FEDERICO BELTRAN MASSES - Miss May Fleishhacker

FEDERICO BELTRAN MASSES - Miss May Fleishhacker
FEDERICO BELTRAN MASSES
Guaira de la Melena, Cuba 1885-Barcelona 1949

Miss May Fleishhacker. 1925
Oil on canvas
Signed and dated 1925
Measures 111 x 107 cm

May Belle Greenbaum was born in 1884 in San Francisco, where her father, Sigmund Greenbaum, was involved in the world bank of this prosperous city. She married Herbert Fleishhacker, one of the leading financiers of his day, in 1905, and they both enjoyed their role as leading philanthropists and figures in San Francisco society.
In 1924, another sign of where the Fleishhackers were and who they were, Herbert's bank (then Anglo-Canadian Bank) was the largest lender to newspaper magnate William Randoloh Hearst. In fact, they had a complex business relationship without which the entire expansion of Hearst's media empire, especially intense in that year of 1924, would not be well understood. Thus, without an express contribution of money from Herbert, Hearst would have entered into collapse that same year. The Fleishhacker businesses were varied and prosperous; also strongly welded with public figures and local and regional politics, such as the Mayor of San Francisco, James "Sunny Jim" Rolph Jr.
In 1924 they were at the top of the mountain and this status would last for almost ten years more, but one day this whole way of life changed as a result of a series of operations of dubious legality around the sales of some oil fields made in fraud by co-investors, and misfortunes were chained in the way that misfortunes are clustered modern day about a timely prey: lawsuits, liquidity crises and over-indebtedness included, as well as the effects of the disastrous economic policies that led to the Great Depression and continued through the New Deal. Of this state of affairs in America, it seems that only William Randoph Hearst pulled himself together for a time; but characters like Herbert and May Fleishhacker did not. We are left with the look of a self-confident May from the moments of prosperity, but there is no record of the look from the moments of anxiety of someone who, together with her husband, was everything at one time and of some objects that today the chronicle of a suggestive past.