Michigan Post Office Murals Project

Plymouth: The Mural

Carlos Lopez’s Plymouth Trail was described by a Plymouth news article praising the mural when it was completed in 1938 as “an arresting display representing the development of the methods of carrying the mail from the early days of the city up to the present.” (Image 1)

Looking at the many elements of the busy panels showing modes of transportation–from the stagecoach to the railroad–in relation to one another reveals Lopez’s style in this work to be quite varied. While Lopez depicted the coach, the horses pulling it, and the faces of a few townspeople with dimension and detail, he represented many of the mural’s elements using flat fields of color, simple shapes, and black line work. A cat runs behind the horses’ legs with a tail that is made of just six lines of black pigment brushed across the field of brown dirt below. In the same vein, in the center panel of the lower scenes, Lopez painted black lines of pigment onto his white plaster base to create an outlined drawing of horses pulling a carriage in front of a house. Much of this scene was left untouched beyond this black outline, with no further painting added and the plaster left exposed; where green, blue, or burnt red pigment was added to the scene to become leaves, sky, and brick, the fields of color were brushed on gesturally. Into the plaster below these brushstroke-filled fields of color, Lopez used a sharp tool to etch lines that form the pattern of brickwork on his red walls, of a grid on one man’s gray suit, and of the ornate detailing of the wooden carriage. The combination of detailed renderings, gestural black lines, brushy fields of color, and etched white linework makes for a complex work of many disparate elements depicted using varying techniques–a quality that caused Rowan to express to Lopez the following year that he worried Lopez “[hurried] the final painting a little too much for a wall decoration.”

While Lopez’s style for the work is highly variable from element to element, as a whole, the mural’s main scene fits neatly within the context of other Section works’ romantic depictions of nineteenth century agrarian America–one similar example was also painted by Lopez for the post office in Dwight, Illinois. This chosen historic proposal, though echoing his previous work for the Section, was less exciting to Lopez than two other sketches he made for the Plymouth work–one, a composition celebrating the railroad, industry, and “progress,” and the other, a sketch inspired by Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry murals, that like its predecessor engaged in a politics of international solidarity across racial and geographic bounds (see Process).

While Plymouth Trail cannot be read as suggestive of Left political thought in such an overt way as this latter sketch, there is a thread running through Lopez’s proposals of the importance of international connectivity. It is interesting to understand such a theme in the context of Lopez’s identity as a Spanish-American artist painting the work during the Spanish Civil War while living in the United States. The mural highlights not just the delivery of mail but likewise, the distribution of the Detroit Free Press. In the foreground, a group of men gather around the paper, reading it, while in the back, a man on the stagecoach hands a bundle of papers to a woman standing on the street. Plymouth Trail might thus be understood as a scene that–through his emphasis on the logistical networks past and present upholding the dispersal of information across space–reveals Lopez’s ties to a world beyond Michigan.

While the connection between Plymouth Trail and Lopez’s sketch of hands was purely thematic, it seems that Lopez completed a miniature version of his sketch focused on the railroad–the scene he most hoped to paint in Plymouth–in the three small lower scenes of Plymouth Trail. In the middle panel (image 2), Lopez centers on a detailed rendering of a train–the “big iron monster” he had hoped to make the focus of the mural as a whole–that cuts across the panel’s composition. In the panel on the left (image 3), Lopez painted a lone man cutting timber from a forest occupied by deer, bears, and a wolf–the “as yet, unsettled land” that Lopez described hoping to paint for Plymouth.

The final panel, though, has a scene that was not mentioned in Lopez’s description of his railroad sketch. This panel seems to show the Plymouth of the 1930s that Lopez knew, located just miles from his home and studio. (Image 4) It is a departure from his romanticization of settler colonialism in Michigan through time, giving way to a depiction of then-contemporary life in Michigan during the Great Depression. In this panel, which shows Plymouth’s subsumption into the industrial landscape of the Detroit metro area at the time, smoke billows from the stacks of a factory in the distance while a migrant worker sits slumped over himself inside an empty train car in the foreground. The silhouette of a woman carrying a sack on her shoulders with one hand and holding the hand of a child with the other is painted roughly in black pigment. This final scene, a depiction of the alienation of life under capitalism in Lopez’s Michigan of the 1930s, stands in stark contrast with the rest of the work’s celebration of Plymouth’s past. This final panel in its bottom right corner is signed in thin white lines etched into plaster: “Carlos Lopez 1938.”