Herman Volz


Herman Roderick Volz Swiss-American painter, muralist, lithographer, set designer, decorative artist and ceramist. He was politically active, vocal and often made social statements through his imagery and he was especially taken by the industrial horizon of his adopted home of San Francisco Bay Area. Many of his art pieces done for the Federal Art Project, for example, were of men at work and of docks, piers, and railroad yards.

Biography

Herman Roderick Volz was born December 25, 1904 in Zürich, Switzerland. His first training was under the tutelage of his grandfather, a master in decorative arts. He then started his formal training at the Art und Gewerbeschule in Zürich, the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna, and travelled for four years in France, Spain, Italy, Africa and Holland, eventually moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1933. By 1938 he became a US citizen.

Early work

During the Great Depression, Volz was appointed to the position of supervisor in the Northern California Art Project and supervisor for the Federal Building mural project at the Golden Gate International Exposition Art in Action exhibit from 1939-1940. He painted the two large mural on two sides of a large federal building called, The Conquest of the West, and on one side of the building it was By Land and the other was By Sea. This particular mural was the world's largest at the time and had around ten artist helping including Jose Ramis, John Saccaro, John Thomas Hayes, Carlton Williams, Peter Lowe, Percy Freer, Robert P. McChesney, Alden Clark and Ernest Lenshaw. Two large, 50′ x 45′ low-relief polished marble mosaic panels, created during the GGIE World's Fair, were installed at the San Francisco City College in the 1940s. The two mosaic panels took two years to install with a staff of eight workmen, Juan Breda served as assistant mosaicist for the project. The murals are named Organic and Inorganic Science. The imagery of the mosaics represent fields such as physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics with text accompanying the mural that reads ‘Give me a base and I move the world.’

Later work

From 1944–1948 he worked in Hollywood, as a scenic artist and technical director at Actors' Laboratory Theatre and he designed sets for MGM and Paramount Studios.
In the 1960s he became a resident of San Jose, California.
Herman Volz died on December 30, 1990 in San Jose, California.

Work

Exhibitions

Council of Allied Arts in Los Angeles, California Watercolor Society