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<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\tBut what would a federal art program look like? There were few precedents. Elected representatives, handmaids to private interests, were wary of culture subsidies. (When in 1817 Congress paid John Trumbull $32,000, or approxomately $800,000 today, a senator harrumphed that they \u201cwere not worth 32 cents.\u201d) By the time of the stock market crash, access to \u201chigh culture\u201d was mostly dependent upon the noblesse oblige of a handful of robber barons whose wealth and assets underwrote a few forbidding institutions in city centers. No more than one in 10 Americans, Roosevelt lamented, could \u201cfind out that art is an added enjoyment of life and enrichment of the spirit.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
WITH THE APPROACH <\/strong>of winter, lofty goals met urgent necessity: to put the unemployed\u2014artists included\u2014to work. The Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) got underway in December 1933, hiring artists across the country to make prints, paintings, and sculptures for tax-funded buildings. The government had recognized, wrote PWAP director Edward Bruce, that the artist \u201ceats, drinks, has a family, and pays rent, thus contradicting the old superstition that the painter and sculptor live in attics and exist on inspiration.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tBruce, a painter with a useful background as a lawyer and lobbyist, assigned artists the \u201cAmerican scene\u201d as their subject. It was a strategically vague term easier to define in the negative: \u201cAnyone who paints a nude,\u201d sniffed one PWAP administrator, \u201cought to have his head examined.\u201d Another official compared European modernism to a speculative stock whose bubble had burst.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tIt was time for artists to climb down from their ivory towers and reenter the currents of American life. The model was regionalist Grant Wood, of recent American Gothic <\/em>(1930) fame, who ran the PWAP in Iowa and painted glossy murals of ruddy farmers and pristine haylofts for Iowa State University. Wood saw regionalism as the New Deal in visual form: Both affirmed the country\u2019s varied livelihoods and landscapes.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe American scene depended on the view. Aaron Douglas foregrounded the Black experience, from enslavement to the Great Migration, in his Harlem mural cycle Aspects of Negro Life <\/em>(1934). <\/em>San Francisco muralists smuggled the Communist newspaper Daily Worker <\/em>and Marx\u2019s Capital<\/em> into their compositions. Queer artist Paul Cadmus\u2019s bawdy painting of sailors on shore leave, The Fleet\u2019s In! <\/em>(1934), was spirited away from a high-profile PWAP exhibition in Washington, D.C., on the orders of an outraged admiral.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tSuch provocations, Bruce warned, would \u201cdiscourage further government patronage.\u201d But Cadmus scandal aside, the D.C. exhibition was well received, smoothed by savvy public relations, and earned the consensus that taxpayer money had been well spent. The president and first lady even selected PWAP paintings for the White House. The United States \u201chas accepted the artist as a useful member of society,\u201d Bruce crowed, \u201cand his work as a valuable asset to the state.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n WHEN FUNDING FOR <\/strong>the PWAP expired, afterhaving paid 3,700 artists to make more than 15,000 works, Bruce negotiated a new program to maintain momentum: the Section of Painting and Sculpture. From 1934 to 1943, the Section hired 850 artists to create 1,400 paintings and sculptures for federal buildings, mostly post offices and courthouses. \u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tToday, more than 1,000 post offices nationwide still have Section murals installed over the postmaster\u2019s door\u2014enduring proof that Bruce achieved his goal of taking \u201csnobbery\u201d out of art, making it part of the average citizen\u2019s \u201cdaily food,\u201d in his words. This \u201cfood\u201d was mostly flavorless\u2014formulaic views of local history, regional commerce, or the postal service\u2014diluted by the lengthy Section approval process. Yet the murals remain a singularly ambitious attempt to map American life, past and present, exposing the fault lines in conflicted visions of national history and identity.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tAccording to its official bulletin, the Section hoped to awaken \u201cfaith in the country and a renewed sense of its glorious possibilities.\u201d The able-bodied white male stood for the virility of the New Deal nation-state. Broad-shouldered riveters, sun-kissed farmers, and brawny bricklayers share in the bounty of a thriving economy steered by enlightened policy. Edward Laning\u2014who, along with leftists like William Gropper and Joe Jones, seized the chance to salute the dignity of labor\u2014later wrote that painting Section murals meant \u201clearning how railroads were built, and sawmills were operated, and coal was mined, and steel was manufactured.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tA sense of \u201cglorious possibilities\u201d was harder to sustain in the Jim Crow South, where Southern Democrats maintained legal apartheid, and Section murals upheld white supremacy. Murals in the West, crowded with cowboys, prospectors, conquistadores, and missionaries, airbrushed scenes of westward expansion. (Bruce declared a Kentucky mural of square-jawed pioneer Daniel Boone, flexing frontier machismo, possibly the \u201cbest thing\u201d painted for the Section.) Ethel V. Ashton\u2019s Defenders of Wyoming County\u20131778 <\/em>(1941) defied stereotypical portrayals of women as helpmates and caregivers. They stand shoulder to shoulder with men as musket-wielding protagonists fending off an attack by Haudenosaunee warriors.