Wagner Murals - Origin of The Collection

Origin of The Collection

Harald Wagner was born in Falls City, Oregon in 1903. He later went on to obtain a degree in Architecture from the University of Oregon at Eugene. In 1927, Wagner moved to San Francisco and went to work as a draftsman for the architectural firm of Bliss & Faville. It was here that Wagner became adamantly interested in art. Influenced by his mentor, William Faville, and Arthur and Lucia Mathews, popular decor artists in the area, Wagner began to learn and collect art from around the world. In the 1950s, he traveled for the first time to Mexico where he fell in love with the country and its people. He eventually purchased a house there where he lived part time. It was here that, in the mid-1960s, he began to acquire a collection of mural pieces from the city of Teotihuacán. His combined love of architecture and its various artistic components fueled his collective spirit and his collection quickly grew to over seventy pieces. Although it seems that his original intention of this collection was to sell it for profit, increased awareness of the ethical implications of acquiring such collections nullified their marketability. In the end, Wagner donated the entire collection to the de Young Museum in San Francisco as part of his will shortly following his death in 1976.

Since that time, the collection has been extensively studied by numerous academics of Teotihuacán culture. Because of excessive looting at the site of Teotihuacán, scholarship has been very difficult to undertake. Very few murals were known in situ before the emergence of the Wagner Murals. However, they may eventually help us to fully understand the artistic depictions created by the people of Teotihuacán.