Pacific Progress

To the amusement and edification of the San Francisco public, Conservatives and Modernists were at it again last week. An organization known as the "Progressive Group of California Painters & Sculptors" held an exhibition in the City of Paris department store, an exhibition which they loudly proclaimed had been rejected as "too extreme" by the imposingly colonnaded Palace of the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park. Eastern critics were bewildered. No longer ago than October the Legion of Honor Palace gave California its first view of the work of Isamu Noguchi, about as "extreme" a sculptor as the U. S. contains. And on exhibition last week in the Palace was a pair of limbless little wooden figurines called "Mr. & Mrs. Technocrat" by Atanas Katchamakoff. On the other hand, star performer of the Progressives in their department store show was grizzled, close-cropped Beniamino Bufano, an artist of unquestioned ability who paints somewhat in the manner of Diego Rivera but whose sculpture looks like that of an Italianate Paul Manship.

If the Progressives' show did nothing else it reminded people of Sculptor Bufano and the mystery of his great statue of St. Francis. Beniamino Bufano, brother of Puppeteer Remo Bufano, was born in Italy about 1890, went to New York as a child. In his early 20's he won a sculpture prize from the old Whitney Studio Club, ancestor of the Whitney Museum of American Art. During the War he put the trigger finger of his right hand on a block, chopped it off to avoid killing his fellow men. Later he carved a crucifix in which the Christ is minus a trigger finger.

After the War, Bufano moved to San Francisco, married, had a child, deserted wife & child to study terra cotta glazing and firing in China. He returned a convert to Oriental philosophy, living entirely on nuts, and set up a studio in the old Hawaiian building, left over from the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915. His unworldly attitude soon caused the sheriff of San Francisco to attach all his personal belongings. Nut-eating Beniamino Bufano moved to Paris.

There he let it be known that he had a commission. A number of rich citizens of San Francisco had given him money to carve a gigantic statue of St. Francis of Assisi for the top of Telegraph Hill--San Francisco's arty quarter. Sculptor Bufano acquired three enormous blocks of Swedish black granite and went to work.

It took him a year. He worked in a field outside Paris because his figure, 25 ft. high, 10 ft. thick at the base, was too big to get in any studio. It was the coldest winter France had known for half a century. Sculptor Bufano broke scores of tools on the tough granite before he found a special U. S. steel tool that would last nearly a fortnight. Finally his St. Francis was finished. Sculptor Bufano was out $2,400 of his own money. He moved his St. Francis into a barn, neglected even to have it photographed. From under the arms he quarried two lumps of black granite that he fashioned into two abstract female figures, known as the Twin Peaks. With these he returned to California, blandly expecting San Franciscans to put up $5,000 more to bring his colossus, sight unseen, across the Atlantic and the continent. When this was not forthcoming he withdrew to live apart, sleeping in his clothes, munching nuts in silence. Only two Californians, Glenn Wessels and Sidney Joseph, have actually seen the completed statue. It is a standing St. Francis, with head bowed and face in the deep shadow of a cowl. Friends of the sculptor busily circulate the rumor that the Italian Government is anxious to buy it, to erect in Assisi.

As one of his contributions to last week's Progressive show, crop-headed Ben Bufano presented a 10-ft. fresco of another cowled Franciscan, screaming. It had no official title but to friends he explained that it was "Anathema Against San Francisco."

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