His work is all over SF. But this secret society head is now forgotten

rewrite this content and keep HTML tags Haig Patigian in 1927 with his newly created bust of tennis star Helen Wills Moody. The bust now belongs to de Young Museum. (Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images)Anyone can see his art up close at some of San Francisco’s most popular landmarks, even 73 years after his death. Outside the city, there’s one notorious exception only the most privileged can visit.The life of Haig Patigian is a fantastic, complicated and surprisingly forgotten one. An Armenian immigrant who escaped genocide as a child and lost three of his siblings and his son to illness, he went from earning $11 a week at a San Francisco newspaper to earning a $15,000 commission to sculpt a president, winning international acclaim from the likes of Rodin and marrying into a wealthy California family.Patigian did all that in seven years. And he didn’t stop there.AdvertisementArticle continues below this adDespite being mostly self-trained in sculpture, he became quickly renowned for it as “the guy to call on when you had a commission,” said Emma Acker, curator at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which has three of his pieces. So prolific was Patigian that a 1975 art commission survey published by the office of San Francisco Mayor said, “No sculptor has had as many works placed, portraits, monuments and plaques, in and around San Francisco as Haig Patigian.”He also created the owl. That owl, the 40-foot shrine made of concrete and steel, is the centerpiece for the highly secretive and exclusive Bohemian Club’s “Cremation of Care” effigy-burning in a Monte Rio forest every year. It’s the kind of event we can only confirm with FAA air traffic advisories.The burning of the owl at Bohemian Grove, date unknown. Laser Burners Flickr CC 2.0We couldn’t get a response from the Bohemian Club for this article, which is little surprise because “footage not found” may as well be the club’s motto. But before the rich-men’s-only fraternity became better known for disturbing ritual photos, peeing on redwoods and wage theft allegations, it did self-publish some literature that named its members.AdvertisementArticle continues below this adPatigian was the Bohemian Club’s president multiple times, and when he died in 1950, fellow member Charles Kendrick eulogized him in a club-published booklet as “the high priest of our traditions.” Those traditions included the Cremation of Care, which took its current form in 1923, and elaborate costumed plays and musicals overseen by Patigian, known as “High Jinks” and “Low Jinks.”If you want to see a much smaller owl Patigian made in 1933, you can always visit the bronze plaque outside the Bohemian Club’s building in Nob Hill, San Francisco. His other publicly accessible San Francisco works include the following: —The bronzed Abraham Lincoln statue that has been sitting pensively outside City Hall since 1926—The statue of World War I Gen. John J. Pershing in Golden Gate Park that Patigian finished in 1922 after recovering from being critically ill from the influenza pandemic.Haig Patigian’s statue of World War I Gen. John J. Pershing in Golden Gate Park, near the SkyStar Wheel.Charles Russo/SFGATEAdvertisementArticle continues below this ad—The Washington Square Park statue of San Francisco’s once-controversial volunteer firemen, a $50,000 gift from Lillie Hitchcock Coit, where Patigian dramatically depicts them rescuing a fainting woman.—The 1941 stone monument parked near the water on Marina Green and dedicated to William C. Ralston, Bank of California founder. A symbolic figure on the monument faces San Francisco Bay, where Ralston mysteriously drowned just as he had lost his massive fortune.—Along the Filbert Steps, anyone can stop at the rose garden on 300 Filbert Street to admire the studio model of Patigian’s “Creation” nude sculpture that was displayed at the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island. It was placed here by property owners Virginia and Elios Anderlini, occasionally dressed up with clothes by pearl-clutching neighbors, and it survived being stolen as part of a prank before the 1955 Cal-USC football game.From the Filbert Steps you can still see the studio model of Haig Patigian’s “Creation,” which was displayed at the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island. Greg Keraghosian—The 103-year-old, roughly 50-foot-wide triangular pediment outside the Ritz Carlton on Stockton Street, formerly home to Metropolitan Life Insurance. The winged central figure in the tableau represents exactly that: insurance.