Stackpole returned to San Francisco in 1912 and married Adele Barnes, two months younger than he, an art student of
Xavier Martínez and one of the first graduates of the
California Academy of Arts and Crafts. Adele Stackpole was a perfectionist in many ways, including the precision of her bookplate engravings and the demands she placed on her relationships. Stackpole was part of the foursome that founded, early in 1913, the California Society of Etchers (CSE). The other founders were
Robert B. Harshe, an etcher and art professor at
Stanford University, etcher and educator
Pedro Lemos, who taught at the San Francisco Institute of Art, and
Gottardo Piazzoni, an Italian-American painter and muralist who was Stackpole's master in France. The CSE exhibited twice in 1913, and grew to 78 artist members and five associate after two years. In 1926, the annual publication listed 46 artist members and 156 associate members: Stackpole was still a member. Decades later, the CSE merged with another group to become the
California Society of Printmakers.
Panama-Pacific International Exposition Around the same time, Stackpole was commissioned to sculpt architectural features for the 1915
Panama–Pacific International Exposition, a major assignment that was to take two years to complete, even with the aid of assistants. To give a grand entrance portal to the Palace of Varied Industries, he completed a copy of the main entrance to the Hospice of Santa Cruz, built in
Toledo, Spain in the 16th century. Stackpole's design replaced the original figures of Catholic saints with figures of industry. His works for the Palace of Varied Industries included "Man with a pick", "Tympanum group of Varied Industries", "New World Receiving Burdens of Old", "Keystone figure", and "Power of Industry". Stackpole also sculpted figures of "Thought" on the columns flanking the half domes of the west facade of the Palace Group. and they encountered Diego Rivera. While there, Stackpole's marriage unraveled, and he returned to the Bay Area in 1923 with a 24-year-old French still life artist and model named Francine Mazen, nicknamed "Ginette"; his wife and son returned after the school year to take up residence across the bay in
Oakland. Stackpole obtained a divorce, and then married Ginette in Mexico. In late 1923, Stackpole organized a major art exhibit, in partnership with Piazzoni. This was the first large-scale art show in San Francisco since 1915; there had been no expected rush of artists after the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The exhibit, held in Polk Hall in the Civic Auditorium, was companion to a nearby print exhibit which included Gauguin and Matisse works. Critic and author Laura Bride Powers felt that the event was a disappointment—it displayed "inconspicuous examples" of leading artists, and failed to show any
Picasso, avant-garde or
Dadaist works. In 1926, Stackpole delivered the William A. Coleman Fountain to the city of
Sacramento, a Moderne work (centrally located in what is now known as Cesar Chavez Park) which celebrated the city's completion of a difficult water filtration project. That same year, Stackpole traveled to
Mexico City to see Rivera working on some of his 124 frescoes in the courtyard of the
Secretariat of Public Education. Returning with a small Rivera painting, Stackpole gave it to
San Francisco Arts Commission president William Gerstle (who was initially unimpressed), and began a several-year effort to bring Rivera to work in California. Stackpole accepted an offer to teach at his former school, its name having changed to the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) [now
San Francisco Art Institute]. For a stretch of almost twenty years, he taught a number of subjects.
Dorr Bothwell studied sculpture under Stackpole, then the head of the Sculpture Department, and thought him to be
sexist—she said he told the women in the class that "the place they really belonged was in bed." building.
Kenneth Rexroth wrote of Stackpole in 1929 that "He knew everybody in town from top to bottom ... and he took us everywhere." Stackpole's sizable San Francisco studio at 716 Montgomery (adjacent to Montgomery Block) served as a social center for San Francisco's artist community. Photographer
Dorothea Lange rented upstairs studio space there in 1926, and Helen Clark and
Otis Oldfield, both artists, married there the same year. Lange's husband
Maynard Dixon had his studio next door, and the Stackpole and Dixon families were close—both men were members of the
Bohemian Club. Throughout the 1930s, Stackpole worked frequently with architect Timothy Pflueger on various commissions. Beginning in 1929 when the two men first met, Stackpole was given responsibility for selecting the artists who worked to execute and augment Pflueger's basic design scheme for the San Francisco Stock Exchange and its associated Tower, especially the Luncheon Club occupying the top floors of the Tower. Stackpole said later of the experience, "the artists were in from the first. They were called in conference and assumed responsibility and personal pride in the building." At the Sansome Street tower entrance, Stackpole worked on a scaffolding with a crew of assistants to
direct carve heroic figures in stone. After the building was completed, Stackpole was finally successful in winning a commission for Rivera; Pflueger became convinced that Rivera would be the perfect muralist for decorating the staircase wall and ceiling of the Stock Exchange Club. This was a controversial selection considering Rivera's leftist political beliefs in contradiction to the Stock Exchange's capitalist foundation. Neighbor Dixon saw the attention, and the American money being given to Rivera, and with etcher
