Sculpture Mystery in San Francisco
A landscaping project at a San Francisco home unearthed a mysterious sculpture that may be connected to a favorite local artist.
Greg Gatwood, a resident of the Russian Hill neighborhood in San Francisco, thought he had hit a piece of concrete while digging in his backyard. But when he unearthed the obstacle and turned it over, he saw a face.
This wasn’t mere construction debris. It was a work of art. Gatwood’s partner Judy Gittelsohn, an artist herself, realized the approximately two-foot-square, nine-inch-thick, 150-pound slab was a limestone sculpture that had taken great skill to carve. “To get that smooth transition in carving a stone, any kind of stone, is really a masterful piece of work,” she told California news outlet KTVU.
Gatwood and Gittelsohn were left wondering who made the sculpture and how it ended up in the yard. During their research, an artist friend told them that the sculpture looked like the work of Ralph Stackpole (1885-1973), whose creations include the monumental figures outside the entrance to the San Francisco Stock Exchange building (now the Pacific Exchange).
In an interview with NBC Bay Area, Gittelsohn said she saw the sculpture’s resemblance to Stackpole’s work, noting the characteristic “flattened nose and broad face” reminiscent of the paintings of Diego Rivera, whom Stackpole brought to San Francisco. However, she believes its likely creator was one of his students. Stackpole taught at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute), which has a campus in Russian Hill, for twenty years. Many students and artists lived nearby.
Gatwood and Gittelsohn plan to keep the sculpture, making it a feature of their yard when they finish the landscaping project. They also intend to continue researching it. After all, there is plenty more to the mystery. If they find out the identity of the sculptor, there is an even more perplexing question to answer: Why was it buried in the yard?
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