Democratic Vistas - University of Virginia



Democratic Vistas

▪ Xvii (Preface) “During the New Deal the government of the United States altered its relationship to the people. For the first time, Washington built housing for it citizens, regulated the stock market, established the right of labor unions to exist, and provided relief – or money – directly to people who were destitute. It also became a patron of the arts. Where once it had commissioned a work or a building, now it initiated comprehensive and extensive programs. Its theory was that though the country was in the worst depression in its history, though millions were out of work, hungry, and living in shacks, Americans needed cultural as well as material assistance. Culture was not to be just for the rich, the educated, the elite; it was also to be for the poor, the uneducated, and the remote. To accomplish this end, the government put thousands of artists, themselves often destitute, to work. As Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to reach ordinary people individually in his fireside chats, so the government, in the belief that a country needed citizens familiar and involved with the arts in order to be truly democratic, tried to bring original art to small towns everywhere.”

▪ Xvii (Preface) “We forget how few people in the 1930s had ever seen an original painting and how extraordinary was the effort to place murals and sculpture in communities of every size.”

▪ Xvii (Preface) “…the work of the Section makes clear the tension between regionalism and nationalism implicit it the New Deal’s programs.”

▪ Xvii (Preface) “A study of the Section reveals still another tension, that between fine art and democracy.”

▪ Xvii-xviii (Preface) “…the government…wished to give citizens what they wanted, citizens not so familiar with, and sometimes hostile to, prevailing aesthetic as well as political opinion. One result was the almost total exclusion of abstract painters from Section work. Another was the all too human struggle – sometimes tragic, more often not – between the desire of the artist and the will of the local or national committee considering his or her work. However much one deplores or praises the results, a study of the Section reveals the problems inherent in a system of government patronage that respects both the integrity of the artist and the democratic process.”

▪ 5 “The projects were a uniquely American blend, combining an elitist belief in the value of high culture with the democratic ideal that everyone in the society could and should be the beneficiary of such efforts.”

▪ 5 “In addition to the democratic ideals of federal patronage, New Dealers expected that the art projects would help create a national culture.”

▪ 6 FDR’s 1941 speech about federal art patronage “A few generations ago, the people of this country were taught by their writers and by their critics and by their teachers to believe that art was something foreign to America and to themselves – something imported from another continent and from an age which was not theirs – something they had no part in, save to go to see it in a guarded room on holidays or Sundays.

“But recently, within the last few years, they have discovered that they have a part. They have seen in their own towns, in their own villages, in schoolhouses, in post offices, in the back rooms of shops and stores, pictures painted by their sons, their neighbors – people they have known and lived beside and talked to. They have seen, across these last few years, tooms full of paintings by Americans, walls covered with all the paintings of Americans – some of it good, some of it not good, but all of it native, human, eager and alive – all of it painted by their own kind in their own country, and painted about things they know and look at often and have touched and loved.” (See note 10)

▪ 6 WPA/FAP 1935-1943 = “largest and most famous” of the federally sponsored art projects

▪ 6 “To provide decorations for federal buildings, the Treasury Department, which at that time built and administered those buildings, also directed two art programs. One, the Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP, 1935-39), like the WPA/FAP, largely employed artists on relief. The other, the subject of this book, was the longest lived of these agencies, the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture, later the Section of Fine Arts.”

“The Section was organized by order of the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., on October 16, 1934. The original idea for the Section came from Edward Bruce, who proposed that a ‘Division of Fine Arts’ be established in the Treasury Department and that the President, by executive order, set aside one percent of the cost of new federal buildings for their embellishment.”

▪ 7 “The leaders of the Section were typical New Dealers in that they were not part of an entrenched bureaucracy, but brought new ideas and new idealism to their work….the Section leaders all had a background in art. Edward Bruce (1879-1943) and Edward Rowan (1898-1946) were painters, and Forbes Watson (ca. 1880-1960) was an art critic. They worked extremely well together. Bruce formulated general policy and ran interference with Roosevelt and Morgenthau; Watson continued to be an important art critic and publicized the Section’s work in countless newspaper and magazine articles; and Rowan made the day-to-day artistic and administrative decisions.”

▪ 7 “…though its staff consisted of only nineteen people, including secretaries, a carpenter, and two photographers, it had an impact in virtually every congressional district of the United States.”

