Another hall of learning

Home of William and Blanche Hinman Garland, ca. 1901.

A COLLEAGUE RESEARCHING the original St. James Park in the West Adams historic district came across a mention of Garland Hall, a graceful mansion that originally occupied the lot on the northwest corner of West Adams Boulevard and South St. James Place. Garland Hall, we were surprised to learn, was briefly part of the original Downtown Campus of Mount St. Mary's.

The house at 815 W. Adams Blvd. was built by real estate developer William "Billy" Garland around 1901 and occupied by Garland (who died in 1948) and his widow until her death in 1958.

It was never part of the Doheny compound next door on Chester Place, and its Mount connection lasted only a few years. When Blanche Garland died in 1958 she deeded the property to the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, which in turn sold it to the Catholic Archdiocese. Thus it was literally in the neighborhood and available when the Mount opened Downtown in the fall of 1962.

The garage of the building
was used as a sculpture studio.

An old Admissions brochure from 1963-1964 lists Garland Hall with the other buildings and their original names:

–Fontbonne Hall (known now as Building 10) - administrative offices, chapel, bookstore and classrooms
–Médaille Hall (Building 2) - library and study rooms
–Faculty-Student Center (Building 1) - informal lounges, meeting rooms, student body offices and counseling services
–Carondelet Center (Building 8-1/2) - Home Economics center
–Garland Hall (815 W. Adams Blvd.) - fine arts gallery and studios

The Catholic Archdiocese sold the building and it was demolished in 1972, to be replaced with nondescript apartments, something that was happening to stately homes all over the area.  But for a almost a decade it was home to art exhibits, music performances and aspiring young artists.

Discovering the existence of Garland Hall might also solve a little mystery that has intrigued us for years. During a cleaning up operation a few years ago, a number of paintings turned up in storage in the Doheny Mansion. Some were by prominent Los Angeles artists, including Mount benefactor José Drudis-Biada, complete with exhibit information and price tags. But they had been jammed rather haphazardly into two closets in the basement and left there for the next 45 years. Perhaps they once graced the gallery in Garland Hall.

A writeup for an exhibit in The View, October 15, 1964.

Mary Chapel's Stations of the Cross

Ecclesial permission to have the Stations of the Cross
in the original Mount Chapel in 1932

WE BLOGGED THE OTHER DAY about some of the treasures that have surfaced this summer in storage in the Mary Chapel Sacristy, and now we're going to dig into a little more history about one of them.

A framed document in Latin is dated 1932, which would be within a year or two of when the Mount community finally moved up the hill to the new Brentwood campus (the future Chalon) from temporary quarters at St. Mary's Academy in Inglewood.

Brady Hall was the one and only structure until 1939 when Mary Chapel was built. It was a beautiful, multipurpose building into which were crammed the CSJs' convent, student dorms, dining facilities, classrooms, science labs, library, infirmary and of course a chapel. Mass was mandatory and celebrated daily in two converted dorm rooms with the dividing wall removed.

Every Catholic church is entitled to a Stations of the Cross, or Way of the Cross, an ancient devotion that relives Jesus' passion and death in 14 "stations," usually around the walls of the nave. The Latin is Via Crucis, and this document kept in the Sacristy is formal, written permission to stage them in the chapel at the new Mount campus.

These days, the Stations in Mary Chapel are barely noticeable, owing to their small size and decades of grime. In the tiny Brady Hall chapel, there was room for only 14 small pictures, but when the new Mary Chapel was consecrated in 1940, the old Stations were incorporated into the new architecture. The originals were photographed and enlarged, and then hand tinted by one of the Art Department faculty, Sister Ignatia Cordis, CSJ. The covering varnish has darkened and muted the original colors, but when you looks at them now, you are seeing part of the Mount's first chapel in 1932. (What became of the originals is unknown.)

