WPA Alumnus

The WPA Art Project pointed proudly last week at one of the few first-rate talents it has dug up: shy, 36-year-old, Moscow-born Muralist Anton Refregier, who won one of the biggest awards ever offered by the Government's Section of Fine Arts.

Muralist Refregier gets $26,000 for a set of murals to be painted for the walls of a long L-shaped lobby in San Francisco's new Rincon Annex Post Office. His winning designs, chosen in an anonymous competition from among 82 sets of entries, illustrate the history of San Francisco from the Spanish conquest to the building of the Golden Gate Bridge. Laid out in 27 dramatic panels, they show Grecoesque padres and armored discoverers, gaunt Indians paddling their canoes on California rivers, horny handed fortyniners grubbing for gold, sharpfeatured industrial workers building the engineering monuments of the modern city.

Artist Refregier, who still talks with the traces of a foreign accent, has been in the U.S. since he was a stripling of 16, studied art at the Rhode Island School of Design, once did scenic designs for Max Reinhardt. His first big mural jobs, done on WPA for a Greenpoint, L.I. hospital and New York's World's Fair and Riker's Island Penitentiary, got him so talked about that Manhattan's Museum of Mod ern Art decided to buy a sample of his work. A hard worker, he took time off from his WPA job to do a series of murals for Manhattan's Hotel Lexington, where he brought guffaws from hotel guests by painting New York's Mayor LaGuardia as one of the plotters of the Boston Tea Party.

Of his $26,000 fee, Muralist Refregier expects to spend less than one-third on paint, assistants and other expenses. The San Francisco job will take him three years to complete. Says he: "It's the most important thing in my life."

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