Murals of San Francisco
Aug. 28th, 2010 10:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dedalus_1947 “My soul magnifies the Lord,
And my spirit rejoices in God my savior,
For He has looked with favor on His lowly servant,
And from this day all generations shall call me blessed.
The Almighty has done great things for me,
And Holy is His name”.
(Magnificat - Latin for magnifies - Luke 1:39-56)
“That’s what Christ’s message is supposed to do,” he replied gently. “I wouldn’t be doing my job as bishop if I didn’t say it out loud”.
That was it. George had nothing more to say on the matter. He didn’t dissect his sermon or draw me a picture of what he meant to say. I concluded that he had said it all from the pulpit and he was leaving it for me to sort out for myself. His words haunted me for the remainder of our trip; and it wasn’t until after I saw the murals of San Francisco that I realized their unique power.
Kathy and I were spending the weekend in San Francisco and staying with the Archbishop at his residence on Cathedral hill. Kathy came to know George when he was a Monsignor in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. The friendship had continued through the years, even as George was appointed to a series of important, but distant, administrative and pastoral positions, first as Bishop of Salt Lake City, and then Archbishop of San Francisco in 2005. We had attended his installation, and visited him in San Francisco on two other occasions, each time promising to stay at his residence. We were finally able to do so this month, when we combined this visit with a trip to Carmel for our 35th wedding anniversary.
When George welcomed us to his home, late Saturday evening, he warned us that Sunday’s mass would be an extended celebration of the Feast of the Assumption because the Cathedral was consecrated to St. Mary of the Assumption. He would be con-celebrating the service with two other bishops and three newly consecrated monsignors. It was going to be a big deal, so I assumed it would be filled with much pomp, ritual, and flowery testimonials to Mary and the Catholics of the archdiocese. I wasn’t disappointed. The cathedral was resplendent, and the music and liturgy were elegant and carefully choreographed. A long line of altar servers, chaplains, priests, monsignors, and mitered bishops processed out from behind the altar, paralleled the monumental walls of the cathedral, and streamed down the center aisle, as the choir sang soaring tributes to Mary, the mother of Christ. Since I’d failed to pick up a Sunday missalette, I listened carefully to the readings to anticipate the basis for the homily that would come.
The first reading was from the Book of Revelation (11:19a; 12:1-6a, 10ab) in which the prophet described a woman “clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of 12 stars. She was with child and wailed aloud in pain as she labored to give birth… She gave birth to a son, a male child, destined to rule all the nations with an iron rod… Then a loud voice in heaven said: ‘Now have salvation and power come, and the Kingdom of God, and the authority of his Anointed One’. The Gospel was from Luke (1:39-56) and it told the story of Mary’s visit to Elizabeth and her declaration of the Magnificat. The only reading that did not mention Mary was St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (15:20-27) in which he concentrated on Jesus. It was an obscure passage (as I find most of St. Paul’s writings to be) where he proclaimed that, “Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through man, the resurrection of the dead came also through man. For just as in Adam all die, so too in Christ shall all be brought to life, but each one in proper order…” When the Archbishop rose to give the homily after the Gospel reading, I expected him to emphasize the Feast of the Assumption and the sanctification of Mary in her role of mother to Jesus and intermediary for mankind. I wasn’t prepared for his depictions of the readings.
George first used the reading from Revelation as his tribute to Mary, tying the celebration of her assumption into heaven with the consecration of the present Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption. He introduced the dignitaries con-celebrating the mass; mentioning the activities planned for the remainder of the day, and invited all to attend the special Vesper services investing the three new monsignors of the Archdiocese later that afternoon. He also reminded us of Mary’s role as Queen of Heaven and how she prays for us as we meet the daily challenges of following Jesus. In each Hail Mary that we pray, he explained, we say to Mary, ‘pray for us, now and at the hour of our death.’ Then he mentioned the second reading by quoting Saint Paul’s perplexing line about the Kingdom of God, and using it as his transitional to the main homily: “For just as in Adam all die, so too in Christ shall all be brought to life, but each one in proper order.”
