Hugo Gellert's Seward Park Murals
Dear Mr. Keller:
I am writing in support of your resolve to preserve the historically and
artistically important murals by Hugo Gellert at Seward Park Housing.
These murals were created by one of the more prominent social activist
artists of the 1930s generation. They remain Gellert's last surviving mural,
all his other murals, such as those at Radio City's Center Theatre and the
1939-40 Worlds Fair, having been destroyed.
They also represent a late survival of 1930s subject matter—the usable
past represented by Jefferson and Lincoln, and the creative present looking
forward, as it were, to a usable future, as personified by Franklin Delano
Roosevelt and Albert Einstein. The inscriptions under the central portraits
are eloquent in this regard.
In style they present the spare, linear imaging and coloration of a skillful
artist who had devoted most of his life to the graphic arts.
Seward Park Housing owns a now rare, and quite valuable, example of Gellert's
work, and murals that are representative of the history of the housing complex
and the experience of those who first lived there. The present tenants ought
to be made aware of this impressive history, and the honorable artistic
intentions that went into the creation of the murals, and preserve them for
the future.
I am currently writing a history of the American mural, and want to include
the Gellert murals at Seward Park Housing; I would hope they will still be in
existence when the book appears.
Sincerely, |