Bad Daddy: George Washington in San Francisco

A public lecture by Richard Meyer (Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History, Stanford University).

Abstract

A series of murals depicting the life of George Washington, painted in San Francisco in 1936 by the Soviet émigré artist Victor Arnautoff, were recently denounced for racism and threatened with destruction. The current controversy over the murals has largely erased their original social and political context, including Arnautoff’s membership in the Communist party and his ambivalence toward the United States. Rather than simply representing George Washington as the heroic “Father of our Country,” the murals suggest that the leader may also have been a “bad daddy.”

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