Belle Baranceanu: The Artist at Work [review] (original) (raw)
Una Casa Del Pueblo — a Town House of Old San Diego
A ll around the empty plaza stood the crumbling adobes and roofless walls of another time. One of them, the Casa de Estudillo on the southeast side of the plaza in Old Town San Diego State Historic Park, had been bought in 1906 by the sugar magnate and investor John D. Spreckels. Hoping to capitalize on Old Town' s tourist potential, he extended his streetcar line up Calhoun Street to the plaza. Two years later his vice president and managing director, William Clayton, hired a 43-year old widow recently turned designer to research and restore the historic ruin. Her name was Hazel Wood Waterman, the daughter-in-law of former Governor Robert Whitney Waterman and then employee of noted San Diego architect Irving Gill. 1 Completed in 1910, the restoration launched one of California' s first historic tourist attractions and in the process helped to inspire a nostalgic fetish, an antiquarian enthusiasm for the state' s Spanish heritage. An estimated 125,000 people visited the Casa de Estudillo in 1915, the same year that the Panama-California Exposition opened in Balboa Park. 2 San Diego had been "discovered" by the outside world, but what was the appeal of this restored adobe in a backwater village on the outskirts of the modern city? To unravel the knot of this question requires an investigation into the power and interplay of myth and history. What was the history of the casa and the Estudillo family who lived there until 1887? How accurate is Waterman' s restoration in terms of design, use of materials, construction methods, landscape, and furnishings? What was her research approach? Her source(s) of information and inspiration? What did the Casa de Estudillo signify to early twentieth-century California society? How did myth and history as popularized in literature, film, and art shape or alter the historic memory of the visiting public? History of a House and a Family
JCGBA article Mission San Luis Obispo.pdf
Recent archaeological investigations near Mission San Luis Obispo encountered a zanja (irrigation ditch) and associated terracing within the larger mission landscape. Native Californian practices persisted through the mission period―incorporating new technologies and new food sources―and using those new technologies to build upon existing social structures. In the process, native groups and individuals actively controlled some of the land use within the mission setting, as well as the products of that land use. Previous investigations of this and other California missions acknowledge the importance of native labor, but typically frame discussion of the infrastructure as part of the larger colonial institution. Recent findings have prompted the authors to reconsider water and infrastructure as part of the native landscape within the mission system at San Luis Obispo.
While in San Francisco, California, in 1930 and 1931 to execute several mural commissions, including The Allegory of California and The Making of a Fresco, the famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera also produced an associated sketchbook. In 49 charcoal drawings, plus two additional watercolor landscapes, Rivera sketched the land, industry, and people of Northern California, in particular miners and the mining environment, as well as important patrons of his work. In this article, we contextualize the sketchbook within the history of California, identify several sitters for Rivera's portrait sketches, and additionally suggest reattributing one of the sketches to the artist's wife, Frida Kahlo.
Monumental Hydraulics: Diego Riveras Lerma Waterworks and the water temples of San Francisco
Boom: A Journal of California, 2016
Water system infrastructure and the monuments that commemorate it in California and Mexico are evidence of similarities in their cultures’ water regimes. Mexico’s Lerma Waterworks site argues the importance of reliable water provision for Mexico City’s modern identity. The mid-20th c. architecture and the murals designed by Diego Rivera, entitled “Agua, Origen de la Vida,” narrate the journey of water as it flows continuously from the indigenous past and into the modern present. Along the way, Rivera represents water as bridging distinct locations, cultures, and social classes. This mythic rendering, however, does not account for today’s disparity in water access in the city today.
San Bartolo, Petén: Late Preclassic Techniques of Mural Painting
Like the artist in charge of drawings for the San Bartolo Archaeological Project, the murals of San Bartolo have been documented as faithfully as possible through scale drawings and watercolor paintings. The illustration process presented me with the opportunity to conduct a very detailed observation of both the pictorial technique and the style of the San Bartolo artists. Just like modern artists copy the works of Rembrandt and Michelangelo to get acquainted with their techniques, in the San Bartolo murals every line, color, figure and even paint drops were copied, providing an opportunity to study the Maya masters of the Late Preclassic period. Now, all observations will be presented in regard to the preparation of walls, the design, the composition, the pictorial technique and the style of the San Bartolo murals. PREPARATION OF WALLS Structure Sub-1 in Las Pinturas was conceived and built as a unitary addition to the east side of the mound (Figure 1). The structure was specifically designed to be painted with murals and intended to be easily seen. Las Pinturas Sub-1 is a single, open room with three main doorways in the façade and two secondary ones at the sides. The walls climb until they form a curvature similar to the springing of a vault, but it is known that this room was not vaulted. Instead, the walls continue climbing vertically until they form a frieze that protrudes slightly from the walls and surrounds the four sides of the room, and on which the murals were painted. Several large beams crossed the 4 m of width of the room and interrupted the East and West murals. This beams, as well as other transversal beams and the slabs that were placed between them made internal supports, which could have represented a physical and visual obstacle, unnecessary.
An ‘American’ Mural in Morelia, Mexico
Academia Letters, 2022
Guston completed a monumental mural in the city of Morelia, Mexico, on the timely topic of the struggle against fascism. By working in a relatively remote location, Guston and Kadish were able to realize a certain amount of artistic autonomy in Morelia that led to a mural which still astonishes in its originality. Now residing in the rear patio of the Museo Michoacano, the former summer palace of Emperor Maximilian which became part of the city university in the 1930s, the mural has been variously titled Workers' Struggle for Liberty, The Struggle Against Terrorism, The Inquisition, and The Struggle Against War and Fascism [Fig. 1].[1] Devoid of any overt references to Mexican culture or history, and rooted in western archetypes of modernism and surrealism, Guston and Kadish's foreign mural commission has been overwhelmingly identified as an 'American' mural in Mexico. As art historian Ellen Landau has written, the location in Mexico at a museum of indigenous and Hispanic artifacts combined with the American artists' Jewish émigré background makes the work appear at first "jarringly out of context."[2] Yet the artists' inclination to head south mixed with their use of the large-scale format and candid syntax of Mexican muralism underscores the significance of the Mexican context that led to this striking public work. Though it is unclear how many Mexican people viewed The Struggle Against Terrorism (the most commonly used titled), it was contentious enough to be covered in the 1940s and was lost to the world until air conditioning repairmen rediscovered it hidden behind a fake wall in 1973.[3] The artists, who had witnessed the highly publicized presence of David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, and Diego Rivera in California in the early 1930s, were optimistic about the possibilities offered by the foreign context of Mexico after experiencing extreme censorship and racial discord in Los Angeles (where they had attempted to portray the racism experienced by African Americans). Despite their desire to travel to Europe to see "the old
These styles are distinguished as one of the earliest great North American painted mural traditions, and constitute one of the greatest prehistoric rock art traditions worldwide, comparable to those of paleolithic Europe, Africa and Australia. These styles most likely date to the Middle to Late Archaic periods (4000 B.C.-A.D. 500). Elaborately stylized figures, sophisticated polychrome compositions, and simultaneous monumentality and miniaturism characterize the imagery, and provide the aesthetic affect that activates the various iconographic programs in each region. Yet only in the last 40 years have these styles begun to be subjected to more specific artistic and art historical interpretations.