Nostalgic Art and Activist Art in the  1930s

New Deal art had a short life, but it helped change the face of American art forever. Before the 1930s, most American artists focused on history painting, portraits, still-life, landscape and allegorical paintings. They depicted people, places, and events as they might or should have been. They rarely got their hands dirty by depicting the darker sides of daily life, except for the Ashcan School (1900-1920).

After 20th-century European art movements—which we will collectively call Modernism—arrived in America in 1913 at the famous Armory Show in New York, they slowly influenced American artists. The most influential movements were Cubism (a geometrical art in which shapes are depicted from multiple viewpoints), Expressionism (an art of intense, dark emotional power in which people and things are distorted—a kind of expressionist art shows up in nearly every issue of Rolling Stone magazine) and Surrealism (a dreamlike art of surprising or shocking contrasts—often mimicked today by the advertising industry and in music videos). Meaning was suggested indirectly in “modernist” art.  The viewer had to chase after it. American realism was more direct.

The art of the 30s, like the literature, is activist—art with a message. Though some of it, influenced by European art trends, was more abstract and less message-laden. In the early Depression years, before FDR’s inauguration in March 1933, many artists looked for ways to represent the tragedy they faced. Usually, their response was to idealize the past while at the same time protesting the causes of their problems (which, of course, were rooted in the past that they idealized!). These tendencies continued to grow after the New Deal art programs were launched. In-your-face depictions of poverty, suffering and deprivation (which we call social realism) did not dominate the art of the era.

Very little hard core social realism is found in American art of the period, though it did exist, as we see in the example above by Abraham Jacobs, a WPA artist based in Cleveland, Ohio. Most of the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographs (like the Dorothea Lange photos in The Grapes of Wrath & the American Dream volume of NEXUS) while capturing the terrible economic reality of the rural population, stressed the indomitable nature of the people, not their abject condition. They were survivors, like the characters in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which was strongly influenced by FSA photographs. Of the art illustrated in Art Front, the most radical art publication of the era, only about 25% is protest art. Most artists, regardless of their politics, chose to depict either “the good ole days” or what could be, but rarely the here and now. This type of “social idealism” makes sense given that the major art form of the era—the mural—is permanent. Muralists realized that depicting the cure is better for people’s morale than making a lasting monument to the disease. So, as some critics have noted, they made a lot of happy pictures (like the mural below).

Uncle Sam Gets in the Art Business

But there’s more to 30s’ art than that. It is worth remembering—for it is easily forgotten—that artists, government officials, and the general public in the 1930s, did not see the world in the same way we do. World War II, the Holocaust, the Cold War – with its political witch-hunts and its threat of nuclear annihilation – the Civil Rights movement, the international Counter Culture of the late 1960s, and perhaps most important, the progressive politicizing and psychologizing of our culture has affected how we perceive the world. It is important to know that life and art were seen more literally during the 1930s. “Ordinary people” were valued, and there was a basic bond of trust between them and government that does not exist today. What “Art” meant then— especially government-sponsored art—and what it might signify to us eighty odd years later, can be quite different things. We need to be aware of these cultural changes when we consider the art of the 1930s and the New Deal projects.

There were two key developments in the first four years of the era—1930 to 1933. The mural (wall painting) was revived as a popular art form. It had been the domain of academic painters and commercial decorators since the mid-19th Century. The second was the borrowing of European art (modernist) conventions and making them serve specific social purposes—using some of the formal devices of abstract art to help to deliver very concrete social messages. This happened through the growth of Regionalism—art that reflects a region and is created by artists who live in that region—led by Thomas Hart Benton (see above, one of sixteen murals executed by Benton on the “Social History of the State of Indiana”), and the arrival in this country of the two great Mexican muralists, Diego Rivera and  José Clemente Orozco. On the political level, the development of activist artists organizations—the John Reed Clubs[1]—and the start of the New Deal’s art projects were crucial. They and their followers attempted to find a “usable past” in the history and local traditions of the nation. They tried to idealize positive parts of the past to give a broken nation a sense of roots and to remind Americans of past achievements to which they might again aspire. Benton’s murals (such as his first, the America Today murals in the New School for Social Research in New York (1930), and his most developed, The Social History of the State of Missouri in the State Capitol at Jefferson City, painted between 1934 and 1936) while borrowing and modifying impressive stylistic developments from Cubist and Surrealist artists, glorify rural American history and the common people of the country. His two most famous Regionalist colleagues, Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, were also adept at painting a past with which the country might identify—as Wood’s notorious easel painting, American Gothic, and Curry’s mural of John Brown in the Kansas Statehouse, attest. The mural below, from the former Des Moines, Iowa Public Library (now the World Food Prize Hall of Laureates), was part of a WPA Iowa murals project supervised by Grant Wood.

