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

künstler/in (in grau: assistent/innen): David Siqueiros, Luis Arenal Bastar, Lee Everett Blair, Henri Gilbert de Kruif, Philip Guston, Murray Hantman, Philip Herschel Paradise, Reuben Kadish, Harold Lehman, Fletcher Martin, Katherine McEwen, Robert Merrell Gage, Barse Miller, Thomas Montague Beggs, Myer Shaffer, Millard Owen Sheets, Paul Starrett Sample, Donald Wilkinson Grahamtitel: Workers' Meeting (Street Meeting)jahr: 1932adresse: Chouinard School of Art (exterior wall), 743 S. Grand View, Los Angeles, CA

+: Fresco on cement, 6 x 9 m. Destroyed

«In early June Siquieros was contacted by CAC Member Millard Owen Sheets (1907-1989), at that time a young watercolorist teaching at Chouinard, to conduct a fresco class at the school. [22] A new class, composed of professional artists and graduate students, began creating their own fresco “blocks” by utilizing plywood frames and chicken wire layered with plaster. Before long the popular course would lead to a second class. “Enthusiastic over the classical method of painting watercolor into wet lime plaster” wrote the Times, the equipo or team that would work on the mural dubbed themselves the “Fresco Block,” though it was later renamed the “Block (or Bloc) of Mural Painters” by Siqueiros (who used both spellings himself, sometimes in the same correspondence).

[…] During the planning stages of Street Meeting, Siqueiros consulted with world-famous architect and CAC member Richard Josef Neutra (1892-1970) and Sumner Spalding (1892-1952), also an architect, about new approaches to conserve the outdoor mural from southern California’s warm climate. Although a fresco of this type would normally take four months to complete, Siqueiros’ “radical experimentation” with airbrush or paint “guns” allowed him to finish Street Meeting in two weeks.

[…] On July 7, 1932, eight hundred people attended the evening dedication and unveiling of Street Meeting. […] Siqueiros’ depiction of a union organizer speaking to a multi-ethnic crowd “of twenty figures” was met with somewhat of a mixed public response: some viewed it as “bold and powerful painting unlike anything previously done in Southern California,” while others saw in it too much political commentary and “the dull red glow of Communism.” […]

There is disagreement about what subsequently happened to Street Meeting. Siqueiros claimed that “unceasing newspaper criticism” forced Mrs. Chouinard to construct a wall in front of the mural, and the mural was subsequently destroyed. But in a later account he contradicted himself, implying that the mural was destroyed by the artists themselves because it was “only [a] simple class exercise in mural painting.” Though Merrell Gage remembers that “police…descended on the school to inform Mrs. Chouinard [that] the mural had to be removed,” and she then painted over it, Sheets, Paradise, Beggs and Millier all believed that the “experimental airbrush technique [Siqueiros] used was so faulty [that] the colors either chipped or ran from the wall with the first rain and had to be whitewashed.”

[…] In January 2005 an article in the Los Angeles Times revealed that after some preliminary tests at the old Chouinard building, now a Korean Presbyterian Church, conservators believe that the Street Meeting mural is at least partially intact, its bright colors surviving under layers of paint. […] Although the article is cautiously optimistic, it also says that nothing further will be done in the near future, at least not until the building is secured and has an owner who will work with the conservators in its preservation.»

(from: Merrell, 2010)