Jackson Pollock's Mural: The Story of a Modern Masterpiece

Jackson Pollock represents a kind of dead end on what he created because if someone else does a drip picture then it just feels like thievery. I like to think about American modernism as having a much older origins, an older foundational history which allows us to think about American modern such as Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood. Grant Wood not only did advertising and he did book illustration but he even represented the Masonite company. He represented furniture companies. I mean he was quite an active artist in the professional world. What's interesting about Benton is that he's a modernist. He goes and studies in Paris for a number of years and he studies all the isms, futurism and constructivism and mix it in with the modern art techniques that he's learned and create a kind of dynamic modern art, representational kind of art that will be about American stories, American people, American places, and American history. So he does a number of murals. Well there are thousands of figures in all of these different murals and so he's always calling on his students to pose for him and Jackson Pollock is one of those students who poses for him in his America Today mural. The federal government really becomes the major cultural patron of the era. A lot of the artists who would become famous or sort of make a name for themselves in the post-war New York art world, Jackson Pollock, among them Mark Rothko, worked on the projects, worked in as New Deal artists during the 1930s. Benton always considered Pollock one of his favorite students. He would later say, well he went off in a different direction than me and I think Pollock really picked up from Benton the idea of painting big, mural-sized, large-sized painting spaces, nothing small, but also a kind of dynamism, kind of movement and energy that for Pollock and for Benton expressed how the dynamism of the modern 20th century. Just as the metropolis of New York is a center of transportation, industry, and trade, it is also a great cultural center. Of all its many museums and art galleries, none is more famous than the Metropolitan Museum of Art. By the 1940s, particularly by the mid-1940s, right after the war, there are a lot of artists in New York and around the country who are beginning to experiment with different ways of painting that are increasingly abstract, increasingly non-objective, not so much centered on American scene subjects, spaces, places, focused more on the artists themselves, how they feel, what their thoughts are, what their beliefs are, but the name that eventually sort of becomes most popular is Abstract Expressionism. You could say that if Peggy Guggenheim herself had not existed, she would have to be invented. It was Peggy Guggenheim who gave Pollock his start in life, really as an international artist, by commissioning Muir in the summer of 1943. So she was brought up in a big mansion, not an apartment or anything, and Peggy was expected to grow up and marry, to lead a very conventional life, but she knew very early on that hers was not going to be a conventional life, and she made sure it wasn't going to be, and this took all kinds of forms, including sleeping with artists, but more importantly, buying artists and showing artists, and she opened this legendary gallery on 57th Street that was called Art of this Century. That sounds kind of tame, I think, to us now, but it was really, she was making a bold claim, but it was also accurate. I mean, that was 20th century art then. Very cutting edge, very avant-garde work, and she also promoted and cultivated the work of new artists in a very energetic way. One of these artists was Jackson Pollock. She came to realize that Pollock was somebody that she should pay attention to, and in fact, in her memoirs, she said that eventually he became the whole point of Art of the Century. What she started doing with this gallery was showing, giving first one-man shows to Mark Rothko, Clifford Still, and most importantly, her big discovery was Pollock. She gave Pollock a contract, the terms of which was she would pay him $150 a month. That was unprecedented, and to the other artists, this was like hitting a home run in a World Series game. She was going to give Pollock his first show, and she decided there would be a party at her apartment, and that she wanted Pollock to design a mural for the entryway to her building. It was an enormous space, and we know that Jackson Pollock, in the summer of 1943, wrote to a family member saying, it's as exciting as all hell. That shows a kind of kick and impetus, which a commission for mural had given Pollock. Peggy Guggenheim, being the most important art patron, had a lot of influence over him. We are fairly sure that his materials were chosen by her. This was going to be the biggest, best painting that Jackson Pollock had done in his career up to that point, and would launch him as an important artist in the U.S. and in the world. Peggy Guggenheim had given him this commission, and months and months, and she bought him the canvas, and he stretched it, and they had to knock a wall out of their apartment, which they weren't allowed to do, which they basically, in the dark of night, they hacked away at the wall, and they put pieces of it in buckets, and got rid of it in the alley. The painting was supposed to be delivered so that Peggy could show it at a New Year's party, and two days before that, he hadn't even made one mark on it, according to Krasner. According to Krasner, she went to bed, and the next morning, she found Pollock covered with