Russian émigré artist Anatol Shulkin painted American Life as a statement about the cultural incongruities plaguing his adopted country during the Great Depression. By the mid-1930s, Shulkin perceived New York City as center stage for these forces, allusions to which he wove through his twenty-eight-foot mural as a series of tabloid-like vignettes depicting an urban society brewing with unrest, glamour, corruption, and tumultuous energy. The provocative results, all the more noteworthy because the piece represented the artist's trial venture into mural painting, demonstrate the fusion of powerful design, compelling social content, and heroic scale that boosted popular interest in mural painting during the 1930s.

The privileged position that murals would claim over the decade was aided, to a large degree, by federally financed programs offering relief to unemployed artists while securing decoration for the walls of public buildings. Shulkin's commission, however, fell outside that network of government patronage. The main dining room of the Barbizon-Plaza Hotel at 106 Central Park South, erected in 1930, was the seemingly unlikely backdrop for American Life. Although the specific circumstances of the mural's arrival within the establishment's stylish Art Deco interior are unrecorded, its placement may be attributable to the hotel's receptivity to contemporary art, inferred by its billing as New York's "first fully equipped music-artist residence center," complete with two concert auditoriums, a library, art studios, and exhibition rooms catering to creative tenants.¹ The work's installation in 1934 coincided with Shulkin's own residency there. More significant was the Barbizon-Plaza's concurrent service as host to An American Group, an organization activated in 1931 to arrange show space for "individualistic" artwork with "something to say" and consequently foreclosed from traditional gallery venues.² The hotel facilitated exhibitions for the group for three seasons before its members opted to turn their programs over to professional gallery management. The provocative mood of Shulkin's mural, though not necessarily suited to whetting patron's appetites, apparently was more tolerable for a hotel than the American Group artists, to whom uncensored expression was paramount.³

For his grand opus, Shulkin marshaled figures and symbols that embodied the polymorphic culture of Depression-era New York. These he welded into a dense, rhythmical design that delivers a cumulative portrait of the decadence, confusion, and economic and racial strains afflicting the city. Framing the composition, at far left, a trio of Salvation Army volunteers tries, futilely, to attract attention to their cause outside the well-guarded entrance of a pleasure resort. Inside -as the eye shifts right -a porcine politician, or "swell,"

Notes:

  1  For a brief history of the Barbizon-Plaza Hotel, designed by Murgatroyd and Ogden, see Carter B. Horsley, "Upgrading Under Way in Central Park South Hotels," New York Times,

February 25, 1973; and W. Parker Chase, New York, The Wonder City, 1932 (New York: Wonder City Publishing, 1932), p. 139. Although the hotel had street-front footage on stylish Central Park South, where the building's entrance was located, the majority of the building fronted on West 58th Street.

  2  The six pioneering members of An American Group were Shulkin, Jacob Getlar Smith, Chuzo Tamotzu, Stuart Edie, Robert Phillip, and Frederic Knight. By the decade's end, membership had expanded and the group's annual exhibitions had been committed to the Seligmann Gallery in New York. See Ernest Brace, "An American Group," Magazine of Art 31 (May 1938): 271 -275.

  3  At least one critic of the period singled out the hotel management for its progressivism in facilitating the installation of Shulkin's mural: "The management of the Barbizon-Plaza should be congratulated on its discrimination in approving a modern, creative, plastic artist as against a naturalistic recorder of actualities as the logical decorator of walls and for its broad-mindedness in avoiding censorship." Ralph M. Pearson, "Mural by Anatol Shulkin, in the Dining Room of the Barbizon-Plaza/Central Park South at Sixth Avenue," 1934, original pamphlet in the Shulkin files of the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, microfilm roll N/AG8.

  4  For a sample of critical commentary about Shulkin's mural at the time of its installation, see Carlyle Burrows, New York Herald-Tribune, April 24, 1934, and May 13, 1934; Henry McBride, New York Sun, May 17, 1934; Melville Upton, New York Sun, May 17, 1934; and Margaret Breuning,New York Evening Post, April 16, 1932. These and other contemporaneous clippings appear in Shulkin's files at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, roll N/AG8, frames 765 -771.

  5  Without the precedent of the Mexican mural movement, scholar Greta Berman has observed, "mural painting in the United States might easily have taken an entirely different direction, if it was to develop at all." For an analysis of the Mexican influence on American muralists of Shulkin's generation, see Greta Berman, The Lost Years: Mural Painting in New York City under the WPA Federal Art Project, 1935 -1943 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1978), p. 77.

  6  For numerous clippings and biographical entries on the artist, see the Museum Archives.

  7  Shulkin's obituary ("Anatol Shulkin, Painter, Was 60," New York Times, Nov. 22, 1961) noted that his first exhibition at the Art Center Gallery, in 1927, had included a rush-hour scene titled Half Past Five, reportedly the first of a series of paintings Shulkin planned on New York.