▪ 8 “Though commissioning only three black artists, the Section gave many commissions to women. Over one-sixth, or about 150, of the 850 artists working for the Section were women. The Section made special efforts to commission Native American and western artists who had never before been recognized by the federal government. Whereas the WPA/FAP stressed creativity and experimentation, the Section stressed the quality of the product. In defining quality in a more or less traditional way, it excluded the avant-garde styles. Its goal was [to] create a contemporary American art, neither academic nor avant-garde, but based on experience and accessible to the general public. Bruce wrote in 1934: ‘I think the mere fact that the Government has organized this Section and undertaken this work is bound to have a very beneficial effect on the whole art movement in the country, and especially along the lines of taking the snobbery out of art and making it the daily food of the average citizen.’” (see note 16)

▪ 8 Why post offices? “The New Deal sought to make the national government’s presence felt in even the smallest, most remote communities. The Section, for its part, was committed to making art a part of daily life, not only in cities but also in small town and rural areas across the country. The means for realizing this vision were eleven hundred new post offices. Places where art would be seen daily by ordinary citizens conducting the normal business of their lives. The post office was ‘the one concrete link between every community of individuals and the Federal government’ that functioned ‘importantly in the human structure of the community.’ Usually on a street near the center of town, running perpendicular or parallel to Main Street, these rectangular brick buildings, slightly set back, perhaps to make room for the flag pole, brought to the locality a symbol of government efficiency, permanence, service, and even culture. Thus, the post office became the emblem of the new policy.” (Use pic of Beaufort PO)

▪ 8 Why didn’t the government commission art celebrating national glory? “One sculptor, Carl L. Schmitz, explained why a realistic subject was more appropriate than a symbolic one for a small Kentucky post office: ‘I think that persons entering the building, would get more local pride out of a design having to do with their own activities than a mythological figure which the average man does not even understand and which may give him the feeling of the majesty and might of his government, rather than the feeling of his own personal relation to it and the concern of the government towards him.’ (note 20) Schmitz in fact articulated one of the dilemmas that the New Deal created: the diminution of democratic control in the face of expanded national power.”

▪ 9 “Our approach has been to study the tensions between three polarities: the desire for quality in art and the commitment to make art democratic; the effort to create an art embodying national ideals and values and the wish to make art relevant to people in various regions of the United States; traditional artistic values and the contemporary style.”

▪ 10 “Although historians have carefully documented the federal government’s unprecedented impact on people’s lives during the 1930s, very little is known about how American citizens responded to specific New Deal programs. An examination of the Section’s work provides a unique opportunity to see how the public reacted to one such program because the Section chose to give the public a role at every stage of the creation of a mural or sculpture.”

▪ 10 “the elusive ideal, the common man”

▪ 10 “nature of art based on compromise”

▪ 10 “what the murals meant at the time. Even ordinary subjects, because they were painted in large scale and permanently attached to a wall, had connotations of heroism that gave them different nuances from the ones we perceive today, especially when we tend to see the murals primarily in small photographic reproductions. In 1939 Supreme Court Justice Harlan S. Stone described Peter Hurd’s mural in Big Spring, Texas:

‘What a lovely composition the Hurd mural is. Aside from all the other considerations, how important it is that the humble people of this country should be impressed with the fact that the artist finds beauty and dignity in their life, and one of the many things that we need to be taught in this country is that our lives, however simple or humble, may be both beautiful and dignified.” (chap 2 note 1)

▪ 10 “The depiction of ordinary people engaged in daily routines was a novelty to a public used to the earlier American Renaissance mural tradition with its winged personifications representing the essences of Western culture in an aura of otherworldliness. Instead they saw themselves as the everyman painted large and felt the dignity associated with the mundane.”

▪ 10 “The question about why people cared so much about the murals remains. In the 1930s, despite the general mobility of Americans, people in small towns had a strong sense of local identity….When it came to art, their expectations seem to have been serious, though their ideas of artistic license may have been limited and they may have responded more to accurate than to artful images. And when it came to mural painting, they were faced with a permanent presence that, once installed, was beyond their control. They had well-formed ideas about their own history and about the distinctiveness of their own communities, which rivalry with neighboring towns may have intensified. They were sensitive to implied denigration of the heritage or achievements they took to be their own. They certainly were acutely aware or their taxes and how the money was expended. And their contentiousness or outrage at times may really have been provoked by the New Deal in general rather than by a particular mural.”

