SAN PEDRO MAN DONATES GRANDFATHER’S PAINTINGS TO PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARIES
AZG DAILY #149, 26-08-2011
By Donna Littlejohn, Daily Breeze
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.
From: Baghdasarian