By the time the New Deal visual art projects got underway in the late winter of 1933, the Regionalists and the Mexicans had already set the agenda for an art of social idealism and ideological activism. The artists themselves, in New York, Chicago, Cleveland, San Francisco and other large cities, had organized (like so many other groups) during the first Depression years. In 1930 the John Reed Clubs were established. In 1933, the Artists Union developed out of the New York Club, and its publication Art Front promoted social art and government assistance. This first volume appeared in November 1934, and its early issues were edited by the abstract artist Stuart Davis. Many gifted artists were active in the Artists Union—and the two Artists Congresses it sponsored in 1936 and 1937—and they helped to set the policies of the New Deal’s art projects.

[1]Reed wrote Ten Days that Shook the World and is the hero in Warren Beatty’s 1981 film Reds.

Art for Everybody

These began in the late winter of 1933, and in the next two years resulted in the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture (1934-43; we’ll simply call it “Section”), and the controversial WPA Federal Art Project (1935-1943; WPA/FAP).

The Section commissioned through competition the best art it could acquire for federal buildings in Washington, and Post Offices and Court Houses across the country. Regionalist in orientation, it established “The American Scene” as its over-riding theme and local history its favored subject. You might find examples in your local Post Office.  Section murals constituted a symphony of variations on that “usable past” of events and fables Benton had so successfully exploited in his work.

The Section’s taste for Regionalist themes in its 1,100 odd murals, mostly in Post Offices, resulted in competent but tedious walls depicting rural life and local history. Of greater interest are those it commissioned for federal buildings in Washington, D.C. Among these, Ben Shahn’s panels for the new Social Security Building stand out. Completed in 1942, they were intended to symbolize the goals of the New Deal’s major legislative victory, the establishment of the Social Security system.

The WPA/FAP, in contrast to the Section, became a vast relief project for impoverished artists in all art forms. While this preserved the skills and kept alive greats such as the future Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock and African-American painter Jacob Lawrence, it produced, along with the usual traditionalist art, work that actively encouraged modernist tendencies.

Of the WPA/FAP’s more than 2,500 murals, one of the most thematically far-reaching was painted in the library of the Los Angeles Tubercular Sanitarium (today the City of Hope National Medical Center) at Duarte, California, by the future Abstract Expressionist, Philip Guston, in collaboration with Reuben Kadish. Stylistically, it combined the spatial devices and symbolic comparisons and contrasts of surrealists like Rene Magritte and Delvaux with motifs from Renaissance artists who the young muralists only knew from books —and whose portraits are placed in rondels along the top of the wall. Technically, it is one of the most sophisticated of New Deal frescoes, with the architectural details painted on rough plaster, while the figures are on smooth surfaces—thus creating an elegant relief across its surface.

Philip Evergood used his own brand of Expressionism in his The Story of Richmond Hill mural in that Long Island, New York village’s public library portrayal of ordinary people going about their lives. And the radical Stuart Davis painted a semi-abstract mural, Swing Landscape, for the Williamsburg Housing Project in Brooklyn, New York.

Along with murals, the WPA/FAP also supported serigraphed prints and posters which could reach a wide audience, as well as easel paintings, art prints and pedestal sculpture, the best of which it installed in schools and hospitals. Its Index of American Design project preserved American folk art in thousands of watercolors, now preserved in The National Gallery of Art. Its art education programs were among the first in many school systems, and its Federal Art Centers and Galleries (a number of which became the foundation for regional museums), and its  sponsorship of national Art Weeks, greatly influenced the development of a larger audience for the arts.

All this had an enormous influence on a country that had often never seen an artist at work, or a real work of art. The Federal Art Centers were especially important. One of the most active and productive was the Harlem Community Art Center in New York City. Here, one of America’s most important African- American artists, Jacob Lawrence, got his start on a distinguished career that continued until his death in 2000 (Lawrence was interviewed for and is quoted in The Grapes of Wrath & the American Dream volume of NEXUS).

The experience of Lawrence makes an important point about the New Deal art projects: They included everybody. The Section and WPA/FAP were among the first government agencies to employ all Americans. Women, Native Americans, African Americans, and all other persons of color were treated the same as anyone else in respect to pay scales and job opportunities. This had an enormous psychological effect on the individuals involved, and in effect “integrated” the arts long before many other aspects of American cultural life, education and commercial enterprise were opened to everyone.

