Last piece of Cedar Rapids City Hall mural revealed

CEDAR RAPIDS - Depression-era art that public officials twice decided was not worth seeing is now in full view at City Hall.

Scott Haskins, president and chief conservator of the company working to restore the mural, the Fine Arts Conservation Laboratories of Santa Barbara, Calif., said Tuesday that city officials will like this last section of the restoration the most because it shows a community in tough times providing services to residents.

There is food for the Depression-era poor, help for the jobless, construction projects underway and police officers and firefighters providing public safety.

The four-wall mural was painted by artists who were contemporaries of Grant Wood but who did not embrace Wood's bucolic sense of Iowa as they painted under contract with the federal government during the Great Depression.

The mural covers the top section of walls in what had been a federal courtroom but is now the City Council chambers. Twice since the mural was painted in the mid-1930s, federal court officials decided to hide it beneath a coat of paint because of the content of some of the images, and then because the art was not thought to have much value.

The city undertook the restoration, wall by wall, when it took over the former courthouse building in 2011. The four-year project will be complete on the last of the walls at the end of the week.

A section on the east wall, which included the depiction of a hanging directly across from the then-courtroom's jury box, helped prompt the mural to be painted over in 1951.

That section also featured an image of a physician consulting with a naked patient surrounded by the newspaper headlines 'Sweden Defeats Syphilis” and 'Play Ball.”

Haskins said it was likely that the suggestion of 'unbridled sex” helped 'fuel the fire” of objections about the art that had started with the hanging scene. That led to the entire mural being painted over the first time. In the early 1960s, the art was uncovered, briefly examined and then covered over again.

In restoration work in April, Haskins and his staff discovered that the offending newspaper headlines had been removed completely at some point before the mural was covered up. He and city officials decided to recreate the headlines, but without the original color so people would know they had been restored.

The for sections of the mural were intended to be viewed together as a statement by the artists about law and culture in Iowa. But Haskins said it is not unusual for the taste in art to change and for those who come later to paint over it.

Earlier this year, Cedar Rapids artist Mel Andringa said the best art of the mural is on the north wall, which was situated behind the judge's bench when the room was a courtroom and is now behind the City Council dais. This section depicts Native Americans forced from the land and the work of slaves and laborers in juxtaposition to military forts, the family farm and the arrival of industry.

'If you said (today) that was what you were going to put behind the City Council, there would be an outrage,” Andringa said. 'But that's what sits behind the City Council.”

Seth Gunnerson, a planner with the Community Development Department, said the restoration has cost about $500,000. Private donations and federal, state and city funds have paid for the project.