From the 1930s–40s
50 Years Ago: WPA/AAA
Two very different shows of American art from the 1930s period point to differences in content, context and purpose as diverse as uptown and downtown. Downtown's show, at the Ellen Sragow Gallery, communicates the moods and issues of the times with a proletarian social realism: working people on the job and at leisure. The colors are warm and the mood heroic and celebratory. Uptown, at the Washburn Gallery (at its new location in the Fuller Building), is a selection of work within museum ambition. Trained to appreciate the select at NY museums, we're easy targets for work of this obvious "quality." They have all the moves and pronounce their cultured splendor, abstract for the most part, with as much subtlety as a blitzkrieg or perfect diamond.
The hero of both exhibits is the WPA (Works Project Administration), the federal program set up in the mid-thirties by the Roosevelt administration that buoyed a great number of artists (5000 at its peak in 1936) through the depression years. Artists were put to work all over the country documenting and portraying every cranny and aspect of life in these United States with a fervor and dedication formulated to a great degree by this subsidy program that brought them all together. In the eight years of its existence through various bureaucratic incarnations, artists in 8 divisions of the WPA produced 2566 murals, 17,744 sculptures, 108,099 paintings, 250,000 prints from 11,285 images and 2 million posters from 35,000 designs. Much of the work in both these shows was created under the auspices of the New Deal program but the attitudes in the two groups are starkly different: downtown's show is full of sentiment and is a celebration of the American experience through the grassroots depiction of its workers and history. It violently denies the elitism implicit in the modernism of the European abstraction movement whose reach to these shores shows up in the work that comprises the uptown show. The abstract artists, taking their clue from the advances of their European predecessors, championed this startling new approach that freed the artist from all previous obligations to sentiment and representation.
What comes through so clearly in the large group of paintings and prints at Sragow is the sense of pride in the emerging industrial nation and outrage at war and unfair labor practices. In Amy Jones' 9-panel mural study for the St. Louis post office, i.e., the building of America is portrayed in a succession of colorful scenes that starts at the arrival of pioneer settlers being helped up the shore by the native Indians, trees being chopped down and structures rising and goes through the settling process and spread with the arrival of the steamboat, then railroad, ferries developing into bridges, and finally in the last panels, the beginning of factories and the arrival of the airplane. Lewis Rubenstein's three panels for the same competition (artists traveled all over the country entering these competitions for commissions to execute murals in post offices, schools, public housing projects and other public spaces) also portrays the movement and mood of commerce: cattle being paraded onto railroad cars, bales being toted onto steamboats from a dock shot through with Renaissance arches and a sleeping laborer, a lazy progression of river barges under way resplendent with banjo and fiddle players, an dancing reveler with jug, and rowers and tillers in stride. The treatment is flatter and not as busy, though more academic, than Amy Jones'. It's also less fun.
Joseph Delaney's Third Avenue Movie (1940) shows the gritty interior of a local theater with its just as gritty, bottle-toting inhabitants. It's painted with dabs of color that spotlights a few heads half involved with the action on the screen. The ragamuffin characters emerge from the darkness to be integrated into their surroundings with a Reginald Marsh baroqueness. The artists, now in his 80s, was employed under both the WPA and the pre-Reagan equivalent CETA programs.
The front room is given over to the artist Minna Citron. This strong and delightful group of work focuses on the woman's place in society and lovingly satirizes the frivolity of the beauty parlor habituŽs and shopping frenzy devotees. Her self portrait at drawing table, with Union Square seen through a window, reveals her less than dainty attitude about a woman's propriety. In her concentrating on her art work, she sits so a little too much slip, for what is "proper," shows. Nothing Wrong with Your Chest, Miss is one of those special paintings whose appeal and charm survives the aging of its surface. In this peek into the doctor's examining room, we witness a young woman half disrobed having a chest exam. Her pose and figure are as stately and gorgeous as any Greek statue. It more than balances the overpowering mass of the looming doctor.
