The Palo Alto History Project, Murals Controversy

The Palo Alto History Project

The Mural Controversy
300 Homer Avenue

The Murals Controversy: A Modern Art Mini-Scandal

Through its history Palo Alto has had a somewhat ambiguous relationship with the modern art world. Today
the city’s street corners and parks are full of contemporary statues and sculptures, but many receive their
share of quizzical looks --- and critical comments --- from local residents. California Avenue, for instance,
has been dubbed Palo Alto’s “Avenue of the Arts” because of its wide assortment of sometimes
controversial and rather esoteric pieces. Selected by a Public Arts Commission that leans toward the
highbrow, the street’s statues include Go Mama!, a six foot sculpture of a Mexican doll with a face in its
belly, “Jungle Jane,” a nine foot aluminum wire face and “Body of the Urban Myth,” a twelve foot ancient
Greek woman hoisting a washing machine. And a trip around Palo Alto can sometimes seem like an
extended gallery walk. You can ponder an oversized green egg in Lytton Plaza known as “Digital DNA,” a
car with legs in Bowden Park called “Rrrun” or a steel “tilted donut” at the corner of El Camino and Page
Mill. But it seems that despite this bounty of local artistry, Palo Altans remain a bit puzzled by such abstract
surroundings.

As it turns out, this is nothing new. Way back in 1932, one of Palo Alto’s first public exposures to modern
art at the new headquarters of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation produced both squawking and gawking
from the general public.

The hubbub began when Dr. Russel Lee and his partners outgrew their location at Hamilton and Bryant
Streets as their organization expanded. As Dr. Lee recalled years later, each time a new doctor joined their
group, “we had to set up a whole new partnership.” So the doctors coordinated something virtually unheard
of at the time --- a joint clinic in which many doctors specializing in various fields would work together.

Venturing out to what was then Palo Alto’s distant realms, the foundation centered its new home at Homer
and Bryant streets. To design the new building, they stayed in the family --- signing on Dr. Esther Clark’s
brother, Palo Alto architect Birge Clark. The revered hometown draftsman designed the foundation’s new
U-shaped headquarters in his favored California Colonial style --- a choice that would match the building
with much of Palo Alto’s later architecture. But in selecting an artist to paint a series of murals in the building’
s entryway, the progressive and always feisty Dr. Lee would make a much more radical choice in talent.

He was Victor Arnautoff, the Russian-born muralist who had spent two years in Mexico City studying with
the world’s most celebrated muralist, Diego Rivera. But although the younger painter’s political sentiments
lay somewhere between progressive and communist thought, Lee was not looking for a political statement.
He instructed Arnautoff to create a series of paintings that would celebrate modern medicine rather than any
left-leaning political ideals. Still, Arnautoff would find a way to bring a little radical flavor his first California
creation.

Done in Art Deco style, the display featured 8 panels contrasting modern medical practice with the barbaric
methods of the past. Portrayed were some of Lee’s medical heroes with modern equipment such as the X-
ray machine and the Albee Saw opposite savage images of a Native American mother using a board to
reshape her child’s head and the use of a hot poker to cauterize a wound.

But it wasn’t the medical techniques portrayed that caught the public’s attention --- it was the nudity. In one
mural, called “The Exam,” a woman unclothed above the waist is examined by a gray-bearded doctor with a
stethoscope. Another mural features a semi-nude male patient who, as one writer put it, “looks as
nonchalant as though a clinic held no more terrors than a Turkish bath.“ In a third, a bare-breasted woman is
saved from devils by an ancient witch doctor.

The San Francisco Chronicle soon picked up on the story and with a bit of big-city condescension, chuckled
that “medical murals and seminudes” have “set this little college town upon its ears.” The story summarized
the Palo Alto consensus to be “that a clinic ought to be a clinic, not an art gallery --- especially a modern art
gallery” that “flaunts modernity in the face of a quiet family neighborhood.”

While the Chronicle was clearly poking some fun at its less cosmopolitan neighbor, some Palo Altans were
not amused. Dr. Henry Lanz, a Stanford professor offered a sharp rebuttal in the Palo Alto Times, writing
that the Chronicle “professes to reflect the public opinion prevailing in this rural, naïve community.” But he
defended the murals as “a perfectly well-motivated exhibition of the human body on the walls of a clinic.”

Actually, public reaction in Palo Alto seems to have leaned more toward curiosity than puritanical outrage.
On the Sunday following the unveiling, bumper-to-bumper traffic backed up on Homer Street as Sunday
drivers took a detour from their usual scenic routes to take in wholly different images at the new building.

But the murals did generate some harsh words within the clinic. Dr. Fritz Roth, who ironically would become
the building’s namesake, believed the paintings to be undignified. At one point he even threatened to have
them whitewashed before he would begin work at his new office.

Eventually, the controversy passed, the murals were accepted and Victor Arnautoff --- after great success in
San Francisco --- became a Stanford professor in the Department of Art. The murals remain on the now
abandoned Roth Building --- the future home of the Palo Alto History Museum. When the PAMF moved
to a more modern building on Stanford campus in the 1990s, vignettes of the original murals were recreated
at the new location. It goes to show that if you wait long enough, the public’s taste will come around.

-Matt Bowling

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Sources:
Palo Alto Historical Association, Palo Alto Weekly, Palo Alto Times,
Peninsula Times Tribune, Wikipedia, Homeravenue.com, friscovista.com,
Painting on the Left by Anthony W. Lee.

Russel V.A. Lee with the Roth
Building's architect, Birge
Clark. (PAHA)