paint, and realized what this meant, and went into that room that they had ripped apart, and there it was, the whole thing. And she must have realized that there was no way that that painting could have been painted in one night, and rolled up the next day, and taken to Peggy Guggenheim's, because there were different layers, and it wouldn't have dried in time, and so forth. And then the legend goes that Duchamp was there, and Peggy, and workmen, when it was being installed, and the legend is that it was too big, and Duchamp said, oh well, you know, let me just do this, and that he cut off seven inches of it. He said it doesn't matter with these kind of paintings, supposedly. A, Duchamp would never have done that, and B, if you look at the canvas, it was not, you know, it has white space around it, it was not cut off. Well, despite the legendary image of Pollock as a kind of superhero of modern art, he himself was not a particularly large guy. He wasn't that tall. Mural, unlike the so-called classic pawings, which Jackson Pollock did in 1947 to 50, they were painted on the floor. Mural was already stretched and leaning against the wall when Pollock painted it, so there was a crucial difference in that respect. The sheer physical size of Mural, approximately nine foot high and getting on towards 20 foot long, was absolutely unprecedented for Pollock. This meant that Pollock had a tremendous degree of energy which he projected into that canvas. We know that, from internal evidence, Mural was not begun until at least July of 1943. Pollock was also a very calculated artist, and what we have to remember, that just splashing paint out on a canvas will not necessarily produce the effect in the beholder of extreme spontaneity. Spontaneity has to be calculated and configured on the canvas. A mural, despite the frenzy of its overall appearance, is a highly calculated canvas. It so happens that the Museum of Modern Art held a huge exhibition in the late summer and early autumn of 1943, devoted to action photography across the whole of the late 19th and earlier 20th centuries. I have not the slightest doubt, speaking as an art historian, that Pollock saw that exhibition. Pollock was quite familiar with the action photography. These sort of marching figures are very close to action photographs. This painting was really meant to be his big world splash, where he announced to everyone that he arrived. This was meant to be for her apartment in New York, so it had to fit into the hallway that she wanted to place it. And this hallway was the entry point for everyone who visited Peggy Guggenheim, and so everyone from the art world would walk through this hallway and know who Jackson Pollock was. Peggy Guggenheim commissioned the picture and endorsed Pollock after Mondrian and Duchamp gave her the nudge and said this guy's really good. And it was Duchamp who suggested putting it on canvas rather than painting it directly on the wall, which was very very smart. One, he could work on it at home in contemplation and worry about it and fret over it there. And also it meant it could be taken down. The critic Clement Greenberg, for example, who was the biggest champion of post-war American modernism, and it really is, for Greenberg, American modernism. And it's very much about canvas and paint on canvas. So he helps create a sort of assumption about modern art that is very flat, very pure, almost one-dimensional. And at the same time he's emphasizing the freedom and individuality of these post-war American artists. And he uses the word free and freedom repeatedly in his essays. And he's writing for Partisan Review and The Nation and Commentary. Well it's interesting if you look at his criticism to realize that at the very same time that he's writing about the freedom and individuality of American artists like Pollock, that the American government politically is setting up the same sort of idea that the United States of America, in direct and deliberate contrast with communist Russia and communist China, has free individual liberties, which include the free individual styles of American artists, in direct contrast to the more rigid representational art that's produced by social realist artists in Russia. When he's writing in the mid-1940s he's made it clear that America is now sort of the economic and political leader of the world and it needs an art to match. And that art, he decides, declares, is the art of Jackson Pollock. In the early 20th century, I mean, painters were kind of considered sissies. You know, you have them in berets and, you know, and smocks and little scarves around their necks and they stand there, you know, with a brush and, you know, and kind of, they look silly. But Pollock doesn't look silly. He's an action man. You know, during the Cold War, abstract expressionism was advanced as the American art form. And regionalism, which I think a lot of people now see as a quintessential American art form, was sort of turned and viewed as communazi art. And that's not my term, that's the term that they use at the time. The CIA becomes involved because the State Department organizes a few exhibits of American art and then ships them around Europe. And the art that's exhibited, it really has the agenda of demonstrating American principles or tenets of freedom, individuality. You know, our artists are so free, they can make art that nobody understands or even likes. But it doesn't matter because in America, we're all free. Whereas abstract expressionism was really seen as American freedom, that artists could do anything they wanted. They could throw any paint on a canvas and call it