City of Hope: Shaffer Mural (former) – Duarte CA

City:
Duarte, CA

Site Type:
Murals, Art Works

New Deal Agencies:
Federal Arts Project (FAP), Arts Programs

Started:
1936

Completed:
1938

Artist:
Myer Shaffer

Quality of Information:
Very Good

Site Survival:
No Longer Extant

Description

In 1936, Myer Shaffer painted a mural, “The Social Aspects of Tuberculosis,” for the Los Angeles Tubercular Sanatorium in Duarte, CA, the site of today’s City of Hope. The 7 by 18 foot mural received funding from the WPA Federal Art Project (FAP), the American Artists’ Congress, and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

Shaffer was a 23-year-old student of Mexican social realist artist David Alfaro Siqueiros at the Chouinard Institute in Los Angeles, CA, when he was hired. “Unlike many WPA muralists who painted anonymous subjects or […] imagined suitable subject matter without doing the research to support their choices, Shaffer spent time with patients in the historic sanitarium, established in Duarte by the Jewish Consumptives’ Relief Association (JCRA) in 1913, consulting with them about their experiences as tuberculosis sufferers in southern California” (Schrank, p. 446).

Shaffer’s mural “countered the [Los Angeles] boosters’ promotion of the region’s climate as a cure-all for chronic lung diseases such as TB. In three panels, he emphasized the class dimensions of illness by focusing on those who bore the brunt of the disease, the patients themselves, depicting their overworked, exhausted bodies depleted of vitality and nutrition by their impoverishment” (Luce, “Reluctant Modernist”).

In 1938, Shaffer added three sections to “The Social Aspects of Tuberculosis.” “Shaffer pushed the envelope when he incorporated into the sanitarium mural the international protest symbol of a raised, clenched fist, an image associated in the 1930s with supporters of the beleaguered Spanish Republic. The fist, encircled by a chain, did not last long as the sanitarium administration required Shaffer to paint it out” (Schrank, p. 447).

The entire mural was whitewashed in 1938, as was another of Shaffer’s FAP murals, “The Elder in Relation to Society” (1937), at the Mount Sinai Home for Chronic Invalids in Los Angeles, CA. “Shaffer credited the Federal Arts Project with encouraging public art in the city but kept track in the Jewish Community Press of the increasing number of murals painted over by the Board of Education and other local authorities. […] Wincing at Los Angeles’ regional provincialism, Shaffer wrote that a ‘fallacy that we find in numerous murals is the disregard of the truth of historic events. A mural should be as powerful and moving as a symphony…., not a pretty melody in paint'” (Schrank p. 447).

Philip Guston and Reuben Kadish also painted a mural for the Sanatorium’s library in 1936; theirs survives and is located in City of Hope’s Visitor Services Center.

Source notes

Sarah Schrank, “Public Art at the Global Crossroads: The Politics of Place in 1930s Los Angeles,” Journal of Social History 44, no. 2 (2010): 435–57, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25790365.

Caroline Luce, "Hugo Ballin's Los Angeles" [online exhibit]

"Mural Decorations - Completed and in Progress - by Federal Art Project in Northern Southern California (April 1, 1937)," Marjery Hoffman Smith AAA Reel, www.wpamurals.org/CA37art.pdf

Site originally submitted by Natalie McDonald on March 2, 2023.

Location Info


1500 E Duarte Rd
Duarte, CA 91010
Los Angeles County

Coordinates: 34.1292, -117.9727

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