“1934: A New Deal for Artists” Exhibition at SAAM
Video Player is loading.
Current Time 0:00
/
Duration 0:00
Loaded: 0.00%
0:00
Stream Type LIVE
Remaining Time -0:00
1x
- Chapters
- descriptions off, selected
- captions off, selected
This is a modal window.
The Public Works of Art Project gave artists an opportunity to create art during the Great Depression. Co-Curator of the American Art Museum, Anne Wagner, discusses the federal government and its program to support artists, the artists' lives working on the federal pay roll, and select paintings from the exhibition 1934: A New Deal for Artists.
ANN WAGNER: Thank you very much, Noah. I’m so excited to see everybody. Thank you very, very much for coming. This exhibition was the brainchild of our deputy chief curator George Gurney. This is the 75th anniversary of 1934, and he knew that this museum had about two hundred paintings from the Public Works of Art project. Now, that’s a project that most people haven’t heard nearly as much about as the WPA. So, the Public Works of Art project was the first of the federal art projects, the federal national support of the arts during the New Deal. And so, George came up with this idea and hadn’t realized quite how apropos it was going to be. I don’t think I have to tell anybody about some of the parallels, and we really don’t want any more parallels than we can get, except, I think, in the area of the arts, because some of the things that government funding accomplished for the arts during the Depression were really remarkable and we’re standing surrounded by the works that came out of the Public Works of Art project.
Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated in March of 1933. He had a tremendous amount to turn around in this country, and he got public agencies going. And they realized as the winter of 1933-1934 was coming that they really needed to get things moving rapidly. So, they put a program called the Civil Works Administration to work, which would hire four million people across the United States. They would work on roads and bridges and schools and do all kinds of very significant, important things. So, the question came up as to whether they should include artists among these productive workers. George Biddle, who was an artist who was a friend of Franklin Roosevelt, had written him a letter with the idea that there were artists who would like to put the ideals of the New Deal– these were all the federal programs that were put into place to try to bring the United States out of the Depression. He thought that the ideals of the New Deal would really be inspiring for artists to put into murals in public buildings. Well, this idea kind of kicked around the government for a while and they decided to do something much larger and more profound. And so, they organized what became the Public Works of Art project.
So, anyway, Edward Bruce gathered together a bunch of art leaders from across the country, including Juliana Force, Duncan Phillips, all kinds of important people, in his house in Washington. And Eleanor Roosevelt was there as well to signify the President’s support, and they came up with the Public Works of Art project. The Civil Works Administration had already divided the country into sixteen regions, and so they already had headquarters in place, they already had a certain amount of support, so for the purposes of art they decided to also use those same sixteen regions. And at this meeting, they decided who would head each of these regions, and the idea would be to recruit artists in all media in all, in those days, forty-eight states. They would have every kind of artist, they would have people of every race, they would have both men and women. And they were paid a weekly wage. The artists were divided into three groups: there was top-ranked artists who would make about forty-two dollars a week, second-ranked artists make about thirty-five dollars a week, and then there were laborers who’d make about fifteen dollars a week, and later on in the program their wages were cut ten percent. So, the laborers, say, in New York, might be having a hard time, but you have to remember, at this time, an agricultural worker might be making ten cents an hour. People felt lucky to make a dollar or two a day in some parts of the country. But, also, there was the desire to make sure that they were good artists. They certainly wanted to make sure these weren’t beginning students and these weren’t Sunday painters. These were people whose primary skill was in art. They decided that they were going to hire thousands of artists. They wound up hiring about three thousand seven hundred artists. In the end, some fifteen thousand works of art were made.
But the amazing thing to me is the feeling of importance that goes with it, because this program was devised at this afternoon meeting at Edward Bruce’s house on December 8th. They made an announcement to the press about the program on December 11th. It was in papers across the country – newspapers, the “New York Times,” the “Washington Post,” the “Chicago Tribune,” et cetera, across the country on December 12th. Within days, they had all of their heads of regions in place. Within nine days, the first checks went out to artists. Within less than a week, there were artists at work. Within a few weeks, there were thousands of artists at work across the country. There were an estimated ten thousand artists in the country, unemployed, facing destitution. So, this was a wonderful thing for these artists. It meant not only that they were going to be able to feed their families and keep a roof over their heads, but that what they did was important to their country. Their country had decided that they were productive workers, they weren’t just ivory tower dreamers working for themselves, they were working for their country. What they did mattered – it was going to be put in federal buildings, public buildings of all kinds: in post offices, schools, courthouses, libraries, museums. What they did would be seen. They would have an audience. The audience would be national, and the artists were tremendously excited about this.
