Ballin described his murals at the Title Guarantee and Trust Building in a pamphlet published in 1931:
“The final panel is dedicated to the modern scene, visualizing a city rising to power.

The large central figure is representative of power, of man’s strength to achieve. The child symbolizes the younger generation. They are surrounded by manifestations of modern achievement. There is the harnessing and bringing of water, shown by the Owens Valley aqueduct, the building of which was one of the great engineering feats. There is also, in the form of derricks and machinery, the evidence of man’s success in producing wealth from the earth and by means of tools of invention. In the background there arises a modern building, strong and supple, the architects contribution to contemporary needs.”

In his final panel, Ballin depicts his representation of "the Modern Scene." Echoing the form of the previous panel, he focuses on a central male figure facing the arrival of modern technologies, including the Los Angeles aqueduct and the Title Guarantee and Trust Building. But while the Indian man in the previous panel was depicted as a tragic hero, his culture destroyed by modern technology, this "monumental man" is prepared to contribute to the advancement of his society. His child, likely a symbol of "youth" as appeared in many of his other murals in this period, is protected and nurtured, his strong, muscular body guaranteeing her bright future. Unlike his previous murals where Ballin used female, allegorical figures to represent the virtues of the State (as in the Wisconsin State Capitol) or the senses and seasons (as in the Getz House), here Ballin uses an idealized male body to represent modernism itself, placing his emphasis on movement and strength rather than beauty. The "monumental man", or dynamo as described by art historian Bailey Van Hook, suggests Ballin shifted his style away from his Beaux Arts training and towards modernism to capture the dynamic changes occurring in the city at the time.¹

Ballin's focus on the "monumental man" in this final panel likely reflected his desire to please his corporate patrons and complement their purposes for erecting their new headquarters. He includes the Title Guarantee and Trust Building prominently in the background alongside other modern innovations, placing it on the same scale of technological and human progress as the Owens River Aqueduct, without which Los Angeles would never have grown from the small town it had been when Ballin arrived to the modern city it had become in the previous decade. The "monumental man" harnesses the power of modern technology to fortify his place in the future, just like the Title Guarantee and Trust Company. Ballin's murals in the lobby of the building thereby conveyed to visitors the company's historic strength and stability - by offering a romantic vision of Los Angeles' history - and positioned the company on the cutting edge of Los Angeles’ development to signal to its potential clients and investors that it was both a part of the city’s small town past and its metropolitan future.

Image courtesy of Department of Special Collections, Charles Young Library, University of California Los Angeles.
Appears in the Hugo Ballin Papers, collection number 407, Box 17, Folder 1.

Ballin's quotation appears in his pamphlet, "Murals in the Title Guarantee Building," (Los Angeles: Title Guarantee and Trust Company, 1931).

1. Van Hook, Bailey, The Virgin and the Dynamo: Public Murals in American Architecture, 1893-1917 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003), p. xx.