Hugo Gellert's Seward Park Murals
Israel Keller, President
Dear Mr. Keller,
Paul Lauter, treasurer of New York Metro American Studies Association, wrote to you recently to urge you to Hugo Seward Park's valuable Hugo Gellert murals. I'm writing to second his letter, and to lend the support of the organization to the effort to keep the murals. As scholars who teach and research American life and culture, from many angles, we feel particularly strongly the need to keep hold of the traces of our history and preserve it for future generations.
I had occasion recently to use Nathan Silver's Lost New York in a class; the book is a heartbreaking record of monuments and artwork, as well as buildings, shortsightedly destroyed. My students looked through it and said, "All these statues are gone? But that would never happen now. People understand the value of preservation now." I'd be sorry to have to tell them otherwise.
We don't have many murals like Gellert's in our city. Some have been taken down and moved to museums (though Gellert's fresco-like technique makes that impossible for these). The few we do have are mainly in public buildings such as post offices; one of the things that makes the Seward Park Houses murals special is their unexpectedness to our eyes now: they were commissioned for a kind of space that it's hard in the 1990s to understand as grand or ambitiously public. It's not just historians or specialists that think highly of them. The Gellert murals are exciting and dynamic works in themselves. They are particularly important because they were commissioned in the 1950s, when murals in this style had become politically suspect. Putting up such a mural was a bold statement on the part of the ILGWU. But that layer of history and vision is in your hands. As works of art and other cultural treasures that were created for public enjoyment and education come into private hands, their new caretakers are faced with difficult quandries. The works may not be to your taste, they may not be works you would have commissioned yourselves. But you have become stewards of a valuable trust. I hope you will live up to that responsibility, take pride in it, and celebrate it. NYMASA would be delighted to help you do so.
Sincerely,
Ellen Gruber Garvey
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