Victor Arnautoff

Victor Mikhail Arnautoff was born in Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, on November 11, 1896. He served as a Cavalry officer in the army of Czar Nicholas II; when the Bolshevik Revolution erupted he fled to Manchuria, then left for the U.S. in 1925. He attended the CSFA and learned fresco painting from Ray Boynton and then, from 1929 to 1931, assisted Diego Rivera in Mexico and actually supervised some of Rivera's murals while Rivera was in San Francisco. In addition to his mural at Coit Tower, Arnautoff painted murals in the Presidio Chapel, George Washington High School, the Palo Alto Clinic and in several Post Offices including Richmond, Pacific Grove and South San Francisco. He became an American citizen and served as a professor of art at Stanford, but his politics continued to move to the left and he barely survived a HUAC investigation and calls for his ouster from Stanford. He returned to the Soviet Union in 1961 after the death of his wife, and died in 1979 in Leningrad where he was to have worked on yet another mural.

Works at Coit Tower:

City Life