The pieces that comprise this show are art as a progressive force, responsive to society. These artists felt a responsibility to record the fever of the times. In their political activism and in their art they regarded themselves as workers for social improvement. They worked unceasingly in the administrative bowels of the agency to ensure that their efforts might continue. They'd seen the work of the great Mexican muralists (Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros) who'd all worked in the states by this time and were able to appropriate the Marxian and revolutionary overtones and fashion them to the cause of their own New Deal ideals. Though not necessarily card-carrying members, many of the artists sympathized with the Communist party's attention to the worker's situation and they thought of themselves united by a common purpose with the industrial workers they depicted. The whole people's movement was based on the assumption that these labors would be rewarded with improved conditions. Culture was a weapon.
Less concerned with social evolution and more involved with creating an intellectual revolution are the abstract artists represented at the Washburn. Working in the WPA, many of them sought to educate the masses to the innovations of the abstract approach. They were able to do this through the execution of murals in public places, the dissemination of prints that were easily affordable, even in depression times, and the placing of their posters all around.
Taking up one wall at the Washburn Gallery is Ilya Bolotowsky's reconstruction of a mural he executed under WPA auspices for the Williamsburg Houses in Brooklyn. (The original is still in place, though under a layer of white paint.) What could the original, lower-middle income residents of the housing project make of this abstract work comprised of lines and blocks of geometrically shaped colors on a light blue field? Was this pretense? Was anyone uplifted? Sure it brought abstract painting to a mass that might not have been going to the museums or reading the art journals, but lame public art, as this appears, forced on the folks who have to live with it, might be something to be tolerated more than appreciated. It is an eye-opener in any case.
The question really becomes how were these Americans developing the achievements of the European and Russian artists they emulated (esp. Picasso, Braque, El Lissitzky)? And what defines the quality these artists set themselves up as arbiters of? Development might be defined as fostering the work of your predecessors as a skeleton on which to forge something new. On top of that, and this is the magic part that separates the great from the adequate, the artist must have an intuitive sense of where they're going and the taste to distinguish the enhanced from the banal.
Arshile Gorky, in his Table Top, (1930), had more of a sense of what to do with the liberating forces of abstraction than Bolotowsky. An image is discernible yet the motivation is jazzy and the composition so solid with a charged assurance. Everything is in a new place on this table top, somewhere they've never been before. Gorky's arrangement is so assured that we're convinced this possibility is valid, and in fact, inevitable.
David Smith's 1936 Untitled (Still Life) is obviously derived from Picasso in its pancaking of a subject yet the twisted image is more structural and flatter a mass than Picasso was after and we can see it headed for a sculptural evolution. The slabs of metal are more than hinted at. Jan Matulka's Untitled (ca. 1935) is a dream-providing assembling of familiar objects in an unfamiliar juxtaposition. The objects—hands, light bulbs, hanger and mannequin torso—have lost most of their former identity in the transformation to this new, just discovered dimension. The reality is in the treatment of the painting and the mental associations it evokes and not the familiarity of identification. A rare, painted wood Construction of 1939 by Burgoyne Diller, who headed the WPA's mural division, is fathered by Mondrian but, nonetheless, has some life of its own in the balancing of its stark geometric components. George L.K. Morris' Garden Composition, No. 4, (1934) is a landscape composed of a few basic geometric shapes awash in the still vacuum left from a scene depleted of its extraneous natural elements. The effect is pleasant if a bit disconcerting. A Suzy Frelinghuysen 1944 Still Life is a collage and oil in the grand Cubist tradition. If it's not extraordinarily distinct from its European relatives, it is still a terrific sample of the genre—bottles and glasses cut up with newspapers and the textures of the resinations around them that the Cubists defined.
Artists of the WPA gave a voice to the masses, stretched the limits of our feasabilities, and compassionately documented the news. Their lasting accomplishments cross the borders of party lines, dogma and schools and add up to a vital enrichment of our national heritage and spiritual growth.
(Arts, February 1987)