art. Whereas if you did that in, you know, the Soviet Union, then you would be locked up. Hey, can you go that way? Can someone come and hold this door from this side? Okay, so all we have, we have one hanging light, so we're gonna have to stay a little. We're waiting. So what's interesting about the University of Iowa is it really is sort of Greenwich Village West, beginning in the 1930s. And this reputation that it has of sort of an avant garde place for both writers and painters is established pretty early. And a lot of this has to do with such factors as Iowa is one of the first places to open up a BFA and MFA program, series of BFA and MFA programs, such that I believe by the early 40s, it's producing more MFAs than any other university in the United States. But other factors include a couple of artists in residence at the University of Iowa, including Grant Wood, and eventually Philip, Philip Guston. Grant Wood, great native son of Iowa, born in Anamosa, Iowa, becomes a artist in residence at Iowa in 1934. So he's an artist in residence at Iowa, he's supposed to be teaching classes, he's traveling a lot. He's financially successful, more or less. And in comes a new guy into the art department as the new chair, and I believe this is in 36. And this is Lester Longman. Suffice to say, Grant Wood and Lester Longman do not get along. Longman took issue with Grant Wood in many different ways, from the mundane to the profound. He did not like the kind of art that Grant Wood produced. He didn't like regionalism. He wanted the, what he regarded, I think, as the provinciality of all that Grant Wood represented to go away. There's a story of Grant Wood reporting on a colleague for taking his students to a Picasso exhibition in Chicago, and really accusing the professor of taking down this, taking the students down a bad path. And so that professor was fired as a result of that. But the professor, named H.W. Janssen, who was quite an important art historian, was rehired, and then he made it his mission to eliminate Grant Wood. So, you know, it's a typical academic department. Lester Longman, the new director of the School of Art, he had recently established the MFA and the BFA programs. The basis for the University of Iowa was the employment of professional artists as professors. And he started working very energetically with New York gallery dealers, recognizing that in the summertime, New York galleries often closed their doors because it was hot, no air conditioning, nobody went to New York in the summertime, nobody bought art in the summertime. And Longman took advantage of that to essentially arrange for fairly large shipments of very cutting-edge, brand-new, modernist, abstract, international modernist art to come to the University of Iowa campus for what he called the Summer Contemporary Art Shows. And they brought a remarkable array of contemporary art to campus, gathering the attention not only of local press and statewide press, but national press. So this famous Iowa program attracted Peggy Guggenheim. And when Peggy Guggenheim decided to move back to Europe in 1947, she was looking at institutions that shared her approach to art and artists. And Lester Longman was able to connect with her and convince her that the University of Iowa was the place to park a lot of her works. So she wrote to her friend Lester Longman and said, I'm shipping you a painting. I hope you would like it. You'll have to pay this shipment, but it's yours for free. It took a few more years for approximately to arrive because the professors argued over the $40 shipping fee. But it eventually arrived. But the key point I want to make is that the works of art were given to the University of Iowa in the late 40s while they were still fresh, and in some cases while the paint was probably still wet. It's phenomenal to me that it would suddenly show up in this Midwestern city. And I'm not sure by then whether it was being appreciated for what it was, you know, which is a really pivotal painting in 20th century art history. The public was not familiar with this kind of art. They were mystified by it and sometimes disturbed by it. Mural was placed in the Mural Studio. And the Mural Studio was created by Grant Wood when he ran the WPA program and created murals for that program. And so it represented, in many ways, everything that Grant Wood was not. And for Lester Longman, symbolized perhaps the new dawn of abstract expressionist art, both in the art program and in America. The irony, of course, is that it's then the place where Jackson Pollock's mural was placed. And Jackson Pollock's mural is not like a Grant Wood mural at all. It represents something totally different. And actually something that Grant Wood would highly disapprove of. It's, I'm absolutely convinced that this place and that controversy was a very little known, but really fundamental and rather profound turning point in the history of American art. Then it's moved towards the end of the 1950s to the newly constructed University of Iowa Library. And it hangs there for a while. Then begins an interesting series of letters and correspondence between Peggy Guggenheim and the president of the University of Iowa. And which basically, Guggenheim had heard, and this wasn't true, that the mural had been devoted to hanging in some student dining hall. And she was outraged by this and demanded that the mural be returned to her in Venice, Italy. And would he be interested in the exchange of a 1920s painting by the French artist Georges Braque? The painting probably came into the museum collection in 1969 because it was part of the university's