Publicized Murals

Mural paintings are usually unveiled with only a little more fanfare than attends the effort of a carpenter putting the last lick on the last nail in a wall. But in San Francisco and in Swarthmore, Pa. last week, two new murals were opened to the public in the midst of such community excitement that the paintings themselves were all but lost sight of.

The San Francisco mural at Fleishhacker Zoo was a big, bright-colored affair done in egg tempera,*portraying the story of Noah and the Ark. The work of Dorothy Puccinelli and Helen Forbes, it showed pretty animals embarking and debarking, a highly stylized Noah. But if the mural was restrained, its dedication was not: school children dressed as animals re-enacted the story of the flood, 2,000 pigeons were released during the ceremony.

At Swarthmore, visitors had almost as much trouble seeing the paintings for the fogs of publicity. Two years ago, bashful James Egleson, then 29, got permission to paint an anti-war mural on the walls of a good-sized lecture room in Swarthmore College. An engineer who turned to painting when his eyes began to fail, studied under Jose Clemente Orozco, Artist-Engineer Egleson kept the lecture room locked while he worked, breeding stories that conservative graduates were trying to have the murals suppressed.

When the doors were unlocked last week, the legends evaporated. Painted in true fresco/- in warm and rich greys, browns and purples, the mural dramatized the productive and destructive possibilities of science with contrasting machines for war and peace, gears and shells, bombs and books, live workers and dead soldiers. Obviously inspired by Orozco, it differs from the Mexican's work in the technical exactitude with which Engineer Egleson painted factories and machinery, the sobriety of the human figures, wooden in comparison with Orozco's energetic and muscular people.

*Eggs used as pigment binder, painted on a dry surface.

/-Painting with watercolor paints on wet plaster.

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