potrero view

Giacomo Patri at 77, courtesy of the Patri family.

August 2010

Patri’s Masthead a Reminder of Potrero’s Labor History

By Peter Linenthal

In 1973, Potrero View publisher Ruth Passen decided that her newspaper needed what every paper had, a distinctive front page nameplate displaying the paper’s title. And she knew who to call, her old friend Giacomo Patri. Ruth and husband Joe knew a wide circle of artists that included Giacomo in North Beach in the 1960s. Rents there rose. The Patris and many of these artists found better deals in homes and apartments on then quiet Potrero Hill, the Patris at 21st and Arkansas. It was one reason the Passens moved to the Hill in 1969. Patri was well known for his dynamic illustrations for labor movement booklets advocating racial integration in trade unions. Ruth and Joe Passen shared his commitment to social justice.

Giacomo Guiseppe Patri was born in a village north of Genoa in 1898. He emigrated to the United States with his father in 1916. At the California School of Fine Arts, now the San Francisco Art Institute, he studied with Spencer Macky, Ralph Stackpole and Gottardo Piazzoni. Patri worked as an illustrator for newspapers (including the Chronicle and the Western Worker), book publishers, and many Bay Area unions and political groups. His brochures, leaflets and posters included This Is the Story of One Man and As a Trade Unionist I Hereby Pledge. In 1939, he published what many consider his masterpiece, the wordless graphic novel White Collar. Largely autobiographical, the central character is an illustrator whose family becomes homeless. Patri felt that the economic crises of the Great Depression, disillusionment with capitalism and the possibilities of labor union fellowship made the book necessary. Patri describes how the book began, “One day a friend handed me a paper proclaiming a solution to the all-pervasive social and economic problems. Naturally I became very excited. I wanted to be part of a movement that promised to solve our desperate situation... When the NRA appeared on the scene under the aegis of the New Deal, many white collar workers objected strenuously to any attempts to organize into labor unions. Hence, White Collar.” Engraving, printing, binding and distributing the book with help from his wife Stella and his young sons Piero and Remo took several years. A new edition of the book was published in 1975.

  In the late 1940s, Patri served as chair of the art department and taught at the California Labor School, a school for workers underwritten by many trade unions, as well as the Crocker, Strauss, and Hallinan families. Artists Emmy Lou Packard and Jean Varda taught there as well. Patri said,  “It was there that my contact with the working man developed my philosophy that the human organism is essentially a creative unit.” Trade skills were taught, but the most popular classes were in the arts. It’s estimated that 40 percent of the students were African American. Red scare tactics of the McCarthy era closed the school in 1957. Undeterred, Patri opened his own school on Grove Street later that year, The Patri School of Art Fundamentals, which was aimed at teaching adults who had no art training. Patri explained “As an artist I met so many people who said, ‘Ah, I wish I could draw, paint or sculpt.’...In our school, there is no competition among students. Each one competes only with himself, building on what he has done before, moving ahead at his own pace.’” Patri retired from teaching in 1968.

  The Potrero View nameplate Giacomo Patri designed first appeared in the September 1973 issue. Ruth Passen recalls the everyone loved it from the start “... and the artist was from here!” Cleverly, the nameplate both names and becomes the view itself. View archivist Abby Johnston notes that the waves were a February 1978 addition. The nameplate’s assertive lettering is reminiscent of Parti’s powerful White Collar of 1939; Patri’s activism continues in the View’s engagement with economic and social issues today.   

 

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