▪ 12 “Southerners frequently objected not just that the artist hired was not local, but that he or she was not even southern….most murals in the South were painted by northern artists.”

▪ 12 “In a typical competition, the Section first found a chairperson, possibly a museum director or the head of an art association, who in turn selected other members of the jury – art administrators, artists, architects, or prominent citizens. Both the jury and the Section publicized the competition, the latter in its Bulletin, which reached 8,000 artists by 1941. The artists sent their sketches to the jury. To guarantee anonymity, the artists’ names were kept in separate sealed envelopes and the sketches were given corresponding numbers. When the jury met, it picked the winning design and also decided which sketches were good enough to merit lesser commissions. The Section then reviewed all the sketches and, if the jury’s selection was consistent with the Section’s standards of quality, followed the jury’s recommendations. The names of the artists were revealed only after a design had been chosen.

The Section held 190 competitions in all. Some of these were national…” (while most were regional)

▪ 12 “The vast majority of competitions, however, were regional. Such competitions were more effective in finding local artists and gaining local support…” (But the Section would sometimes overrule the regional committee’s decision.)

▪ 14 describes the varied experiences of artists heeding the Section’s advice to visit a locality for local color and input

▪ 16 In the case of the 48 State Competition, local residents were notified of the foregone results rather than visited and asked for input as per the Section’s usual policy.

▪ 16 re. the 48 States Comp: “Problems arose because the artists produced designs that appealed to a national panel of artists, not local postmasters and communities, and partly because artists were sometimes awarded a location other than the one for which they had submitted a design.”

▪ 17 “The Section was generally able to accommodate local interests when there were differences between the artists and the community.”

▪ 18 “The lengths to which artists would go to ensure the accuracy of their sketches dramatizes their desire to make their work authentic and acceptable, but the severity of local criticism of the details of the sketches shows how difficult it was….Communities took the works seriously enough to criticize the authenticity or accuracy of minor features.” What follows details the types of detailed criticisms artists received, including tobacco in Whiteville and wild pony manes in Beaufort.

▪ 19 “Although the Section sought to instill national ideals and values, local citizens often could not see beyond inaccurate details, and the Section understood that people cared most about what they knew best.”

▪ 20-21 (important!) black citizens’ protests re. “Negro River Music”

▪ 23 various vignettes of dissatisfied citizens and postmasters – use some of these to contrast with reports of pleased citizens

▪ 26 “But support probably outweighed criticism, lending credence to the Section’s belief that art could stimulate a deeper sense of culture and help people to confront the Depression. Even where there was criticism of the mural, as in Rockport, Massachusetts, the interest the work aroused was praised. Rockport’s postmaster suggested that ‘all criticism seems to be an expression of a healthy interest in the work as a picture of what has been for years a leady industry of the section [quarries]. It is quite surprising how many people show interest by asking questions concerning the work and who the artist was.’” (chapter 2 note 84)

▪ 26 “Peter Blume wrote a long and eloquent account of the installation of his mural in Geneva, New York:”

My day in Geneva, supervising the installation of the mural was curiously exciting. It is rare indeed for an artist to be that close to his audience.

One’s first contact is necessarily with the janitor and his assistant. A kind of tentative relationship transacted in cool courtesy, a matter of getting ladders and planks moved about, and a floor space clear enough to lay out the canvas. But after the picture has been spread out the atmosphere of the place becomes somehow transformed. The janitor who was the first to see it is very much impressed, wants to know if it’s really hand-painted, then all the rest of them come trooping down and peer in from the door one after the other. You no longer feel a stranger in a large room, on the unfamiliar side of the grill. The clerk sorting letters along the rack looks up at you and grins. ….?

Mr. Crittenden (the janitor) way up on the scaffold unrolled the canvas like a scroll, fastening it to the wall as he went along, a little at a time. It’s curious to watch this painful process of unveiling. You see your own work in a different perspective and you look over at the crowds and wonder what they might be thinking. Then you hear giggles and ahs, then somebody says, ‘what pretty wall paper, are you going to put it all round the lobby.’ That sort of breaks the spell. Somebody takes one look at it, says ‘fooey’ and walks out.

