This is another in an occasional series about places in L.A. This place is in Long Beach, but it's also long ago.
We’re in front of a mural – a monumental wall of patterned tile. On it, in flattened, Post-Impressionist perspective, are the summer pleasures of ordinary people. Its title is “Recreations of Long Beach.” It once rose a couple of stories over the entrance to the municipal auditorium. It was brought to completion in 1938 through the collective work of unemployed artists and craftsmen. According to Stanton MacDonald-Wright, who was involved in its design, it took seventy-five people and six months to put the mural up. All of them -- MacDonald-Wright, too, who was a noted Los Angeles painter – were employed by the federal Works Progress Administration (later the Work Projects Administration).
Long Beach then was a tourist town, a Navy town, and a comfortable home for retirees – Midwesterners mostly with time on their hands. All of them, mixed in their ages and interests, are in the immense, cut-tile mural, perhaps one of the most elaborate and technically innovative in the WPA’s Federal Art Program (in which MacDonald-Wright was a regional administrator).
Assembled as a pyramid of figures, with picnickers at the base and two vigilant lifeguards at the apex, the mural is a celebration with no greater “social ideal” than the comforts of the commonplace. It’s not a historical panorama depicting the inevitability of the modern age (as in many WPA murals for public buildings). It lacks the working-class stoicism of the era’s best-known mural art. The scene in Long Beach might better be compared to Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” another monument to everydayness.
Shirley Shotwell – who as a child had posed for the group of picnickers at the bottom of the mural – recalled the experience. In the mural, she’s the blond girl reaching for a piece of cake. Shotwell’s mother was a secretary for the WPA branch and posed for the picnicking woman. Shotwell’s brother posed for the figure of the boy who has just caught a fish. Shotwell had to kneel on a stool and mime reaching for the cake. It was boring. She was seven. And there was no cake.
There are no class representatives at the beach, just the often mocked “folks” who had made Southern California their home in the previous decade: a sailor and his young family, a surfer, an angler, some posing girls who are unlikely to go near the water while the bronzed lifeguards are on duty, and a woman pausing in her spirited talk to make an overly dramatic point.
The two dogs are said to immortalize MacDonald-Wright's own Chows.
Far from trivializing the experience of Californians during the Depression, the MacDonald-Wright mural assembles a community of diverse Californians, presents them at their most convivial, and asserts that the ordinariness of their pleasure does not diminish them, even in the midst of brutally bad times.
The critic Alfred Kazin said that the spirit of the New Deal at its best was motivated by “a devotion that was baffled rather than shrill, and an insistence to know and to love what it knew . . .”
The "Recreations of Long Beach" mural is located on the south facing wall of the parking structure at approximarely 213 E. 3rd Street at Locust Avenue.
The images in this post are from the New Deal Network website (under non-commercial use permission) and were taken by James M. Wechsler.
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This mural stands the test of time. Still today, the beach remains one of the few areas in Los Angeles that breaches class divide. Unfortunately, I can't think of many other areas in Los Angeles that push so many kinds of people together.