Â鶹ӰÊÓ

By Marjorie L. Harth, past director for the Montgomery Gallery and Emeritus Professor of Art and Art History, Â鶹ӰÊÓ

Approaching Frary Hall, the first-time visitor would never expect that behind those spare, unadorned, perfectly proportioned walls are two extraordinary mural paintings: José Clemente Orozco's Prometheus, which dominates the dining hall from its position on the north wall, and Rico Lebrun's Genesis, painted above the entrance loggia on the building's west side. Prometheus, 1930, was Orozco's first mural in North America and can be said to mark the beginning of the Mexican mural movement in this country. Genesis, 1960, is one of the last works, and the only surviving mural, by Lebrun.

That Â鶹ӰÊÓ should own major paintings by these two artists, and that it should have commissioned them when it did, reflects the courage and farsightedness that mark enlightened patronage. Both Orozco and Lebrun were controversial artists in their time, and in 1960, as in 1930, mural paintings in Southern California were expected to be more agreeably decorative than fervently moralizing. Although 30 years apart in origin, the two murals are interrelated: it was Lebrun's longstanding admiration for Orozco that led him to express interest in working at Frary Hall and, ultimately, to do so almost literally in the shadow of Prometheus.

Although much has been written about Orozco and Prometheus, Lebrun and Genesis are less well known and understood. In an effort to bring long overdue attention to one of the College's artistic treasures, Montgomery Gallery is exhibiting a number of Lebrun's preparatory drawings for the mural, along with related works on paper and bronze sculptures, from January 25 to March 29, 1998. The exhibition provides the first opportunity for the Gallery's public to view the three important preparatory works received last year from David Lebrun, the artist's son, and to celebrate his promise to donate over time the remaining drawings in his collection.

The story of Rico Lebrun and Â鶹ӰÊÓ began in November 1956, when the artist visited the campus in connection with a one-man exhibition organized by art historian Peter Selz in Rembrandt Hall. Selz, who subsequently served as curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and founding director of the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley, was chair of Pomona's Art Department and director of its departmental gallery. It was during this visit that Lebrun indicated his interest in working in Frary Hall. Excited at the prospect, Selz wrote to President E. Wilson Lyon, "I am especially aware that the continuity of two great works by leading artists of two generations will be in keeping with the great tradition of Western art." Supported in his effort by painters James Grant and Frederick Hammersley, both on the Pomona faculty and former students of Lebrun's, Selz was also responsible for persuading art patrons Donald and Elizabeth Winston to sponsor the mural as a gift to the College. Lyon forwarded the request to the Board, whose members initially requested preparatory sketches for approval. They were dissuaded by Lebrun, Donald Winston, and Selz; "...[we] took it as a matter of artistic--indeed academic--freedom that an artist of established stature should be evaluated on the record of his previous achievements or, like a candidate for a professorship, be judged by his own peers." Shortly thereafter, Lebrun informed the College that he intended to derive his subject from the Book of Genesis, and that the work would "tend more toward the serious and tragic than toward the decorative and superficial." He was to remain true to his word. In October 1958, Lyon informed Lebrun that the Board had agreed unanimously to commission the mural. Lebrun replied, "I can only say that having to be in the same area with Clemente Orozco makes me wish to honor him with my highest possible tribute."

Born and raised in Naples, Lebrun had grown up under the influence of both Italian and Spanish art, Naples having been ruled by Spain almost continuously from the mid-16th to the late-18th centuries. His admiration for fresco tradition, his preference for ambitious subjects addressed on a grand scale, and the baroque sweep of his style all reflect the heritage of Italian art; his high seriousness of purpose, as well as a certain preoccupation with tragedy and death, can be attributed to the influence of Spain. Alongside the always-powerful influence of Michelangelo, he maintained a lifelong affinity for Goya and Picasso. Lebrun emigrated to the United States in 1924, and in 1930 moved to California, where he lived in Santa Barbara, taught at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, and at one time worked with Disney animators on the figure of Bambi for their forthcoming feature film. Having made the transition from commercial to fine art, his work began to attract national attention in the early 1940s, and he showed his figure paintings in prominent museums and galleries in New York and Los Angeles. He began teaching at Jepson Art Institute in L.A. in 1947; by the end of that decade, his style had become increasingly abstract and gestural, and he had garnered a considerable reputation on this coast, both as an artist and as a teacher.

