Anton Refregier

Anton Refregier was born in Moscow, Russia, and moved with his family to Paris before emigrating to the United States in 1920. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and, in 1927, with Hans Hofmann in Munich. During the mid-1920s, he lived and worked in New York City as a commercial artist.

He painted several notable murals; One of them at the Greenpoint Hospital in Brooklyn, NY, and the other at Rincon Center in San Francisco, California. The latter was a highly controversial twenty-seven-panel mural depicting the history of California in the Social Realist style. He began painting the mural in 1941 and completed it in 1948 after being interrupted by the US entry into World War II. Due to a mixture of the post-war (Red Scare) atmosphere and the fact that Refregier chose to depict some of the state’s darker historical moments (such as the anti-Chinese riots and the waterfront strike of 1934), a motion was put forward to have the mural destroyed even before it was finished. Refregier refused to glamorize history and felt inclined to tell it closer to how it was – such as depicting Chinese and black railroad laborers working alongside white workers, an element which had been cropped out of the famous photograph by Andrew J. Russel the day the “golden spike” had been laid to celebrate the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad. The photograph bears no reference to the Chinese being involved at all. Fortunately, nothing came of the motion, and the mural still survives today.

Refregier had a studio in Woodstock, NY, where he began working out in the late 1920s. He also worked as a teacher in Woodstock. In the years following his Californian mural, Refregier painted a number of murals in and around New York City. He died in 1979 while painting a mural at the Moscow Medical Clinic in Russia.