The style in which Wessel rendered them was such a departure from his earlier murals for the Cincinnati School of Engineering, the Cincinnati Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank and the Scioto County Courthouse that the Springfield works could only have come from depths of the Depression.
Covered when ceilings were lowered in 1975 to cut energy costs, the restored 7-foot paintings can be viewed by the public for the first time in 35 years starting at 11 a.m. Friday, June 18.
After that, they can be seen during any of the post office’s regular window hours.
Commissioned in 1936 — two years after the facility opened — the murals pay tribute to two of Springfield’s foundational industries: publishing and the manufacture of agricultural implements.
A Duveneck boy
Born in 1878 in Vincennes, Ind., Wessel was so influenced by the legendary Cincinnati painter and teacher Frank Duveneck that when Wessel died April 13, 1969, the Cincinnati Enquirer called him the “last of the Duveneck boys.’’
Wessel had been a teen of just 17 when he left home with his inheritance to study at the Cincinnati Art Academy. He soon learned that he was especially skilled at one aspect of art Duveneck emphasized.
In a published article, artist Carl Samson and wife Carol Cyran, who live in Wessel’s former home at 2152 Alpine Place in Cincinnati’s Walnut Hills, said Duveneck encouraged “a nearly sculptural understanding of how the painter can interpret and suggest three-dimensional form on the flat surface of his canvas.”
The approach requires the skill of a sophisticated draftsman.
“The human form is probably the most difficult thing to draw,” Sampson said in a telephone interview, and Wessel “had a phenomenal understanding of the human figure and the bones and tendons and muscles that carry that weight.”
Wessel’s gift was recognized not only in Cincinnati but in Europe where he studied in 1905, first in Munich, then in Paris. His draftsmanship was recognized with the Colorossi Medal.
Drawing on that honor, he returned to Cincinnati in 1908 to teach at his alma mater and to pursue his professional career in landscapes, portraiture and murals.
Wall art
When the Treasury Department advertised the competition for the Springfield Post Office murals in the 1930s, Wessel had one big thing going for him: The success he’d had in the 1920s, a period Samson and Cyran call his “most active and creative mural painting decade.”
“The crux of the matter with mural painting,” Samson explained, “is that it’s part of an architectural ensemble. It has to not take away from the interior design (of a building). It has to acknowledge it. You’re essentially a decorator when you’re a mural painter.”
“It demands a lot more,” he added. “You’ve got to visit the site, you’ve got to do the historical work in support of your ideas. And typically, in those days, it was a competition, so you were up against other mural painters.”
Wessel’s first striking success was a three-panel mural for the UC College of Engineering featuring workers beneath the John A. Roebling Bridge across the Ohio River at Cincinnati. (Roebling also designed the Brooklyn Bridge.)
There followed Wessel’s series of historical murals for the Scioto County Courthouse and four murals for the Federal Reserve Bank branch, which some consider to be his best. Those illustrated the development of history, agriculture, industry and transportation in the United States.
It was after this project — and before his Springfield commission — that Wessel’s style changed.
A darker decade
Because the artist had studied Europe before his 16-month visit of 1929-30, Samson said, the trip alone doesn’t explain his change in style.
Samson said “the general historical context of the time” led Wessel “to consider a little bolder, a little deeper, a little darker kind of aura” for his work.
With the American stock market having crashed and Europe entering the turmoil that would lead to World War II, “you had this tremendous upheaval socially, politically and artistically,” Samson said.
Using working people as subjects was nothing new for the artist. But whereas Wessel’s earlier murals had “a ruddy optimism about them,” Samson said, his post Dust Bowl murals in Springfield are “grittier and a little more stylized.”
“You have a little more (flavor of) Diego Rivera and (Jose Clemente) Orozco,” said Samson. “I know he was looking at these people because I read his essays.”
Even those without Samson’s insight can see the stylistic influence of Rivera in the Springfield paintings.
The Mexican painter is identified with a time when working people and their struggles were being idealized not only in the United States but among artists whose political leanings lead them to celebrate the proletariat.
The “socialist realism painting” that focused on the suffering of working people “was discouraged” in the post office commissions, wrote Patricia Raynor in an article on the National Postal Museum website.
“Therefore, the very real scenes of jobless Americans standing in bread lines are not to be found on post office walls,” according to Raynor
But the Mexican mural style had a visual influence, nonetheless, and its spirit of respect for workers were used to boost Americans’ spirits.
The Cincinnati Enquirer called Wessel’s Springfield murals “powerfully built and clearly and impressively explanatory,” adding that “they are compatible and are identified with the architectural style of the room they decorate.”
The review touched on one more accomplishment: “The artist has also proved here that machinery is capable of beautiful aspects and of the highest artistic treatment in the department of mural paintings.”
Space and time
Wessel’s foray into the modernist style of the post office paintings was relatively brief, Samson said. “(Wessel’s wife) Bessie was probably the one who kept Herman from going too far in that modern direction.”
But if the work is a minor phase in Wessel’s career, Samson seems no less interested in viewing the Springfield work in its restored setting.
“You can tell from the studies that he examined not only the historical perspective, but he looked at very minute details of the architecture of the building,” Samson said.
That building is the work of Springfield architect William Schilling, who also designed the Clark County Courthouse, Ohio Edison’s Mad River Plant, Ferncliff Cemetery’s administration building and Tiffany Gym in the earlier Springfield and later South High School.
When Samson attends Friday’s opening, “What I’ll look for and what I expect to find are images that blend flawlessly with the design and purpose of the building. I expect it to be a real fine job of drafting,’’ he added, and inventive use of color characteristic of Wessel in that period.
In short, Samson said he expects Herman Wessel’s Springfield post office murals to bear both the stamp of the artist and the time in which he created them.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.
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