LINCOLN SQUARE — In July, Lincoln Square residents packed a community room at Sulzer Library to express fear and outrage over a series of shots-fired incidents.
What few, if any, of the attendees realized was that the community room itself had been the object of neighborhood fury 31 years ago.
While Sulzer, 4455 N. Lincoln Ave., is temporarily closed for some much needed repairs, let's take a look back at the controversy that threatened to overshadow the building's grand opening in 1985.
The cause of the uproar: A work of art that tens of thousands of patrons have likely passed without giving a second glance — in large part because it's typically hidden from view.
Step into the community room on the lobby's north end and witness the fresco that spawned a debate so heated it captured the attention of the New York Times. The painting covers most of the room's four walls, floor to ceiling, and illustrates scenes from Virgil's epic poem the "Aeneid."
All these decades later, artist Irene Siegel is still taken aback over the contempt her fresco elicited from members of the community, who formed a coalition dubbed Uprave to derail the work while it was still in progress.
"I think I probably met the early Tea Party before there was a Tea Party," Siegel, 84, said during an interview with DNAinfo Chicago.
The darkest sections of the fresco depict Aeneas's descent into the underworld. [All photos DNAinfo/Patty Wetli]
Siegel, whose work is featured in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and New York's Museum of Modern Art, had received a $10,000 commission for the fresco from the Chicago Arts Council.
At the time, Sulzer was under construction to replace Hild Library up the street, which had outgrown its shelf space. (The former Hild building is now home to the Old Town School of Folk Music.)
In applying for the commission, Siegel had submitted a sketch of her plan to the arts council and studied frescoes extensively, researching the work of everyone from Michelangelo to Diego Rivera, before taking up her brushes at Sulzer.
Her choice of the "Aeneid" as the fresco's subject matter was highly symbolic, Siegel told the Reader in 1995.
"If the 'Aeneid' has more blood and gore than most stories, it also deals with mythological characters that you see in Shakespeare. You read about them all the time," she said, adding that she had hoped to "make people curious about reading the classics."
Instead she invited their wrath.
Siegel included literary quotations in the fresco, which critics said looked like graffiti.
Neighbors caught a glimpse of Siegel's first panels of the fresco, depicting Aeneas's descent into the underworld, and didn't like what they saw.
Reporting on the community's reaction, Tribune art critic Alan Artner wrote:
"Its often violent subject matter was said to be inappropriate for an orientation space, just as its expressionist style was thought to conflict with the building's neoclassical architecture. Those who were going to use the room had been told to expect something lyrical — a fantasy on themes from Mozart's 'The Magic Flute.'"
"It probably looked out of control" and didn't sit well with folks more familiar with "Norman Rockwell," conceded Siegel, who grew up in Gage Park, the only child of Russian immigrants.
"They saw things and imagined things that weren't there," she said. "They saw something very dirty in it. They saw something sexual."
A vocal opposition quickly organized and lobbied officials to pull the plug on the project.
According to an account of events published in the Reader, the city told Siegel to halt work on the fresco until the community could weigh in with feedback.
Two hundred residents packed a public meeting at Welles Park, the majority of them demanding the artwork's removal.
Objections ranged from a dislike of the colors to Siegel's decision to incorporate quotations into the painting. Many said the writing resembled graffiti, which could have a bad influence on children, according to coverage of the conflict in the Los Angeles Times.
"It got really ugly, it set in motion some of the crazies there," Siegel said of the meeting.
"The screamed, they yelled, they said, 'This is not a fresco,'" she recalled. "No one had to say any facts, just opinions. In some ways, art is a very safe thing to attack — I think it's a substitute for unspecified anger."
Siegel stopped painting for years after the furor over her Sulzer fresco.
Ultimately Siegel was allowed to complete the fresco, but the hostility she encountered during the process was so traumatic, she gave up painting for awhile.
"It has remained fresh for me," she said.
She told the Reader in 1995: "I almost had to get up there and call for the gods to help me try to remember who I was," struggling "to work in such a negative atmosphere that had nothing to do with art."
Though the brouhaha over the artwork is all but forgotten — and the images themselves are frequently obscured by stacks of chairs and projection screens — some folks continue to fan the dying flames.
In 2013, Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg raged against the fresco in a personal blog post:
"It was sad to have this brand new, classical and beautiful library open with one room turned over, with very little input from the people who would live with it, to this crude defacement with literary aspirations."
In many ways, the war over her fresco encapsulated a broader cultural debate over public art, one that artists in general lost even though her work at Sulzer still stands, Siegel said.
"I think it's timid, a lot of it," she said of the state of public art today. "They will not take a chance on anything."
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