Although some European countries have relaxed epidemic prevention restrictions at present, the situation of artists under the influence of the epidemic is not optimistic. The "core source of production" of a work of art is always the creative population, how do they transition in the present, and how can creativity be stimulated, encouraged, tolerated and purchased in the future?
Britain's Serpentine Gallery revealed a multi-million pound public art program, saying it was similar in size to the art program launched by the Roosevelt administration during the Great Depression of the 1930s, which would support artists during and after the outbreak. So, how did the Roosevelt administration promote the art program? How did the young De Kunin, Rothko and Pollock join the project? Where do the works created at that time survive now?
American artist Marion Greenwood creates murals for federal art projects. Image from the Smithsonian National Archives
In early 1934, the United States fell into a great depression recorded in history, with unemployment approaching 25 percent and even the weather as cold as never before. In February, the coldest on record, the Federal Emergency Relief Act, the prototype of the New Deal relief program, began shoving a few dollars into the pockets of hungry workers, raising the question of whether artists should be included among the beneficiaries. This is not an obvious thing, because by definition, an artist has no "job" to lose. But Harry Hopkins, who was appointed by President Roosevelt to run relief work, made the controversy clear, saying, "They have to eat like everybody else!"
Ilya Bolotowsky, Barbershop (PWAP Project)
PWAP, a "New Deal" project that has only been implemented for one year
Thus was born the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), which employed 3,749 artists in the first four months of 1934 and created 15,663 paintings, murals, prints, handicrafts, and sculptures for government buildings across the Country. Officials may not have paid much attention to the artists' work, but they were certainly calculating the value and remuneration of the artists' work: a total of $1.184 million, an average of $75.59 per work, and even at that time, the value was considerable.
But the Premise of the Public Art Works Project (PWAP) is that artists should maintain the same standards of production and public value as gardeners or shovel-wielding workers in national parks.
Artists were recruited in the form of newspaper advertisements in various places, and the entire project was up and running within a few weeks. In that cold winter, artists lined up outside government offices to apply, they had to pass tests, prove they were professional artists, and then be sorted into different categories—first-class artists, second-level artists, or workers—that determined their pay.
Public Art Projects (PWAPs) may not be able to find outstanding candidates in the form of advertisements. In the 1960s, the Smithsonians obtained some of the surviving PWAP artwork from government agencies that displayed them, and looking at them today, they are filled with names that we barely recognize today. Most of the artists involved in PWAP projects in 1934 were under the age of 40, but by the 1960s they had either gained fame or switched careers out of obscurity. Today, most of them have disappeared below the national horizon and become only regional artists.
John Cunning, Manhattan Skyline (PWAP Project)
"The art they create is quite conservative, and most critics nowadays don't look at it." In his 1969 book Federal Suppport for The Visual Arts, the New York scholar Francis O'Connor wrote, "But many Americans were surprised to find that there were artists in this country." ”
Not only as artists, their paintings seem to be "thematic" creations today, when the only theme offered by the government was "American scenes", and artists embraced the idea, with both urban landscapes and industrial scenes appearing in their pens. The picture includes ports and docks, timber processing plants and paper mills, gold mines, coal mines and open-pit iron mines... If the program continues into the summer, there will undoubtedly be more farm scenery. One of the few agricultural-themed scenes today is Earle Richardson's Black Man At Work on Agriculture, a stylized depiction of a picker in the field, but the cotton balls picked by the man resemble those in a drugstore. Richardson, an African-American, died the following year at the age of 23. He was living in New York City at the time, and judging by the work, it seemed that he had never really seen a cotton picker in the field.
Earl Richardson, Black People Working on Agriculture (PWAP Project)
Of course, this is an artistic creation, not a documentary. Painters have the right to paint according to their own insights or imaginations, and the Smithsonian Institution currently has a collection of about 180 works created during the PWAP period. It is also possible to vaguely see the social reality of the time. When there was a quarter of the country's unemployed, the other three-quarters didn't live much differently than they had in the past, except that they didn't have that much money. A dance band played in the streets of East Harlem, and a religious procession marched solemnly through. In Harry Gottlieb's "Fill the Igloo," a man wielding a tool "transports" ice along a wooden slide; in Morris Kantor's pen, citizens watch a baseball game on a night in the town. Millard Sheets, a California native, depicts apartments in los Angeles slums where women were chatting outside to dry and gossip. Millard Sitz is one of the most famous artists, and southern California still has large mosaics of his mid-20th-century mosaics embedded in buildings. He later created giant murals for the library of Notre Dame cathedral.
