Today I saw an exhibit of New Deal-era murals (commissioned with gov't money in '30s) ...

[gauguin57]

... and I was thinking it might be cool to have some more large-scale, publicly commissioned art and writing projects during this new great depression. Hey ... all those laid-off journalists (and artists and photographers at those same laying-off publications) need to support themselves somehow. I'm only half-kidding, I think.



It sure was inspiring to see these post office murals from across Pennsylvania (the exhibit is in the State Museum of Pennsylvania, in Harrisburg). They were commissioned during early FDR administration, and paid for through the Treasury Department (not WPA). "... In celebrating the dignity of everyday life," the murals "were intended to lift the spirits of a Depression-weary America."

Hey ... I'm recession-weary. I need some murals.

http://www.statemuseumpa.org/common-canvas.html

[lostnotforgotten]

1. Republicans Could Never Allow The Glorification of the Common Man - Nope Never Happen

eom

[Mrs. Ted Nancy]

2. New Deal Cultural Programs

While we are on the topic of public support of the arts, I remember my grandmother talking about the WPA programs for artists and musicians. This is a nice overview of those programs. She mentioned that she took her younger sister to a puppet show supported by WPA funds.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal cultural programs marked the U.S. government's first big, direct investment in cultural development. In many ways, they present a mirror image of today's federal policy picture: their goals were clearly stated and democratic; they supported activities not already subsidized by private sector patrons, rather than following private patrons' leads; and they emphasized the interrelatedness of culture with all aspects of life, not the separateness of a rarefied art world.

The New Deal programs were inspired by many sources. For some, the New Deal offered a chance to act on the exciting ideas of Mexican muralists in their struggle to create a new public art not constrained by the conventions of the European art world. For others, inspiration came from the practical work that had been done in the settlement houses and rural extension services; from new progressive educational theories; from the new definitions of art that had come out of the Russian Revolution; from the Group Theater and other experiments in politically-conscious, collaborative art; and from dozens of other influences.

The main federal cultural programs of the '30s were based on concern for a labor market: professional artists and others engaged in cultural work. The skyrocketing popularity of media like the phonograph, radio and movies had recently supplanted many thousands of live performers: some 30,000 musicians had been displaced by new mechanical modes of music reproduction; the government estimated that well over 30,000 theater workers were unemployed by the mid-'30s. With over 70 million movie tickets being sold every week, live theaters were closing all over the United States. The Loew's theater chain boasted 36 houses offering 40-50 weeks of live entertainment each year before 1930; by 1934, Loew's had only three such houses operating. These new electronic media resulted in "technological unemployment" for workers in the live media.

The concern for professional artists' employment dovetailed with the federal programs of the 1930s. Chronic unemployment was the central and most persistent feature of the Depression: by 1932, estimates of the total number unemployed ranged from 8 to 17 million workers -- this, at a time when the total U.S. population was just 125 million. A variety of federal efforts were taken to address unemployment in cultural fields...

http://www.wwcd.org/policy/US/newdeal.html

[pmorlan1]

3. Great mural!

I love the mural!

[eleny]

4. The post office in my old neighborhood in Woodhaven, Queens, NY has one

It fascinated me as a kid. I feel so lucky to have had that as a part of everyday life.

It depicts the First Amendment and can be seen on this page at Google Books
http://books.google.com/books?id=Sl0M-Gev_uQC&pg=PA174&lpg=PA174&dq=Woodhaven+New+York+post+office+mural&source=web&ots=SpqA-3vw71&sig=ilREiwkapXXnWNOxLw3X5VrF_RY&hl=en&ei=QUuOSeW-AonOtQPN3tH5CA&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=10&ct=result#PPA174,M1

[sandnsea]

5. They even cut money to the Smithsonian

They sure as hell aren't going to want to support a picture painter.

[gauguin57]

6. I know it's a pipe dream, but I was just so jazzed looking at those murals today ...

... and knowing they gave artists work when times were dire.

Without the arts, we are nothing. Ars longa, vita brevis, and all that.

There was also a display case in the exhibit that featured a couple of books about Pennsylvania commissioned through the Federal Writers Project during the Depression.

[BrklynLiberal]

7. There are several sites that go into detail about these projects.

http://www.wpamurals.com/

In the Lakeview Chicago Post office



http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A00E6DA1438F937A35752C0A96F9C8B63

The W.P.A. Lives On

Q.The economic slowdown, reminiscent of the Great Depression, has brought the Works Progress Administration of the 1930s back into the news, and I've always been a fan of those rugged-worker-style W.P.A. murals. Where are some good places to see the murals in New York?

A. Depression-era murals painted by artists who were subsidized by the federal Works Progress Administration (and, for post office art, the Treasury Department's Section of Fine Arts) adorn many public and private building interiors in the city. This list just scratches the surface.

