THE THIRTIES REVIVED “FEDERAL ART PATRONAGE, 1933–1943”
BILLED AS “THE FIRST COMPREHENSIVE showing of government sponsored mural, easel and graphic art since 1943,” a show called “Federal Art Patronage, 1933–1943” opened in April at the University of Maryland. The 100 works, which ranged from two Jackson Pollock paintings shown publicly for the first time to an anti-syphilis silk screen poster, comprised a compelling come-on for an era which has always seemed something of a retrogression—those Depression days when social consciousness interrupted the assimilation of European abstraction begun by Americans abroad between 1910 and 1930.
Naturally the Maryland show—consisting largely of works loaned permanently to the University by the Federal government for study purposes and augmented by art from The Smithsonian, The National Gallery of Art and elsewhere—contained its full share of those familiar “Rockefeller Center modern” images of muscled, anonymous super-workers and democratic culture heroes. Harry Sternberg’s lithograph of “Builders” (two men on a girder) and Seymour Fogel’s bare chested workers and studious technicians (studies for the “Wealth of the Nation” and Jackson Pollock, “Landscape with Factory,” o/c, c. 1939. (Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Benevy.) ” Security of the People” frescoes in the Social Security Building, Washington, D.C.) are as powerful and impersonal as Carl Sandburg’s lines: “Man is a long time coming./ Man will yet win./ Brother may yet line up with brother . . .” Similarly, Frank Romanelli’s saturnine, semi-cartoon painting of “Abraham Lincoln” and Edgar Brittan’s portraits of Frank Lloyd Wright and Carl Sandburg in a study for a ” Natural Resources of the State of Illinois” mural in the Decatur Post Office enshrine these heroes as symbols rather than individuals.
There were sentimental samples of rural realism too. Marion Gilmore’s precise, lady like summer scene of “Band Concert” seemed more suitable for an embroidered pillow cover than a mural design in the Corning, Iowa, Post Office, while Peter Blume’s bright, painstaking farm landscape seemed closer to a Christmas card than a mural study for the Connonsburg, Pa. Post Office.
Yet allegorized men and idealized scenes were only part of the product of the Federal art patronage so strongly advocated by artist George Biddle when he wrote to his fellow Groton and Harvard alumnus Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933: “The younger artists of America are conscious as they have never been of the social revolution that our country and civilization are going through; and they would be eager to express these ideals in a permanent art form if they were given the government’s cooperation. They would be contributing to and expressing in living monuments the social ideals that you are struggling to achieve.”
Although The President later replied that “I can’t have a lot of young enthusiasts painting Lenin’s head on the Justice Building,” (a jibe at the controversial Diego Rivera portrait of Lenin in the artist’s later-destroyed Rockefeller Center mural), the first Federal art project got under way in December 1933. The Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) directed by lawyer, painter and collector Edward Bruce, under the auspices of the Treasury Department, lasted only until June 1934, but it demonstrated the possibilities of government patronage. “In its five months,” writes Dr. Francis O’Connor in the Maryland exhibition catalog, “the PWAP employed 3,749 artists who produced for the government some 15,633 works of art ranging from murals to ceramics.”
Since the PWAP had shown that poverty and professional ability were not always to be found in the same artist, the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture (known after October 1938 as the Treasury Section of Fine Arts) was established in October 1934 with Edward Bruce at its head. The Section aimed to employ the country’s most able artists, usually selected on the basis of competitions, to decorate government buildings.
The problem of relief for unemployed artists, alleviated briefly by the PWAP, was still unsolved, however, and the Works Progress Administration under Harry Hopkins set out to fill the gap. In 1935 the Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP) received a $530,784 grant from WPA for relief employment through the decoration of public buildings. Although TRAP lasted only until 1938, many small post offices and other government buildings without budgets for decoration benefited from the labors of relief roll artists earning the going wage of $69 to $103 per month for 96 hours of work.
The most extensive New Deal art program was to be the WPA Federal Art Project established in 1935. The Project employed about 5,000 artists at its height and had, according to Dr. O’Connor, “the greatest impact on the culture and consciousness of the nation.” And no wonder, for before it was liquidated by Presidential order in 1943, The Project had produced over 2,000 murals, 100,000 easel paintings, nearly 240,000 prints, and about 35,000 original posters as well as 22,000 watercolors for the archaeological program of the Index of American Design. The Index, represented in the Maryland show by renderings of an 1820 taffeta dress, a nearly Surrealistic oculist’s sign and other meticulous watercolors, aimed to produce an exact pictorial history of American decorative arts.
The history of Federal art patronage may be intricate, but for an artist like George Biddle it simply meant that he found himself painting a three-part mural in the fifth floor stair well of the U.S. Justice Department in 1935. Three floors below, Emil Bisttram, a second employee of the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture, was laboring on a single panel devoted to “Contemporary Justice and the Woman.” Both Biddle and Bisttram were conservative painters, struggling with problems common to Pompeian muralists as well as Giotto and Piero della Francesca—problems which often involved spatial and compositional decisions which were essentially abstract.