Out of curiosity, we looked into why the Catholic Church had to give formal permission for the Stations.  If a devoted Catholic reverently "walks" the Stations using the appropriate prayers, he or she is entitled to have sins wiped away, called an indulgence. From medieval times, pilgrims following  Jesus' final footsteps in Jerusalem -- the real Stations of the Cross -- were granted a variety of indulgences, good for clearing one or two or a lifetime of sins. The popularity of the pilgrimage led it eventually to be extended to local parishes. A penitent praying the Via Crucis in her home church is essentially making a little pilgrimage and can discharge her sins without having to go all the way to the Holy Land. This approach was popularized in the 1600s by the Franciscans, who since 1217 have been the custodians of the original Way of the Cross through the ancient streets of Jerusalem.

It is the opportunity to receive an indulgence that explains why any installation of the Stations of the Cross has to be blessed by the local prelate; they have to be done in the proper form according to Church norms. (We have an artist's concept of the Stations in the J. Thomas McCarthy Library on the Doheny Campus, but they're not "licensed," so no indulgences.)

The Mount's Documenta Pro Erectione S. Viae Crucis -- "evidence for the building of the holy Way of the Cross" -- is signed in Latin by Sister Margaret Brady, CSJ (Soror Margarita Maria), the Mount's founding president; Father Ermin Vitry, OSB, a Benedictine monk who was Mount chaplain and a music professor; and Most Rev. John (Joannes) J. Cantwell, archbishop of the Diocese of Los Angeles (Angelorum) and San Diego (Sti. Didaci).

The Franciscans' 800-year-old custodianship of the Holy Land explains why it is also signed by two Franciscans. Head (guardian) of the Franciscan province at Mission Santa Barbara, Father Dominic (Dominicus) Gallardo, OFM, authorized as his local delegate Father John (Joannes) Otterstedt, OFM, to make sure everything was on the up and up.

Since the old Stations were incorporated into the new chapel, there was no need of a new  Documentum in 1939.  Those Stations and their Documentum are all that remains of the original  chapel except a couple of fuzzy photographs. 

The first Mount Chapel right before its final liturgy in mid-December 1939.
After that, Mass was celebrated in Mary Chapel. The room is opposite
the elevators on the second floor of Brady Hall, now a lounge.

'Bernadette' surfaces

Jennifer Jones as Bernadette Soubirous, 1943 

St. Bernadette hung in the
Chalon Library until 1986.

SHE GRACED A CONFERENCE ROOM in the Chalon library and was a familiar presence to Mount students for nearly 40 years. She was the subject of one of American portraitist Norman Rockwell's most famous and beloved works, and an emblem of one of the world's great pilgrimage sites -- Lourdes.

She was Jennifer Jones as Bernadette Soubirous in 1943 drama Song of Bernadette (based on the novel by Fritz Werfel). The 28- by 53-inch oil painting was Rockwell's study for the movie posters that made Jones and St. Bernadette famous. Jones won the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal.

At some point before 1950 the portrait was donated to Mount St. Mary's College -- a spectacular addition to the still-new Charles Willard Coe Memorial Library. Although the circumstances of the donation are lost, it was a rare and wonderful gift to a small college.

Sad to say, our portrait of St. B was sold in 1986. The Mount needed funds. College treasures were located, inventoried and appraised and reluctantly placed on the auction block. A black-tie gala and silent auction was held in the Doheny Mansion on May 10 that year, and among the proceeds were $10,000 (according to oral history, anyway) for Rockwell's St. Bernadette. The buyer is said to have been a Brentwood neighbor, a gentleman who lived nearby in Mandeville Canyon.

Nothing more was heard of the painting, although we did get occasional questions from alumnae about what happened to it. It was sort of comforting to know St. B was close by.

New York Times ad for auction

This week we heard from our favorite alumna correspondent, Bev Halpin Carrigan '52, who noticed an ad in the October 18 New York Times for an auction of Rockwell's Bernadette. Bev remembers seeing the portrait in a conference room off the library entrance. Later it hung in the main staircase.

The painting is to be previewed today and tomorrow in New York City, with the auction scheduled for this Saturday, October 26. The bid estimate is $400,000 to $600,000.

So begins another chapter in Rockwell's painting of our friend St. Bernadette. We hope the eventual owner takes as much inspiration from her as the Mount community did.

