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Hugo Ballin's Los Angeles

Caroline Luce, Author
Burbank City Hall, page 5 of 5
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Burbank City Hall - Citations and Additional Resources


For many years, Ballin's murals at Burbank City Hall could not be clearly viewed because renovations to the buildings obscured them. The city removed the bottom third of the “Burbank Industry” mural during the construction of a bridge walkway to the Municipal Services Building behind City Hall, and the installation of a dropped ceiling in the Council Chambers covered a significant portion of the "Four Freedoms" mural. Fortunately for admirers of Ballin’s work, the City of Burbank restored the Ballin murals as part of their renovation of City Hall in 2001 and they are again visible for all visitors to enjoy. To learn more about the restoration or schedule a visit, visit the City of Burbank's website.

For more historic photos or Burbank and information on its development, see Wesley Clark's "Burbankia" blog and the Burbank Historical Society's website at http://www.burbankhistoricalsoc.org.

If you have any more information about an item you’ve seen on our website or if you are the copyright owner and believe our website has not properly attributed your work to you or has used it without permission, we want to hear from you. Please email the Center for Jewish Studies at cjs@humnet.ucla.edu with your contact information and a link to the relevant content.

1. Unemployed statistics come from William H. Mullins, The Great Depression on the Urban West Coast, 1929-1933, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 56, 91 and Leonard Leader, Los Angeles and the Great Depression (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1991), 198.

2. “The Incoming hobo army” comes from the title of an article by James S. Carter published in the Los Angeles Times Nov. 1st, 1931.

3. According to George Sanchez, the number of Mexican born residents fell from 56,304 in 1930 to 38,040 in 1940. See Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York : Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 224-225, 228.

4. Ballin’s “determination to get some element of pure decorative beauty into every picture that he paints…” was noted in a clipping that appears in a scrapbook from an unknown author written Feb. 28th, 1911, housed in the Hugo Ballin Papers, Department of Special Collections, Charles Young Library, UCLA, Box 29, Folder 2.

5. Schrank, Sarah, Art and the City: Civic Imagination and Cultural Authority in Los Angeles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), p. 57.

6. Schrank, Art and the City, p. 44.

7. Quotations appear in Schrank, Art and the City, p. 49.

8. Schrank, Sarah, "Public Art at the Global Crossroads: the Politics of Place in 1930s Los Angeles," Journal of Social History, Vol. 44 Issue 2 (Winter, 2010): 435-457, p. 447. See also Art and the City, pp. 58-59.

9. The incident appears in articles in the Los Angeles Express Jan. 14th, 1936 and Los Angeles Times, Jan. 2nd, 1936, both of which appear in a scrapbook in the Ballin Papers, Box 29, Folder 2.

10. Wilson, Richard Guy, “Gordon B. Kaufmann and Modernism,” in ed. Jay Belloli, Lauren Weiss Bricker et al., Johnson, Kaufmann, Coate: Partners in the California Style (Claremont, CA: Scripps College; Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1992).

11. Monica Jovanovich-Kelley, “The Apotheosis of Power: Corporate Mural Commissions in Los Angeles during the 1930s,” Public Art Dialogue (Spring 2014).

12. Monica Jovanovich-Kelley, “The Apotheosis of Power: Corporate Mural Commissions in Los Angeles during the 1930s,” Public Art Dialogue (Spring 2014). See also her dissertation, “Power and Patronage: Public Art and Corporate Mural Commissions in Los Angeles, 1928 – 1935” PhD diss., University of California San Diego, Summer 2014.

13. Souvenir Program from the 50th Anniversary Celebration of Burbank City hall, Feb. 12th, 1993 (Burbank: City of Burbank, Burbank Civic Pride Committee, Burbank Historical Society, 1993)

14. Ballin offered a description of the murals at Burbank City Hall in a letter to the City of Burbank in 1948, accessed at http://www.burbankca.gov/about-us/burbank-history/burbank-city-hall/city-council-chamber-murals.

15. Details on Rockwell's painting from the Norman Rockwell Museum at http://www.nrm.org/2013/08/norman-rockwells-four-freedoms/.

16. Ballin’s description appeared in a letter to the City of Burbank written in 1948, accessed at http://www.burbankca.gov/about-us/burbank-history/burbank-city-hall/city-council-chamber-murals.

17. Ibid.

18. “’Freedoms’ Murals to be Liberated” Los Angeles Times May 18th, 2001; Mary Jane Strickland, Burbank Historical Society.
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