I’m standing under a quote from Harry Gottlieb, who was an artist in the Woodstock Artists' Colony in New York state, but I have a little more complete quote, and this will give you an idea of how the artists felt. He wrote to Edward Bruce on January 2nd, so within a very short time of the beginning of this program, “It is as if for many of us an invitation to project ourselves through our work into the highly exciting and stimulating world has broken the walls of our isolation. We are accepting this opportunity as a challenge, and if I’m not mistaken, a most important period of American art is in the making”. Of course, he was right. “Every artist I’ve spoken to and whose project I’m aware of is so keyed up to the importance of the situation, amounting practically to a revolution for him that he is without exception putting every ounce of his energy and creative ability into his work as never before. It is with amazement that I see the electric charge that has come over the artists here. I assure you it is not a question of relief here, as some of the artists who are not eligible are rightfully envious of this great opportunity.” Everybody wanted to be involved. There are lots of letters like this. There are lots of artists who were saying, “I’m going to do my greatest work ever. The government has told me, my country has told me that what I do is important.” So, this saved a generation of artists and cultivated them. It’s one of the most active and wonderful generations of artists we’ve ever had in this country.
This is Harry Gottlieb’s painting – one of his paintings. Most of the artists who did paintings on this program would do two or three or four of them. They would send a card in to Juliana Force, in this case, who was the head of the New York Division. She was the director of the Whitney Museum of Art, Museum of American Art. This shows workers in an icehouse. This was back in the days when this was actually already old-fashioned. So, when people had iceboxes – those of you who remember iceboxes – instead of an electric refrigerator you have big blocks of ice, and somebody would come to your door every few days when the ice would have melted and deliver ice to you for a fee. And some of the ice, still in those days, came from the natural lakes and rivers of upstate New York. So, this is probably near Kingston, New York, which was not too far from the artists’ colony in Woodstock. And it turns out that a lot of the Woodstock artists would go over to Kingston to paint for this particular project. And so these guys would cut the ice off of the lake. They’d cut it into a long strip, then they’d cut off blocks, and they piled them up in icehouses packed with sawdust, and it would sit there until the summer, when you needed ice to keep things cold, and then they would fill up barges and send them down the Hudson River to New York City. Now, commercial freezing with electric freezers was already in place by that time, and refrigerators were already starting to come in, electric refrigerators, so this was an old-fashioned thing. But for people who were poor and didn’t have electricity, this was a really good option.
So, what Gottlieb has done is instead of painting some beautiful woodland scene from around Woodstock, he is showing men at work, and they are at a type of work that people had been doing since the nineteenth century in that area, so it was kind of a traditional sort of labor. And you can see that it’s cold. This is very much of a winter scene, and you see a lot of that in this show, because this program ran from December of ‘33 until June of ’34, and the last couple of months were mostly administrative and people continuing large murals and so on. Most of the art was done by the end of April. So, for most of the time, especially if you’re in upstate New York, it’s going to be either snowy or there are no leaves on the trees. It’s winter. This program was put in place fast to get the artists through the winter.
I’ve come over here to talk about this painting by Carl Redin of “Madrid Coal Mine in New Mexico,” and yes, that’s how it’s pronounced, if you’ve been to New Mexico, it’s Madrid. And, what the artists were asked to represent was the American scene. Now, this is kind of an open term. It tended to imply to people not only what they saw around them in America, but also what they saw around them then. Not some kind of a classic scene that could be set at any time, but what was going on currently, what was current in the American scene. But, there also, I think, was a tendency for artists, actually, in many cases, to do more hard-hitting art for the government than they would for private consumption, because if you’re painting something to go in somebody’s living room, you’re not necessarily going to paint a coal mine. But, if the artist is really interested in that, and the government is willing to support it, then this is his chance to paint a coal mine.