Caption from MSMC auction catalog

Sr. Ignatia's works on virtual view

Sister Ignatia in the mid-
1970s when she was about
90 years old. 

THE MOUNT'S Sister Ignatia Cordis was a prolific painter but, as we noted, original, hanging works are rare, and nearly everything she did prior to 1961 was lost in the Bel Air Fire.

The discovery of an unlabeled box of slides on a shelf in the College Archives was exciting indeed, because the contents give us a glimpse of her diversity of styles. Among her later works are watercolors and oils that documented the aftermath of the same fire that destroyed her artistic legacy.

All of the digitized slides can now be enjoyed in the MSMC Archives space on Flickr. If you can contribute a description or comment, feel free. The slides came with no information, and only bits and pieces in the Mount records suggest that the photos were taken at the time of a retrospective exhibit of Sister's work in 1979.

We'd love to know where her cityscapes were painted, and is that Yosemite Valley and the Ahwahnee Hotel we see?

Arches in a quiet corner of Carondelet Center.

Lost and found: the art of Sister Ignatia

Mount convent (Rossiter Hall) in ruins after the 1961 Bel Air Fire.

SISTER IGNATIA CORDIS, CSJ, founded the Mount Art Department in the 1920s and passed away in 1986 at 99, renowned for her sometimes avant-garde work and for pushing the boundaries of what was considered suitable for a Catholic nun to paint.

In a film cabinet drawer in the College Archives, a yellowed envelope tells a familiar story of pictures borrowed and never returned. A typewritten label dated December, 1985 -- a few months before Sister Ignatia's death -- reads:

Lost -- set of slides of Sr. Ignatia's art show. The set was removed from the archives and never returned. I have asked the Art Department, the press, etc., but no positive results.

It's signed by Sister Margaret Lynch, then the College Archivist.

Every archivist knows that kind of frustration, but for Sister Margaret it had to be especially painful. When the Mount convent (Rossiter Hall) was destroyed in the Bel Air Fire in November, 1961, most of Sister Ignatia's early work also went up in flames. She continued to paint -- including documenting the damage to the College in a series of impressionistic watercolors like the one above -- and in October, 1979, the College staged a tribute exhibit of 50 of her paintings. Photographic copies were carefully made of the hanging work by Los Angeles photographer Gerson Bender and a set handed over to the Treasure Room (as the Mount's Archives & Special Collections were then known).

We are happy to report that after nearly 27 years, the slides have surfaced. Our intrepid volunteer Vivian Santibáñez unearthed them in a shoebox full of unmarked yellow slide boxes, and the Skirball Cultural Center archives kindly let us scan them there last week.

We'll post some of the images over on Facebook at MSMC Archives. Mostly buildings and interesting landscapes, some paintings have historic value, like the one below, a drawing of 21 Chester Place. This imposing white mansion next to the Doheny Campus was torn down and the land sold to L.A. Unified to build Lanterman High School.

That's life in the archives world -- you lose a few, you find a few. Some of Sister's originals hang here and there around both campuses, but the location of many from the 1979 show is unknown. At least now we know what we're looking for. We're sure Sisters Margaret and Ignatia are pleased.

21 Chester Place was the model for the Addams Family home in the
classic 1960s sitcom. No other images exist in the MSMC Archives. 

Advent

SISTER IGNATIA CORDIS, CSJ, served as chairman of the Art Department for more than three decades, from the founding of the Mount in 1925 until 1961. She passed away in 1986 at the age of 99.

A few of Sister Ignatia's works grace the college walls, including a watercolor hanging in Hannon Parlor that depicts the ruins of Rossiter Hall after the Bel Air Fire. Many of her works, sad to say, were lost in that same fire, which destroyed her rooms in Rossiter as well as the studios in the Marian Hall of Fine Arts.

The image above is "The Annunciation," an oil painting done in 1946 and probably Sister's best-known and most unusual work. Her surviving works are all landscapes, but this modernistic treatment of a classic theme is unique. The original is hanging in the Chalon office of President Ann McElaney-Johnson and makes a nice welcome to the Advent season.