The artist reported that he felt a sense of triumph when the man from the State Agricultural Experiment Station defended the accuracy of the rendering of the grape vine from the facetiousness of a grape grower.” (see chap 2 note 86)

▪ 26-27 “In Natick, Massachusetts (see Figure 48), Hollis Holbrook worked in tempera and was impressed with both the number and the variety of people who watched him: ‘You won’t believe it but there are dozens that come in every day just to see the forms take shape. They include no only the house wives but more than twenty tradesmen, plumbers, mechanics, chauffeurs, and taxi drivers. And every person who enters asks the Post men about it. I haven’t heard one remark that hasn’t been highly flattering.’ (chap 2 note 88) In Lewiston, Illinois, when Ida Abelman painted in tempera it was as if she had an art class: ‘Needless to say, most people have never seen work of this sort in progress before. I am told there is no art instruction offered in the town’s high school. After school session many children gathered at the Post Office to ask questions. Many fathers came to ask advice about art education for their youngsters!’ (chap 2 note 89) The painting of the murals in Saint Joseph, Missouri, really did serve as art education. . There the director of art in the public schools mimeographed a three-page form about the artist and the paintings, including a list of questions, and classes came to the post office to study the murals and hear a brief discussion of them by the artist, Gustaf Dalstrom. (chap 2 note 90)”

▪ 27 “Once the work was installed, there was usually a dedication ceremony, often well attended, which included speeches and flag waving. Many people came from out of town to see newly dedicated works. In Siloam Springs, Arkansas, 112 people stopped to see the mural one Sunday afternoon. In Edinburg, Texas, it was reported, ‘the mural seems to be the pride of the valley and brings in droves of tourists to see it. It is the only painting in town and even the flea-bitten, bow legged cow hands say ‘Wal, now, that’s not bad a’tall – really looks like these here parts.”’” (chap 2 note 91)

▪ 27 “When the response was positive, it was often the case that the townspeople enjoyed seeing themselves in the painting or that the painting provided a sense of continuity with the past.”

▪ 27 “The highest praise was sometimes that a mural had created interest in art as such or that one good mural called for another. Of the former testimonials, perhaps the best is: ‘It seems that this mural has done quite a great deal for the people here, as there seems to be more interest in the beauty around us, and I believe the folks are getting art minded as you hear them calling each other’s attention to the beautiful sun set, beautiful clouds and just everything in general.’” (chap 2 note 97)

▪ 28 “Some may conclude that this was an art of consensus, at best benign, and at worst self-serving, provincial, and conservative. Historians may decide that the works reflect small town chauvinism or boosterism. Art historians may decide that the works do not reflect the achievements of such great twentieth-century artists as Picasso, Leger, and Miro. Scholars of both disciplines may think that the control of the Section or the influence of the local citizens was counterproductive to the creation of real art. All these criticisms may be true for some of the commissions, but they are inadequate when applied to the program as a whole. It was daring for the federal government to step in and patronize art on such a scale. It was unheard of for the government to place works of art outside the capital, much less in isolated towns without galleries or museums. It was radical for the government to take the position that art was a necessity rather than a luxury – that people needed paintings as well as highways. And, on the whole, one cannot conclude that the images produced are simply flattering. Though the works certainly do not show the worst aspects of communities, neither do they flatter in the manner of advertising images, which were already well established in the mass media. In contrast to the man in the Arrow collar ads or the woman with the fox collar standing by a Packard in the pages of Time, the Section works were not chic or fashionable, nor did they speak the language of the opulent consumer society that the advertising industry uses to sell products. The Section images lack the hyperbole and slickness of the mass media in the 1930s. If they were not avant-garde, neither were they sentimental or commercial.”

▪ 29 “The New Deal sought to reassure people in a time of emergency, and though reassurance was not part of the Section’s stated policies, its work did in fact serve that larger purpose. Hundred of murals depicting local history and economic activity implicitly affirm the importance of ‘the people,’ a sense of renewal, and the continuity of prosperity. Even an unprepossessing little mural in south Texas depicting a town’s founding and subsequent development showed ordinary people arriving by rail to begin life anew and the extraordinary prosperity that resulted from their efforts. The message of the mural, as revealed in the local paper, was ‘the simple theme of Robstown’s transformation from a lonely railroad junction in the brush, where land promoters sold a dream of a cotton empire, to a fabulous framing land of that dream-come-true. (chap 3 note 3) Judging from the Section commissions, this is the story of America. According to this story, the drought and agricultural crisis of the 1930s were due to the vagaries of nature and could not permanently interfere with the march of progress, or with the popularity of positive thinking.”

