History That Lurks Below the Surface

With its wrought-iron chandelier, red-tiled floor and white textured walls, the reception hall of Village Green is such an ordinary example of Spanish-flavored decor that most Southern Californians wouldn’t give it a second glance. But high above the broad bank of windows overlooking the central courtyard of the sprawling residential complex, mysterious images have emerged.

A face peers out of a rectangular patch where plaster and several layers of paint have been removed. Sprinkled across the wall are other bits of pale imagery--the heel of a bare foot, scraps of drapery, hints of landscape.

The wall still conceals far more than it reveals, but the fragments are clues to a secret within a secret. A group of local architectural preservationists has discovered a long-forgotten mural by Rico Lebrun--a prominent figurative Expressionist who lived from 1900 to 1964--in a room that once exemplified architect Reginald Johnson’s Populist ideals and Modern sensibility. If the group has its way, both the room and the mural will be restored to their original 1940s condition.

Johnson, who lived from 1882 to 1952, commissioned the interior mural in 1942 to enhance the entrance to a planned community he had designed for a quiet stretch of Rodeo Road, just west of La Brea Avenue. Originally called Baldwin Hills Village, the complex of rental units was a model of high-quality, family-friendly, affordable housing in a park-like setting, with “tot lots,” tennis courts and lawns lined with olive and sycamore trees.

The property changed hands in 1949 and several times thereafter. The mural was painted over, probably in the 1950s, and buried deeper under chicken wire and plaster in the 1970s, when the complex was converted to condominiums and the reception hall was redecorated.

That might have been that--if Los Angeles architect Robert Nicolais and several of his colleagues hadn’t launched an initiative to designate Village Green a National Historic Landmark. They knew the complex was a stellar example of principles promoted by the Garden City movement, which began in England during the late 19th century. Architect Clarence Stein--a leading American proponent of the movement and author of the influential book “Toward New Towns for America”--was the consulting architect for Village Green, and many of his ideas were incorporated into the project.

While doing research for their application for landmark status, Nicolais and others sifted through Reginald Johnson’s papers at the branch of the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art that’s housed at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino. Among their finds was a photograph of the Lebrun mural in situ.

“I looked at the doggoned thing and said, ‘I know where that wall is. There is no mural there now; it’s a white wall,”’ said Nicolais, who lives in Village Green. “Then I started poking around, just at the top of the window frames, and I saw traces of color.”

He called the Getty Conservation Institute and was referred to a group of independent conservators, Leslie Rainer, Chris Stavroudis and Aneta Zebala. Then the Village Green Owners Assn. board of directors commissioned a preliminary investigation. With the historic photograph in hand, the conservators excavated one corner of the mural and determined that it had survived, at least in the spot they tested. A few other tests yielded additional positive results.

“Everywhere they looked, where the mural was supposed to be, they found paint,” Nicolais said.

Around the same time, Nicolais got wind of Preserve L.A., a three-year initiative launched in 1999 by the J. Paul Getty Trust to provide funds for the conservation of local landmark buildings and other sites of architectural, cultural and historical significance. In March 2000, the Village Green Owners Assn. submitted an application for the first round of grants. A few months later, the association won a $45,000 planning grant.

“Our goals were to investigate the technical feasibility of restoring the Lebrun mural and to hire [the Pasadena-based architectural firm] Moule & Polyzoides to develop architectural plans and specifications for the restoration of Reginald Johnson’s architecture for this space,” Nicolais said, referring to the large reception room.

Village Green was one of 21 local projects to receive a total of $1.4 million in the inaugural year of Preserve L.A. Among other winners of planning grants, ranging from $35,000 to $75,000, were an African American sorority house, an early California adobe, Wilshire Boulevard Temple, and Wattles Estate and Gardens in Hollywood. Larger implementation grants were given to Griffith Park Observatory ($200,000) and the Greene & Greene-designed Oaklawn Bridge in South Pasadena ($150,000).

