Telegraph Hill – Coit Tower

 Posted by on June 2, 2012
Jun 022012
 
Telegraph Hill
Coit Tower
WPA Murals
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This mural is titled California and is by Maxine Albro.  A wonderful depiction of the bounty of the California agricultural industry from Mt. Shasta Almond Orchards to Napa Valley grapes.
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The “gentlemen farmers” are actually the artists friends.  Ralph Stackpole is in the checkered shirt and Albro’s husband, and fellow artist Parker Hall is by the tray of apricots.  The NRA (National Recovery Act)  eagle is found on the ends of the lugs of oranges.  The NRA was the primary New Deal agency established by U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt  in 1933. The goal was to eliminate “cut-throat competition” by bringing industry, labor and government together to create codes of “fair practices” and set prices.
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Maxine Albro was an Iowan who studied at the California School of Fine Arts.  During the 1920s she studied in Paris and then in Mexico with Diego Rivera.  Like Rivera, Albro was no stranger to controversy. A work of four nudes that she painted at the Ebell Women’s Club in Los Angeles, titled “Portly Roman Sybils,” offended some of the organization’s members. The club rescinded approval of her frescoes, and destroyed the wall on which it was painted in 1935. Also destroyed (due to remodeling) was her mosaic of animals over the entrance to Anderson Hall at the University of California Extension in San Francisco.  In 1938,  after getting married, Albro and Hall moved to Carmel, California. During the 1940s they traveled throughout Mexico. As a result, most of her work consisted of Mexican subject matter, which she was best known for. She died on July 19, 1966 in Los Angeles.

 

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