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

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.

Despite 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.

We 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.

Patigian 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.

—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.

—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.

Before 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.

In 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.

Just 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.

Conceived 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 world-famous artist, Patigian married Blanche Hollister, whose father Dwight had served in the California Legislature, on Jan. 1, 1908. They settled down at a house called The Gables in Russian Hill, and Patigian would later open what he called the first sculptor’s studio west of Chicago in that same neighborhood.

In reality, all of San Francisco was now Patigian’s studio, with demand for public sculptures and monuments booming. A 1997 book on Bohemian Club art history said the club helped give Patigian a bounty of connections that led to work.

“Busily productive over the next 25 years, Patigian virtually turned the City of San Francisco into a Haig Patigian sculpture garden,” wrote Kevin Starr in “The Visual Arts in Bohemia.”

It’s unclear exactly how much Patigian was being paid for these works, but it was likely a lot, based on the McKinley and firemen statue payments. His Tudor-style house in Russian Hill had a panoramic view of the bay.

This kind of lucrative career was unusual up to now, to the point where it led to an unintentionally humorous exchange. When asked what he did for a living while registering to vote in the San Francisco primary election in 1910, Patigian was astonished that the clerk didn’t know what a sculptor was.

When Patigian told the clerk that a sculptor is “one who makes statues,” the clerk’s response was, “A mason?”

“‘No,’ answered Haig in disgust,” said the San Francisco Chronicle story (The Chronicle and SFGATE are both owned by Hearst but have separate newsrooms). “‘A Woodman of the World.’”

The clerk then misspelled “sculptor,” annoying Patigian even more, and afterward he reportedly growled, “I never heard of that business before.”

The unveiling of a Patigian sculpture in San Francisco was often an event. Thousands of people, including dignitaries and a parade, were at Golden Gate Park for the dedication of his bronze Pershing statue on Armistice Day 1922. (Pershing himself chose not to attend.)

There were no such crowds or cameras allowed in Bohemian Grove for the debut of the owl shrine in July 1929, though its dedication did make San Francisco newspapers. The owl was confusingly reported by multiple outlets as an “accidental formation of rock,” with the Examiner calling it “so strongly resembling an owl that it was worshiped by a primitive people as their god.”

The concrete and steel shrine was very much manmade as a project between Patigian and architect Herbert A. Schmidt. Patigian formed the owl’s head and the adjacent rocks himself. The closest thing to a recent description of the formation now comes in “The Visual Arts in Bohemia”: “Although once a pristine concrete group of objects, the Owl Shrine is now moss- and fern-covered and is so well scaled and placed that many guests and new members believe it is real stone.”

Patigian’s prominent role in the Bohemian Club dovetailed with a dubious association that was seen as regressive even at the time. He was president of the Society for Sanity in Art, which opposed avant-garde, abstract, cubist and other forms of modern art that didn’t fit his own classical leanings.

“This opposition to modernism alienated Patigian from many of the major movements of his era, but no matter,” Starr wrote in “The Visual Arts in Bohemia.” “San Francisco was in its established dimension a conservative city, and Patigian sustained his popularity.”

There’s some contradiction here, because Patigian himself evolved as a sculptor. Acker called his association with the Society “disappointing.” But she said his 1927 bust of tennis champion Helen Wills Moody “really shows his adaptability and diversity of his skill set,” with a more streamlined, art deco style and then-modern touches such as Moody’s fashionable bob hairstyle. 

Two years after Patigian released his volunteer fireman monument in 1933, he suffered another tragic loss: His son, Haig Jr., died at 16 of pneumonia. He spoke nothing of it publicly, continuing to work on sculptures such as the Ralston memorial on Marina Green.

Patigian died on Sept. 19, 1950, nine days after his wife. They were buried at Cypress Lawn in Colma. His art continues to live on, with nine pieces on the San Francisco Arts Commission’s monuments and memorials list.

As for his William McKinley statue in Arcata’s town square, it survived the 1906 earthquake but did not survive changing public opinion in recent years.

The statue was contested by some residents because of McKinley’s racist expansionist policies as president that included annexing Native American lands. In 2018, vandals covered the statue in acid. After a city council vote, the statue was taken down in 2019 — 113 years after it went up — and moved to Canton, Ohio.

For Greg Nemet, an Armenian American in Brentwood, Patigian’s enduring contributions to local art matter more than his ascent within a secret society. Nemet said he photographed and displayed three of Patigian’s San Francisco creations for discussion, including the owl plaque, in 2012 at the 111 Minna Gallery while helping host an annual conference of Armenians from around the world.

Nemet said he hadn’t heard of Patigian before taking those pictures, and while he thinks the Bohemian Club seems creepy, he felt pride in learning of his local accomplishments.

“I studied art in college and did photography for a minute,” Nemet said. “I was really happy to see that someone influential had a big tie-in with a city I love.”