As best I can recall, the homily went something like this:
“What is the proper order?” George asked rhetorically, and then pointed out that Luke’s Gospel about Mary, and her “wonderful prayer of praise and confidence and gratitude to God,” actually clarified Paul’s statement, and anticipated the paradoxical “good news” of Jesus Christ. He recited specific lines from Mary’s prayer, explaining how they described who would be first into the Kingdom of God, and who would be last.
“Just listen to Mary’s words,” he insisted, “for they contain Christ’s later message: ‘God has shown the strength of his arm, and has scattered the proud in their conceit.’ It is the humble, not the vain and the arrogant, who follow Christ’s example and recognize him in their neighbors. The poor will see life clearly, as through a clean window or an open door, while the proud will look at life in a mirror.”
“Again, listen to Mary’s prayer,” he continued: ‘God has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly.’ Jesus showed the example of this throughout his lifetime, by dining with sinners and tax collectors, and paying more attention to the poor, the needy, and the outcasts like the Samaritans.”
“And finally,” George concluded, “Mary says: ‘God has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.’ God does not value us according to our possessions or our wealth, rather, he measures us by how we use and share those possessions with others. Notice how the values Mary embraced in the Magnificat look ahead to the values her son will teach us in the Beatitudes, during the Sermon on the Mount: Blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the sorrowing, the merciful, the clean of heart, and the peacemakers. Like mother, like son. Mary is foreshadowing the Good News of Jesus. Do you see how these topsy-turvy Gospel values turn the earthly values of the world upside down? Mary and Jesus teach us the central importance of loving self-sacrifice in finding the meaning and value in life.”
I had heard Mary’s Magnificat hundreds and hundreds of times throughout my life, but I never grasped its revolutionary message. I was doubly struck by the place in which it was being expressed. George was proclaiming Christ’s radical gospel not on the mean streets of the Mission District, where it would be welcome, but from the pulpit of San Francisco’s luxurious Cathedral, surrounded by elegantly dressed and coiffed parishioners who came to celebrate the feast day of their church. Besides the tributes and honors being bestowed on this day, the archbishop was reminding everyone of their harsh duty to Christ’s message, and what that meant in terms of actions, values, and possessions. Honestly, despite my provocative words to George later that morning, I was in fact one of those parishioners walking out of Sunday mass, struggling to make sense of his homily and the challenge presented in Mary and Christ’s words to us.
The next day Kathy and I, accompanied by Kathy’s sister Beth, went to the one place I intended to see on this trip to San Francisco – Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill. Despite having visited the city on many occasions, wandered through its streets and avenues countless times, and always noted the iconic tower from afar, I’d never visited this location. Actually, I was never particularly interested in seeing this tower, dedicated to the firefighters of San Francisco (and supposedly built in the shape of a fire hose nozzle), until I watched a KCET episode of California Gold with Huell Howser. There I learned that the spire was in fact one of the first Public Works of Art (PWA) projects during the New Deal era, and it was filled with colorful and controversial frescoes and murals painted by local American artists in 1934. The program noted that the Mexican artist Diego Rivera was such a major influence on these muralists that they protested the destruction of his fresco at Rockefeller Center in 1933 for depicting a portrait of Lenin, by striking in San Francisco. This sympathy for Rivera led some tower artists to incorporate a variety of Communist ideas and elements in their work: Karl Marx’s book, Das Kapital, newspaper headlines decrying the destruction of Rivera’s mural, and copies of the Communist journals, New Masses and The Daily Worker. Besides illustrating the agricultural and economic industries of the State, the frescoes also called attention to the class and labor struggles in California during the Depression (See Flickr album: 2010-08-16 Coit Tower). I was excited by these radical depictions of longshoremen, immigrants, and farm workers fighting to survive during the Dust Bowl years. They recalled the images of brotherhood and communal support I’d read about and seen in The Grapes of Wrath. This was America’s “public artwork,” connecting with the roots of Mexican muralism, popularized by Rivera, Jose Orozco, and David Siqueiros.
