The Taliban of San Francisco

The most controversial painting in Victor Arnautoff’s Life of Washington series.

Does ‘resistance’ to racism in the US require destroying works by a communist artist, created under the sponsorship of the New Deal? Life of Washington, 13 murals by Victor Arnautoff covering 150 sq m on the walls of George Washington High School in San Francisco, has been condemned by ‘resistance’ fighters despite the fact that it is explicitly anti-racist, which was boldly revolutionary when it was painted in 1936. It exposes the hypocrisy of the virtuous proclamations made by the founding fathers (including Washington) in the US constitution.

Yet on 25 June the San Francisco Board of Education (SFBE) voted unanimously to paint over it. Arnautoff was expected to pay homage to the first president of the US, after whom the college was named; instead, he showed Washington as a slave owner and instigator of the first wars to exterminate Native Americans. However, it is not Donald Trump who is calling for the destruction of a work of art (created by a communist who ended his days in the Soviet Union) that debunks an American myth; his fiercest opponents are doing the work for him.

Their decision was informed by the report of a 13-member ‘reflection and action group’ (appointed by the SFBE), which boldly asserted that the murals ‘[glorify] slavery, genocide, colonisation, manifest destiny [the belief that protestant settlers had a divine mission to “civilise” North America], white supremacy [and] oppression.’

This interpretation does not withstand scrutiny: the socialist realist tradition that inspired Arnautoff left no room for such gross misinterpretation. So another justification was devised, considered more acceptable though it is just as worrying: the reflection and action group claimed that Life of Washington, which shows the dead body of a Native American being trampled by settlers, ‘traumatises students and community members’. We face a choice: should we remember slavery and genocide, or forget them? When can anyone be sure that an artist’s work about the history of his country will never upset ‘community members’, who surely have countless other opportunities to witness scenes of violence every day, in real life or in art? Should Picasso’s Guernica and Goya’s Tres de Mayo, which are just as violent and traumatising, be destroyed as well?

This controversy is at present of concern only to the small section of the US left most agitated about identity issues (see In America, identity replaces solidarity,). But given that this vanguard of virtue has already successfully exported some of its most twisted obsessions, we ought to be less welcoming of this one.