Catalogue of Coit Tower - Telegraph Hill

Catalogue Entry

Artist: Bernard Zakheim (one of the 26 artists)

Title of Work: Library (one of the murals at Coit Tower)

Date of Work: 1934

Nationality: American

Context: New Deal

Movement: American Realism

Medium: fresco

Subject: Coit Tower was built in 1933 on top of Telegraph Hill. It is an attractive touristic location and one of the great landmarks of San Francisco. Covering every inch of its interior walls are a series of murals created by 26 different artists during the 1930s. Some of the murals are of leisure activities but most had a politically charged motive such as, Bernard Zakheim's Library, which had controversial material, such as newspapers headlining the destruction of Diego Rivera's Rockefeller Center mural in 1934. Zakheim created the Library not only to assert his political views but him personally as well. Too the far left of the mural, Zakheim has illustrated a self-portrait of himself, who is seated reading the Tenach, the Old Testament in Hebrew. Zakheim incorporated many of his friends into this particular mural, such as fellow Coit Tower muralist and socialist artist, John Langley Howard. Howard is depicted reaching for a copy of Karl Marx's Das Kapital, to the right of the window. This particular part had great importance to Zakheim who was asked twice to obliterate the reference to Marx, and in his refusal to do so nearly caused the entire project to be abandoned. The gentlemen (the term fits as all can be assumed to be educated men of status by their attire) reading the newspapers, on the right, also have underlying significance. The man in the upper portion reading the newspaper entitled "The Destruction of Rivera's Fresco" is Ralph Stackpole. The man reading the newspaper with the headline "B. Bufano's St. Francis Just Around The Corner" is the sculptor Beniamino Bufano, a radical who in protest against America's decision to participate in World War I, chopped off his trigger finger on his right hand and mailed it to President Woodrow Wilson. The anarchist poet Kenneth Rexroth, is depicted on a ladder reaching for a book on a top shelf. Zakheim asserts his anti-war views explicitly through his many innuendos of what the war is causing. The three large books lying on the top window shelf represent the three books of the Hebrew Bible: Torah, (the prophets), Ketuvim (the writings) and Nevi'im. Apparently it has been observed that this is an incorrect spelling of the third book, which is of course peculiar since Zakheim had been raised and educated in a Hassidic family. Another controversial fact that has been noted is that if Zakheim's underlying message was the idea that America should concentrate more on becoming educated through study and literature and not make war; then the placement of the Bible, a text that is unraveled in war depiction after war depiction, as a prominently larger book than the other books is quite odd. This mural is by no means a simple artwork, Zakheim made sure it was a piece laden with controversial intriguing meanings.

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