▪ 30 “While the subjectsin the post offices are local, the ideals are national. If the subject is tobacco in one place and automobiles in another, the common denominator is work and productivity – national virtues. While the small farmer and the factory worker are of local interest, they are both ‘the common man,’ a person of national significance. Through the murals the government provided important symbols to sustain people during the depths of the Depression. Even so trivial a subject as the mail became a unifying theme as artists depicted its role in tying together far-flung parts of the country or showed hows the government could reach even the most isolated and independent individuals.”

▪ 30 “When we look at these works, we see an essentially nineteenth-century laissez-faire world in which enterprising people work singly and together to construct America. These ingenious, energetic, and hard-working people are neither the rich nor the poor, but the middle-class backbone of the country.”

▪ 31 Bruce: “To talk of defeat and curtailment and less abundance is unworthy of this country. There is not place in this land of ours for a psychology of defeat…. All over this great country of ours, and I speak whereof I know, there is a longing and a soul striving for something more and finer and better in life than two automobiles in every garage and a radio in every room. There is a desire for beauty, a reaction against the ugliness that surrounds us, a wish to fill one’s time with new interests, a hope to find an outlet for the creative spirit. (chap 3 note 7)”

▪ 30 “…the frontier represented opportunity, land wealth democracy, starting over, and renewal….

The material deprivation that a large portion of the population suffered in the Depression made the frontier an important theme. It offered hope for the renewal of American life and perhaps served as a metaphor for the New Deal itself.”

▪ 31 “Dozens of murals portray the settlement of these frontiers – first residents picking a site for the town, building a log cabin or a sod hut, clearing the fields, or meeting in the country store. A few of these people are national figures, such as William Penn; a few are the ancestors of prominent local citizens; but the vast majority are just people. These ordinary people work hard and work together.”

▪ 32 “Because the Section, like the New Deal in general, sought to emphasize what people had in common, distinctions based on race, sex, or class are played down and conflict between groups (except between whites and Indians) is almost entirely absent.”

▪ 34 brief passage on women in the murals; brief passage on social class; brief passage on the frequency of Indian paintings

▪ 39 brief on themes of progress (like from blacksmith to industrial worker)

▪ 42-43 argument about the difficulties of history painting in a nation that denies and reinterprets its past – the past as idealized rather than historically accurate

▪ 48 “Despite the fact that industry had surpassed agriculture as the major producer of wealth and the main employer of labor, more murals are devoted to the subject of agriculture. Most of the towns with post office art were small and visibly agricultural. Agriculture or the farm was a subject that linked past and present and could easily include scenes of family and community, though the number of family farms declined after 1935. The farmer was a model of the self-reliant individual producing for the common good, a conception well established in American thought. And the farmer was also the model of man’s role in reaping the beneficence of nature and of constancy in the midst of the rise and fall of cities and nations.”

▪ 51 brief on representation of industrial work (craft-based)

▪ 53 more on industrial scenes

▪ 56 “Harry Sternberg made the identification clear by using one family to symbolize both the worker and the farmer in his mural for Ambler, Pennsylvania. He wrote: ‘The emphasis …is on the beauty of the forms to symbolize the joy and beauty a worker finds in his work – when working conditions are good. This is a picture of promise – a picture of life as it should be – and as it will be under our developing and progressive democracy.”

▪ 56 brief on artist activism muted by the Section (artists’ desire to represent critically a society made up of social classes)

▪ 61 “Even the mail, especially Rural Free Delivery, was appropriated by the New Deal and tied to the idea of democracy. The Grand Ledge, Michigan, Independent waxed eloquent over James Calder’s mural of a farm family waiting for the mail: ‘one is impressed with the distinctly American aspects of the painting. The ‘RFD’ mailman recalls the part played by this distinguished democratic service extending to the farmer the same opportunity to be as well-informed and intelligent a citizen as the city dweller. Free daily delivery of mail to rural areas [is] now accepted as one of the inalienable privileges of citizenship.’ (chap 4 note 32) Orlin E. Clayton wrote of his mural, ‘A Letter,’ in the Harwell, Georgia, post office: ‘Our Post Office Department is a great wheel that is actually carrying the vast machine of the business world, so necessary to our progress. It serves the solitary worker and his family, the same as captains of industry and finance.’ (note 33) Progress and modernity were often represented by the new, streamlined airplanes and trains. Dan Rhodes wrote of his mural for Piggott, Arkansas: ‘I feel the Air Mail is of unusual significant to the smaller and more isolated community linking them as it does with the most distant centers. I have tried to convey the sense of stream-lined power which is behind the mail service.’ (note 34) And behind the mail service was the federal government.”

