Victor Mikhailovich Arnautoff (Russian: Виктор Михайлович Арнаутов; November 11, 1896 – March 22, 1979) was a Russian-American painter and professor of art. He worked in San Francisco and the Bay Area from 1925 to 1963, including two decades as a teacher at Stanford University, and was particularly prolific as a muralist during the 1930s. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen, but returned to the Soviet Union after the death of his wife, continuing his career there before his death.
Victor Mikhailovich Arnautoff (Russian: Виктор Михайлович Арнаутов; November 11, 1896 – March 22, 1979) was a Russian-American painter and professor of art. He worked in San Francisco and the Bay Area from 1925 to 1963, including two decades as a teacher at Stanford University, and was particularly prolific as a muralist during the 1930s. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen, but returned to the Soviet Union after the death of his wife, continuing his career there before his death.
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Early life in Russia and China Arnautoff was the son of a Russian Orthodox priest. He showed a talent for art from an early age and hoped to study art after graduating from the gymnasium in Mariupol. With the outbreak of World War I, he enrolled in the Yelizavetgrad Cavalry School. He went on to hold military leadership positions in the army of Nicholas II and the White Siberian Army, and was repeatedly awarded medals for his service. While in cavalry school, he learned fencing, which would remain a hobby throughout his life. With the defeat of the Whites in Siberia, he crossed into northeastern China and surrendered his weapons. He remained in China for five years. He again tried to pursue art, signing up for schooling in Harbin, but was impoverished and took a position training the cavalry of (and possibly fighting for) the warlord Zhang Zuolin. While serving the warlord in Mukden, China, he met and married Lydia Blonsky and they had two sons, Michael and Vasily. Schooling and early work in San Francisco and Mexico In November 1925 Arnautoff went to San Francisco on a student visa to study at the California School of Fine Arts. There…
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Work in the Bay Area In 1931 the family returned to San Francisco. Arnautoff's first significant work after returning was a mural on the wall of his studio, which he opened to the public. Shortly afterward, he completed his first mural commission, for the Palo Alto Medical Clinic in Palo Alto (where he had been a patient) in August 1932. Arnautoff's mural series was in the historical Roth building, all were medically-themed murals done in the recessed under a loggia with four panels of modern medicine and other panels showing primitive medicine, and additionally he four painted medallions of Joseph Lister, Hippocrates, Louis Pasteur, and Wilhelm Röntgen are on the exterior wall of the loggia. The four murals done in color feature modern medicine and depict Luther Emmett Holt, William Osler, and Harvey Cushing. The unveiling of this mural caused a traffic jam and some controversy, in part because one of the murals showed a doctor examining a female patient whose bare breasts were at eye-level. Like his other works in the Bay Area, the murals were frescoes. In 1934 he was chosen to paint one of the murals to be done at Coit Tower in San Francisco, with funding…
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Teaching and political activity Arnautoff taught sculpture and fresco painting privately and at the California School of Fine Arts, first during summer sessions and as a regular instructor beginning in 1936. He taught art at Stanford University from 1938 to 1962. Beginning in 1947, he also taught art courses at the California Labor School, including printmaking. At Stanford, Richard Diebenkorn was one of his students; Diebenkorn considered Arnautoff a mentor and admired his intellectual and political stances. Beginning with his association with Rivera, Arnautoff's political views moved to the left, and he joined the Communist Party as well as the American Artists' Congress and the San Francisco Artists and Writers Union. His style was generally more subtle than Rivera's and other social realists, but his politics were nevertheless reflected in his work, which has been described as being part of a mural arts movement that "hoped to inspire change through criticism of the present political system". In 1955, an Arnautoff lithograph titled "DIX McSmear", associating Vice President Richard Nixon with McCarthyism, created controversy. As a result, there were calls for Stanford to dismiss him. The lithograph was then used as the cover for an issue of The Nation. After he…
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Life of Washington mural controversy Since at least 1968, Arnautoff's 13 fresco murals at George Washington High School, collectively titled Life of Washington, have been controversial due to their depiction of slaves and a dead Native American. Arnautoff placed slaves and working people in the center of several of the panels, rather than Washington, and in the words of Arnautoff's biographer, "the mural makes clear that slave labor provide[d] the plantation's economic basis", at a time when high school history classes "ignored... that the nation's founders... owned other human beings as chattel". Similarly, Arnautoff placed the body of a dead Native American at the feet of pioneers, "challenging the prevailing narrative that westward expansion had been into largely vacant territory waiting for white pioneers to develop its full potential". After the 1968 protests, when new, complementary murals were painted by Dewey Crumpler, Arnautoff indicated he was glad his work had "provided the impetus for this new progressive work". In 2019, a new wave of criticism caused the San Francisco school board to announce plans to paint over the murals, on grounds that these depictions sent a racist message. The San Francisco Board of Education voted in June 2019 to develop…
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In California
Fresco murals of medical clinic (1932), Roth Building, 300 Homer St, Palo Alto, California, United States
Peacetime Activities of the Army (1935) fresco mural, Presidio Chapel, San Francisco, California, United States
Exterior reliefs and the controversial 13 fresco murals "Life of Washington" (1936), George Washington High School, San Francisco, California, United States
Urban Life mural, Coit Tower, San Francisco, California, United States
Lovers' Point (1940), oil on canvas post office mural, Pacific Grove, California, United States
Richmond Industrial City (1941), oil on canvas post office mural, Richmond, California, United States
South San Francisco, Past and Present (1941), oil on canvas post office mural, South San Francisco, California, United States
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Other locations
The Last Crop (1938) post office mural, Linden, Texas, United States
Post Office and School No. 54, Mariupol, Ukraine
