Bernard Zakheim

Bernard Zakheim
Zakheim during the painting of the Coit Tower murals, 1934, by Peter Stackpole
Born	April 4, 1898 Poland
Died	1985 California
Known for	Muralist
Notable work	"The Library", Coit Tower
Website	bernardzakheim.com

Bernard Baruch Zakheim (April 4, 1898 – 1985) was a Polish-born San Francisco muralist, best known for his work on the Coit Tower murals.

Zakheim was born to a Hasidic Jewish family in Poland. At the age of 13, he expressed his desire to become an artist and to work with his hands, rather than to continue his religious training as a rabbi. His mother objected and as a compromise Zakheim was sent to a technical training school to become a furniture designer and upholsterer. However, he did not actually give up on his artistic goal; he studied watercolor art privately and then was awarded a scholarship to the Polish National Academy of Fine Art, where he studied drawing, painting, and sculpture.

After fighting in World War I, Zakheim and his wife arrived in San Francisco in 1920, where he lived and worked as a furniture maker in the Fillmore District, then a heavily Jewish neighborhood.

In the early 1930s, he committed himself to the preservation and interpretation of Jewish-American life and culture through the making of art. He was one of the organizers of the Yiddish Folkschule on Steiner Street in San Francisco, where he taught children's art classes, and he organized the first "Yiddish art" exhibit in San Francisco.

Around this time, Zakheim was introduced to the muralist Diego Rivera by Lucretia Van Horn. Turning more seriously to mural painting as a form of expression, he traveled to Mexico and studied with Rivera. Back in San Francisco, in 1933 Zakheim helped found the San Francisco Artists and Writers Union, a group of activist artists. The Union lobbied the national government to create a federally funded arts program during the Great Depression. This program became the Public Works of Art Project, and funded Zakheim's work on Coit Tower.

Zakheim's siblings in Poland died as a result of the Nazi Holocaust, and this subject matter became a major focus of his post-war artistic output.

In later life, Zakheim moved out of the city to the rural-agricultural town of Sebastopol, California, where he lived on an old apple orchard and continued his work as a painter.