prime movers in Chicago’s Artists’ Union. Scholarly Mitch Siporin sings, plays the piano and mandolin. High-strung Eddie Millman relaxes best at the movies. Born on January 1, Millman annually gives a combination New Year’s Eve-birthday party famed among Chicago artists, for the rest of the year stays close to the wagon.

In 1934 Millman went to Mexico, spent his time with Diego Rivera learning mural design and technique. But at St. Louis neither he nor Siporin will use Rivera’s jolting colors and jampacked composition. Their frescoes are in the standard historical vein, grey and red their predominant colors. Contemporary, unlike their murals, are their canvases now on show at the New York and San Francisco World Fairs. But, says Eddie Millman: “In murals alone can art reach the large masses of people. . . . Easel paintings are too personal, too limited in appeal. . . . Painting, to be really functional, must be taken from small exclusive groups and thrown open to everyone.”