NEW DEAL ART : CULTURE AND CRISIS IN THE GREAT DEPRESSION

By John P. Murphy

Thames & Hudson. 335 pages. £19.99. ISBN 978-0-500-20502-0

Reviewed by Jim Burns

James N. Rosenberg was a bankruptcy lawyer by day, and an artist by night. In 1929 he created a “hallucinatory lithograph” with the title “October 29, Dies Irae” in which “lightning splits the sky over buckling skyscrapers. A chaotic crowd rushes to escape the carnage. Birds of prey swoop in the air. The iconic steeple of Wall Street’s Trinity Church cracks and bends. Silhouetted figures leap from rooftops in despair. The words Dies Irae hover in the storm clouds. Days of Wrath”.

It was an apt summing up of the mood that swept America as the “Wall Street Crash” made its immediate impact, to be followed by wider effects as “banks failed, factories shuttered, businesses folded, and workers were handed the dreaded pink slips”, giving them notice of the termination of their employment. Philip Evergood’s painting “The Pink Dismissal Slip” dramatically captures the moment when somebody receives one.

John P. Murphy emphasises the broader social effect when he writes, “there was no social safety net – no social security, no unemployment benefit, or deposit insurance to catch the falling. Millions of families faced eviction or foreclosure. Some ended up in shantytowns or went on the road in search of jobs that didn’t exist. The unemployed, suffering hunger and malnutrition, queued up in breadlines and soup kitchens. Marriages disintegrated. Birth rates fell. Suicide rates skyrocketed.”.

This is not the place to provide a history of the New Deal, the term used to describe Franklin D. Roosevelt’s programme designed to put the American economy back on its feet. Suffice to say that, among its job creation aspects, were several which aimed to find work for writers, musicians, and artists. With regard to the latter, the idea was to employ many of them on painting murals in buildings which were tax-funded, such as schools, hospitals, post offices, and local and national government establishments. Not every artist taken on by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) worked on murals. Easel painting was allowed, though the results were seen as government property, a fact that later led to them being disposed of when the WPA ceased to function. There are stories of early Jackson Pollock paintings being found in second-hand shops and bought for a few dollars. Not that Pollock himself placed any great value on them. His paintings in the 1930s were influenced by the regional artist, Thomas Hart Benton. Abstract Expressionism came later. I doubt that Pollock’s “Cotton Pickers” from 1935 would be recognised as his by those who only know the abstract works.

Other now-famous painters, like Willem De Kooning, Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, and Arshile Gorky, were also hired by the WPA. I’m using the latter term for ease of reference, though different phases of its existence came under separate headings, such as the Federal Arts Programme (FAP) and the Farm Security Administration (FSA). It can be confusing keeping track of who did what for which and when. Some of the most abiding images of the hard 1930s were taken by photographers working for the FSA.

Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother”, with what looks like a careworn woman with two children clinging to her in a makeshift camp in California, has been reproduced in books and magazines many times. Lange later claimed that she knew when she took the photograph that she had “recorded the essence of my assignment”. Arthur Rothstein’s “Farmer and Sons in Dust Storm”, taken in Oklahoma, is another classic, with its huddled figures fighting their way through the “swirling dust and wind”. It doesn’t matter that questions have been raised about the possible factual inaccuracy of this photograph. It remains what Ben Shahn said it was, perhaps “the greatest picture of the whole period”.

Shahn himself was a painter and photographer, and his “A Deputy with a Gun on his Hip”, taken during a miners’ strike in Morgantown, West Virginia, sums up another aspect of the 1930s, the way in which the unemployed and strikers were often violently dealt with by the police. Shahn’s picture doesn’t show the whole man, merely a shot from the rear with the deputy’s ample bulk and his gun prominent. Shahn made no secret of his political sympathies. He appeared before HUAC in the 1950s, was questioned about his relationship with the Communist Party, and saw “photography as a political tool”.

Photographs like those taken by Lange, Rothstein, and Shahn can be seen as making a social comment, if not a direct political one. Obviously, the policy of the WPA was not to provide a platform for radical artists who wanted to promote communism or attack specific policies. Painters producing murals were expected to portray the history and the everyday events of the region where they were working. Or a panorama of the occupation or location the mural related to.

