Victor Arnautoff

City Life, 1932, Coit Tower

Heady days in San Francisco: in May 1934, the Longshoremen’s Union organized an 83-day strike that closed all West Coast waterfronts, followed by a four-day general strike. John Steinbeck was there, taking notes for his strike novel, In Dubious Battle. Artists painting the labor-themed murals in Coit Tower downed brushes to protest the “premeditated art murder” of Diego Rivera’s Rockefeller Center mural in New York. Leading the pack was the technical director of the Coit Tower project, Victor Arnautoff, son of a Russian Orthodox priest, former White Army officer, trusted assistant to Diego Rivera, and creator of The Life of Washington, one of San Francisco’s most controversial public artworks.

Arnautoff’s notorious Coit Tower mural, City Life, showed his uncompromising approach. A busy moment at the corner of Montgomery and Washington includes a car crash, a man robbed at gunpoint, a poster for Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, and a rack that displays such left-wing publications as Worker’s Daily and The Masses—but not the conservative San Francisco Chronicle.

In 1925, Arnautoff arrived in San Francisco and entered the California School of Fine Arts. Expiration of his visa in 1929 propelled Arnautoff to Mexico, where he became a trusted assistant to Diego Rivera (who rather improbably spoke Russian). Under Rivera’s influence, Arnautoff blossomed, improving his mural technique by looking at Mexican examples.

Arnautoff became a prolific muralist in San Francisco. His many commissions reflected concerns about class, labor, and power. He taught at the California School of Fine Arts and at Stanford University from 1938 to 1962, where one of his admiring students was Richard Diebenkorn.

Arnautoff was comfortably buried in San Francisco history until his 13 fresco murals at George Washington High School—Life of Washington—ignited renewed controversy in 2019. The murals, commissioned by a New Deal art program in 1936, were intended to draw attention to aspects of American history ignored at the time. But the focus on the treatment of the enslaved and disenfranchised proved too inflammatory in a new context; the school board wanted to destroy what they considered racist imagery. After considerable pushback, the board elected to cover the panels. In 2021, a superior court judge ruled in favor of historic preservation, and a new school board overturned the previous board's decision to cover the murals, where they remain today.