Harry Gottlieb, Fill the Igloo (PWAP Project)
Maurice Cantor, Small Town Baseball Game (PWAP Project)
Millard Sitz, California Apartment (PWAP Project)
Whether these works contain subtext or not, the audience needs to experience it for themselves. In Gerald Sargent Foster's Long Island Racing, it seems that the "Great Depression" did not affect everyone. Lily Furedi's painting is of people of all walks of life riding the subway side by side. The man in the tuxedo dozed off in his seat, who was supposed to be a musician on his way to or from work, and the young white woman in the seat glanced at the newspaper read by the black man sitting next to him, and a woman wearing lipstick. This makes people feel that, except for the absence of graffiti and garbage, it is the same state as the New York subway today.
Gerald Sargent Foster, Long Island Racing (PWAP Project)
In the current delicate economic environment, it is inevitable that people will feel the cold air of financial collapse. At this time, there is a sense of substitution in the Great Depression-era United States, whether it is a street scene in a big city or a moment in a small city, factories, mines, and shops are still waiting for the magic of workers, which will awaken the sleeping economy.
Lily Freddy, Metro (PWAP project)
Young artists became temporary wage earners, exploring style in public creation
But the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) did not exist long, and its "successors" were the more well-known Public Utilities Agency (WPA, a government agency established during Roosevelt's Implementation of the New Deal) and the Federal Arts Program (FAP), with the younger Willem De Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock) and others have also joined the project.
"This project is very important. It gives us enough living space where we can draw what we want. But a year later, I had to quit because of who I was. But this short year changed my vision of life – to be an artist. I went from painting after part-time work to doing odd jobs after painting. Although this may not seem like a big difference, I have a new perspective on art, and I have given up the idea of making a lot of money first and painting later in my life. This is the change that the Federal Arts Project (FAP) brought to de Kunin.
One of the main purposes of the Federal Arts Program was to use familiar images to tell the story of shared values and the advances of the United States of the time (including the wonders of technology, fertile farmland, the dynamism of town life), and in addition, the program wanted to strengthen the role of art in public life and bring artists closer to everyday life.
At that time, in order to qualify for the Federal Arts Program, you had to prove your poverty and show your artistic talents. It is also because of this selection criterion that the WPA and the Federal Arts Program not only attract and hire white men, but also artists of color and women who are gaining attention in today's mainstream art world. They earn weekly salaries, get to know each other, and make artists no longer feel isolated, and it is this sense of community that is considered one of the cornerstones of the formation of "Abstract Expressionism". But while many young painters were able to explore abstract styles in certain mural designs, the program favored realistic works.
Rothko, Untitled (Subway), 1937
Rothko, who created Untitled (Subway) for the Federal Art Project in 1937, seems to capture the possible solitude of a large city, where the subway station is quiet and the people are not communicating, a woman sitting in a hat and pointy shoes is fully immersed in the world of the ego; the man standing on the edge of the platform seems to merge with the column.
This is probably one of Rothko's rare paintings of realistic subjects. In this early work, Rothko's ability to manipulate color and space to evoke human emotions can still be seen, which is in common with the abstract, floating, overlapping rectangles he will paint on large canvases in the future, which is also the goal he pursued throughout his artistic career.
Pollock, The Cotton Picker, circa 1935
Few of Pollock's works for the Federal Arts Project have survived, and among the surviving works, the 1935 Cotton Picker was a popular subject at the time. Here, Pollock shows sympathetically the plight of the laborers, who are engaged in arduous work and can only defend themselves from the direct sunlight of the open air with long-sleeved hats. The curves of the worker's body and its generalized shape are reminiscent of the style of Pollock's teacher, Thomas Hart Benton, and this work also gives a glimpse into the formation of Pollock's abstract style.
Photographer Berenice Abbott also joined the Federal Arts Project, where she captured the towering structure of the Pennsylvania train station in downtown New York to celebrate the splendor of industrial technology, transportation, and even New York City. Abbott moved to New York as early as 1929 and took photographs of the city, but it wasn't until 1935 that she received funding from the Federal Arts Program. She named her project "New York in Change" and had an assistant to assist her. She documents the diverse urban population and its public, private and daily activities in "New York in Change", and she often avoids the traditional "beautiful" composition in a sharp angle and creates the image of the city with a special perspective.
Abbott, Penn Station, Manhattan, 1935-1938
During the PWAP period, many artists were also involved in the production of public art such as murals. For example, Charles Alston produced the mural "Magic and Medicine" for Harlem Hospital in New York City, and this set of diptychs in which African landscapes and hospital scenes coexist allude to spirituality or the status of faith, reason and science. The figures in the "Magic" section can be seen in the shadow of the original African sculptures that influenced countless modern European and American artists at that time. The woman in the robe at the bottom right of the picture is also given the meaning of traditional therapy.
