Home Photo Gallery Classroom Documents Murals for Use Lucienne Bloch
At my first visit to the Women's House of Detention in New York, where I was assigned to paint a mural, I was made sadly aware of the monotonous regularity of the clinic tiles and vertical bars used throughout the building. In considering an appropriate mural, there was, it seemed to me, a crying need for bright colors and bold curves to offset this drabness and cold austerity. The problem that confronted me was not an easy one. Discussion with the psychiatrist in attendance and many conversations with the inmates revealed with what sarcasm and suspicion the latter treated the mention of Art—as something "highbrow," indicating to what extent art had in the past been severed from the people and placed upon a pedestal for the privilege of museum students, art patrons, and art dealers. To combat this antagonism it seemed essential to bring art to the inmates by relating it closely to their own lives. Since they were women and for the most part products of poverty and slums, I chose the only subject which would not be foreign to them—children—framed in a New York landscape of the most ordinary kind. It could be Uptown, Downtown, East Side or West Side—any place they chose. The tenements, the trees, the common dandelions were theirs. Persons not acquainted with an artist's method of making preliminary rough sketches would naturally find them hard to understand. This was found to be the case by many artists whose sketches had to pass through the hands of directors of various public institutions. The superintendent of the House of Detention was no exception. She did not, at the time, feel that New York and ragged children were suitable subjects to be painted in permanent form on the prison walls. She then believed that "nature scenes" of a fantastic kind "would be more inspiring" and would not remind the inmates of unpleasant associations. Only when I had fully developed my sketches and had made the gas tanks glitter in the distant blue, had drawn out each pert braid on the pickaninnies. did she appreciate that my approach to the subject was intended to relate what I was doing to the intimacy of the lives of the inmates. Craftsmanship won her over. As the work progressed, her interest grew, and she often stood by the scaffold and eagerly discussed my problems with me. As for the matrons, outside of the fact that their conception of an artist was shattered when they saw me work without a smock and without inspired fits, they were delighted to witness a creation of a "genuine hand-painted picture." The inmates had a more natural point of view; they wholeheartedly enjoyed watching me paint. The mural was not a foreign thing to them. In fact, in the inmates' make-believe moments, the children in the mural were adopted and named. The scene representing Negro and White children sharing an apple was keenly appreciated, and some of the more articulate girls even used this and other themes from the mural as subjects of letters to their friends and relatives in the outside world. Such response clearly reveals to what degree a mural can, aside from its artistic value, act as a healthy tonic on the lives of all of us.
|