Inside the San Rafael post office there’s a mural that depicts a scene from 1851. There are Mexicans, dock workers, pioneers, Indians and a missionary. In the center, since this is a post office mural, there’s a mail man. The creek and the hills in the background are still recognizable. Looking at it in 2025, posting something while stopping in San Rafael on my way to somewhere else, I appreciate the symmetry: The number of years that passed between the scene and the creation of the mural is almost the same than between the creation and now.
The style is characteristic of American murals of the 1930s. What distinguishes it from Socialist Realism as practiced in the Soviet Union at the same time is not so much the style as the content. The mural isn’t overtly propagandistic apart from half-hearted glorification of the U.S. Postal Service and pioneer industry.
Contrast this with Soviet Socials Realism, or the even less subtle North Korean propaganda paintings. I don’t mind looking at them for a little while since I like pictures of pretty people and especially pretty women. But then in-your-face nature of the propaganda overpowers everything else. If this is a problem for me, for whom the realities of North Korea are just a curiosity, I can only imagine how grating those images must be to those who are directly affected by it. Incidentally, I feel the same sense of unease when looking at the artwork in Mormon temples.
I think art needs to speak to us, and some degree of realism helps with that. There doesn’t have to a message, but if there is, it can’t be a message that offends by being condescendingly simple – appealing solely to emotions like fear, greed, pity, simple-minded nationalism or glorification of a Dear Leader, whether alive, dead or imaginary.
Nehaveigur 