Francis Danovich’s Paul Bunyan Mural for the Children’s Clinic
Paul Bunyan is the mighty, oversized lumberjack of regional American folktales. The School of Dentistry is home to remnants of a Works Progress Administration mural depicting Bunyan tales.
Visitors to the Children’s Clinic waited for appointments amid Danovich’s exaggerated scenes of lumberjack life
The School of Dentistry’s Kellogg Building has a distinctive Art Deco copper grill and glass doorway facing Fletcher Street. The building was still under construction in 1939 when a promising young artist, Francis Danovich, painted the mural of Paul Bunyan stories that would decorate the walls of the main floor Children’s Clinic.
The Michigan Daily stated that the mural, done in egg tempera on gessoed plaster, was “depicted through the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration,” a government employment program that kept many artists working throughout the Great Depression. The mural was one of several Federal Art Project murals completed for the University of Michigan during the New Deal era.
Danovich worked at night so he could avoid interruption, and his finished work was praised for its lightheartedness and use of space and color.
He called his subject “an amusing and light fantasy, using the elements found in real, existent lumber camps.” In one panel, lumbermen dance in a circle near an oversized fiddler. In another scene, many regular-sized figures prepare a meal for the giant Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe. After, the dishes were washed by Niagara Falls. Danovich relished the exaggerations and casualness of the tall tales: “The huge table,” he said, “is populated with men engaged in the pleasurable orgy of mastication, without the poise of the Emily Post school.”
Mural reconstructed by graphic designer Chris Jung for the Sindecuse Museum of Dentistry
Paul Bunyan stories were popular in the 1930s and 1940s. Students at the University of Michigan held a Paul Bunyan-themed dance, and in West Quadrangle there was another Bunyan themed-mural carved by Detroit sculptor Gustave Hildebrand. Yet another mural of these themes exists in the region. There’s a Bunyan mural by painter and mosaic artist James Watrous at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Forgotten and wallpapered over, the Danovich mural was uncovered in 1998 during construction within the Kellogg Building. At first, the mural could only be seen above the line where a drop ceiling had just been removed. Further investigation showed much of the mural had been damaged. After consultation with preservation experts, three surviving remnants were preserved and mounted. They are now displayed in the Sindecuse Museum atrium.
About the Artist
A graduate of Cass Technical High School in Detroit, Francis Danovich studied commercial art and was vice-president of the Art Club, according to yearbooks. He was a friend of artist David Fredenthal, also a Cass Tech graduate.
Yearbook photograph of artist Francis Danovich. Courtesy of the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library
As a high schooler, Danovich won awards through Scholastic Magazine’s National High School Scholastic Competition: 1st prize in painting, 1st prize in colored inks, and 2nd prize in prints. “As winner of the most important painting prize, the George Bellows Memorial Award, Francis Danovich was invited to come to New York… to participate, with the prize winners in poetry and music, in a national broadcast celebrating National Boy and Girl Week. He was entertained in New York for a week, and then invited to Pittsburgh where the exhibition was on view in Carnegie Museum.”
Danovich also won a Booth scholarship to study with painter Zoltan Sepeshy at Cranbrook Academy of Art from 1937-1938. Sepeshy was known for his mastery of egg tempera, an ancient technique also believed to be the medium of Francis Danovich’s mural at the School of Dentistry. Hungarian-born Sepeshy was also a member and regular exhibitor at the Scarab Club arts center in Detroit, according to their website.
Detroit Free Press articles say he showed work at the DIA’s Annual Exhibition of Michigan Artists in 1938 and 1939. The Detroit Free Press event coverage in Dec 14, 1939 says, “The jury gave… the Mrs. Albert Kahn Prize of $50, for the best water color, to ‘Detroit Riverfront’ by Francis Danovich.” Perhaps the same painting, Danovich’s 1939 painting, “River Front,” is now in the collections of the University of Michigan Museum of Art.
His 1938 watercolor painting, “Round House,” was shown in the WPA Contemporary Arts Project at the 1940 New York World’s Fair, according to American Art in the Newark Museum.
More recently, Danovich’s 1938 watercolor, The Market, was in a group show entitled Lower Great Lakes Watercolorists from the Patricia and Randall Reed Collection at the Detroit Athletic Club Art and Architecture Exhibit in 2008.
Art auction websites indicate that Danovich died in 1956. He would have been only 36 years old.
Three remnants of the Danovich mural have been preserved and displayed in the Kellogg Building atrium.