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Treat for Coit Tower Guides

by Peter O’Driscoll and John Angelico

On October 13, guides for the Coit Tower Murals tour were privileged to meet with Masha Zakheim Jewett. The author of Coit Tower, San Francisco, Its History and Art, Masha shared with the guides her personal experience of meeting and interviewing most of the original artists and workers involved with this project in 1933 and 1934.

Masha's father, Bernard Zakheim, was one of the muralists on the Coit Tower project as well as one of the main organizers who initiated contact with Washington, DC, to secure federal funding and, with Ralph Stackpole, organized the project’s artists. The only Jewish artist to work on the Coit Tower murals, he was given the subject of "The Library" to paint in a 10 x 10 foot fresco. Undoubtedly it was thought that this subject could not be used as easily by him to express his known radical politics, but it clearly backfired: one of the patrons is crumpling a newspaper and reaching for a copy of Karl Marx's Das Kapital. When asked if her father was a socialist, Masha replied, "Oh, he was more than that!"

Bernard Zakheim peopled his scene with portraits of his fellow artists, including his teenaged daughter Ruth (in a middy blouse), his assistant Shirley Staschen Triest (transformed into a boy), the Tower caretaker VFW Col. William Brady at the table reading a book entitled Weird Spirit, a former assistant, Julia Hamberg Rogers, next to the artist reading a book in Hebrew, and a blind boy fingering a book in Braille.

Bernard Baruch Zakheim was born in the Warsaw ghetto in 1896, the youngest of ten children. His parents meant for him to become a rabbi, but he preferred to express his own brand of religion through his art. After studying drawing, tool making, and furniture design at the Applied Art School in Warsaw, he enrolled at the Warsaw Academy of Art. His studies were interrupted by WW I when, still underage, he enlisted in the Polish Army. Within a year he became a prisoner of war and was held in brutal conditions for nine months before escaping to Munich, where he resumed his art studies.

Unable to return to his native Poland after WW I, he and his wife Eda came to America in 1920 seeking political asylum. Zakheim studied briefly at what was then called the California School of Fine Arts (today’s San Francisco Art Institute). After journeying to Paris in 1931 to sort out his various artistic influences, he returned to San Francisco and changed his career focus from furniture to art.

In 1932 Zakheim won the competition for a fresco project in the courtyard of the new Jewish Community Center being built on California Street at Presidio, for which he created “The Jewish Wedding.” His "Community Spirit" and "Growth" frescoes at the Alemany Health Center were completed in 1934. In 1935 he painted two murals for the UCSF Medical Center depicting complementary but opposed aspects of medicine: ancient, which he titled “Superstition in Medicine,” and modern, titled “Rationality in Medicine.” Zakheim’s two sons, Nathan and Matthew, later helped to prepare and move the panels from their original location in the old medical school building to the Health Sciences West Building. In 1936-38, Zakheim created murals portraying the history of medicine in California to adorn the walls of UCSF’s Toland Hall. The Toland Hall murals, restored in the 1970s by Nathan Zakheim, can be viewed on City Guide Lorri Ungaretti’s Inner Sunset tour.

In later years, Zakheim painted and made sculptures in wood and granite at his Sebastopol home. One of these, the wood sculpture "The Genius of Healing," created in 1975, graces the UCSF School of Nursing lobby. Bernard Zakheim died in 1985.

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