[ Thousands of artists - visual artists, painters, playrights,
actor, musicians, singers, and other creatives, were employed by the
Federal government through the Works Progress Administration (WPA),
between 1935-43.] [[link removed]]

WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM THE BRIEF PERIOD WHEN THE GOVERNMENT EMPLOYED
ARTISTS  
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Tess Thackara
January 31, 2017
Artsy
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_ Thousands of artists - visual artists, painters, playrights, actor,
musicians, singers, and other creatives, were employed by the Federal
government through the Works Progress Administration (WPA), between
1935-43. _

Marion Greenwood with a mural she created for the WPA., Image via
Federal Art Project, Photographic Division, Smithsonian National
Archives of American Art // Artsy

 

Jackson Pollock [[link removed]], Lee
Krasner [[link removed]], Willem de Kooning
[[link removed]], and Mark Rothko
[[link removed]] are best-known as pioneers
of Abstract Expressionism.
[[link removed]]  But all four
were also among thousands of artists and other creatives employed by
the government through the Works Progress Administration (WPA) between
the years of 1935 and 1943. That the arts would be funded
significantly by the federal government—never mind that it would
actively employ artists—may well raise an eyebrow today. But working
under a subdivision of the WPA known as the Federal Art Project, these
artists got to work to help the country recover from the Great
Depression, as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Evidence of impoverishment and a portfolio showcasing one’s skills
and commitment to the arts were all that was needed to qualify for the
WPA initiative. This and the Federal Art Project’s
non-discrimination clause meant that it attracted, and hired, not just
white men but also artists of color and women who received little
attention in the mainstream art world of the day. These artists
created posters, murals, paintings, and sculptures to adorn public
buildings.

Hospitals, post offices, schools, and airports were decorated with
some of the roughly 200,000 artworks created through the program. Yet
no accompanying agency was established to preserve the works. So
following the dissolution of the WPA in the lead-up to World War II,
many were destroyed, sold as scrap, or hastily auctioned off with
little record—save a small portion that were discovered at a Long
Island salvage dealer, bought by a Lower West Side curio shop owner,
and repurchased by their artists for three to five dollars a pop, as
Christopher DeNoon notes in the book _Posters of the WPA_.

Reassembling WPA artists’ work

 

In 1965, the art historian Francis V. O’Connor went in search of
artworks created as part of the Federal Art Project for an exhibition
about the WPA artists. O’Connor was particularly interested in
locating posters. The murals, sculptures, and photographs created by
artists under the auspices of the WPA were easier to find. The
posters, innately ephemeral, were harder to recover. On the morning of
February 15, 1966, as he recounts in _Posters of the WPA_, O’Connor
joined Dr. Alan Fern, then chief of the prints and photographs
division, at the Library of Congress. Fern escorted the art historian
up “a very dusty, cobweb-festooned, spiral staircase until we came
to a heavy door” at the entrance to one of the library’s corner
towers.

“Unlocked,” he goes on, “this [door] creaked open to reveal
sinister sights and sounds: a large, musty, circular room...stuffed
with saw-horse tables heaped with ancient circus posters.” Amid the
circus posters and some roosting pigeons, O’Connor and Fern found a
large wooden case with a WPA shipping label on it. When pried open, it
revealed a cache of immaculate posters. “Of all the art and
documentation from this period I have discovered dirtying my hands in
unlikely places,” O’Connor wrote, “this find was the most
unforgettable.”

Remarkably, the whereabouts are known of only around 2,000 of the
35,000 poster designs that were produced during the WPA years. Yet art
from this era, created for the greater good, deserves prominence in
the annals of art history. Graphic, colorful, and easily legible, the
posters advertised plays put on by the Federal Theatre (America’s
only ever national theater) and exhibitions of children’s art that
took place at the more than 100 new art centers created across the
country as part of the Federal Art Project. The posters also raised
awareness for public health issues, promoted the country’s national
parks, and glorified the labor traditions of different states.

