The Politics of Art: The Other Battle of Brooklyn
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The Other Battle of Brooklyn
By LEONARD BENARDO and JENNIFER WEISS
EVEN today, the event still resonates powerfully.
In 1934, workers took axes to a mural depicting earnest laborers,
debauched socialites and rampaging policemen that the Mexican muralist
Diego Rivera had painted on the interior wall of the RCA Building in
Rockefeller Center, facing the plaza.
The artist had aroused the fury of Nelson Rockefeller by adding a small
but eminently recognizable image of the Russian revolutionary Lenin,
and the resulting firestorm marked a signal moment in that era's
pitched battle between art and politics.
Sixty years ago next month, only a dozen years after the smashed
fragments of Rivera's creation were trundled out of Rockefeller Center
in wheelbarrows, another episode of artistic purging took place, this
time in Brooklyn. During May and June 1946, two 900-square-foot murals
depicting three centuries of local history were unceremoniously removed
from the cavernous two-story rotunda of Brooklyn Borough Hall less than
a decade after their creation.
The murals, titled "Brooklyn Past and Present," were the work of a
relatively unknown artist named Alois Fabry Jr., who had been
commissioned to produce them through the Federal Art Project of the
Works Progress Administration. Sprawling and detailed, interspersed
with touches of whimsy and based on three months of prodigious
research, they imbued the borough's central administrative office
building with a sweeping monumentality.
But almost from the moment the murals were completed, they were
criticized for both their content and style. And in an almost surreal
parallel to the events across the river in Manhattan, Fabry, like
Rivera, was accused of including a figure that bore a resemblance to
Lenin.
No one knows where the murals are today, or even if they exist. The
artist died in 1986, at age 74, and largely because the episode lacked
players of the stature of Rockefeller and Rivera, it disappeared almost
entirely from the public's consciousness. The story offers a
tantalizing glimpse of a battle that in its modest way was almost as
dramatic as the one fought a few years before, and involved many of the
same flashpoints.
A Yale Grad in Shirt and Tie
A brief but curious reference to the murals can be found in a small
text titled "Brooklyn's City Hall," which was published to commemorate
the restoration of the neo-Classical structure in the early 1980's. But
no one who might be expected to be familiar with the episode had any
memory of it.
Ron Schweiger, the borough historian, knew nothing of the murals; nor
did the Brooklyn borough president, Marty Markowitz, or his longtime
predecessor, Howard Golden. The Brooklyn Historical Society could
produce only a brochure published to commemorate the original
dedication.
As it turns out, the richest and most complete material can be found in
the memory and personal archives of the artist's son, Peter Fabry, a
59-year-old arts consultant. Sitting under a skylight in the family
room of his SoHo loft recently, the tall and trim Mr. Fabry grew
animated as he leafed through newspaper articles, drawings and other
documents that helped flesh out the details of his father's story.
His father rarely spoke of the murals, he said. "Perhaps out of
resentment that they were taken down so indiscriminately," he said, "or
because he had developed artistically in a different direction, I
learned very little about them during his life."
The son, however, has cared for a trove of materials his father saved,
including the original colored designs for the murals that were shown
to the Art Commission, the city's design review agency, along with
preparatory drawings, figure and detail studies, photographs of the
mural, and newspaper articles describing and deploring the murals.
Through these fragile documents, a remarkable story unfolds.
Alois Fabry, better known as Al, was a handsome man. He stood 5 feet 10
inches tall and had an athletic build, thanks in part to membership on
his high school track and swimming teams. And there was something
slightly formal about him; unlike the bohemians of the day, he often
painted in a shirt and tie.
A graduate of the Yale School of Fine Arts who was only 25 when he
received the commission to paint two of the largest murals ever
assigned by the Federal Art Project, Fabry came from an artistic
family. His father, a Czech immigrant, was a portrait painter who had
studied at the Royal Academy of Art in Munich, and his brother, Jaro,
became a leading illustrator and cartoonist for national magazines.
Growing up near Fordham University in the Bronx, both boys were set
upon an artistic path early on. The father sent his two sons to classes
at the Art Students League and encouraged a friendly competition early
on. When going out with his wife for the evening, the father often set
up a still life for his sons to draw, then chose the better image when
he got home.