In 1936, Alstom became the first African-American artist to assume the role of overseer of the Federal Arts Program. While overseeing the mural painting at Harlem Hospital, he was also controversial for part of his emphasis on African-American themes. So it wasn't until 1940 that the mural was installed.
Charles Alston, Magic and Medicine, 1940
In the nearly eight years of WPA's existence, artists have created about 200,000 works of art for public buildings such as hospitals, post offices, schools, airports, etc., including posters, murals, paintings, and sculptures. Unfortunately, there was no relevant preservation and collection agency at that time, and the WPA was disbanded on the eve of the outbreak of World War II, when most of the works created at that time were hastily auctioned due to the arrival of the war, and even reduced to scrap sales, and almost no records were left. Years later, some of them were found at various art dealers. From Christopher DeNoon's description in the book WPA Posters, it is roughly known that posters designed by WPA artists at that time were mostly sold for $3 to $5 a piece.
WPA poster, circa 1936
In 1965, the art historian Francis V. O'Connor scoured some of the artworks created by the Federal Arts Program and studied the most difficult posters to preserve and restore, including Dr. Alan Fern (then head of the Printmaking and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress). On the morning of February 15, 1966, when he was planning to recreate the creators of the "WPA poster," Finn took him to the entrance to a tower in the corner of the library, "Which was a very dusty spiral staircase with cobwebs hanging from it, and at the end of the staircase was a heavy door." Opening the creaky door, there was a spacious, musty round room with a storage room stacked with wooden tables and old circus posters. In this cluttered environment, O'Connor and Finn found a large wooden box with the WPA's freight label on it. After prying open, the poster is revealed. "This discovery is the most memorable."
WPA Poster, 1940
It is worth noting that of the 35,000 poster designs produced by the WPA over the years, only about 2,000 are known. Looking at these posters today, you can also know the popular style of the time - graphic, colorful, and easy to identify. The posters include advertisements for performances by the Federal Theater (the only national theater in the United States), children's art exhibition programs, and uses to promote public health, national parks, and the beautification of laborers in the states.
WPA poster, circa 1936-1941
Legacy of the Federal Arts Program
Although, hiring artists also needs to keep specific creative goals in mind: to help the government communicate with all regions of the country, to inspire national pride, and to document national rejuvenation. But each artist was paid $24 a week (about $450 today). Although the WPA did not exist long, and many of the works created at that time no longer exist, its greatest legacy may be to let the present know the diversity of the artist community at that time.
In her book Increasing Frustration: An Art Gallery in the Age of Black Power, Susan E. Cahan writes, "It was only in isolated periods, such as the WPA art program of the 1930s, that African-American artists had access to nearly the same opportunities as whites." She noted that the plan at the time supported black artists such as Aaron Douglas and Charles White.
African-American sculptor Augusta Savage makes sculptures in the Federal Arts Project. Image from the Smithsonian National Archives
Michael Denning wrote in his book The Cultural Front that at the heart of the artistic boom at the time was "a new generation of civilian artists and intellectuals growing up in modern urban immigrants and black communities." They poured into New York to join and breathe life into the Federal Arts Project. In the United States during the WPA period, fine art and practical art were in the same vein. These works created from the perspective of ordinary people's daily lives have also brought art back to life.
Ahir Gorky creates murals for Newark Airport
One example is the Armenian-American painter Arshile Gorky, who at the time created a group of ten murals for Newark Airport (entitled Aviation: Formal Evolution under Aerodynamic Constraints), which can be seen in the extant Aerial Map, drawing on the style of Picasso and Fernand Léger, with bold colors and graphics simply superimposed, and outlined with american maps. Elements such as horizontal dots represent flight paths. Although abstract forms were controversial at the time, Gorky insisted on depicting the way the future moved in futuristic art forms.
But during World War II, the airfield was turned into a military base and the murals were repainted, and it was thought that the murals were gone until 1972, when they were rediscovered, and two of them were restored and housed in the Newark Museum.
Ahir Gorky, Aerial Maps, 1935-1937
Today the Serpentine Gallery is considering a scheme to learn from, and at the time there were also voices of opposition. Some members of Congress have suggested that good art is the product of suffering, and that "subsidized art is not art at all." By 1937, the WPA was legally bound not to hire non-U.S. citizens. This led to a significant reduction in the number of artists employed by the program, including Roscoe of Latvians and de Kunin of the Dutch. Beginning in 1939, Martin Dies, then a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, began an investigation into the WPA's activities. Eventually, because of the imminent threat of World War II, these art programs were shut down and the public focus shifted to the war.
Note: This article is compiled from Smithsonian magazine 1934: Art in the New Deal (Jerry Adler, June 2009); Artsy's website, What We Can Learn from the Roosevelt Administration's Brief Period of Hiring Artists (Tess Thackara, January 2017); and Art Story's Federal Arts Project Progress Report