When you search the indexes of art books for the name “Kadish, Reuben,” they usually point you to quotes from interviews with him. The Archives of American Art has two long interviews, one from 1964 and one from 1992, just before his death. They focus on his involvement in the art scenes of the era, mostly in San Francisco, but also briefly in New York, Los Angeles, Mexico, and elsewhere. The quotes you find aren’t about himself or his art, though. They’re about people he knew, like Pollock. Even the journal articles which feature him are usually about a few murals painted with an artist name Phillip Goldstein. The two worked on a mural in LA that the police destroyed. David Siquieros invited them to Mexico to paint one there. Another one still exists at a tuberculosis hospital in Duarte, CA. Then Phillip Goldstein changed his name to Philip Guston, moved to New York, became an abstract expressionist, and for a very long time denied having had much to do with any of those murals. Around the time he made the unexpected, what-you-know-him-for-now return to “figurative” works, he began to acknowledge them again. The KKK hoods, ubiquitous in his later work—and in the commentary on it—appear in the Mexico mural, too.
Kadish stayed in San Francisco, directing the local Murals project for the WPA. One of the murals he himself painted during that time is “A Dissertation on Alchemy,” in what was then the Chemistry wing of the California Teacher’s College. It’s a bizarre blend of de Chirico-esque surrealism and WPA-style bombast. While he painted it, “he was forced to post a written explanation of what he was doing for the benefit of the professors.” 
It was finished in 1937, in a building that is now part of an unused UC Campus. Redevelopment of the site is in the planning stages, and the buliding may or may not be torn down soon, but it has been abandoned for several years and, like most abandoned building in San Francisco, thoroughly squatted and tagged. Outside, a large, rotating mural wraps around the corner of the wall attached to it, at the Haight and Laguna intersection. Inside, chalkboards are ripped from walls, doors are broken off, a few rooms have trash, clothes, discarded needles, and other detritus, and tags are scribbled up and down the hallways, across lockers, and on windows. Except for Kadish’s mural. Apart from the one pockmark over the alchemist’s shoulder, it remains untouched.
(Pictures from The Living New Deal Project.)