Artists were employed with specific goals in mind: to help the
government communicate with the rest of the country, to inspire pride
in a nation that had been brought to its heels, and to document the
country’s recovery effort. In exchange, each artist received $24 per
week (approximately $400 per week in today’s dollars).

By 1938, the Federal Art Project existed in 48 states. Photographers
like Dorothea Lange
[[link removed]] and Walker Evans
[[link removed]] were famously deployed to
Dust Bowl and Rust Belt states, respectively. There, they recorded the
poverty and hardships suffered by workers—while also portraying them
with a sense of dignity.

A new, diverse class of artists

...

Perhaps the WPA’s greatest legacy was the diversity of its artist
pool. In her book _Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of
Black Power_, Susan E. Cahan writes that “Only during isolated
periods, such as the WPA art projects of the 1930s, had African
Americans been given nearly the same opportunities as whites through
government programs that employed artists.” These programs, she
notes, provided support for Aaron Douglas, Charles White
[[link removed]], Charles Alston
[[link removed]], Hale Woodruff
[[link removed]], Archibald J.
Motley Jr., Norman Lewis [[link removed]],
and Eldzier Cortor [[link removed]],
among others.

At the heart of this flourishing period in the arts was a “new
generation of plebeian artists and intellectuals who had grown up in
the immigrant and black working class neighborhoods of the modern
metropolis,” Michael Denning writes in his book _The Cultural
Front_. Anti-fascist emigres poured into New York, fueling the nerve
center of the FAP’s work, with a Federal Art Project Gallery opening
on West 57th Street in 1935.

The WPA years were perhaps the only successful period in American
history when fine art and practical art were one and the same. And
crucial to the resulting democratization of culture was a form of
expression that addressed the experiences of the working class and was
actively shaped by the working class. WPA art favored Social Realism
[[link removed]], in the form of public
artworks and murals that celebrated industry and labor. These works
put art within eyesight of ordinary people going about their daily
lives and are consequentially also among the most famous created
through the WPA initiative. One such example is Arshile Gorky
[[link removed]]’s “Aviation”
murals for Newark Airport, of which two out of 10 panels survive
today.

The Federal Art Project buckles under political pressure

 

In the 1930s as is the case today, partisan politics resulted in
plenty of opposition to the Federal Art Project from Republican
Congressmen such as Representative Dewey Short. Short told Congress
that good art was the product of suffering artists while “subsidized
art is no art at all,” as DeNoon notes in _Posters of the WPA_.
Further fueling the fire, the leftist inclinations of this period,
particularly among those engaged in the WPA and other alphabet
agencies, led to a belief that the Federal Art Project was a hotbed
for Communists.

The WPA’s communist ties were wildly overblown, according to several
sources. Nonetheless, in 1937, the WPA was saddled with a regulation
stating that it could not employ non-citizens. This led to a
significant drop in the number of the artists that the programs
employed—and included Rothko, a Latvian, and Willem de Kooning, who
was Dutch. Starting in 1939, Representative Martin Dies began an
investigation into the WPA’s activities, something which, as DeNoon
writes, was “a frightening precursor to the McCarthyism of the
1950s.” Eventually, as World War II loomed, the programs were shut
down or channeled into the war effort.
 

 

By that time, however, the WPA had left a striking legacy. In
producing many thousands of paintings, sculptures, murals,
photographs, and posters it pioneering new technical innovations in
these cultural fields. It gave numerous important artists a leg up in
a desperate time, among them Jacob Lawrence
[[link removed]], Alice Neel
[[link removed]], and Louise Nevelson
[[link removed]]. Lee Krasner called the
program a “lifesaver.”

Above all, it turned a generation of young American creatives into
career artists. “Even in that short time,” de Kooning would say of
the project, “I changed my attitude toward being an artist. Instead
of doing odd jobs and painting on the side, I painted and did odd jobs
on the side. My life was the same, but I had a different view of
it.”

_[Tess Thackara is a culture writer and editor based in New York. Her
writing has appeared in The New York Times, T Magazine, The FT, Artsy,
The Art Newspaper, King Kong, Art Practical, BOMBlog, The White
Review, SFMOMA Open Space, and Vulture.]_

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