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Article Excerpt
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed to support artists struggling to make a living during the Great Depression, arts administrators in San Francisco received funding for a major mural project in which Jewish artist Bernard Zakheim (1896-1985) would participate. Zakheim was one of approximately twenty-five artists commissioned to paint the interior of Coit Tower, the large monument constructed atop Telegraph Hill in 1932-33 with funds bequeathed to the city by Lillie Hitchcock Coit. These murals have traditionally been viewed in the context of San Francisco labor relations during the early 1930s. All during the spring of 1934, while the muralists were painting, unemployed longshoremen and their union were threatening to strike, and by early summer they had brought waterfront commerce to a grinding halt. Several of the murals in Coit Tower contain references to labor, the union, and far-left political ideals, and San Francisco newspaper writers and later scholars have carefully focused on these details in their discussions of the works. What has not been previously recognized is the ethnic content, specifically the Jewish content, that is also apparent in the mural cycle because of Zakheim's participation. (2)
Zakheim's contribution to the Coit Tower project (figure 1), a representation of the main reading room in a public library, played a key role in the controversy over political imagery, especially after the editors of the San Francisco Examiner took the hammer and sickle--the symbol of the Communist Party--from another artist's mural in the tower and placed it above a reproduction of Zakheim's painting. The doctored photograph appeared in the paper on July 5, 1934, the same day the longshoremen's strike turned violent and two union members were shot and killed. Zakheim, deeply interested in Communism, had prominently depicted on the right side of the mural his friend and fellow-Coit-Tower-muralist John Langley Howard reaching for Karl Marx's magnum opus, Das Kapital. But Zakheim's concerns extended beyond these political and economic issues, and consideration of other books in the painting--especially the Hebrew texts above the narrow gun-slit window and in the hands of the artist himself--reveal a concurrent interest in viewing history from a pluralistic perspective. By looking at Zakheim's career as a muralist more fully, one finds that the Library at Coit Tower is just one of several mural projects in which the artist purposefully included Jewish literature, the Jewish tradition, and the Jewish contribution to life in the United States in his work.
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Bernard Baruch Zakheim (figure 2) was born in Warsaw in 1896 to a family of wealthy Hasidic Jews. As the youngest son in the family, Zakheim was expected to prepare for the rabbinate, but at the age of thirteen he expressed his desire to work with his hands and become an artist. His mother, citing the Old Testament prohibition against making images, objected to his choice. Eventually a compromise was reached: Zakheim enrolled in a school of applied art and trained to became a furniture designer and upholsterer. Private art lessons, and eventually a scholarship to the Warsaw Academy, provided the young man with an introduction to fine art. (3)
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During World War I, Zakheim became politically active. He followed the Russian Revolution with keen interest, developed a concern for workers' rights, became involved in the Polish independence movement, and joined the Polish army in 1918. Captured and held for nine months as a German prisoner of war, Zakheim made drawings of military installations. Upon his release, he left the hardships of Europe for the United States. By 1930, ten years after his arrival in California, he was the owner of a successful furniture company, one of the few businesses in San Francisco with a forty-four-hour work week and a self-imposed closed shop. Zakheim pursued his love of art on the side, enrolling briefly at the California School of Fine Arts. Interested in the work of Diego Rivera, he sent a group of his sketches to the Mexican mural painter. Rivera responded by inviting Zakheim to Mexico City early in 1930. His trip preceded by several months the Mexican painter's visit to San Francisco later that year. (4)
Rivera's involvement in politics made him a natural magnet for Zakheim. Rivera, in his Mexico City murals for the Ministry of Education, had incorporated overt references to the Communist Party and the struggle for political change in Mexico. The Distribution of Arms, for example, completed at the Ministry of Education two years before Zakheim's visit, depicts Rivera friends and artistic colleagues David Alfaro Siqueiros, Frida Kahlo, and Tina Modotti handing out weapons to Mexican revolutionaries and workers. But it was not only with a heightened interest in combining art with leftist politics that Zakheim returned to the United States. As the San Francisco Call--Bulletin wrote on June 21, 1930, "Zakheim, fresh from study with Rivera at Mexico City, reports [that] Rivera, in admiring and praising Zakheim's sketches of Hebrew life, declared that every artist puts into his work something of his own soil, of his own people." (5) Indeed, in San Francisco during the early 1930s, Zakheim became active in promoting traditional Jewish folk life and Yiddish culture. According to an article on July 25, 1930 in the San Francisco News:
Zakheim is a leader in the Yiddish movement in San Francisco. Stimulated by the same experiences which have brought about the present revival in literature, the Yiddish writers of the United States have produced a notable literature. On the assumption that the Jew can most contribute to world culture if he possess himself of a culture, which exactly interprets his artistic will (as other cultures would not), the Yiddish movement is attempting to maintain the Jews as the unassimilated minority in the U.S. (6)
Three years after his visit to Mexico, and after a trip to France and then to Hungary, where the artist painted his first fresco,...
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