At the time of the Pomona commission, Lebrun was a visiting professor at Yale and had been awarded a residency at the American Academy in Rome. The preparatory work for Genesis was undertaken there, in the city of Michelangelo's famed Sistine Chapel, the alter wall of which, Lebrun noted, was only slightly larger than that at Frary Hall. Working at such a distance from the site had its hazards. After seeing a photograph of a workman in front of the wall, for example, Lebrun was obliged to rethink the scale of his work. As William Ptaszynski, who, along with James Pinto, assisted Lebrun, wrote to Selz, "He had no wish to overpower and diminish the spectator, rather the reverse was desirable, to evoke sensations of increased stature." Lebrun also had to contend with the fact that the location of the wall meant that his mural would be viewed from three different levels: from the ground upon entering the loggia, from top of the steps leading to the dining hall, and from the small balcony in the facing wall. The artist wrote, "All the figures have this multi-viewpoint. A single viewpoint on any figure wouldn't do. The figures all have a barrel-like shape to repeat the tremendously curved shape of the arches. If they didn't do this, they would look too small, like a pebble in a great box or like whistling a great song instead of orchestrating it." By August 1960, Lebrun had completed preparatory work in Rome, and a photograph of the preliminary design was presented to President Lyon.

Lebrun began work in Claremont in July 1960. Rather than enlarging, tracing, and then transferring the completed cartoons to the wall as is customary, Lebrun and his assistants created a collage of the drawings, taping them to the wall in sections and then, for a period of six weeks, rearranging and redrawing, enlarging and reducing the many figures. In November, Lebrun wrote to a friend, "The wall looks all right to me; I have revised, ripped apart, reassembled it a dozen times and fortunately every time for a telling step ahead." Later, charcoal tracings were made and the figures painted, although the collage technique continued to be used to test new ideas. Many of the preparatory works in the exhibition are, in fact, collages. As Ptaszynski later wrote to Selz, "Therefore, completion of sketches, working on the wall, and the process of working were interrelated and simultaneous, perhaps to an unprecedented degree for a work so large..."

Lebrun's letters from this period indicate both the challenges of the project and the pleasure he took in it. "This is a far more magnificently proportioned hunk of masonry than I had remembered, now looking immense and now just tame, nice, and manageable," he wrote. "The main trap to watch for was scale, neither too minute...nor too mammoth. Of course, the scale of each unit is such that when I paint up there I could as well be painting the map of Siberia for all I really see in relation to the rest. Three weeks ago I painted a magnificently cross-eyed head, two and a half feet square, one eye practically overlapping the other when I believed them to be well apart and minding their own business. But, in fact, apart from some comical flops of this kind, I have had and am having a marvelous time."

Lebrun's mural was painted on an independent "curtain" wall, constructed in front of the structural wall of Frary Hall in order to allow air to circulate and to prevent cracking in the event of an earthquake. The false wall consisted of a screen of wire mesh supported on metal channels and coated with gypsum plaster and Keene's cement, the latter providing an absorbent surface for the painting. The medium employed was vinyl acetate resin, a durable plastic used widely in industry. By diluting this to the consistency of an ink wash, the artist was able to make later changes by removing the medium with acetone and revealing the white of the wall.

In Genesis, Lebrun restricted himself to a monochromatic palette, producing a work of dramatic starkness that departs significantly from mural tradition. In November 1960, he commented, "It looks very black and white, burnt black, soil black. I have kept up a broom-sweep way of handling that gives it a look of drawing, not 'painted in,' which I shall leave as is." Both Lebrun's palette and the graphic quality of his painting bear importantly on the impact of Genesis. Although the artist never recorded his reasons for using only black pigments on the white wall, several possibilities suggest themselves, including a desire to set his work apart from the intensely colorful Prometheus just inside the building. Somber monochrome suited the tragic themes he intended for Pomona's wall, and he had used it before. Ten years earlier, he had completed a Crucifixion Cycle of more than 200 paintings and drawings in black and white because he had intended to film the central triptych and wanted the greatest possible value contrasts; he had also agreed to the filming of Genesis by Pomona student John Fuegi '61. Lebrun also acknowledged the influence of Picasso's Guernica, 1937, the extraordinary, widely known black-and-white canvas depicting the bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. Like Genesis a passionate protest against the atrocities of war, Picasso's work clearly demonstrated the visual impact of a monochromatic palette at monumental scale.