Bisttram, the less talented of the two painters, combined allegory and illustration in his rectangular Justice Department panel in which modern woman (in a white, Isadora Duncan dress) escapes the dark prison of convention in the company of a robed judge. Leaving her yoke and broken chain behind with a red robed crone, she gamely faces a blue sky embellished by an over-sized moon. Undaunted by such symbolism, four panels of girls on either side of the mural study, play tennis, dance, type and paint. The eight female groups (which were slightly rearranged in the mural from the preliminary sketch in the Maryland show) contrast with a dreary group of unemancipated lovelies below who wash, cook, weave and tend children under orders from a leopardskin-garbed male holding a club. The mural is a simple visual lesson; the all-important allegorical figures are forced to the forefront of staged scenes, while space is foreshortened, existing only to contain a few necessary props.
In contrast, the Biddle murals (tempera sketches for the two side panels were included in the Maryland show) are a far more powerful example of the foreshortened, negated perspective which had already been used by American abstractionists such as John Marin and Joseph Stella. Marin often used dramatic perspective lines compressed unnaturally in a shallow space, and paintings such as Stella’s “Gas Tank,” 1918, featured the same combination of a background only seemingly in perspective and a flat, more important foreground pattern. The semi-abstract formula developed by Americans from 1910 to 1930 reappeared in many government muralists’ naive, country-cousin adaptations of Cubist space. The Biddle murals’ composite views of sweatshop workers (left), tenement dwellers (right) and a productive farm family (center) offer a surface pattern of sensitively drawn and gently sentimentalized figures poised, as in the Bisttram, on the edge of a “stage” which recedes only enough to accommodate the foreshortened tableau. Deep perspective is indicated by the lines of factory railroad tracks and a slum fence, but the recession dies in the central panel where the natural vanishing point is concealed by the foreshortened view of a farm house with the front wall removed to reveal the ideal family at dinner. Biddle is a meticulous realist yet, but his carefully bi-symmetrical sweatshop and tenement compositions, which are strengthened by four staircase motifs, have little in common with the 19th-century American genre realism of say, Williams. Mount or George C. Bingham. Mount and Bingham did candid views of everyday life—the humorous or memorable moment. Murals such as Biddle’s however, are “abstract” in characterization (the symbolic rather than the specific American), in time (scenes combining past, present and future rather than specific incidents) and in space (composite views rather than convincing perspectives). Unlike Diego Rivera who had no objection to dramatically varying the scale of his figures in his brilliant frescoes in Mexico City’s National Palace and elsewhere, Biddle maintains a conservative and peculiarly American veneer of realism, but, beneath it, abstract ideas—a powerful and continuing undercurrent even in 1935 animate his painting.
Other mural sketches in the Maryland show revealed similar tendencies. Symeon Shimin combined conflicting, foreshortened perspectives in “Contemporary Justice and the ChiId,” a composition which recalls the crossing, diagonal lines in paintings by Marin and Lyonel Feininger, while Seymour Fogel arranged his figures on a narrow “stage” in studies for Social Security Building frescoes in which indicated lines of perspective are blocked by foreground patterns as emphatically as they were in American Cubist-influenced paintings of the 1910–1930 period. The criss-crossing patterns and compressed space of William Gropper’s Freeport, New York, Post Office mural study again recalled Marin’s compositions. One of the most beautiful mural studies in the show was Ben Shahn’s “Resources of America” for the Bronx Central Post Office. “Worker with Electric Drill,” an enlargement of one of the 13 mural panels, demonstrated the artist’s talent for combining a semi-abstract background (one window and the bright red girders of the factory) with a single, monumental foreground figure.
Although there were other powerful visual images in the show—Reginald Marsh’s studies of New York tug boats painted with Rubensian gusto and Fletcher Martin’s view of two miners carrying an injured comrade through a shaft—Shahn seems to have been one of the few to glimpse both the abstract organization of the mural as a unified plane and a genuine sense of compassion for the allegorical—but nevertheless real—worker whom lesser artists painted pretentiously but failed to animate.
Among the out and out abstractions in the show, Ad Reinhardt’s canvas, painted for the New York WPA Art Program in 1940, and Arshile Gorky’s study for one of ten mural panels called “Aviation: Evolution of Forms Under Aerodynamic Limitation,” once in the Newark, New Jersey, Airport, are outstanding. Both are sensitive arrangements of interlocking, hard-edged forms. In each, the pattern and the surface are united, and the spatial ambiguities found in many of the murals are absent. These government artists, at least, were firmly on the road to their later achievements as Abstract Expressionists.