Frank Van Sloun organized a short-lived protest against the Communist artist. However, both Dixon and Van Sloun quickly realized that the San Francisco art world "oligarchy" who were obviously smitten with Rivera, including Stackpole's well-connected patrons, were the same group that they themselves would need to support their own art aspirations. For much of 1931, Stackpole partnered with other artists to decorate Pflueger's
Paramount Theatre in Oakland, an Art Deco masterpiece. A bas-relief scene of horses, waves and a central winged figure was placed over the stage's proscenium arch, finished in gold-toned
metal leaf—the work jointly designed by Stackpole and
Robert Boardman Howard. The design worked into Pflueger's metal grille ceiling grid likely came unattributed from Stackpole's sketches. Pflueger was an able project leader; Stackpole later described his involvement: "He was the boss alright, as an architect should be ... He would call the plays just as a symphony conductor does ... There wasn't a lock, molding, or window that he did not inspect in the drawings and in the actual building with the utmost thoroughness and care." Stackpole worked through ten months of 1932 on a monumental pair of sculptures flanking the grand entrance of the Stock Exchange: a male and a female grouping showing the polarity of agriculture and industry, showing in their rounded human shapes the influence of Rivera. Chiseling into of Yosemite granite, he wore goggles and a mask. The unveiling ceremony took place in the cold of New Year's Eve, with Mayor
Angelo Rossi joining Stackpole, Pflueger and artisans in smocks. Stackpole's design was abandoned in favor of a largely flat expanse of poured concrete. In 1933 and 1934, Stackpole took part in the
Public Works of Art Project assignment to paint murals for
Coit Tower. Many of the murals were executed in styles reminiscent of Rivera, and Stackpole himself was portrayed in five of them; in one he is shown reading a newspaper announcing the destruction of a Rivera mural in New York. In 1937, Stackpole received a commission to sculpt his interpretation of
Colorado River explorer
John Wesley Powell, for display in the
Main Interior Building of the U.S. Department of Interior. It was to be a companion piece to
Heinz Warneke's portrayal of the
Lewis and Clark Expedition. Warneke learned that Stackpole intended a water scene, so he changed his portrayal of Lewis and Clark to be one of them on land. Stackpole and Warneke delivered their stone reliefs in 1940, and the two panels were mounted on either side of the stage of the building's auditorium. Another work of Stockpole's, "Dispossessed," one of his most notable canvases and a painting of great power and (unfortunately but apparently) permanent relevance, is also in Washington, D.C., at the Smithsonian.
"Reverence" In 1938, Stackpole was contacted by the President of the United States,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. While visiting the 1915 fair, in San Francisco, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, FDR had seen Stackpole's figure of
Reverence, also known as
Worship, on the long-gone altar at the Palace of Fine Arts. It had stuck in his mind somehow. He wanted one. Stackpole responded that the original had deteriorated, and was lost, but that he would be happy to undertake another version in travertine as a commission. FDR agreed, with regular inquiries on the progress of the piece over the next five years. In April 1943, Stackpole explained the result about to be revealed: :
The changes of 28 years, in the world, in you, and in me, made the exact copying or reproduction of the first statue unattractive... So I did the job as I would do it now... here are a few things I thought of when I was working. Big mass movements in thinking and labor naturally reflect in art. The slender and graceful belong less to us now. I’ve tried to make heavy and strong forms. She is more bent and the burden heavier. This was not what the President had remembered or wanted. He ordered it to a secluded area of Hyde Park, where it was re-discovered in 1987, identified, then concealed all over again within a new ring of trees according to FDR's wishes.
Golden Gate International Exposition was the central spirit of the
Golden Gate International Exposition. Pflueger made certain that Stackpole was given a major commission for art in preparation for the
Golden Gate International Exposition, also called the Pacific Pageant, a world's fair to be held on
Treasure Island between San Francisco and Oakland. Stackpole worked to create an tall frame-and-stucco embodiment of
Pacifica, the theme of the exposition. By November 1938, when
Life photographer
Alfred Eisenstaedt was capturing images to promote the event,
Pacifica was ready for his camera. The magazine carried the image of this, Stackpole's most monumental work, "a peaceful, contemplative, almost prayer-like female figure" intended only for temporary placement. The heroic sculpture stood in front of a tall "prayer curtain" of regular star-shaped steel bangles that rippled in the wind. Vivid orange and blue lights washed the curtain at night, while
Pacifica, the image of Peace, was brilliant in white. Over two years, 16 million visitors came to the exposition. When it was over, Stackpole proposed that the sculpture be recast in a more permanent form—steel, stone or concrete—and positioned prominently on an island in the San Francisco Bay, perhaps
Alcatraz or
Angel Island, in a manner similar to the
Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.The plan was not seriously considered by civic leaders whose attention was on the gathering war clouds in Asia and Europe. The sculpture and most of the exposition buildings were dynamited in 1942, and the U.S. Navy took ownership of the island as a base in
World War II. ==Later life==