An Old Mural and a New Perspective
Finally, after 70 years, honest to god and this time we mean it, los angeles is going to return its most historically titillating bit of public art to the public.
Lack of funds, bureaucratic tangles and other impedimenta have frustrated the re-displaying of David Alfaro Siqueiros’ mural “Tropical America” for a decade. Now, however, new plans have been approved by the city, and the $4.5 million in funding (about $3 million of it from the Getty Trust), is in place. “For the first time, it’s really going to happen,” says Kory Smith, interim general manager of El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument. Construction of a viewing platform and protective shelter should begin by the end of the year. By next fall, we’ll be able to visit a new interpretive center and view what remains of the once-inflammatory 18-by-80-foot mural above Olvera Street, the first such public outdoor painting in the city, and probably the country.
Siqueiros, who died in 1974, was one of the great masters of Mexican mural art. He was also a devoted communist who fought as a boy in the Mexican Revolution, commanded Republican troops during the Spanish Civil War and, at the behest of Joseph Stalin, led a failed attempt to machine-gun Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940.
Siqueiros painted “Tropical America” in 1932, during a six- month exile in Los Angeles. Consider the year: The Great Depression was in full flower. Revolution was in the air. Los Angeles was hosting the Olympic Games, and boosters were “restoring” the Olvera Street area to comport with Anglo arriviste hallucinations about a serene, picturesque Mexican past.
The artist painted his work on the second-story wall of the Italian Hall facing a rooftop beer garden. It took him and many volunteer helpers a couple of months. As its Mayan temple, jungly vegetation and pair of rifle-toting peasants took shape, the mural seemed to be in keeping with the folkloric idyll suggested by its title. Siqueiros stayed up the entire night before its unveiling, painting in solitude the mural’s central figure. That turned out to be an Indian peon crucified on a cross with two horizontal planks. Atop the cross perched an American eagle, copied from the figure on the U.S. quarter. It was clearly meant as a symbol of Yankee economic imperialism. Moreover, it was right in the line of fire of the peasants’ rifles.
You can imagine the reaction of the local babbittry the next day. Within weeks, the part of the mural visible from Olvera Street was whitewashed. In 1938, the rest of it was whited out.
By the early 1970s, rain and sun had degraded both whitewash and mural, making restoration impossible. The mural deteriorated further until 1982, when a narrow shed-like structure was built over it.
Inside the shed today, the darkness is pierced by tiny shafts of light from nail holes in the corrugated fiberglass facade. Pigeon feathers and droppings carpet the floor and fleck the black canvas curtain that veils the mural. The air is thick with dust and bird dander. The mural is a mere apparition, its pigments having paled to near-indistinctness. “It looks to me like what remains of early Christian painting,” says Kristin Kelly, who leads the conservation project for the Getty. “It looks archeological.” An instant ruin, so to speak, for an adolescent city.
Standing near the wall, a viewer can make out very little. From a distance, however, the ghostly work coheres somewhat better, which is why the viewing platform will be set 40 feet away.
No contemporary color photographs of the mural exist. Its hues can only be guessed at. Even a half-scale model of the original planned for the interpretive center likely will be in black and white.
The mural’s future roofed shelter will be bracketed by baffles for keeping strong sunlight off the mural. Kelly says it’s best seen either in complete shadow or complete light. Because of the baffles, the latter will be possible only from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. on winter days, when sunlight is adjudged too weak to harm the painting further.
The saga of “Tropical America” demonstrates the futility of suppressing art, no matter how exasperating to majority tastes. Not only did the mural shrug off its shroud of whitewash and come back from the dead, but even while entombed it sprang up in altered form in the hundreds of politically and socially motivated outdoor wall paintings that have been one of Los Angeles’ distinctions since the 1960s.
It’s also a tidy emblem of our always troublesome relationship with the past. Today the work carries none of the threat it held for those who angrily rejected it as anti-capitalistic propaganda in 1932. Just as we’re better able to make visual sense of it from a distance of 10 or so yards, so can we better place it in social perspective from a distance of seven decades. As it reminds us, the past is inevitably problematical to know, its true colors hard to ascertain. The best we can hope for is the proper light for viewing it in the present.