Québécois sculptor Armand Vaillancourt outside his studio and archive building in Montreal. Vaillancourt has sent San Francisco a cease-and-desist letter for its plan to remove his public fountain art piece.ROGER LEMOYNE/The Globe and Mail
The Vaillancourt Fountain was born controversial.
The fiery, long-haired Québécois sculptor Armand Vaillancourt spent four years in San Francisco erecting the brutalist tangle of concrete on the city’s new Justin Herman Plaza – only to be left off the guest list for its grand unveiling in 1971.
Believing that his outspoken leftism had earned him the snub, Mr. Vaillancourt flew down and crashed the ceremony, jumping into the water and stencilling “Québéc Libre” on his masterpiece in red paint, as journalists and dignitaries gawked.
It was the beginning of a long and colourful existence for the Zelig-like work of public art, featuring cameos by Tony Hawk and Bono. It has survived earthquakes, changes in public taste and years of neglect.
But now another controversy threatens to end the fountain’s life, leaving the 96-year-old Mr. Vaillancourt in a fight to save his greatest creation. A plan by the City of San Francisco would tear up its distinctive angular limbs to make way for a public-private mixed-use development, absent the modernist monument that has galvanized San Franciscans for more than 50 years.
A lifelong provocateur whose wizardly white hair belies a man who says he has “the energy of a 20-year-old,” Mr. Vaillancourt is not letting his beloved fountain go quietly. He has sent the city a cease-and-desist letter and is threatening to sue with a group of cultural organizations. It may be the last great battle in the life of an artist who has never shied away from one.
“I can’t sleep! When I wake up I think of this. When I go to sleep I think of this,” he said in a recent interview at his Montreal studio. “We have people around the world saying we have to protect this fountain.”
Joseph Armand Robert Vaillancourt grew up during the Depression on a farm in rural Quebec, where he slaughtered his own pigs, felled his own trees, and learned to sculpt for entirely practical reasons.
“If you wanted a hammer handle, you had to make it yourself,” he said.
As a young man he studied at Montreal’s École des beaux-arts at a time when Quebec artists were taking up the anti-establishment rallying cry of the Refus global, a 1948 manifesto that called for radically rejecting the province’s religious conservatism.
Mr. Vaillancourt rubbed shoulders with the city’s mid-century bohemians – Leonard Cohen wrote one of his most famous songs about Mr. Vaillancourt’s ex-girlfriend, Suzanne – with the young sculptor making his first splash by chiselling away at a tree on Montreal’s Durocher Street for two years, intriguing and baffling passersby.
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About a decade later, with his reputation on the rise, Mr. Vaillancourt won the San Francisco commission with a bold plan for a 40-foot-high, 700-ton fountain of square textured concrete tubes that evoked both the stretch of adjacent elevated highway and the landscapes of his native Quebec.
In 1967, at the height of the Summer of Love – and as the Quebec independence movement gained momentum back home – Mr. Vaillancourt moved to San Francisco to oversee the construction of his monumental project in collaboration with the renowned landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, courting controversy from the start. “My job is to disturb the people,” he declared in a television interview, and he quickly set about doing so, offering safe haven at his studio to American Indian activists who had been occupying the disused Alcatraz prison.
The water in Vaillancourt Fountain was dyed green during a Global Climate Strike demonstration on September 20, 2019.Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
From that point on, his relationship with the city deteriorated, he believes, although it may not have helped that his challenging design sharply divided public opinion. At the 1971 unveiling, protesters distributed handbills calling the structure a “howling obscenity” and a “pestiferous eyesore.” The San Francisco architecture critic Allan Temko compared it to the waste “deposited by a giant concrete dog with square intestines.”
The lore of the fountain was just beginning. It made headlines again in 1987 when U2 played a free show in the plaza and Bono cheekily spray-painted “Rock N Roll Stops the Traffic” on one of the concrete limbs. Mayor Dianne Feinstein was appalled; Mr. Vaillancourt said he wanted to shake the singer’s hand.
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The sculpture’s countercultural bona fides were secured when pioneering skateboarders turned the ledges and stairs of the plaza into an “epicentre” of the sport, said the local art historian and skater Ted Barrow. Nike eventually produced a limited-edition sneaker in homage to the fountain, and Mr. Vaillancourt’s handiwork featured in the popular Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater video games.
Meanwhile, nature and the City of San Francisco seemed determined to bring the fountain down. It somehow survived the deadly 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which led to the dismantling of the nearby elevated highway, but its water was later turned off for several years after a drought, and then dyed electric blue to combat algae. Last year, the fountain was drained again because of electrical issues with the pumps, revealing years of accumulated junk including several electric scooters.
The structure’s decay, Mr. Vaillancourt believes, was caused by the city’s long-standing disdain for him and his work.
“They kept a deep rancour against me all these years,” he said. “If they understood my political engagement they would have said, ‘Armand is like that, he gave us a fantastic work’ – but no.”
In 1967, Mr. Vaillancourt moved to San Francisco to oversee the construction of the project.ROGER LEMOYNE
The latest apparent sign of the city’s animus came last November when then-mayor London Breed revealed renderings for a US$30-million redesign of the space, now known as Embarcadero Plaza, and an adjoining park that conspicuously lacked any trace of the Vaillancourt Fountain.
The artist’s family whipped into action to rally support for the masterwork. In May, Mr. Vaillancourt flew to the city with his wife Joanne and his son Alexis, a fellow sculptor, to lobby local officials.
It soon emerged that the wiry, elderly Mr. Vaillancourt had the full force of the city stacked against him. This summer, Recreation and Parks officials released a third-party report that claimed the fountain contained asbestos and lead and wasn’t up to seismic safety codes; it was then deemed a public hazard and fenced off. (The family disputes the report, arguing the chemicals are present in trivial amounts and noting that the fountain has withstood massive earthquakes before.)
A further blow came in August when the parks department asked the San Francisco Arts Commission, which owns the fountain, to formally deaccession it, paving the way for its destruction. The commission is expected to make an evaluation this fall.
Against this tide of setbacks, the Vaillancourts did have allies in their corner. The Washington-based Cultural Landscape Foundation used freedom of information laws to argue that the city was dramatically exaggerating the annual maintenance costs of the fountain in a “ruse” to make the case for its demolition. (The city did not respond to a request for comment about the allegation, and declined to comment on the controversy in general.)
Mr. Vaillancourt claims the fountain structure’s decay was caused by San Francisco’s long-standing disdain for him and his work.ROGER LEMOYNE/The Globe and Mail
“It’s like starving a patient of needed medical care and then blaming the patient for getting sicker,” the group’s president, Charles Birnbaum, said in an interview.
At the beginning of September, Mr. Vaillancourt hired a lawyer to write a cease-and-desist letter demanding the administration refrain from any further steps that would endanger the fountain and hand over all documentation related to the artwork’s future. If the city fails to comply, the artist says he intends to sue.
Today, Mr. Vaillancourt is still busily at work in his Montreal studio, which could only belong to an avant-garde sculptor. The 19th-century stone townhouse is crammed with curios and found art: a plush hobby horse, moose antlers, a plastic stegosaurus, the abandoned steel crucifix of a nearby hospital.
One of his current projects is designing his own tomb, an ambitious geometrical balancing act of black granite, to be located in the Mount Royal cemetery. His artistic legacy and the meaning of his life clearly weigh on his mind these days – a life of fierce political engagement and democratic art whose distillation is now endangered.
“I live once,” he said, “but I live for the people, with the people.”