collection, but we didn't have a museum until 1969. So when the museum was built, a lot of these paintings that were acquired by the art department, and some of them were things that, I think that one time there was a committee that selected art that was part of the faculty. So there was a collection of things that the university had, and they became part of the museum collection. So I'm fairly certain that the Pollock mural came in at that time. Seeing the Jackson Pollock in the museum of art was sort of centered me. And I have to say that as my three small children were growing up, we didn't have a lot of time, but I did get a babysitter every Friday afternoon, and I would walk down to the museum of art, and I would sit in one of their wonderful Eames chairs for three hours, and I would just study it. It became sort of my rock. If you can say there is an external, something external in the world, some people have religion, churches, art, it was art for me. Well, it rained a lot over the weekend up north, and it was apparent that it was definitely going to flood, very much. It was going to go over the spillway quite a bit, and it was going to get into the building. First thing we did, obviously, was move the Pollock out and the major paintings. Friday the 13th finally decided to flood, and I was still hopeful that we would have most of Friday to pack, because we've been doing some night work all week. In 2008, there was a major flood that flooded much of the University of Iowa campus, particularly the arts campus, and the museum had to be evacuated. So the art was moved to Chicago and then moved back to Iowa to other museums, including Pollock's mural. So we were quite lucky, very lucky, but it's still, most of the high water marks around town you can't see except maybe on the bridges, but we still, you know, the staff still has its high water marks, you can tell. You can see the water marks on the people at times. In the aftermath of the flood, because the University of Iowa buildings were devastated in so many different ways, the cost of repairs so high that one of the proposals that came out of the non-university sector was that perhaps the Pollock mural painting could be sold, because it was valued, after all, at something around $150 million, and that would go a long way towards some major flood repairs. Very quickly, there is a bill put forward in the Iowa legislature in which a congressman, congressional representative, makes a requirement in this bill that the mural be sold and that the proceeds be used to pay for undergraduate scholarships at the University of Iowa. And ultimately, after checking into some things, it was discovered that there was a letter from Peggy Guggenheim saying, essentially, that if we no longer wanted the picture, that she would be glad to have it back. So it is not possible for us to sell the picture. We would have to give it back to the Guggenheim Foundation. After the flood, the museum decided to pursue a number of projects that it could not have done before. The collection was in flux. It was moving around. The Getty being the most important conservation department that we had contacts with, and so they could do things like restore and conserve paintings. We decided to speak to them to see if they were willing to do the painting. So I said, great, what do you have in mind? Well, there's this Pollock in Iowa, and my first question was, well, how big is it? And when he told me, I said, absolutely not, that's too big, because large pictures have problems all of their own. Just even moving a large picture requires a team effort. This is a big project, and it's not an easy project. So it's understandable that they were not willing to take this on. In about 2011, I contacted them again, and I decided to be inclusive about my approach. And I copied the curator of paintings, Scott Schaefer, on the note that I sent to the head of conservation there. And Scott Schaefer was so excited at this idea that the painting would come here. And he made a point to me that I thought was relevant, and that is that it was quite clear that the painting needed not only conservation attention, but it also needed some study. There were a lot of myths surrounding the painting that had circulated around it for years, so I said yes. But only, I said a conditional yes. And that was based on our wanting to go and see the painting before we actually agreed to take it on. So a team of us, the core team of us, flew to Iowa to visit it at the Figge Art Museum, and where we spent a day looking at the painting and doing our first sort of close look of it. And we all came away from that trip very excited about the possibility that the painting would come here. We knew that we were on a schedule, and we were also holding a series of meetings during the treatment. Meetings bringing other conservators here, other scholars here, who either had treated Pollock, or had written about Pollock, or understood the painting perhaps more than we did. When the painting was treated in the early 70s by a conservator, a very well-intentioned conservator, that conservator had varnished the painting. And in doing so, he had put on a synthetic resin that had the effect of veiling that original diverse surface. You imagine taking a Q-tip and cleaning the varnish off a 20 foot by 8.5 foot wide painting. It's a very long process, it's excruciating. Removing, in this case, a very grayed discolored varnish, it was gray because it was synthetic, opened up the space in a way that was entirely unexpected, and in particular, the unpainted areas of ground, which really form areas of repose in this composition, which is just a riot of movement. Everything that we did was slightly complicated by its large size. For example, even to take an x-ray of the painting, we couldn't do in our normal way, because our room, where we normally x-ray pictures, could not accommodate a picture of this size. So we had to hire outside people to come to the Getty and take the x-ray for us. Yeah, so that's a nice sharp edge. Where are you looking at? The transition edge. Over here? Yeah, see how sharp it goes? