Restoring bit of history at the S.F. Art Institute
The San Francisco Art Institute was founded in 1871, and the many generations of faculty and students who have passed through its doors are largely responsible for the way San Francisco sees itself. So when they told me that they had recently discovered a series of frescoes from the 1930s — in that era’s social realist tradition, which is the tradition of so much San Francisco public art — on their grounds, I rushed over to see what they had found.
First, though, I had a question: How did the institute manage to lose all record of a series of frescoes in the first place?
“There are a few reasons,” said Jeff Gunderson, the institute’s special collections librarian. “The building was completely taken over by the Red Cross for a blood bank during the Second World War. So for years those pieces were neglected, for obvious reasons. Then, by the time the war was over and the building was back in use, art movements had changed pretty dramatically. So they were likely painted over to make room for new student work.”
As the institute added new buildings and student interest shifted to other methods of expression — photography, performance art — the frescoes were gradually forgotten.
A few of the most beautiful works survived, like “Life Drawing Class,” a 1936 piece by former student Eleanor Bates Streloff. This fresco, which curves over an archway, shows students sketching a nude model in an institute class, and is one of the few local murals done by a female artist from that period.
“We think that one may have been too high for students to climb up and paint over it,” Gunderson said.
The frescoes that weren’t so lucky were painted over, and then over again and again. In their preliminary work, restorers have manually removed as many as 20 layers of paint to get to the frescoes that lie beneath the institute’s whitewashed hallways.
“It takes two weeks to chip away a tiny square of an image,” said Heather Hickman Holland, the institute’s director of operations. “They use special solvents and Q-tips. It’s very time-intensive.”
Holland is largely responsible for the discovery in the first place. One afternoon in 2013, she stepped out of her office and walked down the hallway in the institute’s oldest building.
“The light was hitting the wall in a certain way, and I thought I saw spiderwebs in the corner,” she told me. “I walked up to it closely, thinking that I would make a complaint to the cleaning staff. Then I backed up — and it became clear to me that the dust was outlining shapes of pictures underneath the paint.”
A former institute painting student herself, it didn’t take Holland long to realize that she had found something important. “I ran and got my boss, I got Jeff Gunderson, everyone I could find,” Holland said. “That was when we started doing research.”
The staff looked at articles from the 1930s in The San Francisco Chronicle and the Examiner and found that some of their faculty members had been quoted talking about the student work they directed on those very walls. “That was a huge clue,” Holland said. They also paged through the school’s archives. A few of the frescoes and murals were photographed before they disappeared.
Thanks to an old snapshot, they know that one of the pieces they are working on restoring is called “Marble Workers,” and it’s from 1935. The artist is Frederick E. Olmsted Jr., who created many social realist murals in San Francisco, including part of the “Power” piece at Coit Tower and “Theory and Science” at City College of San Francisco.
“So far we’ve been able to uncover the tip of a fedora on that mural,” Gunderson said. “It’s going to be an important part of San Francisco history when we uncover the whole thing.”
In order to complete the restoration work, the institute will need monetary support (hint, hint, art-loving institutions and donors). The staff members promised me that this time, the frescoes will remain uncovered.
“No one’s going to paint over them again,” Holland said. “There’s new space for students to paint on now.”
The “new space” is on the outer walls of an additional building constructed in the late 1960s. There’s a stunning view from the rooftop, stretching out to Alcatraz on the left and Coit Tower on the right, and we walked up so that they could show me a piece of the student work that stands there now. It was a painting, and I asked what would happen to it when another student wanted to put a piece up. “It will be painted over,” Holland said. “Wait, but what if this student becomes really well known?” I asked. “Will we be back here in the 2060s, trying to chip away 20 layers of paint?”
They laughed, but then there was a long pause as everyone considered the possibilities. Gunderson and Holland reassured me that all of the pieces get documented now, thanks to the ubiquity of digital images. Plus, the pieces that students make now are usually paintonly, whereas frescoes are made by painting on wet plaster, so they become part of the wall.
“We’re not really teaching the frescomaking process here anymore,” Gunderson said.
Alas, everything is more ephemeral now, even in art. Today’s institute students will be responsible for creating their own archive, but that’s all the more reason for the institute to uncover the work that the students before them have done.