—Four busts inside City Hall, including one of former Gen. Frederick Funston.AdvertisementArticle continues below this adBefore all that, Patigian was born in 1876 in Van, an ancient city in modern-day Turkey with strong ties to ancient Armenia. His father, Avedis, was credited with introducing photography to Armenia as a university professor before facing persecution for his work. The Turkish government alleged Avedis’ photos of Russian soldiers and the ruins of Van were acts of espionage and religious treason. Organized Turkish massacres of Armenian citizens were only years away, with the Armenian Genocide of 1915 soon to come.Avedis reportedly fled Turkish officials by disguising himself as a courier, and he settled in Fresno in 1890. Haig and the rest of his family joined Avedis a year or two later.Haig got a job as a teenager painting signs in Fresno before moving to San Francisco around 1899 and getting a job as an illustrator for the SF Bulletin newspaper. At this point, he wasn’t the star artist in the family — his older brother Horen was making a name for himself designing covers for several weekly publications.However, Horen died of pneumonia at 29 — his sister Rose also died of illness just three years later in 1905 at age 20.AdvertisementArticle continues below this adThe volunteer firemen memorial in Washington Square in San Francisco, created by Haig Patigian.Charles Russo/SFGATEIn between absorbing these personal losses, Haig opened a small studio on Clay Street and exhibited his water-color paintings, an art form he had studied at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art. Then, he made a name for himself in something he hadn’t studied: sculpture.His debut, a 2-foot classical-style sculpture called “The Unquiet Soul,” showed a nude man with his head swung back, his arm covering his eyes in agony — we don’t know if it reflected Patigian’s own despondency at the time. Nevertheless, when Patigian revealed it to the San Francisco Press Club in 1904, two years after Horen’s death, “all beholders were astounded to find that the work was that of the obscure young newspaper illustrator,” said a Bay Area history by Bailey Millard.While Patigian hadn’t studied sculpture, he had read books on human anatomy — his lifelike presentations of male and female bodies earned him acclaim for “Unquiet Soul” and many works to come.AdvertisementArticle continues below this adHaig Patigian’s original sculpture of “Unquiet Soul” that gained him some of his first recognition.Screenshot via Newspapers.comJust eight months after that artistic breakthrough, Patigian got his first financial one. According to Millard’s book, when a businessman came to San Francisco offering a commission for a statue of former President William McKinley, he was referred to Patigian. The offer: $15,000, which in today’s money was several hundreds of thousands of dollars.Patigian accepted. His 8-foot bronze of McKinley was completed just in time to be stored in a foundry and kept safe from the Great Earthquake of 1906. It did survive the quake and was erected that year in Arcata, Humboldt County.Patigian benefited from even better timing when he traveled to Paris in late 1906. He opened a studio and met leading sculptors such as Auguste Rodin and Alix Marquet, who helped him enter a sculpture into a major exhibition, the Salon. That piece, a bronze named “Ancient History,” stole the show — a highly unusual accomplishment for an unschooled non-French sculptor making his debut. Rodin wrote Patigian a personal commendation letter for it, and when the piece was displayed in San Francisco in 1918, thousands of people a day came to see it. It was installed on the first floor of the Bohemian Club, where it may or may not still be today.AdvertisementArticle continues below this adHaig Patigian’s owl plaque outside the Bohemian Club in San Francisco.Wikimedia CommonsConceived in San Francisco and executed in Paris, the nude figure in “Ancient History”  is inspired by Egyptian art, with sleeping sphinxes beneath her. But the face of the woman rising from a globe with outstretched wings was reportedly an ancient Assyrian queen, Semiramis, who, according to legend, killed an Armenian named Ara the Handsome after he spurned her. In one version of the story, Ara was resurrected near Van, Patigian’s birthplace.Seven months later and back in San Francisco as a…

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