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Much of the work that I did on the project was looking at the paint cross sections in detail, and from that, we were able to completely reconstruct the palette that Pollock used in the creation of Mural, and to also identify how many different combinations or mixes of paint that he used. And we think that Mural is created in about 25 to 26 different batches of paint. Many of the layers in the cross sections that we examined have very well-defined boundaries with the underlying layers. And usually, that means that the lower paint was at least touch dry, or dry enough to withstand being disrupted by the later applications of paint. So these clear boundaries indicate that the painting was done over quite extended period of time. Oil paint takes several days, if not sometimes weeks, to dry. Pollock did something quite unconventional, and there's another paint in the middle sequence of painting that is actually, we think, a cheap commercial house paint, probably an interior paint for walls. And that paint is based on casein, which is a protein derived from milk, and it's water-based, and water and oil don't mix. So it's very unusual for an artist to be combining a water-based medium with an oil-based medium in the same painting. We were very intrigued by this pink paint that has an appearance of a house paint, a sort of glossy enamel paint, and perhaps had been applied horizontally, which we know Pollock was doing later on in his career. So what we're doing at the moment is just seeing if we can use the materials that we think Pollock had access to in 1943, and keeping the canvas vertically, whether we can achieve some of the same effects that we're seeing on the painting. Who hasn't gone up on the ladder yet? We did do a mock-up of the painting in order to better understand how it would be installed, how it would look on the wall. In planning the treatment, there were essentially two areas that needed to be addressed. Both the aesthetic concerns, in this case the varnish that was on the painting, and then also the structural concerns, the stretcher and the fact that there were now areas of unpainted canvas on the face of the painting. The stretcher that he used to stretch the canvas was not strong enough. So it must have started to sag very early on in its life. And the consequences of that sag, and what to do about it, and the 1970s treatment were a big part of our work. And so after a great deal of deliberation and a great deal of study, we made the decision to put the canvas on a shape stretcher. And once that decision was made, the actual outcome of the treatment remains still very much up to the painting to reteach those old tacking margin turnover lines to a painting that has been wax lined. Because it's not just the canvas and not just the original painting, there's the added complication of the wax resin adhesive, which is somewhat brittle, and then additionally, a secondary canvas. So not only do you have the added thickness, but those two canvases must move against one another. I think it was one of the top three or four exhibitions here at the Getty, in terms of numbers of people who came, percentage of visitors to the Getty who came to see that painting. But they came in great numbers because, of course, it is this iconic picture in his oeuvre, in his career, but also in the development of contemporary American painting. And then they had access to this painting, as they don't typically have access, because they had all the didactic materials related to the conservation project and the investigation of the picture. I was invited to see Mural when it first arrived, before the restoration. And it was absolutely fantastic. And that can only mean that the restoration was even better. It was brighter and stretched more perfectly. And it's a glorious, glorious thing. And the Getty did a real service to humanity by restoring that picture. Called Sean. I knew the painting was at the Getty being conserved. So I said, well, why don't we plan to have it come by the Sioux City Art Center on its way back to its home base? And he said, well, that might not be as far-fetched as you think. And we started talking about it. I told him that we could raise the funds to do our part. And then he was concerned about the facility and if we could bring it into the facility, because it's a very large piece. Wasn't a very large crate at the time. Since then, the crate was made a little bit smaller, so it made it easier. But we were gonna have to take down the front entrance to the art center to get it in initially, originally. And then that changed, and we were able to get it into the loading dock. But in order to get it into the gallery, we did replace an eight-foot door with a ten-foot door and remove a temporary wall so that we could accommodate it in our permanent collection gallery. When it arrived, it was all very exciting. We were crossing our fingers that we all measured correctly. It just grazed a few things on the way in, but very lightly. And was able to get into the gallery. We let it acclimate for a day, took it out the next