Like Shahn, Gorky sensed the need for unified space. “The architectonic two-dimensional surface plane of walls must be retained in mural painting,” he declared. “How was I to overcome this plastic problem when the subject of murals was that of the unbounded space of the sky-world of aviation? . . . The problem resolved itself when I considered the new vision that flight has given to eyes of man. The isle of Manhattan with all its skyscrapers from the view of an airplane five miles up becomes but a geographical map, a two-dimensional surface plane. The new perception simplifies the forms and shapes of earth objects. The thickness of objects is lost and only the space occupied by the objects remains. Such simplification removes all decorative details and leaves the artist with limitations which become style, a plastic invention, particular to our time.”
Gorky’s statement (quoted in Ethel K. Schwabacher’s “Arshile Gorky,” 1957) pinpoints the connection between the message-bearing, social art of the thirties and the post-World War II flowering of abstraction. Faced with the pressure of the times for the depiction of genre scenes and home town views enlarged to monumental murals, the best artists of the thirties, like Gorky, began to rely more on the unity of the picture plane and less on literary or conservative compositional techniques for resolving impossible subjects such as “Evolution of Forms Under Aerodynamic Limitation.” The overwhelming, generalizing hugeness of subjects that were considered appropriate for small town post offices would have staggered even such 19th-century American masters of vastness as Albert Bierstadt and Frederic E. Church. Acres of far away snow-capped peaks were really nothing, after all, in comparison to the artist-destroying possibilities of a subject such as “Homes, Past and Present” depicted manfully by an artist named Clarence H. Carter for the Portsmouth, Ohio Post Office. Poor Carter compromised by squashing as many buildings as he could into a desperately careful little mural study in the Maryland show. The painting suggests John Marin dreaming uncomfortably in the idiom of Salvador Dali, and two white statues of unidentified classical ladies flanking a soldier on a fountain do not help matters.
“Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits,” Carl Sandburg wrote, and Federal patronage art had some of the same, paradoxical combination of flowery ideas that merged on myth—plus the depiction of down-to-earth details which earned daily bread for indigent artists.
Poetry aside however, another lesson of the Maryland show was the importance of painterliness in the bit-by-bit dissolution of subject matter into pure paint surface. Adolph Gottlieb’s “Sun Deck,” 1936, done for the WPA Federal Art Project in New York, is really a study of loosely-brushed color areas in which the importance of the roughly indicated figures seated on the ship’s deck is superseded by the large, dark, box-like, abstract shape of a piece of deck machinery plunk in the center of the painting. The small “Message IV,” a 1937 painting by Morris Graves, demonstrated an even more delicate appreciation of forms-in-themselves.
The two Jackson Pollock canvases were auctioned off in 1944 with thousands of other “surplus” WPA works. A plumber bought a number of paintings to use as cheap pipe insulation, but sold the lot to a junk dealer when he found that the oil paint smelled when heated. The Pollocks, “Landscape with Train,” 1937, and “Landscape with Factory,” 1938, were bought for about three dollars each by Herbert Benevy, their present owner.
Both works are expressionistic, loosely painted landscapes rife with personal svmbolism. In the 1937 scene a train approaches a group of buildings between two mountains. In the foreground, an indistinct blue grey area which could be either rocks or trees partially blocks the view. The smoke from the train’s engine moves forward instead of backward, capping a repeated triangular motif in the center of the composition. In the 1938 Pollock, a group of industrial buildings on a hill includes a wooden tower and a dark, high, arched entrance. The colors, reminiscent of Soutine, explode into burnt sienna and chrome green highlights. The brushwork is emotional and energetic, and flame-like trees stand behind the buildings. The path to the buildings is intersected by a stroke of paint from the lower left—creating a crossing motif.
Pollock’s personal symbolism—the stalled train, the obscuring but central rocks or trees, the interrupted path—recalls not only the artist’s inner problems but the faintly Cubist blocking of perspective lines noted in the murals. Pollock, like many more realistic artists of the Federal patronage period, was grappling with the problem of uniting the composition with the picture plane without losing the organizational energy formerly provided by perspective. In Abstract Expressionism—a painting such as “Blue Poles,” 1953—he realized what he had been looking for.
The Maryland show was not a collection of great art. It was an invitation to re-experience the thirties freshly and without prejudice. Dr. O’Connor’s catalog is a valuable introduction to the historical intricacies and creative possibilities of Federal art patronage. It should be enough to send us to Post Offices and public buildings to see what is left of forgotten frescoes. In Washington’s Justice Building, for instance, the murals, sculptures and architectural details are often impressively harmonious.
If an artist cannot be ahead of his time, perhaps he cannot be behind it either. The paint is peeling from Emil Bisttram’s emancipated woman; the Justice Department’s only readily available list of murals is filed with inventories of office furniture, and in the Social Security Building a portly Sgt. McLure guards the Seymour Fogel frescoes from the public eye on Saturdays and Sundays “for security reasons.”
—Elizabeth Stevens