For Lebrun to have worked in black and white is also consistent with the strongly graphic tendencies of his art. "Lebrun is always a draftsman," one scholar has written. "His drawing is line, but it is also wash. Because he reaches for a third dimension with tone, his drawing is continuous with his painting... a line comes closer to reality than paint, for forms and colors are relative, but a line does not resemble the form of hand or limb, it is, or can be, the form or shape."

Despite the importance Lebrun attached to drawing, however, the resulting works never appear labored but, rather, show us the artist's process at its most immediate, spontaneous, and, at times, chaotic. The intimate relationship in Lebrun's work between drawing and painting, so apparent when one compares the Genesis drawings to the mural, makes clear how crucial this "preparatory" work is to understanding the finished painting.

Lebrun completed Genesis on December 4, 1960, and a dedication ceremony was held the following February. The acclaim was immediate. President Lyon wrote, "I shall never forget the sense of fulfillment you showed and the reverence we all felt the afternoon you completed the mural. The mural has been a spiritual experience for those of us close to it, and over the years its depth will be communicated to those who have the privilege of seeing it. Because of your Genesis, Pomona has something more to say to its students and to the generations ahead." One New York Times critic wrote that, except for the works of Orozco in Guadalajara, there were no frescoes of comparable quality in this hemisphere; another placed the work within the grand tradition of Renaissance mural painting. Artist Leonard Baskin, then on the faculty of Smith College, likened Lebrun to Goya and wrote, "José Clemente can rest in peace. Hallowed ground has not been despoiled...Job, Noah, Eve have been torn from the Bible and have been made to stand witness for the unholy coupling of tenderness and horror which is our age. Only you, Rico, were man and artist enough for the task." Lebrun gave his own assessment in a letter to Donald Winston. Genesis, he wrote, was "the best and most conclusive work I have painted to date...I think both Orozco and I gave Pomona two formal statements in the grand tradition, perfectly suited to the place and carrying a message necessary to the audience which frequents that place."

This leaves us to examine Genesis itself, what Lebrun intended it to say to "the audience which frequents" Frary Hall, and to consider whether its "unholy coupling of tenderness and horror" speaks to the current generation of Pomona students as eloquently as the artist wished and as Wilson Lyon believed it would.

Although Lebrun did not offer a specific reason for selecting the theme of Genesis, the subject, at once tragic and redemptive, was consistent with the religious content of his previous work. Lebrun's first concept for the wall was to portray, in his words, "the evolution of form, of becoming," and he spoke at the time of "half-borrowing and half-inventing organic fragments, skulls, sections of backbones, sections of ribcages, roots of plants, geological formations...to weld some kind of design which would put across the becoming of form." The story of Creation-the original "becoming" of Christian doctrine-lent itself to this goal while also accommodating the artist's personal philosophy that regarded reality as a complex interweaving of ideas, an inextricable blending of opposites, where good and evil coexisted side by side. With its epic events and universal themes, the story of Genesis thus provided the narrative framework for what was to be a highly personal aesthetic and political statement. At the same time, Lebrun was quick to acknowledge his sources, whether in the work of other artists, in nature, or in contemporary events. The compositional structure of the mural, its individual pictorial units integrated into a monumental whole, mirrors a blending of artistic influences-Michelangelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, Italian Baroque painting, Picasso's Guernica, among others with the artist's keen observation of nature and impassioned response to a world that included Hitler's death camps and Hiroshima. An enormously ambitious undertaking, Genesis is, in concept and realization, not only wholly characteristic of the artist but also a brilliant summary of a lifetime's work.