▪ 62 “The Section discouraged representations of the Depression as such because the Depression was temporary and the works were permanent.”

▪ 63 representing the TVA; painting educational murals dealing with such issues as soil erosion and praising govt programs to address it

▪ 66-67 “Some interpreters of the work of the Section charge that is supported the status quo and was basically conservative because it selected works that avoided the representation of conflict or controversial subject, gave a positive view of local history and life, and affirmed a faith in America’s uniqueness and ability to surmount any difficulty. But the Section can also be seen as promoting a progressive vision of America in which progress is based not on entrepreneurs, machines, and technology, but on working people who plough the fields, build the towns, and produce the goods. The Section’s history is not the story of great leaders and national heroes, but of ordinary people. The American ethic that emerges is communal rather than individualistic. Belief in work, community, and progress can promote both traditional values and social change. Though the long-range goals of New Dealers and radicals differed dramatically, in the 1930s they shared the conviction that national power and national ideals were essential to progress.”

▪ 68 “Although the Section actively promoted nationalist ideals and unifying themes in consonance with broader New Deal objectives, it also fostered regionalism because of its commitment to a public art that people in each locality would recognize as authentic. Consequently, the works reflect the natural and cultural diversity that existed across the United States. The concept of regionalism had great importance between the world wars. It provided a model for planners who sought to balance the economy and inspired, for writers and artists, a new realization of the importance of folk traditions. Though it has less relevance today, in the 1930s it was a well-spring of both popular images and broader ideas. Regionalism was a way to keep what was good from the past, to discover the originality of the present, and to counter the increasing uniformity imposed by industrialization.”

▪ 68 “Because the Section spread it patronage across the entire country, and because it insisted upon authentic subject matter, its works are more regional than those of the other federal art programs. The Section emphasized local and regional competitions and required that artists be tied to the area in which they competed. Because the artists portrayed scenes of local historical and economic development, their art mirrored existing regional patterns. The Section, a national program with a central administration in Washington, D.C., stimulated artists and residents to examine and articulate what was distinctive about their area.”

▪ 85 “In contrast to the dynamic nature of the works in the mid-Atlantic states and other regions, the South’s murals and sculptures have a distinctly static quality. This is due in part to the fact that the South has the fewest depictions of history in its post offices. Because southern history was dominated by the institutions of slavery and the defeat of the South in the Civil War, history was apparently not a viable subject for post office murals. Here, national ideals and the expanding power of the federal government came into direct conflict with white southerners’ attempts to build regional pride around the glories of the Old South. During the New Deal ‘waving the bloody shirt’ and scenes of plantation owners upholding states’ rights were not appropriate subjects….

The other major reason for the static quality of southern work is that the southern economy, dependent on labor-intensive agriculture, was stagnant. The South also suffered from its effort to maintain a rigid caste system through segregation and to subordinate blacks through sharecropping, which concentrated black labor on white-owned cotton farms.” (continues) (Each other region is also characterizes separately.)

▪ 92-93 on the West Palm Beach, FL mural of the mail carrier

▪ 95-96 (and image on p 97) resembles the Harrisonburg mural in that is it contemporary and was painted during WWII – shows the community and democracy Americans were fighting to preserve. Use with Harrisonburg.