Then, this is a man, Carl Redin, who usually painted picturesque towns and landscapes around New Mexico, much more pretty or beautiful scenes than this. But when he was asked to paint the American scene, instead of painting the landscapes he was used to, he went to Madrid, which was a company mine-town, all owned by a single coal mining company – and this a breaker, this is the building where the coal comes out of the ground up here, and it is broken into pieces and sorted into various sizes as you go down. I thank Jerry Hovanec, who works here at American Art, for that information. His grandfather was a coal miner. And, as you can see here, then they put the coal into railroad cars, and the train can take it away. And everybody who worked in that town was associated with these coal mines, and they were very productive mines. So, this was a company that provided a lot of entertainment for these people. They were famous for their lights at Christmas, for their parades and horse races, and they had a baseball team. But this artist doesn’t choose to paint any of that. He paints this coal mine, and look around – as in many of these paintings actually, can you see a single figure? We can assume there’s somebody driving the train, but otherwise, everybody’s either in the breaker or underground. And you can see these slag heaps and the pollution in the air. This is a hard way to make a living, and you can’t mistake it in Carl Redin’s painting. So, a lot of these artists did some rather difficult subjects for the government. But then again, it is also a local industry in New Mexico, so it’s something that they would have known and that would have involved a lot of people in New Mexico. There’d be thousands of people in New Mexico making their living from coal mines, or be the families of miners, or running a shop for the coal miners, or whatever. So, this is something that involves a lot of people. It’s not just the individual expression of the artist – he’s speaking for his community.
This one is one of my favorites for just the story of how this program happened. This is Saul Berman’s “Riverfront,” from 1934. This is the Navy Yard in Brooklyn where they built a lot of ships both for the Navy and for civilian purposes for many, many years. But during the Depression, if you look at this carefully, you’ll see there are dry docks back here and they are empty. There are no ships being built or taken care of at that time. But, you’ll also see – and this is something you’ll have to come to see individually – there’s a little blue eagle. A little fine, red sign with a white circle with a blue eagle in it in the window here. That’s the NRA, the National Recovery Administration, and they worked with various businesses to set standard, within the business, wages, hours, and prices. In other words, price fixing in a way that it would, under ordinary circumstances, be illegal – collusion, if you like, between the government and the companies, but it was the only way to restructure the economy so that people could go back to work. And the way that the people could communicate their wishes was to throw a strike – you had a strike, if they didn’t approve of what was set. And so, the dockyard workers did some striking late in ’33. By early ’34, when this painting would have been made, the strikes were over but there was still no work. There was simply no work coming in from the government, from the Navy, and they wrote to Franklin Roosevelt and said, “Send us work. There are fifteen hundred men in danger of losing their jobs.” And shortly after that, a keel was laid down – in other words, they started building a ship, and so a good five hundred men had their job saved. At that point, and of course, when World War Two came on, these docks were as busy as they could be turning out thousands of ships, so things did change, but this shows a moment – you can see the men are clearing snow. It may be – I don’t know whether those are federal relief workers or whether those are people who would rather be building ships, but in any case, there was probably nothing more going on at this moment more important than clearing snow. There were no ships being built yet, so this is a very honest reportorial piece.
It’s interesting though, by the way, you talk about how the artists were chosen and kept. Not all of them were kept on the program permanently. They were taken off at various times as the money was cut back and they had to get rid of some of the artists. And this artist, Saul Berman, had written to Juliana Force: “I’m sure you’re well acquainted with my work, my ability as an artist, but perhaps you’re not aware of my financial difficulties and the inability to get on in these trying times.” So, he got on the program, but he had started two small pieces as people with the government were looking at it with the committees, he hadn’t finished anything, and so there was a memo: “Nothing delivered to date. Harry says these are small pictures of no consequence, thirteen weeks on payroll, has drawn $406.67. I think he should be sent for with both pictures and fired.” I’m kind of glad that he apparently finished this, because I think it’s a fabulous document of what was going on in America at that time. But it was tough for these artists. They had to produce or they would not be kept on the government payroll.
Okay, I wanted to point out this piece over here is called “Gold is Where You Find It,” by Tyrone Comfort. This was made in California, and it’s a good example of how the current political and social and financial forces had an impact on some of this art, because when the government – in those days the currency was still backed by gold, and they needed, as the concern that we have right now, to get more currency circulating. And so the only way, short of finding a whole bunch of gold, that they could do this was to have gold be worth more. So, the government propped up the price of gold, and so people across the west were running around reopening old gold mines, finding new ones, certainly working in existing ones as hard as they could. So, this is indeed a gold miner, and he’s got a pneumatic drill and he’s in this very tight space. You can imagine it’s hot, it’s dark, it’s close, when that drill is running it’s noisy, there are bits of stone flying. He’s drilling holes to put dynamite in so that they can blow open new areas of the mine to look for gold. This is rough work. You can see that the artist has shown this man, this strong, hard-muscled, resolute, hard-working man. He probably would really have been wearing a helmet. I found a lovely book on Depression-era gold mining, when I’ve seen pictures of professional gold mining, because this is a very professional drill. But not necessarily, it depends. So, he’s playing up the masculinity of this figure and it’s such a marvelous, gutsy image. And this was in the White House. It would have represented an up-and-coming industry, it would have represented California, I think it also simply represents a terrific painting. Unfortunately, Comfort died just a few years later, he died in 1939. So, I don’t know a whole lot about what happened later, but you can see he’s a dynamite painter, so to speak, since that’s what this guy is putting in here.
