DRESSED for action in a white T-shirt, denim overalls, safety goggles and a bright yellow rubber apron and boots, Philippe Soler grasps the nozzle of a high-pressure tank and aims it at a mess of graffiti. As he guides a spray of warm water up and down a 4-foot-by-8-foot panel, rivulets of thick latex paint wash away, revealing a softly colored, stony surface. Within a few minutes, a graceful composition of hard-edged shapes begins to appear.
"It's like a treasure hunt," says Andrea Morse, president and chief conservator of the Sculpture Conservation Studio in West Los Angeles. But there's no doubt about what lies under the garish paint. Soler is working on one of 60 panels that compose "The History of Transportation," a 240-foot-long mural made by the late Los Angeles artist Helen Lundeberg. The artwork, which ran along a busy thoroughfare bordering a park in Inglewood, is a pictorial panorama that begins with Native Americans on foot and ends with passengers boarding a DC-3 aircraft.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday March 11, 2004 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 50 words Type of Material: Correction
Railway name -- An article in the Jan. 11 Sunday Calendar on the restoration and relocation of a historic mural by Helen Lundeberg gave an incorrect name for an electric railway that ran near the mural in 1940. The railway's name was Los Angeles Railway, not Pacific Electric Street Railway.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday March 14, 2004 Home Edition Sunday Calendar Part E Page 2 Calendar Desk 1 inches; 50 words Type of Material: Correction
Railway name -- An article in the Jan. 11 Sunday Calendar on the restoration and relocation of a historic mural by Helen Lundeberg gave an incorrect name for an electric railway that ran near the mural in 1940. The railway's name was Los Angeles Railway, not Pacific Electric Street Railway.
The enormous mural was born of Depression-era goodwill -- and built to last. Commissioned in 1939 by the Work Projects Administration's Federal Art Project, Lundeberg executed her design in petrachrome, a sturdy material that resembles terrazzo. In 1940 when the first panel was installed, The Times reported that the $30,000 mural would "withstand the wear of the ages and should last as long as the remaining great monuments of antiquity."
But less than 50 years later "The History of Transportation" had nearly died of abuse. It had been hit on the front by speeding cars, smacked on the back by forklifts moving caskets at the adjacent Enderle Vault Co. and cracked along vertical lines by rebar pulling away from the concrete backing. Weather and pollution also had taken a toll, but the most intractable and unsightly problem was perpetrated by gang members who had buried Lundeberg's art in layer upon layer of graffiti, effectively turning the historic mural into a billboard for their violent subculture.
Lundeberg, who died in 1999 at 91, took all this in stride. But eventually, Inglewood did not. An effort to restore the mural languished for nearly a decade, but now a $1-million conservation and relocation project is underway and expected to be complete this fall. Spearheaded by a citizens' group, supported by city officials and financed by state funds, the project will restore the mural and give it a place of honor at the new Grevillea Art Park, near Inglewood's City Hall, Central Library and High School.
"This project is great for the community," says Kevin L. Hawkins, director of the city's department of parks, recreation and community services. "Everybody is on board for something that is not political, which is a victory in and of itself. The mural is a precious treasure that has spawned something incredible."
FORM AND CONTENT
The artist who created the object of all this excitement was born in Chicago in 1908 and moved to Southern California with her family when she was a child. She studied art at the Stickney Memorial Arts School in Pasadena and married her teacher, painter Lorser Feitelson. In 1934, they jointly founded a Modernist movement that advocated integrating form and content in a new aesthetic order, variously known as New Classicism, Subjective Classicism or Post-Surrealism. But they are best known for separate bodies of work: Feitelson's painting evolved into pure form and color; Lundeberg's explorations led to quiet, abstract mergers of landscape and still life.
Struggling to make a living during the Depression, Lundeberg landed commissions for several government-funded murals and executed them in keeping with the notion that public art should deliver a simple message in a representational style. One of about 200 artists who created WPA murals in California from 1935 to 1943, she was delighted to have a job -- even if it took her away from her independent work.
"Altogether, it was a great thing for most artists," Lundeberg told Eleanor Munro, author of the 1979 book "Originals: American Women Artists." "My being an artist had been a worrisome thing for my family. But the project saved the day."
In "The History of Transportation," her largest mural, she laid out a progression of life-size characters in a flat, poster-like style -- but only after doing considerable research on her subject. She first worked up a color sketch of the entire artwork, then enlarged the sketch to a full-scale cartoon, with colors coded by numbers, and traced it onto shellacked wood panels.
Next, the artist and her assistants outlined shapes of the composition with brass strips and covered them with plasticine to create temporary, nonstick borders between different colored sections. Then they filled in the spaces with a wet mixture of crushed rock aggregates embedded in tinted mortar. Known as petrachrome, it was developed for murals by artist Stanton Macdonald-Wright, who directed Southern California's WPA art projects.
