Richard Haines, “Recognition of All Foreign Lands,” Los Angeles, 1963

As a quick follow-up to my recent posts about the Sheets Studio’s relationship with the Ravenna Mosaic Company and the questions of religious symbols in artwork for public patrons, I present these mosaics, designed by Richard Haines for the federal building at 300 N. Los Angeles Street in 1963.

Among other reasons for interest, this demonstrates the staying power of Ravenna Mosaic Company as the fabricator of choice. The use of mosaic with marble columns and the change of color planes divided by diagonal lines are very reminiscent of Sheets’s work—though I find this artwork flatter, in all senses of the word, than the Sheets Studio work. (Haines’s work at UCLA, on Schoenberg Hall and the Physics Building, seems more lively and fun.)

UPDATE: Just after posting,  I have learned via John Waide and the Ravenna Mosaic archives at St. Louis University, that Sheets, Haines, and a mosaic designer listed only as DeRosen (likely Jan Henryk de Rosen) had all bid for the UCLA Music Hall job in 1954, but that Haines eventually received it.

Richard Haines, Schoenberg Hall, UCLA. Photo courtesy of http://historylosangeles.blogspot.com/2010/04/schoenberg-hall-ucla.html

Beyond the design and the fabrication, the universalized themes of “Celebration of our Homeland” and “Recognition of all Foreign Lands” also contributes to that rather blah feel—perhaps a demonstration of the way, in the early 1960s, a government commission could be more limiting than work with a financial institution, despite the risk-averse and “conservative” nature of each. (For comparison, these mosaics appeared at that time at the downtown Home Savings branch—and Sheets’s tile mosaics for City Hall East are vibrant visions of a universalized theme. More on them one of these weeks.)

Richard Haines, “Celebration of Our Homeland,” Los Angeles, 1963

The mosaic depicts many symbols of justice and harmony, showing two hemispheres, flowering trees, small images of animals and industry—and then collections of white-robed people, carrying gifts and tools. Though perhaps no more than one is holding an overtly religious symbol, the sense of a procession and of communal action in white robes is as evocative of a choir and a baptism as much as the Parthenon frieze or the art and architecture of the United Nations. But perhaps evocative is the key word–no explicit religious symbols, and hence no controversy?

Back next week to Sheets and Home Savings.

California Home Savings locations on the landscape, Home Savings calendar, 1978. Courtesy of George Underwood.

As the semester revs up, longer and shorter posts will be alternating here, on somewhat of a regular schedule. Today, a short one, as a postscript to recent posts on the use of maps by Home Savings to connect to customers in Illinois, Missouri, New York, and other new states with branches in the 1980s.

Here Home Savings is put on the map of California, its home state — but in a very different format. This is from a calendar, rather than a road map, and that probably helps — the size of the state and the number of branches might overwhelm the other format (though I hear one exists).

While the eastern maps emphasize the convenience along the roads, here Home Savings is represented on a natural-resources map of California–emphasizing, in an even more dramatic way, the history and rootedness Home Savings strove for.

Here it seems the savings and loans are literally as old as the hills, and as permanent on the California landscape as the Sierras, the Mojave desert, and the Central Valley. (And how great it would be if those blue regional dividing lines were rivers instead!)

More in the weeks ahead about that Home Savings shield in the bottom left corner.