The encouragement of a competitive spirit paid off when Alois Fabry won
the New York City Architectural League medal for drawing at Evander
Childs High School, followed by a scholarship to the Fieldston School
in Riverdale. At Yale, he entered his first W.P.A. mural competition,
which in turn led to a commission to create works for a post office in
Ohio.
Then, in 1937, came the job in Brooklyn.
Inspiration at Every Turn
At first, the project seemed to meet only good fortune. Fabry's
proposal for Brooklyn Borough Hall had the support of Borough President
Raymond Ingersoll and was unanimously endorsed by the Art Commission.
The artist began work on the project at a Hudson River studio that had
been home to many W.P.A. muralists, among them Arshile Gorky, then
moved to Borough Hall, where he painted atop specially constructed
wooden scaffolding. The project would take two years to complete.
Using egg-tempera paint, which retains its vivid color for centuries,
and working on pieces of canvas securely bonded to the walls, Fabry
executed his works in a distinctly modern style, drawing inspiration
from everything from Renaissance frescos to the popular school of
Mexican murals, of which Rivera was the leading figure.
The image on the east wall, finished in the winter of 1938, was titled
"Historic Brooklyn." It depicted events ranging from Henry Hudson's
landing in 1609 to Brooklyn's incorporation with New York in 1898.
Other scenes from Kings County history included the Revolutionary War
Battle of Long Island; Walt Whitman brandishing a copy of The Brooklyn
Freeman, the newspaper he edited; the renowned preacher Henry Ward
Beecher bidding farewell to Brooklyn's Union troops as they were being
dispatched to the front; and John and Washington Roebling, the
father-and-son engineers who created the Brooklyn Bridge, examining
blueprints with their assistants.
The image on the west wall, completed early the following year, was
titled "Brooklyn Today," and it showcased the borough's development
from 1898 to 1938. It was replete with images of the period's
achievements, including the extension of the subway to Brooklyn; the
development of the borough's skyline, waterfront and amusement parks;
and the Brooklyn-based aeronautical achievements of the aviators Henri
Farman and Floyd Bennett.
To give his murals a timeless quality, the artist often invited people
lounging on the steps of Borough Hall to pose for him, along with
people who worked at Borough Hall and sometimes even those who were
simply passing through. The supposed likeness of Lenin, a figure who
appeared in "Historic Brooklyn" above the figure of Beecher, may have
been inspired by one of these people. Nor did he depict only the
prominent figures of the day; interspersed with statesmen and
dignitaries were characters from a broad spectrum of society: farmers,
blue-collar workers, schoolchildren and shopkeepers.
'Amateurish, Garish'
"I believe these murals will be of great interest and value to the
people of Brooklyn," Borough President Ingersoll said at the dedication
ceremony in 1939. "They will help us to preserve our sense of
historical continuity."
However, the work had its critics almost from the start. One woman
complained to The Brooklyn Daily Eagle that she found the murals
"amateurish, garish, monstrosities." The New York Times reported that
"there were more than a few Brooklynites who contended vociferously
that those characters with the gnarled hands and distorted features
must have come from another borough, Manhattan, for instance."
The abstract quality of Fabry's perspective - horses sailing over
Beecher's head, or Civil War soldiers hovering above settlers tending
land in Gowanus Bay - may not have resonated with Kings County
residents. Or, as The Times added, "art critics who liked the murals
didn't count for much in Brooklyn."
Brooklyn between the wars was no stranger to social conservatism. In
1940, three W.P.A. murals at Floyd Bennett Field were destroyed on the
grounds that the artist, a Queens resident named August Henkel, had
included an image of Stalin in one of the works. (Henkel said that the
image in question was a copy of a picture from the Aeronautical Chamber
of Commerce depicting Franz Reichelt, a parachutist.)
While Henkel was left-wing - he had run for Congress and the Sate
Assembly on the Communist ticket - Fabry was not. A teetotaling
family man who spent much of his career as director of art for the
public schools of New Canaan, Conn., where he lived with his wife,
Sally, and their three children, he was described by his son as
essentially apolitical, although he liked Eisenhower for being a Sunday
painter.
Far from being a socialist, his son suggested, had his father caroused
with the left-leaning Abstract Expressionists who hung out at the Cedar
Tavern rather than diligently raising his children, he might have had a
more impressive career.
