Lucien Labaudt

Labaudt was born in Paris on May 14, 1880, and came to New York in 1906. He soon went to Nashville to take a job designing costumes for the theater, and moved to San Francisco in 1910 with his first wife and young daughter. He became the lead designer for the old City of Paris department store on Union Square (site today of Neiman Marcus) and was responsible for the elaborate designs of the city's major society balls, along with his second wife, Marcelle Duchamps, who was a student at his school before they married. Labaudt was a self-taught fresco artist who was inspired after seeing paintings of Cezanne and Seurat. He is credited with introducing modern art to California. He worked in a Cubist style for some time and then helped launch the "Post-Surrealist" movement along with friends Helen Lundeberg and Lorser Feitelson. He produced a large body of work, much of which is owned by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the vast majority is in storage, however, and little has been digitized, making it extremely difficult to see his different styles and subjects outside the Coit Tower and Beach Chalet murals he did for the WPA in 1936-1937. 

Labaudt, like many artists (including Frede Vidar) joined the Army in WWII as a combat artist and illustrator. After a two-month crossing of the Pacific in a troop transport in late 1943, he arrived in New Delhi to await transit to his war posting. After much cajoling from the local commanding general, an old friend, Labaudt secured an assignment to the China theater - an assignment that had been meant for the general himself. It would have been the realization of a life-long dream to paint in that country. Along with all his shipboard work and materials, Labaudt boarded a four-engine plane on December 12, 1943, bound for Assam, India on the first leg of his journey. The aircraft was being flown by a fighter pilot, a captain who, though uncertified on the larger plane, pulled rank on the lieutenant assigned as the pilot and took the controls. He crashed the plane 800 yards short of the runway, killing everyone on board. All of Labaudt's work was lost in the accident. He was buried in the military cemetery nearby, aged 63.

Works in Coit Tower:

Powell Street