Plymouth: The Process
In April 1935, an internal Treasury Department memorandum was sent from the Office of the Supervising Architect to the Director of Procurement, outlining proposed mural work for the new post office in Plymouth, Michigan. The mural was slated to be twelve feet wide and five feet high. Two years later, in October 1937, a second memorandum was sent from the same office in conjunction with the Section of Painting and Sculpture, stating that “on the basis of competent work executed under the Treasury Department Art Projects by Carlos Lopez the Section of Painting and Sculpture wishes to invite this artist to submit designs for the mural decoration in the Plymouth, Michigan, Post Office.”
Shortly thereafter, Section administrator Edward Rowan wrote to Lopez to invite him to submit designs. Rowan detailed the project, writing that the proposed mural was to be designed for a space at one end of the public lobby and would sit above the postmaster’s door. Rowan advised Lopez to submit several pencil sketches to start. He would then be asked to submit a required color sketch of the chosen design at the scale of two inches to the foot. Rowan also advised that Lopez visit the post office to meet with the postmaster. Finally, he suggested that the subject matter of the mural “[embody] some idea appropriate to the building or to the particular locale of Plymouth.” Rowan noted that a contract would be prepared, with Lopez’s pay amounting to $700–with $200 paid when preliminary sketches were approved, another $200 paid when one half was complete, and the final $300 paid once the entire mural was complete, installed, and approved. The work was to be completed by May 31, 1938.
In early November, Lopez responded to Rowan accepting the invitation and noting that he would visit the post office the following weekend and start designs immediately. He was enthusiastic about the project, noting that the post office was located just fifteen miles from his home in Royal Oak. Late that month, Lopez mailed four pencil sketches to Rowan, each one a different proposal for the Plymouth mural.
The first sketch, as described by Lopez, showed Plymouth in the 1870s when the railroad was built through the town. There is a horse, “excited and scared of the big iron monster.” While the horse was meant to show the “slow-moving times,” the “engine going in the opposite direction from the horse represents progress.” A group of boys–meant to represent the youngest generation of Americans–were drawn running toward the train, “always ready to grasp new ideas and inventions.” Finally, “open fields in the background show the, as yet, unsettled land.” Lopez wrote that he believed this sketch to be the best choice, for it was “happy and cheerful” and he thought it would not “bring bad comments.”
Lopez described his second sketch as a “symbolical representation of communication.” It seems that this, for Lopez, may have meant communication across racialized difference and across geographic space. He wrote that hands were the subject of the sketch, and that they “represent the different races of man, reaching for the symbols of civilization” in the center of the panel. The top of the mural contained “icy mountains” to represent “North,” and the bottom, “a South sea island.” The sketch also contained a dove, meant to symbolize “peace and understanding among men that can only come about through communication, in which the post-office plays such a great part.” Lopez noted that he believed this second sketch would also be a good idea for a mural but that he was quite nervous about how it would be received by Plymouth residents. Lopez’s hesitation stemmed from the “terrible criticisms Diego Rivera’s hands received here in Detroit” just a few years earlier. Rivera’s Detroit Industry murals, which he painted at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1932 and 1933, depict varyingly racialized disembodied hands emerging from the earth and pulling chunks of its minerals from the ground. One of these hands forms a fist. The panels of hands are suggestive of international solidarity amongst the labor force involved in the extraction of metals that bolstered Ford’s production of cars in Detroit. The murals were met with fervent racist and anti-communist backlash amongst wealthy white Detroit residents.
Lopez wrote less extensively on his third and fourth sketches, but he noted that each showed a historic scene of Plymouth. The third sketch (image 1) showed a “view of Plymouth, MI, in the days of the stagecoach. The small building in the center was the town’s hardware store and post-office. The building on the extreme left is the old Plymouth Hotel.” The fourth depicted a fire that destroyed Plymouth’s commercial area in the 1880s.
On the final day of November, Rowan responded to Lopez and without including any explanation for his choice, stated that Lopez’s third sketch was selected–a sketch that Lopez seemed less enthusiastic about than his sketches showing the railroad or the hands of global communication. Rowan provided some feedback, too, on Lopez’s sketch, writing that the axle of the coach appeared to be broken. He also asked Lopez to fill out a form with the title, exact dimensions, and medium of the mural in order to draw up a contract.