But perhaps the most important reason the murals were destroyed had to
do with a shift in the political winds in Borough Hall. Ingersoll's
untimely death in office in 1940 had left the murals without a powerful
ally to fend off growing criticism, and Ingersoll's successor, John
Cashmore, became the artwork's principal antagonist.
It was Cashmore who issued the official request that the murals be
removed. He said that he was "uninspired" by the works, and it was
rumored that he took visitors into Borough Hall via a back stairwell to
avoid sight of the offending panels.
It is hard to say whether Cashmore hated the style of Fabry's murals or
the subject matter, or perhaps he was simply a savvy politician
responding to what he saw as public discomfort with Fabry's work. What
is certain is that he envisioned higher office - he was contemplating
a mayoral run against Fiorello La Guardia - and may have sought to
align himself with what he perceived as the public's taste. In the end
he remained as borough president until his death in 1961 and is better
remembered for presiding over another regrettable Brooklyn
disappearance, that of the Dodgers.
By 1945, the Art Commission that had unanimously approved the murals
eight years earlier voted to have them removed. The only artist member
of the commission, Dean Cornwell, conceded that while Fabry's works
were better than 75 percent of other Federal Art Project murals, he
voted with the majority and went on to suggest other sites for the
murals, including what he described as "an army barracks with wall
space crying for paintings."
Even Mayor La Guardia offered his support for getting the images out of
the building. "I understand that the question has come up as to the
desirability of removing the paintings in the foyer of Borough Hall,"
he wrote Cashmore in April 1945. "If you like them, you may keep them.
If not, we will be happy to restore Borough Hall to its original
condition."
Even after a decision was made to remove the murals, it took a full
year before they finally came down, in part because the Department of
Public Works was uncertain how to remove them without damaging the
building's interior walls. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle weighed in on the
matter with a cartoon. "Our tests show the only way to get rid of these
murals is to tear down Borough Hall," an engineer notes, to which a man
replies: "Wait'll I get my hat, then go ahead. It's worth it."
The artist tried to put the best face on the situation. "It doesn't
matter to me what they do with them," Fabry told The Daily Eagle. "As a
matter of fact, if I were to do the whole thing over again, the chances
are I would use an entirely different idea and technique."
He continued to paint throughout his life - primarily modernist
watercolors - and his paintings were shown at the Metropolitan and
Whitney Museums. He also drew small illustrations for The New Yorker
and published three books on the craft of painting. A beloved teacher,
over the years he had thousands of students, some of whom, like the
painter Martin Mull, went on to notable careers.
His work has been acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and
in a development that makes the story of the Brooklyn murals seem to
come full circle, a group of his studies for other W.P.A. murals is
owned by the Wolfsonian Museum in Miami Beach, Fla.
But his widow, who still lives in New Canaan, suggests that her
husband's true feelings about what he once described as "a labor of
love" were not reflected by his public statements.
"Al was saddened by the whole thing, felt it was unjust and regretted
the loss of his work, which he had spent two years of his life
painting," she said recently. "But he faced it philosophically, and by
the time of their demise was working on new paintings and the next
phase of his artistic career."
The Mystery of the Murals
For a time Fabry's murals were stored in Borough Hall while the
Department of Public Works and the Art Commission jousted over which
agency should take responsibility for them. But no one is sure what
happened next.
Although the Art Commission has photographs and other documents
relating to the murals, staff members there had no idea where they
ended up. Nor did managers at the Department of Citywide Administrative
Services, the agency that inherited some holdings of the now-defunct
Department of Public Works.
The most plausible theory is the one that is most straightforward, that
the murals remained in a storeroom at Borough Hall and were, at some
point, tossed. Mr. Golden, the former borough president, suggested that
the works could have been unthinkingly jettisoned during the building's
renovation in the 1980's. "A lot of stuff was missing when we came back
to Borough Hall," he said. "They may have been just thrown out."
The images in Borough Hall today reflect the ethnic transformation that
began sweeping through Brooklyn during the postwar period; Mr.
Markowitz, the borough president, has made an effort to include
portraits of women and minority officials.
As for the Fabry murals, Mr. Markowitz muses they might one day show up
on eBay and promises, that if recovered, "they will return to their
rightful spot at Borough Hall."
Leonard Benardo and Jennifer Weiss are the authors of "Brooklyn by
Name: How the Neighborhoods, Streets, Parks, Bridges and More Got Their
Names," to be published in July by New York University Press.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company