| In 1968, the Marin Art and Garden Center wanted to honor Jose Moya del Pino for the many years of dedicated service he had given to the center. He was embarrassed by this idea of a tribute but acknowledged that a library should be created in the center to serve as a cultural and educational heart of the center. Moya, being and artist, has his eyes for many years on the then termite-ridden octagon house built in 1864. He had seen it used as an office then as a lunchroom. He felt that this lovely structure deserved better. Moya's health was failing and his wife, anxious to get his dream off the ground, contributed $25,000 to start the project while Moya was still alive. Other monies came in for the restoration bringing the total to $32,000. Roger Hooper was the architect and Carla Flood the interior designer. It was decided to move the octagon house from over the well to a more suitable site where it now stands. Moya died in 1969 before completion of the project but his personal library of books and those contributed by members of the center, covering fine arts and gardening, are a living and vital memorial to his artistic and intellectual judgement. |
|
| It is hard ot
know how best to describe Jose Moya del Pino: renowned artist,
distinguished statesman, dedicated founder of the Art and Garden Center,
respected teacher, or, as he is so often remembered, a delightful, warm
and charming friend.
Born in 1891 in Priego, a small town in the province of Cordoba, Spain, he was apprenticed at teh age of nine to an intinerant artist. By 1907, Moya was studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid and by 1915, he was associating with post-Impressionist artists. In 1925, King Alfonso XIII of Spain appointed Moya director of the "Spanish Artistic mission" to foster appreciation of Spanish art and culture in America. Moya and two other distinguished members of the Spanish Court brought over 50 paintings for exhibitions in Philadelphia, New York, Washington D.C. and San Francisco. The king had given Moya the commission to copy all of the paintings of Velasquez hanging in the Prado Museum in Madrid. Among the paintings collected for exhibition were the 41 Velasquez reproductions. Moya had labored for 4 years on this project: measuring, studying, grinding pigments, and mixing colors according to 17th Century recipes in order to duplicate the original canvases as exactly as possible. In subsequent years, when civil war in Spain threatened the original masterpieces of Velasquez, Moya's work gained in importance. Today, these paintings hang in the Library at U.C. Berkeley. |
|
|
|
By the time the "Exhibiciones Velasquez" reached San Francisco, the Spanish government was in a state of collapse and there was no more financing for the tour. America was in the Great Depression, and Moya faced hard times. He turned to portraiture at which he excelled, but, as most of his private patrons did not wish to have their portraits exhibited, Moya's talent was known only to a small group. In 1934, he was asked by Otis Oldfield to paint a mural of a bay scene for the Coit Tower Lobby . It is a companion piece to Oldfield's mural of the SanFrancisaco Bay entitled San Francisco Bay, North. You see it here. |
|
Over the years, Moya taught at the San Francisco Art Students' League, the California School of Fine Arts and the College of Marin where he shared his interest in experimenting with many media and styles. In 1928, Moya married Helen Horst, whom he had courted in French: Moya spoke little English and she spoke no Spanish! In 1938, the Moyas and their three children moved to 160 Laurel Grove in Ross, a house designed by the architect Gardner Dailey, the mutual friend who had introduced them. On the dining room wall, Moya painted a mural of his daughters. Other Marin County murals are those in the Ross Grammar School, St. John's Church in Ross, and the former Rossi Pharmacy in San Anselmo. Today, for your pleasure, we display a small group of portraits by this talented artist. |
|
|
The Gathering of the Hops |
|
| By
the mid 1930s, Moya was a respected member of the local art community
with an established reputaton as a portrait painter. He copmpleted the
Acme Brewery murals in November 1935 between commissions at Coit Tower
for the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) in 1934, and a series
of Bay Area Post Office murals completed for the Treasury Department
Section of Painting and Sculpture from 1936-1941.
The Acme Brewery murals may be seen as part of the regional impulse then flourishing in the United States. Regional realist painters celebrated the qualities of their local environments, the places they knew best. In the Acme Brewery murals Moya del Pino explicitly praises California's natural environment by placing Mt. Tamalpais and the Golden Gate (pre-bridge) in the background of the picnic scene, and the productivity of the land and its human inhabitants in the other two panels depicting the growing of the ingredients and the beer-making process.
Making and Bottling Beer |
|
| "A
Family Picnic" represents "typical Americans" enjoying
the bounty of farming and the brewer's arts while they share the joy of
family and the Bay Area's incomparable vistas. In this panel Moya del
Pino has been freed from the sort of specific documentation the other
two panels' subject matter required. The model for the central figure is
believed to be the artist's wife.
|
|
