Wall to Wall

“Some night, perhaps, men will come with buckets of white paint and it will take very little time to destroy that which took me so long to make,” wrote Anton Refregier in a 1949 manuscript recounting his creation of a 27-panel mural inside the lobby of the Rincon Annex, an imposing post office just off the Embarcadero in San Francisco. “And in the morning it will be just like it was three years ago. White walls without colors, without ideas, ideas that make some people so mad and so afraid.”

Refregier beat out 83 other artists in a 1941 competition to create the mural, which was funded by the Works Progress Administration. The Federal Art Project—a WPA program that provided unemployed artists with work—had sponsored the contest and awarded Refregier the $26,000 contract. This was the last good news the artist heard about the project, which seemed troubled from the start. First, the endeavor was put on hold when the country entered World War II following the December 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor. After the war ended, Refregier was given the green light to resume his work on the paintings, which would show the history of California—from Sir Francis Drake’s voyage, to the Gold Rush and the San Francisco earthquake, through to various labor strikes. Then the trouble really began.

Refregier was born in Moscow in 1905 and emigrated to the United States in 1920. He studied art at the Rhode Island School of Design, first working as a set designer, then painting murals for ocean liners and private residences. He later landed work with the Federal Art Project, producing murals for post offices and the 1939 New York World’s Fair. A social realist painter, Refregier’s often depicted the trials and tribulations of workers; his World’s Fair mural was a celebration of the accomplishments of Federal Art Project employees. He was also a devoted defender of leftist causes and workers’ rights, and had done illustration work for the American Marxist publication The New Masses. The Rincon mural reflected Refregier’s empathy for the working class, even if that meant depicting a less-than-glowing version of California history.

Among the scenes depicted by Refregier—which included the 49ers panning for gold, the raising of California’s bear flag, and the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge—were images of the 1877 San Francisco riot, in which whites attacked Chinese immigrants, and the 1934 West Coast waterfront strike. A panel that shows the 1945 meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco depicts the flags of the countries present, including the Soviet Union’s hammer and sickle. Postwar America was in an anti-communist frenzy; Refregier’s Russian origins were enough for many to cast suspicion on his motives, even without his inclusion of pro-labor motifs.

As he worked, calls for revisions rolled in. Officials from the Public Buildings Administration in Washington, D.C., objected to a planned portrait of the late president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (In a November 1947 letter to the artist, they explained that they did not approve of depictions of any “prominent persons in any mural.”) Refregier told the San Francisco Chronicle that he believed the request was due to the Truman administration’s campaign to discredit Roosevelt—but still, he complied, leaving FDR out. The Catholic Church objected that a group of friars was depicted as too fat. (Refregier slimmed them down.) The Veterans of Foreign Wars objected to the use of their logo on a hat being worn by a protester in a three-panel scene depicting a waterfront strike, and argued that the entire sequence should be removed because of its Communist sentiment. On this point, Refregier fought back: he had photos of the event showing strikers wearing the hats, he told the Chronicle. Washington officials responded to the controversy by ordering the offending panels covered up until they could reach a decision, prompting longshoremen and artists who supported Refregier’s work to protest on his behalf outside the post office. Finally, officials decided the panels could be left in—if the artist would just remove the VFW hat. He did.

All 27 murals were completed at last in 1948. Chronicle columnist Herb Caen noted this accomplishment with no small amount of sarcasm: “Well, everybody can relax now,” he wrote. “On Tuesday, artist Anton Refregier put the final finishing touches on his ‘controversial’ murals at Rincon Annex Post Office ... The finished product is now pure and wholesome, guaranteed to wrinkle no brows and crease no brains.”

But the murals’ tribulations had still not come to an end. Local conservatives continued to stew over the content of the paintings, and in May 1953, Congressman Herbert Scudder of Sebastopol, California, a small, rural community about 50 miles north of San Francisco, submitted a resolution to Congress requesting the murals be removed. A hearing to decide their fate was held by the House Committee on Ways and Means. “It was the first instance of the death penalty being asked for paintings in a congressional action,” wrote the Chronicle.

At the hearing, Scudder decried the murals as “subversive” and “historically inaccurate.” He even complained about the quality of the artwork, lambasting the “pot-bellied monks” (who apparently had not been slimmed enough for his liking) and the “dwarfed heads” and “sadist expressions” of other figures. Others defended the work. “These things happened,” Representative John F. Shelly from San Francisco argued at the hearing, “and we can’t say they didn’t because we don’t like the artist.” At the end of the hearing, the committee said it would take two weeks to decide on the fate of the murals. In the end, the committee bowed to the pressure of artists, museum directors, art critics, and a majority of California politicians. The murals could stay.

Today, the Rincon Annex has been rebranded the Rincon Center, a commercial property with offices and a food court. Downtown workers jetting in and out for a quick lunch may not even clock the historic murals in the lobby. In the 1980s, a series of new murals by the artist Richard Haas were added to the building’s atrium, depicting upbeat scenes of California agricultural workers, technology, and transportation.

“The Hass paintings depict the abundance and sense of well-being often associated with the accomplishments of free enterprise and the American Dream,” wrote Thomas Portue, the conservator tasked with caring for the Refregier murals, in a 2016 blog post for the American Institute for Conservation comparing the two projects. “There are obvious contrasts and a distinct irony associated with the juxtaposition of these two very different works of art. But I believe that standing between them gives one a great sense of what it means to be uniquely American.”