"The Family Group" by Bernard (Tony) J. Rosenthal at The Parker Center (1955)
A bronze sculpture by Tony Rosenthal, The Family Group, hangs near the entrance to the Parker Center building.
|
When the Los Angeles Police Department’s Parker Center was opened in 1955, the building was a symbol of police modernization and a focal point for controversy. This new space was also to act as a signal of the department’s shift "away from rampant corruption and toward the modern age of professional policing" (Los Angeles Magazine). In 1952, Tony Rosenthal was commissioned to build a sculptural piece for the exterior of the building, fitting of this new image of the LAPD.
At the suggestion of a police department employee, Rosenthal designed the work to represent a policeman protecting a family. "All models depicted a policeman, represented by the tallest figure, standing behind a family composed of a mother holding a small child in her left arm and a boy standing to her right. However, the initial curved lines of the composition became increasingly angular, the natural proportions and realistic body elements became increasingly abstract and the facial features were ultimately eliminated" (Public Art in LA). Unfortunately for Rosenthal, this was a time when Los Angeles art and civic imagination was still in transition between the private and public powers, and modern art became a significant outlet for red-baiting and increasing the fears of communists being among the public sector. |
On the tail-end of the debates surrounding the California Art Club and the Los Angeles Art Association regarding bringing modernism into the purview of the Los Angeles art scene, the clubs sought out this piece as a quintessential example of anti-American art, with its nondescript figures. Moreover, during the Cold War era, a white, middle-class, suburban family emerged as the ideal "nuclear family", ready and willing to protect the home, as well as the nation, during nuclear attack. The head, Rosenthal said, was kept simple "so it cannot be construed as belonging to any definite race or creed in preference to another." As this statue seemed to portray a negative view of the American family, "without eyes, ears, noses, or brains" ("City Art Chief Denies Board OK'd Statue"), or any definitive race or class, the art clubs came up against the Municipal Arts Department demanding legal action be taken against the piece and be banned from installation. "For an artist to claim that a modernist sculpture represented the American family transgressed the necessary boundaries of cold-war domestic ideology by conflating the interpretive, immigrant, and urban qualities of modernist with hermetically sealed visions of suburban homogeneity" (Art and the City, 93). Much to the dismay of the traditionalists, however, the piece was installed in 1955, coinciding with the opening of the Parker Center.
Although the sculpture faced intense scrutiny when the city was preparing for its installation, the interest in, and resulting debate over the piece diminished as local Cold War tensions fell out of people's minds and switched to new political, social and economic issues across the city.
The LAPD has been working from yet another new building since On January 15, 2013, the City of Los Angeles permanently closed Parker Center. Threatened with demolition three times in the last three years, the City Council voted in April 2017 to officially move forward with razing the building, although the timeline is yet to be confirmed. As noted by the LA Conservancy, "Despite being eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, Parker Center has fallen victim to a flawed and highly politicized process. This outcome further illustrates the challenges of preserving places with difficult histories."
Currently located at the now empty Parker Center at 150 N. Los Angeles Street, the removal, relocation and preservation of "The Family Group" sculpture remain to be determined.
The LAPD has been working from yet another new building since On January 15, 2013, the City of Los Angeles permanently closed Parker Center. Threatened with demolition three times in the last three years, the City Council voted in April 2017 to officially move forward with razing the building, although the timeline is yet to be confirmed. As noted by the LA Conservancy, "Despite being eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, Parker Center has fallen victim to a flawed and highly politicized process. This outcome further illustrates the challenges of preserving places with difficult histories."
Currently located at the now empty Parker Center at 150 N. Los Angeles Street, the removal, relocation and preservation of "The Family Group" sculpture remain to be determined.