Colorful sculptor left his mark as artist, tree advocate in S.F.
Beniamino Bufano was born near the heel of Italy, in 1889, or was it 1898? Both have been listed as “one of his truths that changed a lot,” says Mary Serventi Steiner, who attempted to verify Bufano’s background for a recent exhibit at Museo Italo Americano.
Bufano claimed to be from a family of 15 kids. He was missing half of his right index finger and claimed that he cut off his “trigger finger” and mailed it to President Woodrow Wilson in order to prove his pacifism during the Great War.
It is generally accepted that Bufano arrived as a child through Ellis Island and studied art in the New York City public schools. As a teenager (or in his 20s) he made the break to San Francisco to apprentice on art being made for the PanamaPacific International Exposition of 1915.
He stuck and so did his nickname “Bene,” Americanized to Benny. Within 10 years, he had established enough of a presence that when his radical teaching methods got him fired from the San Francisco School of Fine Arts (now the Art Institute), it merited a news report in The Chronicle, according to research conducted by staff librarian Bill Van Niekerken.
As noted by Chronicle Art Critic Alfred Frankenstein, “Bufano never could decide if he wanted to be an artist or a town character . ... He was very good at both roles but his performance in the second of these assignments would get in the way of his performance of the first.”
He was ornery and irascible, and these were the very attributes Mayor Roger Lapham was looking for when he appointed Bufano to the San Francisco Art Commission in 1944.
In addition to making sure that the municipal Art Collection was well-stocked with his own work, Bufano had two lasting contributions, according to “Arts for the City: San Francisco Civic Art and Urban Change,” by Susan Wels.
The first is that he persuaded the Art Commission to plant trees on city streets, a program that has been ongoing. The second is that he came up with the idea for a municipal outdoor art show, held at the Civic Center Plaza in 1946, the first of its kind in the country.
He made things happen, though one thing that didn’t was his plan to cast a 180-foot-tall statue of
St. Francis, to be given additional height by its placement atop Twin Peaks.
Bufano was married and divorced twice, and had a daughter, Aloha, and a son, Erskine. But he was indifferent to family life and lived off the kindness of his benefactors, one of them being Trader Vic Bergeron. The restaurateur, who fancied himself a sculptor, paid the rent on Bufano’s studio, and gave him board at his restaurant off Union Square.
“Meat and potatoes were OK, but when he started going for caviar, pate and Champagne, that was too much,” Bergeron told The Chronicle.
This is the kind of spirit that earned the praise of Herb Caen. When Bufano died in 1970, Caen devoted an entire column to his memory, while his funeral was attended by then-Mayor Joe Alioto, prior to his burial in Colma.
“San Francisco was enriched by Benny’s talent, his spirit, his character . ... ” the mayor eulogized. “We need a thousand Benny Bufanos . ... Ciao, Benny, Ciao . ... You are part of our lives from here on in.”
Joe Alioto, former mayor, in his eulog y for Bufano “San Francisco was enriched by Benny’s talent, his spirit, his character.”