Art in the Library

Albert Herter

Egyptian Hieroglyphs (1937)

The Printing of the Gutenberg Bible (1944)

Two murals by renowned artist Albert Herter grace SBPL’s Fireplace Room. In Egyptian Hieroglyphs, a pharaoh gazes at painted hieroglyphs that record Egyptian history on the walls of an ornate temple as artists pause their work and bow before him. Orientalist in style, the mural depicts a Western fantasy of Ancient Egypt that is “Othering” and romanticized.

In The Printing of the Gutenberg Bible, we see the 15th-century workshop of Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of Europe’s first movable-type printing press. Gutenberg holds a page from his masterpiece, the Forty-Two Line Bible. Both Herter murals emulate historical tapestries with their unique decorative borders in order to make a statement about the paintings being comparable to a woven object of great beauty and worth.

Albert Herter originally made his designs on the history of the written word for the Los Angeles Public Library rotunda. Herter created ten designs for the competition that thematically spanned cave paintings to the printing of American newspapers. When the civic commission was granted to another artist, Herter offered to donate any paintings he completed from this series to SBPL.

The Herter murals were originally placed above the fireplaces on the south and north walls. Herter was about to design a third mural on the invention of paper in China. He hoped to place it on the end wall between the windows. He left for Asia with his wife in 1944 to do research for the mural but passed away before he could complete the painting.

Herter’s frequent use of green-blue paint in his paintings was lovingly referred to among Santa Barbarans as “Herter blue.” Today, you’ll see swathes of Herter blue in both murals and in the single fireplace. 

Channing Peake and Howard Warshaw

Don Quixote (1959)

As a tribute to Della and Callie Chambers, SBPL allotted $1,000 in 1958 for a competition to design a large mural for the library patio. Artists Peake and Warshaw won the commission on the condition that they utilize a plastic paint that would withstand the elements outdoors. The mural was originally installed as one piece outside but moved to the interior and split into two in 1980 when the library was remodeled.

The Don Quixote mural depicts two key scenes from the 17th-century Spanish novel by Miguel de Cervantes. Peake and Warshaw chose this theme to highlight Santa Barbara’s Spanish architecture and history. On the left, Peake depicted Don Quixote and his companion, Sancho Panza, mounted on their steeds. Don Quixote attacks a herd of cattle, mistaking them for enemy cavalry. On the right, Warshaw portrayed Don Quixote dangling from an upper window and later attacking windmills. The enduring partnership between Quixote and Sancho represents the tension between imagination and reality but also its balance. 

Working to combine their distinct artistic personalities into one work, Peake and Warshaw utilized a distinctly Cubist framework for the spatial organization of the mural. The viewer cannot take in the entire painting from one vantage point but instead sees multiple perspectives of reality.
 

Michael Gonzales 

Summer Solstice Celebration (1981)

Painted by the Santa Barbara Solstice Parade’s co-founder, Michael Gonzales, this scene evokes the festive exuberance, pagan madness, and Chagallian whimsy of the city’s annual parade. Every year near the solstice, the longest day of the year, a boisterous stream of floats, puppets, costumed performers, and musicians make their way up State Street. Gonzales established the parade on his birthday as an inclusive event that brought people from all walks of life together in the general spirit of love and celebration. The painting portrays the final year the parade ended under the County Courthouse arcade.

After a 20-year sabbatical in Australia, the painting returned to Santa Barbara and was gifted to the Santa Barbara County Arts Commission in 2008.

Nancy Gifford

Lament (2014)

Commissioned as part of the group show “Requiem for the Bibliophile” in 2015 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, Gifford’s installation is “a final bow to the book as a reverential object.” The work is a meticulously assembled collage of over 1,700 altered book covers. With its impressive scale and subdued color palette, the work invites the viewer to contemplate the book as a physical object. In the course of the year that it took to create Lament, Gifford mourned the loss of 6 friends. Haiku-like tributes can be found woven within the work, including quotes from poems and song lyrics by beloved writers and musicians.

Lament was donated to Santa Barbara Public Library by Nancy Gifford in 2019. The original dimensions of Lament were 10 by 32 feet, but without a wall wide enough to accommodate the piece, 4-foot panels from each side were removed.

From the Artist’s Statement: 
“LAMENT is a ‘poem of mourning.’  In the center of this mélange is a restful place which represents the beginning of it all – The Word.  In the middle of a sea of stained papers, like a gyre in the larger sea of knowledge is the idea of THE WORD as a Stain Upon the Silence.” 

Learn more about Lament