Sand Lot Riots (Ditail (sic) From Mural)

 

Anton L. Refregier

  1905 - 1979

1947  

serigraph / screenprint 

12 3/8 x 12 1/2" image 

black ink, lower right 

2 of 50  

titled, dated, and editioned in ink; signed in plate 

 

cream wove 

published 

artist 

RM101 

SOLD

A screen print of a detail from the "Sand Lot Riots" mural which he did as a commission in 1940 for the Rincon Annex Post Office. The mural consisted of 27 panels and covered 400 square feet of wall space. The mural is formally known as the “History of San Francisco” and is located in the Rincon Post Office in San Francisco, California. Refregier painted the mural with casein tempera on white gesso over plaster walls. The mural consisted of various historical events from California's past. It included the anti-Chinese "Sand Lot" riots, the 1934 San Francisco Waterfront Strike, and trade unionist Tom Mooney's trial that was based on fabricated evidence. Refregier used these tragedies as inspiration. Refregier “believed that art must address itself to contemporary issues and that a mural painting in particular must not be ‘banal, decorative embellishment,’ but a ‘meaningful, significant, powerful plastic statement based on the history and lives of the people.'" Republican Senator Hubert Scudder and former President Richard Nixon were involved in a protest to have the work covered. They claimed it had a communistic tone and “defamed pioneers and reflected negatively on California's past.” Many believed that “no artist, however distinguished, escaped the heavy, if well meaning, hand of federal supervision.” In a letter to the editor in 1952 the President of the College Art Association said that “the pro-Chinese sentiments of one section of the murals and indication of the then existing wartime alliance with Russia of another section reflected the realities of the time.” The protest was eventually defeated by a group of artists and museum directors.