Dorothea Lange. Walker Evans. Coit Tower muralist Victor Arnautoff. Works Progress Administration (WPA) artists have often become household names, known for their searing documentation of social issues during the Great Depression.
Yet Reuben Kadish’s “A Dissertation on Alchemy,” a 1937 mural that will be dedicated at the Haight Street Art Center Thursday after an extensive restoration, breaks the mold.
A surrealist work—and one of Kadish’s few surviving pieces after a studio fire destroyed the majority of his abstract expressionist paintings—it stands alone in the straightforward, often socialist-leaning WPA oeuvre.
“They were too flamboyant,” Kadish said of the designs he submitted to the WPA (“Alchemy” was the only one of the 20-some he created that was selected).
Not that “Alchemy” doesn’t have its own serious story to tell, one just as complex as class struggle.
“It’s about finding value in yourself and others,” said Gail Baugh, co-chair of the Victorian Alliance of San Francisco, which raised $20,000 for the mural’s restoration—“and about what really matters in life.”