Buildings whose interiors have been protected by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, and which have federal New Deal murals, include Radio City Music Hall at Rockefeller Center, the United States Custom House at 1 Bowling Green, the New York County Courthouse at 60 Centre Street, and, in Queens, the Marine Air Terminal. The lobby of Staten Island Borough Hall, another landmark building, has a rich series of W.P.A. murals.

Abraham Lincoln and Samuel J. Tilden High Schools in Brooklyn were built around 1930, and both their auditoriums have large paintings done as W.P.A. projects.

Post office art includes the Jackson Heights, Forest Hills and Woodhaven stations in Queens, Manhattan's Madison Square office, and the Bronx Central Post Office.

One Web site with a listing of New Deal art across New York State is www.wpamurals.com/newyork.htm.

A 1937 federal art project mural by Anton Refregier for the visitors' room at the Rikers Island jail still exists, although the room has been partitioned.

Jose Maria Sert Murals at Rockefeller Center
http://www.waltlockley.com/rockcenter/0430rock/0430rock.htm

Above is Jose Maria Sert's "American Progress, the Triumph of Man's Accomplishments Through Physical and Mental Labor" behind the front desk, which other sources have as "Labor Collaborating with Art", also known as "Man's Conquests."

This is the scene of Diego Rivera's supposedly terrible mistreatment at the hands of Junior Rockefeller.

On the focal wall of the largest lobby of the tallest building, this is the psychological locus of the entire complex, and what we have here is a puzzling mess. Look closely in the middle and you'll find a figure in a tall hat, which not only DOES turn out to be Abraham Lincoln but who is leaning on Ralph Waldo Emerson. Supposedly. And evidently it's the Muses at the right and the forces of action on the left. At one point Frederick Allen Lewis described this mural as "a man on a scaffold throwing a tree at another man on another scaffold." I'll award the brass figligee with bronze oak-leaf palm to anybody who can explain Lincoln's appearance or simply tell me what the hell is going on back there.

This was the very spot where Rivera set himself to work painting his mural called --

drumroll --

Man at the Crossroads Looking with Uncertainty but with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a Course Heading to a New and Better Future

This of course as celebrated in song and story blah blah blah and also featured in the Tim Robbins film The Cradle Will Rock with Ruben Blades as Diego Rivera, this was the mural that the Rockefellers found objectionable and destroyed. The title comes from the original Hartley Burr Alexander art program. It's funny, funny, that Diego Rivera kept the title and followed the brief, and was taking it quite seriously, or perhaps thumbing his nose at it, or perhaps having it both ways. That's the unlikely connection between Hartley Burr Alexander and Diego Rivera.

In all this controversy has - has everybody been too busy with the politics to look at the thing (as recreated in Mexico City with a pointedly different title) and imagine it in place? It's a much better composition because it has a literal middle, instead of a murky void, and because it's damned colorful, and it has an emotional center, a figure that the viewer can instantly identify with. It has butterfly crosshairs and in the bulls-eye there's Man at the Crossroads, looking like a reasonable technologically savvy proletariat, kind of fed up or trodden-down, faced with the decision between the old corrupt world and the vital new Communist world. He looks ambivalent. Y'know, I don't think Lenin's face was the real problem. The real problem was the graphic, colorful choice presented between the hopeful egalitarian Communist future on the right, and all those gas masks and urban riots and cocktailing capitalists on the left.

Mouse over the above image for some sense of what the mural would have looked like in place (and, yes, I think Sert had already been hired for the ceiling); click on the below image for a full-sized image of Rivera's 1934 Mexico City version of the same mural, significantly retitled "Man, the Controller of the Universe". Through the courtesy of Wikipedia.

[hedgehog]

8. If you look closely, not everyone in that painting is wearing eye protection.

I noticed that because my grand dad lost an eye in the mill back in the 30's. He caught a splash of liquid metal.


My mother remembers that he had so many burns across his back and shoulders that they wouldn't let him into a public pool because they thought he had a skin disease. This was just "normal" wear and tear.

[gauguin57]

9. Wow. What a story. We bitch about how gov't regulators fall down on the job today ...

... but as we bitch, we forget how much better things are than when you grandfather was sacrificing an eye -- and getting burned and scarred -- as he worked in the mill.

[Davis_X_Machina]

10. The Portland (ME) Museum of Art...

...has the old postmaster's door from the Westbrook PO, surrounded by Waldo Pierce's Woodsmen in the Woods of Maine.

Chapel Hill's old PO had some nice ones, too.

[lxlxlxl]

11. Just recently, Quebec and later all of Canada were up in arms over cuts to arts funding

It has been really depressing to see the lack of will and ability to defend our Arts programs as necessary spending. These ignorant Republican hicks deride the very culture that makes America such a powerful force in the world. Thank you for posting the murals...haven't seen them in a while. Diego's murals are so beautiful also. I hope to see one of those in real life.

[DianeG5385]

12. If you're in San Francisco go to Coit tower

There are some amazing depression era murals inside.

[KittyWampus]

13. The post office in my hometown growing up had a WPA mural by William Gropper