San Francisco State University professor emeritus Robert W. Cherny’s book, The Coit Tower Murals: New Deal Art and Political Controversy in San Francisco, published by University of Illinois Press in November 2024, follows a train of thought and explication developed over Prof. Cherny’s long career teaching and writing on American social and political history. Tonight at Bird & Beckett, Prof. Cherny will discuss the politics that swirled around the Coit Tower project in the New Deal era of the 1930s, and implications for political art in the present. The Coit Tower murals, completed in 1934, remain a highly visible and prized feature of San Francisco’s storied cultural and political history.

In 2017, just as a local controversy over Victor Arnautoff’s 1936 Washington High mural was rising to a high boil, Cherny brought out his book Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art (also published by University of Illinois Press). That book explored the life and times of Arnautoff, San Francisco’s leading mural painter during the New Deal era, who had been an artist-contributor to the Coit Tower murals as well as the project’s technical director.

Arnautoff had come to San Francisco in 1925 to study at the California School of Fine Arts. Born in Southern Ukraine in 1896, he was diverted from his budding artistic development into military leadership positions in the army of Nicholas II and then the White Siberian Army during the Bolshevik revolution. With the collapse of the Whites in Siberia, he crossed to Harbin, China in 1919, where he trained cavalry soldiers and continued his pursuit of art before making his way to San Francisco to enroll at the California School of Fine Arts. Arnautoff left San Francisco for Mexico in 1929 to assist muralist Diego Rivera and returned in 1931 to gain prominence in the New Deal’s art projects and later, a faculty position at Stanford University, which he held from 1938 to 1962. He returned to Mariupol in Ukraine, where he had attended gymnasium as a youth, and died in Leningrad in 1979.

Prof. Cherny will return to Bird & Beckett on Thursday, January 23rd to discuss his book, published earlier this year, San Francisco Reds: Communists in the Bay Area, 1919-1958.