day. And it's an amazing crate, a very elaborate crating system. Took all day to put it on the wall, and here it is. Okay, one, two, three, open. And when it leaves the Sioux City Art Center, it will go to Venice, and then it'll go to Berlin. From Berlin, it'll go to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to London, and then back to the United States, going to Washington, D.C. So we're part of a very exclusive circuit of museums that will be showing the Pollock before it returns home. When the University of Iowa builds its new art museum, it'll be housed there. And obviously, because of its pristine condition, this is getting to see the mural in this state is like seeing it the first year that Pollock painted it. This painting was never viewed in that part of the country. And it was a great opportunity to be able to reach a new audience and also pursue the idea that Peggy Guggenheim advocated, which was that this was part of an educational program. That this painting was there to show people about new American art, new ways of approaching art, about ways that Jackson Pollock solved certain problems on the canvas. And so she would have been very proud of the way we're using this painting to educate a wider audience. Anyway, one of the times- On this boat is a substantial crane, which then serves to lift the crate, massive and heavy, onto an ad hoc ramp, which enabled us then to slide the picture effortlessly into the hallway of the palace. But this will always be the case when we're doing exhibitions. Aquatic arrivals and manpower and cranes to winch the crates into the building or into our exhibition spaces behind. We were flattered but also aware of something inevitable when the mural would begin, was to begin its European tour at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. It made perfect sense for our mission. David and Fan's exhibition has the peculiarity that we're placing it inside Peggy's palazzo and not in our temporary exhibition galleries. We might have done, but they're far too small to take something as outsize as the mural. And so it's being exhibited inside, together with Peggy's permanent collection. In the company of some of the Pollocks that Peggy herself owned, the museum will open as normal to the public and they will find, to their astonishment, these magnificent paintings. Its style dates back to the 1943s and there's the passage from the woman to the moon in 1942, where there's still the figure. There we see a man walking, so we have a stylization to get to Alchemy, where there's the complete decomposition of the forms, where every visual form disappears. Well, the Pollock mural is extraordinary for several reasons. Being one of his early commissions, he's responding to Peggy Guggenheim's requests for something magisterial, large, show-off. And he has hit the button every time. Abstract or informal, gestural, just for the gesture that he carries with him, of passion and feelings. And these are the practical demonstrations, artistically, of his artistic poetry. The Venice Biennale is the most important modern art show in the world. It takes place every two years. And the Guggenheim Foundation is responsible for presenting the American offering. One way or another, Jackson Pollock is one of those artists like Picasso, Dalí, Warhol, Monet. I mean, he's up in that league, isn't he? And as it happens, 2015 is a year of the Venice Arts Biennale. And so a particularly qualified audience will be coming through the city. And my assumption is they'll all come to see the Iowa mural. The Pollock mural is really a wonderful story of modernism's mobility. Mural is an icon. It's a striking enough painting in itself, but in terms of its influence, its influence is absolutely enormous. Does have a kind of aura to it, has a kind of magic to it, but it was also made by hand. I would say that not a week goes by that Pollock's name is not mentioned in the New York Times. And 70% of it is in a context that has nothing to do with art. Mural is still, I feel, somewhat figurative. I get the impression of dancing figures in the blacks. He famously compared it to, or said he was trying to paint a horse stampede. And once you hear that, you can see that in the painting. I'm not sure if you can before. But there's something very visceral and very active and very even violent, like a stampede, going on in that painting. I was daunted by the scale of it and by the complexity of it. I'm wondering how we were going to try and make sense of it. And that's one of the satisfying things from the project. I think we've been able to comprehend it better from the technical point of view. It still has many mysteries in it. Working on Mural was an incredible privilege. And quite frankly, having the University of Iowa send it to the Getty was a tremendous act of faith. And we took it as a very serious responsibility. And it was really one of the great privileges of my career thus far, and I suspect I will feel that way for many years to come. With a picture like the Pollock, I'll have to make a special trip to Iowa to see it again. As issues of money and cultural capital take precedent, it's understanding what that work of art is all about shifts and moves back and forth. The painting didn't arrive here by accident. It was actually placed here because it was part of the larger development of the art program and its relationship with patrons and artists. It's ultimately more than whatever million dollar price tag might be attached to it. Mural really belongs to Iowa for many reasons and it should stay in Iowa forever because it is the essence of Iowa and its art program.