“We are trying to assist in preserving the built heritage of Los Angeles,” said John Oddy, a program officer at the Getty Grant Program, which administers Preserve L.A. So far, most of the money has gone into planning grants “to emphasize the importance of studying and planning before you actually go in and operate,” he said. However, a larger number of implementation grants--which go up to $250,000 and usually require matching funds--may be awarded this year and next, he said. The next deadline for applications is Aug. 20.

Village Green had several things going for it. “The community is a rare West Coast example of the Garden City movement, which originated in England and is better represented in the Northeast of the United States than in the West,” Oddy said. What’s more, the proposal encompassed both the Modern building that was the gateway to the community and the mural, which was designed as an integral part of the room and painted by a significant artist, he said. It also helped that the applicants had developed a logical plan, based on documentation of the architecture and consultation with qualified conservators, Oddy added.

When the conservators finally got to work, they removed a coat of plaster affixed to chicken wire “to get down to the level where there was just over-paint,” Rainer said. “When that was done, we had about 450 nail holes in the mural, wherever the chicken wire was nailed down. That’s a shame, but we were lucky there weren’t even more nails.”

The ruptures add to the challenge of restoring the ambitious mural, which fills a 10-by-20-foot area on one wall and extends about four feet onto each adjacent wall. The holes must be filled and touched up so they don’t distract from the mural’s imagery. Meanwhile, they have provided an unexpected, if unwanted, benefit. “Every nail hole allows us to see a little bit of paint. So, in a way, that helped our investigation,” Rainer said.

The next step was to remove several layers of commercial paint covering the mural. That entailed experimenting with various solvents and treatments until the conservators came up with a two-step method that dissolved the over-paint without damaging the mural. First, they applied a paint stripper and scraped off the commercial paint with blunt wood tools. When they got down to the white paint directly on top of the mural, they applied a mixture of solvents that doesn’t affect Lebrun’s tempera-like paint, and wiped off the white veil with large cotton swabs. If carefully timed, the process works perfectly, Rainer said.

The conservators used the photograph to select places for test patches that would yield a variety of information about Lebrun’s techniques and materials. “The palette is muted, but we have found little red tassels and the sky is a beautiful blue,” Rainer said. “It also looks as if Lebrun used some theatrical techniques to highlight certain elements. On the figures, he outlined arms and legs with broad strokes, then painted over them.”

Lebrun was fond of depicting heroic characters and themes from mythology. His well-known mural at Pomona College in Claremont was inspired by the biblical subject of Genesis. Little is known of the Village Green mural, but the photograph of it portrays huddled figures watching men with strange contraptions attached to their backs leap from a cliff and fly into space.

“We are calling it an allegory of flight, which seems pretty safe,” Nicolais said.

With the grant-financed work complete, final restoration of the mural awaits more fund-raising. Nicolais estimates that it will take $61,000 to $73,000 to complete the job, and an additional $200,000 to $250,000 to restore the room. In the meantime, AAA Flag & Banner Co. is printing a reproduction of Lebrun’s painting on a huge length of cloth, which will hang over the mural to indicate how the restored work might look.

But uncertainties remain. “At this point, we have investigated each area of the wall, but until the entire over-paint areas are removed, we won’t know what condition the mural was in when it was painted over or why that was done,” Rainer said. The painting could have been a victim of changing taste, or it could have suffered some sort of damage or deterioration, she said. “But we have a pretty good idea that it is all in place, and it looks quite wonderful.”

For Nicolais, working on the restoration fulfills a longtime dream. He first saw Village Green in the early 1960s, as a student at Pomona College on a field trip with architecture professor Ted Criley.

“I have turned into an enthusiast for Clarence Stein, Reginald Johnson and another of the associated architects, Lewis Wilson, who was also committed to affordable public housing but is virtually unknown,” he said. “I would love to find his relatives and archives, to see if there is something to recover of his reputation.

“These people were amazingly selfless and dedicated to noble objectives,” Nicolais said. “Everybody is pretty jaded and cynical these days, but they were idealists. They were absolutely good at what they did and they were good people. That’s an inspiring story.”