While murals dominated New Deal art in the public awareness, another wall-oriented art form, the poster, also flourished. The WPA/FAP’s Poster Division made silk screened posters for the three other Federal arts projects: Theatre, Music and Writers (see America Transformed – WPA Arts), as well as public health organizations and a wide range of environmental activities. These posters utilized the most modern designs, and established serigraphy as a graphic medium for works of art as well as for posters.

New Deal Photography and Its Powerful Impact

Of all the art forms encouraged by the Projects, it was certainly photography that had the greatest impact in terms of understanding the nature of the national crisis, and the role of the New Deal in coming to the rescue. Between 1935 and 1943, the program  known from 1937 on as the Farm Security Administration, produced over a quarter of a million photographs, most of a devastated rural America. A few of these images have become icons–such as Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother of 1936, depicted in this volume of NEXUS (the photographs above and below are also by Dorothea Lange). Other notable FSA photographers were Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein and Ben Shahn – the latter using his FSA photographs as the basis for two major Section murals, those in Washington’s Social Security Building and the Bronx Central Post office. One must also mention Pare Lorentz’s two “cinematic murals” for the FSA, The Plow That Broke the Plain of 1936 and The River of 1937.

The power of these photographs stemmed from the fact that the camera technique was simple and direct, without eccentric viewpoints or darkroom gimmicks. Everything was in the sharpest focus and seen in natural light. Further, the subject was almost always addressed head on, and this frontality gave the best of these images their moral authority: they confronted the viewer with an undeniable situation that required a response both emotional and political.

Of greater variety are the photography projects of the WPA/FAP, the most important of which was Berenice Abbott’s Changing New York series, taken between 1935 and their publication in 1939. The WPA/FAP also experimented with photo-murals, the most original being designed by Wyatt Davis (the brother of Stuart) – but the limitations of the medium at the time, and the lack of color photography, inhibited their development.

The New Deal’s Successor –

the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)

In conclusion, two matters. First, a word about quality. It has been all too common for people to dismiss New Deal art as “poor art for poor people.” This is grossly unjust and snobbish, given that these programs supported the work of an entire generation of American artists on a national basis. Obviously, given the scale of patronage, not every object was a masterpiece. Equally obvious is the fact that the various projects produced some of the best art of the 1930s era. Further, the artists who worked on the projects went on in the 1940s and 1950’s to revitalize American visual culture in ways that could not have been imagined when the Depression started in 1929. The New Deal set out to help all of its citizens find honest work and preserve their skills—artistic talent among them—until better times arrived.

Second, after the end of the New Deal art programs in 1943, it was over twenty years before the government got around to establishing, in 1965, another cultural support program in the form of the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities. That delay was primarily because of the anti-communist witch hunts of the ‘40s and ‘50s, and the overall immaturity of the country when it came to the creative arts, which it understood as luxuries rather than necessities. The government also came to understand that it was safer to fund institutions—such as museums—than painters and sculptors, who had independent minds often powerfully expressed in their work. Over the years, the NEA struggled with the practicalities of funding individuals as opposed to institutions, and more recently has almost ceased to exist because of wildly inflated instances of offensive free speech. Another factor in the NEA’s problems is that art today just looks different than it did in 1965—or even in 1935 when the WPA/FAP started. The indirection and individualism at the heart of Modernism have created new art forms—installations, performance art, video art etc.—that tend to violate all the old norms of what people came to think of as proper art—even those who eventually came to accept abstract art. That these forms have been used for political protest has been, in certain conservative quarters, even more distressing. Of course, those most distressed, fear the freedom of artistic expression, resent art being used as an ideological weapon, forget that constitutional protections apply to them as well as those with whom they disagree. That the NEA can survive, given the compromises it has made, and the political opposition against it, is an open question.

THE HISTORY OF ART IN THE NEW DEAL ERA — by Francis V. O’Connor, Ph.D.

NEXUS – PALLAS COMMUNICATIONS, INC.

© 2019 All Rights Reserved

Photographs of WPA murals are by Carol M. Highsmith, from the Carol  M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress. The Dorothea Lange photographs are from the Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress. The photograph of the Abraham Jacobs WPA illustration is by Gloria Wilder, courtesy of Case Western Reserve University Department of Special Collections, Kelvin Smith Library.