Over here, this piece by Jacob Getlar Smith is probably the most Depression-y looking painting we’ve got here. These would be men who would be on relief, who are clearing snow in a park in New York, and you can see that they are different races, they come from different backgrounds. Some of them look like they’re used to working with their hands, some of them look like they’re not, they’re probably more used to working at a desk. Some of them may have been hungry for some time and look kind of hollow- eyed, and they're getting to work. You can see there's a boy with a sled looking over at them, and you wonder whether he might be the son of one of these men, and whether he's wondering, you know, now that they're being put to work and getting some money, is some money, is some food going to come home? It's a very affecting image; and it is typical of a lot of this work in that the races and different conditions and races of men are working together harmoniously. I don't know that that was always the case in real life, but it is frequently the case in this art. There is a lot of good feeling among different people. I can tell you that there were a lot of people who had particularly a hard time in the Depression. When you're counting the unemployment, at the worst there was twenty-five percent unemployment twenty-five percent underemployment, but that's counting only what we would now call male heads of household. That's not thinking that you can have two wage-earners in a family. So that's a lot more unemployment than it sounds like to us. And the women, single women, and women heads of household really had a tough time, and a lot of the aid, from what we're told, went prejudicially against people of minorities. So, certainly I'm not saying it all did, but there was a feeling that if you were black, you were going to have a harder time getting aid. So, it's nice to see that at least the artist wanted people to be getting things on an equal basis.
I wanted to bring you over here because aren’t there fabulous colors in these pieces? I love this one over here. It’s called “Tenement Flats,” it’s by Millard Sheets, who, if you’re familiar with California art of the period, is a pretty prominent artist. And he painted a lot of landscapes, but, at this time, he visited a lot around these slummier neighborhoods of Los Angeles. And this is an area called Bunker Hill in Los Angeles. I understand it’s nothing but high-rises now. Just off the picture to the left would have been a very steep cable car called Angel’s Flight, which Sheets painted multiple times. And he said he loved to visit with these folks, that he’d go into their homes and you can see the warmth of his regard for them. And, somebody pointed out, I think this is very cute, you know, since they’re doing laundry, their sheets are all hanging out, so he’s making a pun on his own name. And I love the color, and there are little cats hanging around, and you can guess that these women have been working hard all day. They probably - you know, doing laundry by hand in the old days when that was a very heavy task indeed, with no electric machines to help you. So they’ve stopped to chat a little while, and I think this is in recognition of the women who worked in the home as workers and as having a very viable community, so these are not all men, miner type of pictures. There are definitely some people who give some recognition to the women who were facing some very hard conditions at home. And for anybody who’s aware of the Ashcan School, “The Eight,” around New York, I think he’s really been working at that kind of work, which, again, is very affectionate about the urban people. And Sheets was a young artist at this time, but he was an up-and-comer, and he was actually one of the members on the local committee, so he gave this painting, rather than getting a weekly wage to paint it. And it did wind up in the White House, and it did appear in the “Los Angeles Times” saying, if you go to the White House, you may see this. They were proud of their local artist being in the White House.
On the other side here is another marvelous urban scene. This is one of the “Little Italy’s” in New York as painted by Daniel Celentano, who was an Italian-American who grew up in New York himself, so he knew these street festivals and bands and pizza sellers and butchers with their stalls and carts in the street. He knew all this very, very well and understood what was going on. He studied with Thomas Hart Benton, if you’re familiar with Benton’s style, you may see the reflection there. And these big tanks in the background— I spent quite some time researching those, so I did all the labels here. So, these great big tanks, and they’re gas tanks, exactly. So this is — a lot of these gas tanks were gone by this time — they’re natural gas tanks, and they leaked like mad, and so nobody who had the money to live elsewhere would live there. So, that’s how these areas became known as the Gas House District, and the famous Gas House Gang, that was a very real, very violent gang, worked there. So this is a kind of recollection of the nineteenth century hard times that Italian-Americans in New York had gone through. It was a whole different situation by the twentieth century than they had gone through in the nineteenth century, but they were not forgetting their roots. And I just think it’s the most colorful painting, I can just hear it and smell it as well as see it.
