El Rodeo Elementary School Mural – Beverly Hills CA

Description

Hugo Ballin painted a mural, “Rudimentary Education,” at El Rodeo Elementary School in Beverly Hills, CA. Completed in 1934, the mural was funded by the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) and—upon termination of the PWAP—the Federal and State Emergency Relief Administrations (FERA/SERA).

The mural is oil on plaster and approximately 1500 square feet. “Ballin traced his design on to the wall for [his] assistants to complete and included several symbolic references. Towards the top was the Egyptian figure of Set, inventor of numbers, and below him, Tubal-Cain, the ancient metal worker. In the center was a scene of a teacher holding slates of Babylonian, Greek and Hebrew letters to symbolize the study of ancient languages. On the lower right was Greek grammarian Crates of Mallos near a temple” (Luce, caption to photo “El Rodeo Elementary, Rudimentary Education, 1934”).

Ballin was assisted by Robert Woolsley, Charles Jorgenson, and Don Smith. A critic of the modernist turn in mural painting, Ballin wrote in his unpublished memoirs that “not one of these men knew the rudiments of art training. But they had made up their minds to be artists. Perhaps they labored under the erroneous delusion that it was an easy way to make a living” (qtd. Luce, caption to photo “El Rodeo Elementary, Rudimentary Education, 1934”).

Caroline Luce compares “Rudimentary Education” to Charles Kassler’s mural at Fullerton Union High School, “Pastoral California.” “Both works were commissioned in 1934 with funds from New Deal programs, but offered remarkably different visions of art’s educational value. […] [Kassler’s] mural presented students at the school a history lesson about inequality and racism, prompting the school’s Board of Directors to whitewash the mural in 1939. Ballin’s mural […] avoided the politics of the period entirely, offering a somewhat disjointed portrayal of the civilizing role of education in society through the ages. While Kassler’s mural capitalized on the power of mural art to educate viewers about the stories of the marginalized, Ballin used his mural to celebrate the value of traditional education” (Luce, “Reluctant Modernist”).

Ballin’s murals appear throughout the Los Angeles region, including at Griffith Observatory, the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, the Los Angeles Times Building, and Los Angeles City Hall Council Chambers. His other New Deal–funded works in the region include the murals “Burbank Industry” and “Four Freedoms” (1943) at Burbank City Hall in Burbank, CA.