A post office mural would show the way it served the local community, and one for a hospital would have a medical theme. Walter Quirt’s “Study for the Growth of Medicine from Primitive Times”, in New York’s Bellevue Hospital is interesting in that, unusually for WPA work, it incorporated surrealistic images. When it came to a school, the values of education could be stressed. Some commentary, in terms of pointing to specific social difficulties might inevitably be included, but on the whole the aim was to picture an America that, despite its problems, was determined to look to the future. Doris Lee’s mural”, “Country Post” for the Post Office Headquarters in Washington, depicted “the excitement of rural mail delivery”, with farmers “greeting the arrival of new tools and farming equipment”.

It needs to be said that in virtually all WPA murals, photographs and easel paintings, the people seen are white. Sometimes, a black face appears in the background of a crowd scene. But not often. There is a telling photograph by Dorothea Lange, “Plantation Overseer and his Field Hands”, in which a well-built white man “props a proprietary leg on the hub of a gleaming Chevrolet coupe” while behind him sit several leaner-looking black men. There were some black artists and photographers employed by the WPA. William H. Johnson’s “Art Class” is set in the Harlem Community Arts Centre, as is Genevieve Naylor’s photograph of a “Harlem Arts Class”. As for murals, Charles White’s “Five Great American Negroes” was painted “to help raise funds for Chicago’s South Side Community Arts Centre”.

Although WPA overall policy was firmly against direct political comment, it was never able to easily control wider social issues being shown. Isaac Soyer’s “Employment Agency”, with a dejected-looking man, and a woman wrapped in “pensive melancholy”, makes “the emotional toll of the Depression palpable” as they, and others in the room, face “the interminable and likely futile wait for a prospect”. I was reminded of Alfred Hayes’ 1930s poem, “In a Coffee Pot”, with its lines ”Shall we squat out our days in agencies?”,  and “Working yet? The job ain’t come/Got promised but a runaround”, and “It’s all the same there’s nothing anywhere”,  when I looked at Soyer’s painting. An air of desperation is evident in both painting and poem.

People did start to fight back, especially through their unions, as we can see in Harry Gottlieb’s “The Strike is Won”, a colourful rendition of workers celebrating a union victory. And, following the organising drives of the 1930s, painters started the Artists’ Union and launched a magazine, Art Front, to represent their aims and interests.  As Murphy says, “The Artists’ Union formed part of the pro-labour, anti-fascist movement retrospectively labelled the ‘Cultural Front’ by historian Michael Denning”. It can also be seen as part of the “Popular Front”, the “broad-based anti-fascist alliance of communists with socialists, liberals, union members and New Deal Democrats”. It was a loose grouping, essentially a policy following a line laid down by Moscow, and seen as necessary to oppose the rise of Hitler, Mussolini, and General Franco as he launched his attempt to overthrow a democratically elected left-wing government in Spain.

One of the artists most active with the Artists’ Union, not to mention also being “a recipient of prestigious Treasury Section mural commissions” (a  situation that could be seen as a case of biting the hand that feeds you) was William Gropper. His “Study for Automobile Industry” is a fairly conventional painting of men at work, whereas his cover for the June-July 1937 issue of Art Front, protesting against planned cuts in the budget allocations for the WPA arts programmes, is sharper.  And his satirical “The Senate” has a clear political intention with its Daumier-like portrayal of a ranting Senator “ignored by the few scattered colleagues napping, reading the papers, and propping their feet on a desk”. Gropper, like Ben Shahn, was summoned to appear before HUAC in the 1950s, and was blacklisted and his book of drawings, American Folklore, was withdrawn from State Department libraries around the world.

When war arrived for the United States in December 1941 it finally put an end to the economic disruption of the previous decade : “Idle factories geared back up. New factories were built. Soon tanks, ships, aeroplanes, firearms and ammunition came rolling off the production lines. Unemployment dropped from 14.6 to 1.2 %, the lowest in history”.

The WPA, or aspects of it, continued until 1943, with painters and photographers encouraged to turn their talents to picturing the war effort in factories and elsewhere. Alfred T. Palmer’s photograph of a “Woman Working on an Airplane Motor” is typical of its time. In a similar vein, Edna Reindel’s painting, “Riveter at Lockheed”, illustrates a mixed group of busy men and women, though the pictorial emphasis is on the female riveter in the foreground of the picture.

