Painting on the left
Subtitle: Diego Rivera, radical politics, and San Francisco's public murals
By: Anthony W. Lee.
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 1999
Place of publication: Berkeley
Language: eng
Number of pages: 264
Subjects: Rivera, Diego, 1886-1957 -- Political and social views; Mural painting and decoration, American -- California -- San Francisco -- 20th century -- Themes, motives; Street art -- California -- San Francisco
Description: During the 1930s San Francisco's most ambitious public murals were painted by artists on the left. In this study, Anthony Lee shows how these painters, led by Diego Rivera, sought to transform murals into a vehicle for their rejection of the economic and political status quo and their support of labor and radical ideologies, including Communism.

In addressing these subjects, the mural painters developed a new imagery, based on the activities of the city's laboring population - its efforts to organize, its protests, its strikes.

Painting on the Left relates the development of wall painting to the city's international expositions of 1915 and 1939, the new museums and art schools, corporate patrons and government administrators, and the concerns of immigrants and ethnic groups.

It examines how murals became, and the extent to which they remained, "public," and it looks at how mural painters struggled against developments in art and politics that threatened their practice: the growing acceptance of modernist easel painting, the vagaries of New Deal patronage, and a wartime nationalism hostile to radical politics.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 225-254) and index.