Home Life

Jane Berlandina

Unlike the rest of the murals, "Home Life" is unique in being not a fresco at all but egg tempera - a technique in which pigments are mixed with egg yolks as a binder and applied to a specially prepared drywall. The style of this work is unique, involving a limited palette, washes of color pigment, and the use of stark white outlines to define but not precisely depict the figures. It is a style known as "fauvism" (meaning "wild beast" in French) that Berlandina learned from her teacher in Paris, Raoul Dufy, one of its creators. (This style is the chief reason why many visitors believe the work to be unfinished; it is actually complete and the white lines are pigment, not inscribed.) 

The panels depict the various rooms and activities in an upper-class home of the time, from the baking in the kitchen with mother and daughters, to the lavish entertainment room and grand piano, to the card room (complete with a Jane Berlandina painting on the wall). The man playing cards and facing the viewer is her husband, Henry T. Howard, the chief draftsman of Coit Tower at Arthur Brown Jr.'s firm and the brother of John Langley Howard (California Industrial Scenes). Berlandina was constantly bugging Brown to be allowed to decorate the inside of his commissions -- which he was completely uninterested in doing, as his style tended to open space and he was a minimalist when it came to decoration. 

There are two schools of thought about this work. One considers it to be the masterpiece of the entire Tower, clearly modern art leading toward the more abstract work of the later 20th Century. Another views it in the opposite way, as nothing more than a set of scenes of tranquil, upper-class domestic life that pays no heed to the Depression around it and takes no thinking to enjoy - a pretty picture on the wall created by someone as much an item for the society pages as the art section.