San Pedro man donates grandfather’s paintings to presidential libraries
By Donna Littlejohn Staff Writer
P07/08/2011 San Pedro News
His grandfather’s 1962 oil painting of President John F. Kennedy hung on the
family’s dining room wall during all the years John Saroyan was growing up
in San Pedro.
On Friday, Saroyan, 49, packed up the 24-by-30-inch canvas and shipped it
off to what will be its new home – the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library
and Museum in Boston.
Later this year, he plans to send another canvas portrait – this one of a
young Richard Nixon when he was still in Congress – to the Richard M. Nixon
Library in Yorba Linda.
“They belong in the right place,” Saroyan said of his decision to donate
some of the works by his artist grandfather, Jay Meuser. “It seems for me to
hold on to them really doesn’t do much. … They have to have a home.”
September 28 will be the 100th anniversary of Meuser’s birth. Saroyan’s
donations aren’t the only means by which the self-taught artist, who spent
the last part of his short (Meuser died in 1963 of a heart attack at the age
of 51) but varied life in San Pedro, is getting some new recognition.
On Thursday, the San Pedro Arts Association – a group Meuser was president
of in 1953 – dedicated a plaque in Meuser’s honor on space donated by Linda
Jackson and her brother, Charles Barsam, the owners of property at 343 W.
Seventh St. in downtown San Pedro. The plaque was installed on a wall
between two galleries.
Meuser, born in San Francisco, packed plenty of adventure into his years.
His biography includes stints as a teenaged Vaudevillian performer, sailor,
shipyard and sheet metal worker, baseball pitcher and instructor at the San
Francisco Art Institute.
At 31, he was the youngest chief of police in Marin County.
But in his later years, living in San Pedro with his wife and daughter (who
married a cousin of American playwright William Saroyan), it was his artwork
that consumed his time and passion.
Classified as an abstract expressionist, Meuser also painted classical
portraits of prominent people through the years. His portrait of Franklin D.
Roosevelt, done in the late 1930s, hung in the White House for a time and
the artist received a personal letter of thanks from the president.
The JFK painting “wasn’t done from a sitting or a photo, it was by memory,
maybe a series of shots,” said grandson Saroyan, a Rancho Palos Verdes
resident and psychologist who has a practice in San Pedro.
Saroyan’s daughter, Lynn, a 21-year-old Loyola Marymount sociology major,
will be on hand Wednesday, he said, to represent the family when the
painting is formally accepted by the presidential library and museum.
The family still owns a number of Meuser’s paintings, but it was still
difficult to part with the heirloom.
“I have to admit it was, it was part of our family history,” Saroyan said.
“Taking it out of the frame was kind of hard.”
His grandfather’s body of artwork, Saroyan said, “was quite eclectic. Being
an abstract impressionist painter in the ’50s was quite a challenging thing,
it wasn’t that acceptable.”
Many of Meuser’s works today are in private collections, Saroyan said, but a
few can still be seen in public places, including his award-winning painting
titled “Spirit of the Fisherman” that hangs at Dana Middle School in San
Pedro.
No one is sure what happened to the Roosevelt portrait, but it is believed
to be still with the former president’s family.
There was no assessed value determined on the Kennedy portrait before he
shipped it East, Saroyan said.
And while he said its familiar ornate frame now looks quite “empty,” the
painting’s new home will serve to display his grandfather’s talent in a way
that can be shared by the museum’s many visitors.
When it’s ready to go on permanent display, Saroyan and his family plan to
visit it in Boston.
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