▪ Consider dividing the mural gallery into regions and including Dem. Vistas’ overviews of the patterns of each region. (would mean scanning a few of the b&w images here) – See chapter 5

▪ 113 scan this image “Most painted canvases in their studios and later affixed them to the wall.” (p 112)

▪ 112 “A mural over the postmaster’s door seems a quaint anachronism today, but in the 1930s such murals had a significance that is difficult now to grasp. The rationale for placing murals in post offices all over the country went beyond utility – the need to employ artists or decorate new public buildings. The federal government, in all of its various art projects, sought to create visible and permanent cultural artifacts that would articulate and record American beliefs for future generations or civilizations, just as the pyramids had done for the ancient Egyptians or the cathedrals for the medieval Christians. And the most suitable visual form for recording these beliefs would be murals, for they were the most public and permanent form of painting. Murals would project a belief in the basic dignity of ‘the people’ and their right to social justice and useful work. Even art, previously the province of an elite, would now serve the people. And what better theme than the people themselves; what style more appropriate than a representational one; and what better place than their local post office?”

▪ Chapter 6 (about p 114) is about the limitations of the architectural space given the murals. The buildings were not designed for the murals and the Section had to make do. Architects weren’t usually cooperative, seeing the murals as detracting from their designs for the buildings. Spaces for murals were generally small, poorly lit, etc.

▪ 114 a letter from an artist to this effect

▪ 116 “Because the artist received a set fee based on the cost of the building, the larger the mural the lower the artist’s fee per square foot. The Section wanted to pay twenty dollars a square foot for murals, the commercial rate, but actually paid about fifteen. Most of the commissions were small, and the sums included the cost of materials, shipping, and installation as well as the artist’s labor, so that some artists chose to paint smaller murals.”

▪ 116 fresco was ideal but unachievable for several reasons, noted here

▪ 125 “The only guideline for artists was that their works were to depict the American Scene – subjects, whether past or present, familiar to the pubic and presented realistically so that the public could understand them.”

▪ 127 the length to which one artist went to paint an accurate Spanish conquistador (artist’s letter – funny)

▪ 128-129, etc. several examples here of Rowan’s letters to artists critiquing the drawings – some sound like an art lesson

▪ 138 “For some of the artists, the Section commission was simply a job that helped them through the hard times of the Depression, but for many it was an important opportunity to reach – for the first time – the American public that did not go to art galleries or museums, to crate a public art along new lines, and to promote a new social order.”

▪ 138 “The Section conceived of public art as a dialogue between the artist and the public. It thought that the language of the public was realism and therefore insisted that the artists working realistic styles. Since the bulk of American artists in the 1930s were realists of various sorts, the Section had many to choose from.”

▪ 138 (use as pop-up definition): “Realism in Europe and America is not a particular style but a tradition of representational painting that attempts to give meaning to what is represented. In America the tradition of which the painters of the 1930s felt they were a part began after the Civil War with Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer and continued through the Ash Can painters and the independent realists of the mid-1920s such as Edward Hopper. It was a self-conscious movement before the creation of the Section. Realism in this tradition is a vision as well as a visible subject. It is intelligible in both form and content. It is social as well as artistic in its intentions. It is a figural art because the figure is the metaphor for both human existence and society. It attempts to convey the essence as well as the individual observation of life, and its spectator must feel that what he or she sees is observed from life and conveys a higher view of it. Realism is not synonymous with naturalism, which seeks to show life in the more meticulous and sometimes unflattering detail; nor is it idealism, which offers a vision of perfection, present or future, of form or content; nor is it expressionism, which gives primacy to emotion; nor is it romanticism, which colors life with heightened sensibility. Though in the 1930s realism was more abstract in both form and conception of life – whether heroic or homey – than it had been in the nineteenth century, its simplification of form conveyed the ideal of feeling. It used a mixture of earth colors and others, taking harmony to the edge of discord.” (continues)

▪ 139 most Section commissions fall into category of American Scene painting (paraphrase)

▪ 140 William H. Calfee of Washington, D.C., a young artist who won numerous Section commissions, painted a series of genre scenes rich in detail for Harrisonburg, Virginia. They are not the timeless sort of genre scenes, for they include contemporary costumes, in particular a Naval uniform that places the scene in the early 1940s. Again, both the sense of design and the sense of observation are strong, and the overall picture of America is reassuring.”

▪ 176 “The Section provided the patronage and, in their negotiations with the artists [from the various schools of art] and the public, moved the art toward a center. But that center represented shared ideals about public art and realism. Artistically that center was a period style, created by the interaction of government and public, and exemplified by Section commissions.”