Muralism was the unique art form that spread at the beginning of the 20th Century, in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution. It was a revolutionary social and political movement that confronted the abuses and inequities of capitalism and imperialism through public art. Murals were painted in accessible places where all people could see and learn from them, regardless of race, education, or social class. Muralist worked over a concrete surface or on a façade of a building, and they depicted provocative scenes and images, with strong Marxist influences, that taught revolutionary historical, cultural, and political ideas. It occurred to me, as we left Telegraph Hill, that the radical Gospel values that George expressed in Sunday’s homily should also be visible in these murals, and I wanted to test my theory on more murals in San Francisco.
From Coit Tower, the three of us made our way to the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). Originally founded in 1871, the SFAI had gone through numerous rebirths, renaming, and relocations before occupying its present site on Chestnut Street in 1926. At that time it was called the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA), and many of its faculty and students painted the Coit Tower murals. They were also instrumental in bringing Diego Rivera to paint two frescoes in San Francisco, one in the San Francisco Stock Exchange, and the other at the Institute. This was the mural we found in the vast gallery adjacent to the central courtyard of the SFAI. Yet, while the space given to Rivera’s work was impressive, the content of the mural was surprisingly passive compared with the controversial scenes in Coit Tower. The mural was called, “The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City”.
Filling the entire end wall of the gallery, the mural was divided into six visual sections. As the title indicated, there was a fresco within a fresco showing the building of a modern city. The work included portraits of the individuals who worked on it, or helped produce it as technical advisors and wealthy patrons. In the middle of the central panel was Rivera, who painted himself sitting on the scaffold with his back to the viewer, holding a paintbrush and a palette. Above his head loomed the largest figure in the fresco, a worker in blue overalls, operating the control levers of a machine. The only hint of controversy was a red badge with a red star in it, hanging from the machinist’s shirt pocket (an allusion to the Soviet Order of the Red Star medal). There were no other scenes of struggling workers, exploitive capitalists, or social issues. The fresco was simply a tribute to the artists, engineers, workers, and businessmen who were creating and building San Francisco (See Flickr album: 2010-08-16 S.F. Art Institute).
The following day, on our way to Carmel along Highway 1, Kathy and I stopped at the campus of San Francisco City College to see one last Diego Rivera mural. After a confusing search on the chaotic first day of classes, we found the fresco, titled “Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and the South on this Continent,” commonly called Pan American Unity, in the foyer of the Diego Rivera Theatre. It was a massive, ten-panel mural, originally commissioned for the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1940, celebrating the opening of the Oakland Bay and Golden Gate Bridges. It was later installed in the Fine Arts Auditorium of the San Francisco City College. Rivera described it as “the fusion of the genius of the South (Mexico), with its religious ardor and its gift for plastic expression, and the genius of the North (the United States), with its gift for mechanical expression.” It was a lush and beautiful visual panegyric to the history and culture of both nations, with the city and bay of San Francisco floating in the background. Only one panel dealt with political topics of the 1940’s by showing the rise of Fascism and Totalitarianism with ominous representations of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Franco (See Flickr album: 2010-08-17 S.F. City College). The radical issues of social and economic justice that made up so much of his earlier works were no longer visible in this mural. I felt as if Rivera’s revolutionary fervor and energy had finally ground to a halt on the wealthy and affluent streets of San Francisco.
So, what happened to me on this trip to San Francisco? I saw evocative murals, the sights of the city, and the breathtaking beauty of Highway 1 (See Flickr album: 2010-08- Highway 1). However, I have to admit that I was a little disappointed by my tour of the murals of San Francisco. I had been challenged by George’s homily to seek artistic representations of the revolutionary message he pointed out in the Magnificat and the Beatitudes. I thought they would be illustrated in the radical works of the muralists, but learned, instead, that the most provocative ideas come from the Gospel and the ministers who preach it. At best, the muralists depicted emotional images of political ideologies and beliefs that separated people from each other, and from themselves. One doesn’t need to search the work of artists, scientists, philosophers, or industrialists to find meaning and value in life. Cities and movements rise and fall, political ideals and philosophies expand and wane, but the Good News stays constant: “The Kingdom of God is here!” Christ proclaimed. All we have to do is “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength; and love your neighbor as yourself”. George was right. Christ’s message is radical and revolutionary, and it will never fall or fail, as long as people seek it and strive to live it.
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Date: 2010-09-29 07:38 pm (UTC)TRH