Ironically, this was a WPA, Commie-painted mural intended to show a “nuanced” view of GW. The artist later return to the Soviet Union. Those subtleties are, of course, lost on the neo-philistines and woke iconoclasts.
“Ironically, this was a WPA, Commie-painted mural intended to show a “nuanced” view of GW. The artist later return to the Soviet Union. Those subtleties are, of course, lost on the neo-philistines and woke iconoclasts.”
Excellent point.
In 1937, Victor Arnautoff became a member of the Communist Party.
Communist Victor Arnautoff’s largest project, funded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and completed in 1936, was a twelve-part depiction of the life of George Washington at San Francisco’s new George Washington High School. In the murals, Arnautoff implicitly challenged the version of U.S. history then typical in American high schools. In depicting Mount Vernon, Arnautoff literally marginalized Washington and put enslaved African Americans in the center of one of the scenes. The mural presented a counter-narrative to most highschool histories of the time, which tended to ignore the existence of slaves at Mount Vernon, as well as the paradox of slaveholders fighting for the principle that all men are created equal. Another large mural presents Washington pointing the nation to the West. Again, however, Arnautoff’s counter-narrative makes it dramatically clear that the way west was over the body of a dead Indian.
In 1955, Arnautoff found himself in the headlines again when a lithograph he had made, entitled DIX McSmear, was removed from the annual San Francisco Art Festival. The artwork showed Vice President Richard Nixon wearing a black mask, holding a pumpkin in one hand, and carrying, in the other hand, a paintbrush and a bucket labeled “Smear.” Arnautoff described the cartoon as “a composite and symbolic characterization of McCarthyism,” but festival officials removed it, they said, because it caricatured the vice president. The Nation magazine promptly put McSmear on its next cover.
In December 1956, Arnautoff was summoned before a subcommittee of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Arnautoff cited the Fifth Amendment in refusing to answer questions about his membership in the Communist Party and other organizations.
He later returned to the Soviet Union and lived their until his death.