▪ 178 Conclusion begins here – first paragraph is overview of all New Deal art programs and their various roles. “In one sense the Section was the most conservative of the art programs. It shunned the political limelight and made the fewest claims for its efforts.” Unlike the WPA/FAP’s attempts to build public support through publicizing its work, “The Section took a bureaucratic approach that involved keeping a low profile and building support through Bruce’s political contacts in Washington. Bruce understood from the beginning that it would be difficult to make art acceptable to people in small towns, and that understanding determined the Section’s working methods. The Section officials sought to make their project a permanent one that would be above politics. They feared that if they were too visible and tried to build a popular constituency, they would arouse conservative opposition to any and all government patronage. In the end, of course, the combination of the Second World War and conservative opposition led to the Section’s demise. But if the Section did not build a constituency, it did leave a rich legacy of work for all Americans.”

▪ 178-179 the “comparative achievements” between the WPA/FAP and the Section

▪ 179 “What did Section officials, in effect, impose, foster, accept, or reject? What they imposed on the artists was a realistic style, legible design, convincing drawing, and accuracy of representation. What they fostered were subjects of small town history and contemporary scenes, whether of purely local or regional significance. They also encouraged a positive view of society and a faith in the importance of peaceful social change, expressed in such themes as the dignity of work, the pleasure of leisure, the bounty of rural life, the importance of family cohesiveness, and value of community, and the diversity and drama of urban life. What they accepted was a wide range of artistic abilities and divergent political views on the part of the artists. They accepted images of the heroism of the worker, the evils of slavery, the dialectic of class struggle in history, the importance of civil liberties, the distinctive contributions of ethnic groups and immigrants, the Revolutionary heritage of struggle, the primacy of native traditions in the Southwest, and the activism and courage of women. What they rejected was nudity, caricature, abstraction, and whatever they considered to be propagandistic or negative. The final product almost always had a tone of harmony, deriving from both the composition and the subject. To some, the Section’s art may seem to promote a middle-class, consensus view of the world, but in the 1930s, when labor and the left saw the New Deal as an ally in transforming society, this positive vision reflected a confidence in the possibility of change. It was not a picture of the status quo but of a society undergoing fundamental improvement. Radicals and liberals were willing to work together in what they felt was a progressive cause.

▪ 180 “One’s assessment of the Section’s accomplishments depends on one’s expectations of both bureaucracy and democracy. The question is not whether the Section was a bureaucracy; government agencies by definition are bureaucratic. The question is whether it was effective and human. It was both. A small staff in Washington administered a national program that commissioned 1,400 works in less than a decade. Virtually all the money budgeted for the Section went directly to the artists. The administrators’ correspondence was patient and supportive, and insofar as they were able, they made allowances for individual artists. The other question is: how democratic was the program? It was, for the most part, democratic. It gave opportunities to as many artists as possible, and most of them were relatively unknown. It made original art more widely available and for the first time extended democracy into the cultural sphere. It involved local residents in the decision-making process and solicited local approval for the art. It worked by compromise, responded to community pressures, but never satisfied any one group to the exclusion of others. Its success can be measured by the popularity of the works with the public. But it was not entirely democratic. It’s emphasis on small towns over large population centers meant that it served fewer people than it might have. It responded more to vested interests and to organized opposition than to individuals. It retained the ultimate authority and sometimes used it. Even though it made efforts to ensure that women and Indian artists received commissions, it made no such effort for black artists.”

▪ 180 (and continues) “One of the reasons for the downgrading of Section works is that they are not modernist.” More on modernism…

▪ 180-181 “The history of the Section raises important questions about public patronage. Is art by nature an elite activity, and can it maintain its particular qualities and still reach the general public? Can administrators or the public make artistic decisions, or can only artists decide what art should be? Is public involvement in the artistic process antithetical to the creation of a genuine art? Can art be produced by commissions, or is it an activity rather than a product? Should the government, if it decides to play the role of patron, promote an art that corresponds to a social norm, or should it consciously commission pieces that represent every current style or theory? Is the role of government to educate the public, to teach it what it should want, or is it merely to reflect the spectrum of public taste? Can the process of selection be democratic, and if it is democratic, is the resulting art by definition appropriate to a democracy? Is the selection by a government agency intrinsically bureaucratic? Are norms, as the product of a former consensus, always out of date? Can a society at any given time understand what is new or creative? Should art be defined only as what is new or creative? In a pluralistic society, can the government serve the interests of all groups equally, or should it promote unity and agreement?”

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