Library

Bernard Zakheim; assisted by Shirley Staschen and Julia Rogers

This was one of the most controversial of the works in the Tower. Zakheim wanted to paint the street scene that became "City Life," but because of his known radical politics he was given the library as his subject, on the grounds it would be somewhat innocuous. It turned out anything but, but rather a directly political mural filled with books by leftist authors, controversial newspaper headlines and Nazi-sympathizer Frede Vidar parodied as a blind man with Down's syndrome. 

In the reading room on the left, the artist appears in self-portrait at the table, reading the Tenach (the other three Hebrew books in the window are the Torah, Prophets and Wisdom Literature). His daughter Ruth is in the sailor blouse, lower left, next to assistant Shirley Staschen portrayed as a boy (his other assistant, Julia Hamberg Rogers, appears next to Zakheim). San Francisco poet and writer Kenneth Rexroth, who supplied Zakheim with the names of the authors, is on the ladder, while at the lower right, Lt. Col. Brady is reading a book entitled Weird Spirit. 

In the periodical room on the right appear fellow Tower artists and other close friends, from Ralph Stackpole (reading about the destruction of Rivera's mural in New York) to Benny Bufano (reading about his own, eventually failed, project for a 100-foot steel statue of St. Francis on Twin Peaks). Perhaps most controversial is the rendering of John Langley Howard reaching for a copy of "Das Kapital." Zakheim was twice asked to remove that from the mural; he refused both times even though it hurt his future patronage in the city.