In late January 1938, Lopez mailed Rowan his color sketch of the mural, and Rowan approved the sketch, instructing Lopez to proceed with a full scale cartoon. He warned Lopez that he felt that the previous mural of a stagecoach that Lopez painted in Dwight, Illinois, had a “lack of finish” and requested that Lopez make sure that “the high quality of this color sketch [is] carried out in the finished work”. It seems that Lopez never completed the form that Rowan requested he fill out, and thus his contract was delayed. However, the details of the plans for the mural were communicated between the two men over the next few months and the contract was signed in early February. In regards to the title of the work, Rowan suggested the name “Detroit Free Press” for the mural, referencing the newspaper held by a man in the foreground of the scene of Lopez’s color sketch. Lopez elected instead to name the mural Plymouth Trail. There was much communication between the Plymouth postmaster, Rowan, and the Office of the Supervising Architect on the state of the post office’s walls and Lopez’s plan to paint fresco murals directly on the office’s wall, and thus, to remove the wall’s plaster and replace it just before beginning to paint. Fresco seco murals were Lopez’s chosen method of painting for Section murals–the process consisted of laying new, fresh plaster, and painting that plaster with water-based pigments, which integrated with the still-setting substrate. There was likewise discussion of the repainting of molding in the office’s lobby and the condition of the building’s walls.
Lopez sent the full-size cartoon of his work to Rowan in early February (image 2), and noted that he would begin removing plaster from the post office’s walls that week. Rowan wrote back to Lopez on the 23 of the month, stating that the cartoon appeared rushed and that he wished for Lopez to redo it. However, Lopez had already pounced the cartoon–tracing the drawing’s lines onto the wall through perforated holes–on the freshly plastered wall on which he would paint and had begun work. He wrote to Rowan confessing that he had been working on the wall for ten days already, but also stated that he had already made corrections on the problem areas that Rowan identified in the cartoon–some of which included the horses’ necks being too long and the boy and men at the left of the scene appearing too small. He explained that the cartoon looked unfinished because he viewed cartoons for fresco murals as a plan without detail. He noted that he pounced the cartoon on the wall as a guide, but would then redraw the whole thing from the color sketch. He felt that this practice gives a mural more life. Lopez did seem concerned that Rowan may not approve of his use of the original cartoon, and he halted his work on the wall, mailing Rowan photographs of his progress to approve before he would continue. Finally, in late March, Rowan wrote to Lopez approving his work and stating that he may continue.
Soon, though, another issue arose for Lopez. A few days after he began work again, the postmaster at Plymouth reported to the Postmaster General’s office that Lopez had included imagery of a newspaper in his mural with the heading “Detroit Free Press”. Alarm bells were rung that such an inclusion constituted an advertisement, which was a violation of Section 434 of the Postal Laws and Regulations of 1932, disallowing advertisements for any private business in the public exhibitions or decorations of post offices. On April 1, Rowan wrote to Lopez notifying him of this violation and requesting that he repaint the area of the mural, “entirely eliminating any printing which can be constituted as an advertisement.” Lopez wrote back to Rowan with an apologetic tone, noting that the included newspaper was meant as a historic reference and was based on a copy of the paper from 1864. He wrote that he would change the image by “folding the paper in such a way that the headlines will not be visible at all.” In the finished mural, rather than repainting the section, Lopez smudged the title of the newspaper, making its text illegible. Despite this hiccup, Lopez notified Rowan on April 17 that the mural was nearly complete. He submitted a photograph of the work on April 28. (Image 3)
While the mural was complete, correspondence regarding the authorization of Lopez’s pay continued. In May, Rowan requested the Plymouth postmaster issue a statement of completion. On June 1, 1938, Lopez wrote to Rowan politely requesting his pay and inquiring about future work with the Section–a letter that offers us a reminder of the context of Lopez’s position as an artist hired on a New Deal project during the Great Depression. The postmaster at Plymouth finally submitted a statement on the mural’s completion on June 18, and Lopez’s pay was authorized at the end of the month, two months after he completed his work.
Sources
- Alex Goodall, “The Battle of Detroit and Anti-Communism in the Depression Era.” The Historical Journal 51, no. 2 (2008): 457-480.
- “Plymouth.” Box 51, Case Files Concerning Embellishments of Public Buildings, 1934-1943, Entry 133, Records of the Public Buildings Service, Record Group 121, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland.
