by Greg Mayer

In tomorrow’s New York Times (online now), Bari Weiss writes about a decision by the San Francisco School Board to destroy a mural by Victor Arnautoff, a Russian-American-Russian artist who taught at Stanford from 1938 to 1962.

Arnautoff led an interesting life. He was a White cavalry officer in the Russian Civil War, a mercenary in China, and, after immigrating to the United States, became an ardent Communist. He repeatedly applied to return to the Soviet Union during the depths of Stalinism, but was denied. During World War II, he became a pro-Russian activist following the falling out between Hitler and Stalin. Finally, the Soviets relented, and he returned to Russia in 1963.

During his long sojourn in California, Arnautoff painted many murals, including a series at George Washington High School in San Francisco. As might be expected from a staunch leftist, the murals are unsentimental– they show that slaves were an economic linchpin of colonial Virginia, and that pioneer expansion meant the death and displacement of the Indians.

Now, these murals are to be destroyed in order to insure that students “are mentally and emotionally feeling safe at their schools,” and because the murals do not reflect “social justice”. Weiss points out the great irony in destroying a work of art that is an explicit critique of hagiographic and rosy views of Washington and American history in the name of social justice. And, needless to say, it is not white students who are to be made safe from being exposed to Washington’s faults, but rather non-white students who are to be made safe.

Both students and alumni oppose the destruction, and the mindlessness of the Board is made evident when Weiss points out that the vice president of the school’s alumni association, Lope Yap, who is Filipino, is accused of being a “white supremacist”!

Weiss, insightfully in my view, refers to this as an incident of “progressive Puritanism”. The Puritanical mindset, once the province of the right, has now become a mainstay of the woke left: unacceptable opinions and art must be banned.

An aspect of Arnautoff’s life that Weiss does not emphasize is his role in helping establish principles of academic freedom at Stanford University. Arnautoff’s work often contained political statements and social critique, and even, on occasion– heaven forfend!– bare female breasts (the angst over which is another link to Puritanism), and thus led to controversy. His Washington murals were in this style. Historian Robert Cherny describes them this way:

In the murals, Arnautoff implicitly challenged the version of U.S. history then typical in American high schools. In depicting Mount Vernon, Arnautoff literally marginalized Washington and put enslaved African Americans in the center of one of the scenes. The mural presented a counter-narrative to most high-school histories of the time, which tended to ignore the existence of slaves at Mount Vernon, as well as the paradox of slaveholders fighting for the principle that all men are created equal. Another large mural presents Washington pointing the nation to the West. Again, however, Arnautoff’s counter-narrative makes it dramatically clear that the way west was over the body of a dead Indian.

A lithograph entitled DIX McSmear, caricaturing then Vice President Richard Nixon and McCarthyism, was removed from the San Francisco Art Festival. Eventually, Arnautoff was investigated by both Stanford University and the House Un-American Activities Committee (which Arnautoff cheekily referred to as the “Un-American Sub-Committee”). In a response to the Committee, Arnautoff wrote

Do they [the Committee] consider an artist’s colors, brushes, crayons and pencils as murderous tools? If they do, it is a new low in right-wing thinking, and it is time for the American people—and especially for American artists—to be concerned with a threat that affects everyone as fully as it does me. I value my freedoms, and I intend to defend my rights as a citizen and as an artist, and to express my belief in American principles in the future as I have in the past.

Stanford instigated a second investigation of Arnautoff after this. Detailed records no longer exist, but Arnautoff apparently scored a major victory. Not only was he neither disciplined nor dismissed by Stanford, he got a 15.5% raise! (Arnautoff had raised the issue of low salaries for humanities faculty during the investigation.)

Cherny summarizes, “The lack of any suggestion of incompetence or bias in Arnautoff’s teaching effectively undercut the arguments of those who claimed that a [Communist] party member was inevitably an incompetent teacher.”

And when a while later local papers criticized Arnautoff, Stanford now came to his defense:

The right of free speech and free thought is a very important part of a strong democracy; it is easy to lose this privilege if we do not defend the right of people to hold views which differ radically from those held by most of us.

In Arnautoff’s heyday he was attacked by the right; now he is attacked by alleged leftists. But his critics share the same Puritanical mindset. Arnautoff is perhaps not an unmixed hero– a Stalinist who demanded the rights of an American while secretly renouncing his American citizenship so as to return to the Soviet Union– but in his defense of art and academic freedom, he was absolutely right. As Churchill said, if Hitler invaded hell, he would at least say something nice about the Devil in the Commons.

Cherny, R.W. 2017. “No proven Communist should hold a position at Stanford”: Victor Mikhail Arnautoff, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Stanford. Sandstone & Tile 37(3): 3-18. (The journal of the Stanford Historical Society.) pdf