www.mural.ch: akteure

dieser beitrag wurde verfasst in: englisch (eng/en)

name: Olmsted jr.

vorname: Fred

gnd-repräsentation: 128499451

biografische angaben: Born 1911. Grandson of Frederick Law Olmsted, the famous planner of New York's Central Park, and son of Frederick Law Olmsted, landscape architect and conservationist, was born in San Francisco. A painter and sculptor and later an architect, twenty-three-year-old Fred Olmsted initially came onto the [Coit] Tower project to assist John Langley Howard and George Harris. Howard later assigned him the three-foot panel above the main entrance; in it, Olmsted created «Power», a fist bursting through a lightning jag. Modestly, he hid his signature so that the viewer can see it only by standing on tiptoe, in just the right light. He was one of six Tower artists whom Albert Bender selected for decoration of the Anne Bremer Memorial library at the San Francisco Art Institute. A critic in 1936 said of his lunette there that it was "one of the most colorful of the whole series, folk art represented in the work of the American Indian potter". Later he created murals in the Utah State Capitol. Now gone is a mural for the library of the San Francisco Boys' Club showing a closely packed Riverastyle scene of active boys. Students at City College of San Francisco remember Olmsted for his two large heads of tufa stone: Thomas Edison and Leonardo da Vinci (1941, WPA) outside the east entrance of Timothy Pflueger's science building. Inside the main entrance he painted two fresco panels showing students engaged in various scientific pursuits in a semi-astract composition (1942, WPA). (source: Zakheim Jewett 1983)