Central Los Angeles

David Alfaro Siqueiros’ “American Tropical,” created in 1932, is probably the most controversial mural ever painted in Los Angeles. Not only did it depict an American Indian being crucified, but at the top of the cross was a symbol of America--a screaming eagle--being threatened by two Mexican revolutionaries, one who aimed his rifle at the bird.

The mural, painted on a wall of an Italian meeting hall on Olvera Street, so outraged Los Angeles government officials that they ordered part of it painted over shortly after the mural was unveiled. Within two years, the fresco had been completely whitewashed.

But slowly, the 18-foot-by-80-foot mural is on its way back.

For several year, the Getty Conservation Institute has been slowly restoring the mural. Experts say the whitewashing actually helped protect it from decades of sun.

Los Angeles officials are helping to finance the construction of a viewing platform and protective canopy.

Last week, the City Council instructed the Community Development Department to estimate the cost of completing the viewing platform. Some public fund-raisers will help raise part of the money.

Completion of the mural and viewing platform is at least one year away, according to El Pueblo Monuments, the administrative office of Olvera Street.

Siqueiros, who died in 1974 at the age of 75, represented the grand triumvirate of 20th century Mexican muralists, along with Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco.

In an October 1932 Times article, art critic Arthur Millier wrote that after midnight on Olvera Street, he saw Siqueiros sitting on a scaffold “painting for dear life.”

Siqueiros had been commissioned to paint a mural with the theme of “tropical America.” But the artist, a participant in the Mexican Revolution and a Communist Party organizer who had just spent a year in a Mexican prison, later said he had no intention of painting “a continent of happy men, surrounded by palms and parrots, where the fruit voluntarily detached itself to fall into the mouths of happy mortals.”

For weeks the artist and his team worked on the mural, but the center remained unpainted. Then on the night before the mural was scheduled to be unveiled, Siqueiros sent everyone home and frantically worked through the night to complete the fresco.

The next day, Oct. 9, 1932, the mural was unveiled and “onlookers gasped” reported Millier. Soon after, the whitewashing began.

It was not until the early 1970s that the first efforts to preserve the work, now considered by many art critics to be a masterpiece, began. As one local artist recalled, 40 years after the mural was presented,: “It had guts. It made everything else at the time look like candy box illustrations.”