Hugo Gellert's Seward Park Murals
March 17, 1998
TO Tom Thurston
I am writing to express my support for the preservation of the important murals painted by American artist Hugo Gellert for Seward Park in the late 1950s. I write from the point of view of a historian of American art and culture, and an individual who is increasingly unnerved by abiding patterns of historical amnesia in our country. There is no doubt that taste, like art styles and housing styles, changes from decade to decade. Yet if we fail, as American citizens, to preserve the cultural fragments of our past, we fail to preserve our own cultural memories and history.
The murals that Gellert painted for the Seward Park housing complex are an important part of that history, the visualization in fresco of Gellert's own social vision, painted when the building was a union cooperative and the Lower East Side was a profoundly different place than today. They are the only murals to survive from Gellert's important public artwork, they are among the few surviving murals to survive from this period in general.
In art market terms alone, they are quite valuable: Gellert's work, like that of most American artists of his era, has dramatically increased in monetary value over the past decade. I note here that in the early 1980s a similarly 'unpopular' and under-appreciated mural, the AMERICA TODAY mural painted by Thomas Hart Benton for the New School for Social Research in 1930-31, was sold by the school to Equitable Assurance for several million dollars; it now graces the lower floors of their corporate headquarters in midtown Manhattan. Surely the dollar value of the Gellert murals is a consideration for the general value of the Seward Park property.
Perhaps more importantly than their monetary value is the fact that Gellert's murals recall a different era in American culture and society, and provide a different point of view. This country has been built on the tolerance of different opinions and I believe we remain, as American citizens, committed to those principles. That commitment entails responsibility, including being responsible—preserving, maintaining—the art from a not so distant past that embodies points of view, art styles, and degrees of taste, that may differ from those we hold today. On that note, I urge the preservation of the Seward Park murals by Hugo Gellert!
Yours sincerely,
Erika Doss
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