Economic Depressions and the Arts
With all the dire economic news, it seems unlikely that anything good can come out of
the worst crisis since the Depression. But even in the worst days of the 1930s meltdown, the government created and funded a program that put people to work in all kinds of jobs and in all kinds of disciplines: the Works Progress Administration. In 1935, President Roosevelt signed an executive order that created the agency as an effort to provide some financial relief to unemployed Americans. The arts community, in particular, received funding under the Federal Arts Project, part of the WPA. By the time the program expired in 1943, over 5,000 artists had created more than 225,000 works of art. Post office murals of the 1930s have gained a lot of recognition in the past few years and individuals like Jackson Pollock, Willem deKooning, Mark Rothko, Berenice Abbott and Walker Evans also benefited from the government program.
of Toussaint L'Ouverture, No. 11, 1938; jacobandgwenlawrence.org /Artwork: designslinger]
Many artists were put to work under the FAP's easel division, which was created to give
financial support to American artists. One painter who received a WPA stipend, and not well known outside the insular art world (but a favorite of mine), is Harlem artist Jacob Lawrence. Born in 1917, the young African-American began painting scenes from his Harlem neighborhood, using tempera poster paint on brown paper. By 1938, when he joined the FAP, Lawrence had completed his first series of paintings, The Life of Toussaint L'Ouverture, which told the story about the establishment of the first black republic in the Western hemisphere. His work began attracting the attention of the New York art world and he was asked to join the Downtown Gallery, becoming the first African-American to be represented by a major commercial art gallery. Lawrence had a long and productive career. He died in 2000 having just completed a mural design for the New York City subway station in Times Square, which was installed in 2001. And in May of 2007, The Builder's, which Lawrence painted in 1947, sold at auction for $2.5 million. His works are in major museums around the world, and the Jacob and Gwen Knight Lawrence Foundation oversees art programs endowed by a trust, set-up by the artist and his late wife.
angelo.edu /Artwork: designslinger]
Among the many parts of the easel division was the mural section. One of the beneficiaries
of this program was an Iowa State University art instructor named Grant Wood. In 1934 he joined the staff of the University School of Art, and in 1936 he was asked to design and oversee a mural, that would be painted in the school's library with WPA funding. Wood's theme for the work was based on Daniel Webster's, comment, "When tillage begins, other arts follow." The main panel bears the title, When Tillage Begins and the remaining panels are the arts that follow: Agriculture, Home Economics, and Engineering. Of course Wood is most recognized for his 1930, American Gothic, which had its first showing at Chicago's Art Institute, where Wood went to art school and where the painting still hangs today. Upon his death at the age of 51, in 1942, Wood's estate went to his sister Nan, the woman who appears as the farmer's wife in the iconic artwork.
The WPA was a gigantic program made up of hundreds of different divisions. Tomorrow
I'll introduce you to the largest single effort ever made to document our nation's built environment. Hundreds of architects, engineers and writers scoured the country, measuring, surveying, photographing and writing about our architectural and historical heritage.
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