Property versus art, the battle to save Hugo Gellert's murals
People's Weekly World
**Property versus art, the battle to save Hugo Gellert's
murals **
(Reprinted from the April 11, 1998 issue of the People's
Weekly World. May be reprinted or reposted with PWW credit.
For subscription information see below)
By Phillip Stein
NEW YORK - Sound the alarm: Hugo Gellert's only surviving
murals are being threatened with destruction. We must build
a barricade of human forces to save the four major murals
of this great artist.
It is startling to discover that in our midst are four
splendid Hugo Gellert murals threatened with destruction by
ill-informed and ignoble forces. The four 50-foot-long
murals painted in the true fresco technique are located in
the lobbies of each of the four apartment buildings of the
Seward Park Apartments at Canal and East Broadway in lower
Manhattan.
Built in the 1950s, Gellert was commissioned by the ILGWU
in 1959 to paint the murals. Seward Park was a union-
subsidized middle-income housing project until two years
ago, when it was transformed into a private co-op.
Subsequently, the co-op board decided the murals would have
to go when the decision was made to redecorate the four
lobbies. However, the murals are not an obstacle to
redecoration and, in fact, redecoration would enhance their
setting.
When vigilance was lacking, earlier Gellert murals were
destroyed - one in Radio City's Center Theater and another
from the 1939-40 World's Fair in New York City.
Artists have formed an ad hoc committee to save the murals.
The Municipal Art Society of New York has pledged its
support. The Art Commission of the City of New York has
been alerted. The struggle has moved to the Internet, where
one can find the subject of Gellert's murals on the New
Deal Network website at http://newdeal.feri.org/gellert
under the heading "Save Gellert's Seward Park Murals."
The International Ladies Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU)
commissioned the murals in 1959 and is now showing strong
interest, along with its successor union, UNITE, in
preserving these magnificent examples of working class art.
Gellert's murals have a grandness about them. They are a
paradigm of the true nature of public art - art for a mass
and diverse audience rather than for an individual. The
four priceless murals depict important aspects of the
history of the United States. The motif of each is
expressed through symbolic historical figures: Thomas
Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and
Albert Einstein.
Gellert created a marvelous depiction of the American
Revolution, the abolition of slavery, the struggle for
integration, the building of labor unions and the movement
for world peace and against nuclear war. These monumental
murals enrich our lives and especially serve to instill
strong, humanist, pro-working class values in
schoolchildren who see them every day.
By following an American tradition of mural painting that
began in the 1930s with the government-sponsored Works
Progress Administration (WPA) art, a tradition inspired by
the Mexican mural movement, Gellert has left us one of the
rare examples of social realist art still extant but now
threatened with extinction.
How do the co-op owners who want the murals obliterated
justify themselves? A New York Times reporter in the Feb. 8
edition quoted a resident dressed in her "stockbroker's
suit" who looked at the mural in the lobby of her building
and said she thinks it should be destroyed. "These are
market co-ops," she said. "This is like any other luxury
building in the city, not like a public housing project."
Israel Keller, president of the co-op board, said some
residents think the murals are "ugly ... socialist ...
murals whose time had passed."
On the other hand, there are residents of the privatized
co-op who are staunchly opposed to the desecration of these
precious examples of public art honoring the best in U.S.
history. These residents are active in the grassroots
committee that is working to save the murals.
History is replete with examples of the creative efforts of
artists of conscience being destroyed for political
reasons, from religious bigotry or through ignorance. The
past century alone provides many unfortunate examples. The
obliteration of much Jewish art by Nazis is well-known.
Less well-known are incidents in the U.S. of the
destruction of art works, usually for political reasons.
John D. Rockfeller smashed the plaster of Diego Rivera's
murals in Rockefeller Center because they dared to
incorporate a portrait of the great Russian revolutionary
leader, V.I. Lenin. The WPA mural by the Mexican artist
Luis Arenal at Bellevue Hospital here in New York City was
long ago covered over with whitewash. In Los Angeles, two
important 1932 murals by the great Mexican muralist David
Siqueiros were obliterated. And it took a tremendous
struggle that included the International Longshore and
Warehouse Union to save Anton Refregier's murals in the San
Francisco Post Office.
James Wechsler of the Art History Department at City
University of New York is active in the campaign to save
the murals. He pointed out that in Gellert's murals "there
are no Lenin portraits, no scathing caricatures of
prominent members of society ... It celebrates great
Americans who are recognized as national heroes ... Thomas
Jefferson ... Abraham Lincoln ... John Brown and Frederick
Douglass ... FDR ... Albert Einstein."
Wechsler added, "Gellert's Seward Park mural cycle has
historical, social and artistic value. It is a memorial to
the intellectual, cultural and political history of the
Lower East Side. It would be a tragedy to destroy Gellert's
murals ... The destruction of a work of art is just wrong.
It is brutal ... To destroy the past is an arrogant act.
Preserve the murals and let posterity decide."
One may raise the legal question: Does ownership of the
work of an artist endow the owner with a right to destroy
the work?
Is it possible that Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates could
burn the Leonardo da Vinci notebooks which he owns? Or that
owners of a Michelangelo or a Raphael masterpiece could do
the same? Must we allow the arbitrary destruction of works
that are treasures of human artistic productivity, part of
the positive legacy that belongs to all humankind?
This question, though highly charged, has already been
answered. Buildings and other sites considered especially
precious to the nation's heritage have been saved from the
profit-crazed wrecking balls of real estate developers by
being placed on the National Registry of Historic Sites or
in our national parks system. Obviously, the answer is
that, even under existing U.S. federal law, there are
limits to the prerogatives of private property. Yet works
of art are being destroyed.
In 1961, at an exhibition of Siquieros' paintings at the
ACA Gallery in New York, I met the gentle yet inwardly
smoldering Hugo Gellert. I also met Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
there, then chair of the Communist Party USA. We had come
to express our solidarity with Siqueiros, who was
imprisoned by Mexico's repressive regime.
Gellert was born in Budapest, Hungary, May 3, 1892 and died
Dec. 6, 1985 at age 93. In a letter to a friend written a
few years before his death, Gellert told how the world of
art was opened to him at the Lovag Street Gymnasium where
he was mesmerized by the poetry of the revolutionary
Hungarian poet Sandor Petofi and by the art of
Michelangelo, especially by Michelangelo's fresco murals.
In 1906, his family emigrated to the U.S., where he began
to absorb the Marxist-Leninist outlook that fueled his
artistic creativity.
To a friend he wrote, "At first, I only had some vague
notions about it, but later I became firmly convinced that
the workers are the most indispensable members of society.
I came across a quotation by Marx citing the British
economist William Petty (1623-1687) who said, 'The earth is
the mother and the workers the father of all the value in
the world. Without labor, there is no metabolism between
man and nature. In other words, there can be no life.'"
Phillip Stein is an artist and the author of Siquieros, a
biography of the Mexican muralist David Siquieros,
available through International Publishers.
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