And I love this one over here— you know, if you came on the metro, you go home on the metro. Look how she’s looking at people on the metro. Oh my goodness, can you look at people on the metro and not get hit, or something? You know, have people stare at you? It’s tough to look at people on the metro, but this, I think that she’s so wonderfully observant. This woman is putting on lipstick, the man is kind of sneaking a little glimpse of the back of her neck. People are holding up their reading materials so they don’t have to look at other people. And look, this musician in his formal clothing, that would be his working clothing, has fallen asleep with his violin. Her father was a cellist, so he probably was in similar circumstances frequently, so you feel this kind of warm connection between the artist—
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Who is the artist?
AW: Oh, I’m sorry, Lily Furedi. She was— Lily Furedi, yeah, she was a Hungarian-American painter, and probably rode the subways many, many times, I would imagine.
The question was, were there very many women artists? And the answer is kind of a relative one. These days, of course, we want fifty percent or fifty-one percent women artists. In those days, it was pretty marvelous that you had about twelve percent. So, there were hundreds of women artists. That was better than you usually did. Women were not usually as well-represented in those days. Women had been well-represented in American art schools since the nineteenth century, but professionally it was always tough for them to get recognition.
This is Agnes Tait’s painting of people “Skating in Central Park”. So, by no means are all these paintings about work or suffering. These are people out having a marvelous time, and she said this was something she’d always wanted to paint, and it was only through this program she could get support for it. So, again, this was government money that didn’t so much take art away from where it wanted to go, as to allow it to go where the artist wanted it to go. And I get the feeling that here, the sun is starting to set. There’s kind of a mist rising. People are skating, they’re tobogganing. She’s done some marvelous things here where she’ll put down a little bit of gray or brown paint, and then use the end of her brush to scratch into it to do the white lines, which would be little branches or bits of grass that have snow on them that stand out against the shadows. And these wonderful colors of the coats against the white and the gray. It’s a beautifully decorative, fun scene. It’s probably pretty cold out there, but they’re all having so much fun. They’ve all been running around so hard that they’re probably pretty warm. And you can see, you know, lovers skating along together, and dogs sniffing around, and it’s really, really evocative of Central Park, which is where this is set.
There were a lot of paintings set in Central Park. I mean, if you were an artist in New York and you wanted to do something other than city streets, where would you go? You would go to Central Park, and we’ve got multiple Central Park scenes in the collection and indeed in this show. So, this was the standard skating place in those days and it was a very popular way for people to amuse themselves. So she’s caught a lovely spirit of the fact that New Yorkers are not letting this get them down. Now, I will also say that in both our Central Park paintings that we’ve got up, you don’t see the Hooverville, the shack town that was erected in the center of Central Park, where people who had no place to live had found anything they could and built themselves little hovels. And if anybody’s been to the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, there were sheep in it until then, and they took them away because they were afraid that people would grab them and kill them and eat them, because they were hungry. So, these paintings, sometimes, you know, they’re showing a certain amount of truth, but they’re also avoiding a certain amount of truth.
There is, I think, a lot of hope for what the artists wanted to be going on, what they were glad to see going on, because things were starting to get better. The New Deal programs had started things improving. There was money starting to get out. In Lorena Hickok’s records, you can see as you got to late ‘33 and early ‘34, the people were starting to get some money, they were starting to get jobs, they were starting to see a little hope. Things were starting to turn around. And so, the art recorded some of that joy of the fact that you could start to see a little bit of a light at the end of the tunnel.
More Videos
Our America Audio Podcast - Elizabeth Broun, "Mis Hermanos" by Jesse Trevino
This audio podcast series discusses artworks and themes in the exhibition Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Our America Audio Podcast - Elizabeth Broun, works by Margarita Cabrera
This audio podcast series discusses artworks and themes in the exhibition Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Our America Audio Podcast - works by Freddy Rodriguez
This audio podcast series discusses artworks and themes in the exhibition Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Our America Audio Podcast - Amado M. Pena Jr., "Mestizo"
This audio podcast series discusses artworks and themes in the exhibition Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In this episode, artist Amado M.