There is so much in New Deal Art, with illustrations on almost every page, and intelligent commentary to accompany them, that I wanted to carry on referring to specific paintings and murals. Philip Guston’s “Bombardment”, from around the time of the terror visited on Guernica by German aircraft during the Spanish Civil War, stands out. Jack Levine’s “The Feast of Pure Reason”,  a “scurrilous satire in the vein of German artist George Grosz”,  with its trio of a corrupt policeman, bloated plutocrat, and conniving local politician, has lost none of its power to impress. There are simpler things, too. A painting of dahlias by Bumpei Usui, a Japanese artist who had emigrated to the USA in 1921 and established a reputation as a painter and picture framer, is attractive.

As for the contentious, it wasn’t only the politically-inspired that brought a reaction. Paul Cadmus’s “The Fleet’s In”, “a ribald painting of drunken servicemen on shore leave”, as they consorted with various enthusiastic ladies, wasn’t popular and drew the attention of a retired Admiral who fumed that it “represents a most disgraceful, sordid, disreputable drunken brawl”, and had it removed from the gallery it was in. The Admiral didn’t mention it, but the painting also contains “coded signifiers of queerness such as the rouged blonde civilian offering a Lucky Strike cigarette to a seated marine”.

There may have been some objections raised about paintings which didn’t adhere to the representational pattern. Grace Clements’s “Winter 1932” uses a collage-type technique to show “a battalion of spectres, hollowed out by hunger and rage (striding) forward in a   topsy-turvy world of fractured planes and stuttering architecture. Headlines clipped from newspapers advance alongside them : Hunger March, Against Hunger, Against Starvation”.

And there were, of course, objections with regard to the abstract, or near-abstract, especially from those who were opposed to funding impoverished, or any other kind of artists. But, for me, Stuart Davis’s “Swing Landscape”, fusing “European modernism with the jazzy dynamics of American popular culture”,  and Irene Rice Pereira’s “Machine Composition no.2”, in which “images of technological components” appear, are fine examples of work that reflected the modern world.

It should be obvious, by now, that I found New Deal Art to be a stimulating and provocative book. It’s possible to have a perfectly serious debate about public funding for the arts, especially when, as in America in the 1930s, the level of the funding was extensive. The circumstances were such that little else would have sufficed to relieve the poverty many artists experienced. Some critics would still argue that pouring money into the arts in a wholesale way is wrong, and that selectivity ought to be the key if public money is to be used to support a writer or painter or musician. There is also a case to be made for suggesting that money should only be paid for what someone has done, not for what they might do.

In a way, that’s what the WPA did. It required artists to produce paintings. I suppose a test of whether or not it was worthwhile subsidising artists is to look at what they created. In the post-war period it was often fashionable to dismiss social realism and similar styles as no longer relevant.  Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Colour Field painting were all the rage. Barbara Rose, in her book, American Art Since 1900, remarked, “the WPA programmes produced almost no art of any consequence that has survived”.  Who wanted to look at a picture of a striking miner or a ragged migrant or a homeless family as the trappings of the affluent society became the ideal to aspire to?  Art had to be politically innocuous and inclined more to the decorative rather than the disturbing.

It does also occur to me to wonder whether or not the reaction to social realism, especially when it had a political edge, perhaps came about because of its association with Russia and communism? Were people afraid of talking about it positively in case they were seen as sympathetic to left-wing ideas? In the McCarthyite 1950s “guilt by association” was a fact. In the book accompanying the William Gropper retrospective exhibition which toured various galleries in 1968, it’s noted that, following his HUAC encounter, “Long time friends and acquaintances crossed the street to avoid meeting Bill Gropper”.  To be seen talking with him might place them in the same category, i.e. subversive and subject to investigation.

New Deal Art is an essential guide to its subject. John P. Murphy knows a great deal about it and writes in a direct manner that explains the paintings he has chosen to look at, and tells us something about the artists who produced them.  And he usefully fills in the social, political and economic backgrounds to what the artists were doing. The book has a bibliography, notes and, as I’ve already noted, is extremely well illustrated.