Biography

It was the misfortune of Alois Fabry, Jr. to be celebrated more for the destruction of one of his murals than for the execution of others. Fabry was born into a family of artists. His father was a portrait painter and his brother became a well-known illustrator. Both brothers attended classes at the Art Students League and competed for their father's approval in their artwork. Alois won a medal for drawing in high school and a scholarship to the Fieldston School. While an undergraduate at Yale, he entered a mural competition and was commissioned to complete a mural for the post office in Sandusky, Ohio. He graduated from the Yale University School of Fine arts in 1936, completing his Ohio commission in 1937. Another mural commission followed for the post office in Williamsburg, Kentucky. But his grandest achievement in that genre was the culmination of a two-year effort to decorate the Brooklyn Borough Hall. Two 900 square foot murals, very much in the spirit of Diego Rivera were completed for this project in 1939. But six years later they were removed, much as Rivera's Rockefeller Center mural had been removed.

This hardly ended Fabry's career. He became the Director of the mural-painting department at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design and taught at Columbia University and the Pratt Institute. From 1956-1971 he was Director of Art for the New Canaan school system. He wrote three books with titles like "Oil Painting is Fun" and illustrated other books and magazines.

Critical Analysis

While Fabry himself claimed that removal of his Brooklyn mural was not a crushing event in his life, since he had already moved on to other interests, his wife and son have expressed different views. Certainly the calm demeanor of Fabry's two post office murals suggests that he was holding back his emotions in those works, only to let them pour forth is his work at the Brooklyn Borough Hall. In any case he focused thereafter on watercolors, with landscapes, seascapes and studies of the circus.

It's unclear why the Brooklyn murals aroused the fury of local politicians. Perhaps they saw in them an echo of Rivera's work and presumed Fabry to be another trouble-making radical. But Fabry was a mild-mannered person who painted in a shirt and tie, eschewed alcohol, maintained a quiet family life and became an Eisenhower Republican. It's true that he had used people off the streets as models for his Brooklyn murals and that he thereby brought to them a realism that may have grated upon the sensibilities of people who expect art to be merely pretty. But these murals were a massive artistic achievement, and their destruction, endorsed ultimately by Mayor La Guardia, is to New York's shame.

Interestingly, Fabry's Kentucky mural has also been treated shabbily. The U.S. Postal Service has left the mural in its original location, which means that it is now hanging in the storeroom of a little-used postal facility.

Murals

• Williamsburg, Kentucky - County Clerk's Storage Facility: Floating Horses Down the Cumberland River
• Upper Sandusky, Ohio - Post Office: The Mail