<\/p>\n \n\tNearly a quarter of Section murals include Indigenous figures, ranging in tone from romantic to racist, evidence of their prominent but equivocal place in the historical imaginary. Few were painted by Indigenous artists. A high-profile exception was the Department of the Interior headquarters in Washington, D.C., where the mural program notarized the so-called \u201cIndian New Deal,\u201d legislation restoring a measure of tribal sovereignty. Artists including Allan Houser (Chiricahua Apache) and Woody Crumbo (Citizen Potawatomi Nation) honored Indigenous lifeways even as more critical themes of genocide or forced assimilation remained off-limits. \u00a0<\/p>\n THE SECTION WAS NOT <\/strong>a job-creatingprogram. Then as now, artmaking was not readily considered real work, and officials prioritized the quality of the art over the quantity of artists hired. As high unemployment persisted, however, Roosevelt signed an executive order creating the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which put millions to work on projects like building schools, paving roads, and sewing clothes.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe WPA provided for culture workers through Federal One, encompassing the Federal Art, Music, Theatre, and Writers\u2019 Projects. But the social benefits of painting a mural were less obvious than those of planting a tree. When asked why taxpayers should fund artists, WPA chief Harry Hopkins barked: \u201cHell, they\u2019ve got to eat just like other people!\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe risk of starvation was real. \u201cI don\u2019t know how I would have eaten without [the WPA\u2019s] support,\u201d Alice Neel recalled. She nearly fainted with gratitude when she showed up to receive her first government paycheck, the standard $24 a week, in exchange for delivering a painting every month or so. (It was less than the median annual income, but a \u201cprudent couple could survive handily,\u201d another artist remembered, \u201cif they ate with caution and watered down the gin.\u201d)<\/p>\n \n\tBut Federal One did more than keep unemployed creatives from starving. \u201cThe art projects were being set up to deal with physical hunger,\u201d wrote Federal Theatre Project director Hallie Flanagan, \u201cbut was there not another form of hunger with which we could rightly be concerned, the hunger of millions of Americans for music, plays, pictures, and books?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tHopkins tapped Holger Cahill, an expert in American folk art, to help nourish a culture-deprived country as director of the Federal Art Project (FAP). A disciple of pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, Cahill lamented that fine art had become the purview of a moneyed urban elite. Artists seeking fame and fortune in cities had left behind cultural deserts in rural America\u2014a form of \u201ccultural erosion,\u201d Cahill claimed, equivalent to the Dust Bowl\u2019s eroded topsoil. The FAP\u2019s goal would be to expand access to making and experiencing art: cultural democracy in action.<\/p>\n \n\tTo further the goal, the Project released art from its confines in galleries and museums and displayed it on the walls of schools, hospitals, libraries, and prisons. The FAP was more accommodating than the Section of modernist experiments. Stuart Davis\u2019s Swing Landscape <\/em>(1938), intended for a Brooklyn housing project, pulses with hot, syncopated colors, while Arshile Gorky\u2019s Newark Airport murals greeted travelers with stylized maps and aeronautical instruments. No site was too humble: Italian-born Cesare Stea sculpted a frieze of pipefitters for a Bowery Bay sewage treatment plant.<\/p>\n \n\tCahill compared New Deal painters to New Deal politicians: Both were \u201csearching, trying to find a way\u201d as the economic crisis opened a space to test new ideas. The \u201cSocial Content\u201d artists, as Cahill called them, many from Jewish families escaping violent persecution abroad, exalted the downtrodden and skewered the rich and powerful. Social surrealists painted the American Dream (a phrase coined in 1931) curdling into nightmares of poverty and slum housing. A young Jackson Pollock struggled to synthesize his influences, from regionalism to Mexican muralism, while Mark Rothko (born Marcus Rothkowitz) painted alienated subway stations.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe FAP championed self-taught artists for their \u201cfresh poetry of the soil,\u201d in Cahill\u2019s words. Josephine Joy\u2019s canvases teem with San Diego\u2019s pepper trees and aloe plants. Pedro Cervantes painted jewellike vistas of New Mexico\u2019s tablelands. Time<\/em> magazine declared Southwestern sculptor Patroci\u00f1o Barela the \u201cdiscovery of the year\u201d in 1936 for his compactly powerful wood bultos. <\/em>William Edmondson, born to enslaved parents in Tennessee, carved stone figures on the WPA in Nashville.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cPrints for the People,\u201d the title of a 1937 FAP exhibition, announced printmaking as arguably the most \u201cdemocratic\u201d medium. Unlike paintings or sculptures, prints can be reproduced, easily shipped and stored, and sold affordably. (Libraries even lent out FAP prints.) Workshop camaraderie incubated technical innovations. Dox Thrash developed the carborundum mezzotint in the Philadelphia workshop, using the medium\u2019s smoky tones to make atmospheric portraits. Prints could flout the decorum expected of public art; Chet La More\u2019s daring color lithograph of three blood-splattered Ku Kluxers <\/em>(1939), for example, would have been unthinkable as a mural.<\/p>\n \n\tPrintmaker Elizabeth Olds complained that limited print editions imposed artificial scarcity when printing innovations could make art as accessible as free public education. In that spirit, the FAP\u2019s Poster Division screen-printed as many as two million posters, commissioned by government agencies for a dime apiece to promote federal theater, workplace safety, planned housing, doctor visits, and trips to national parks. Lester Beall\u2019s designs for the Rural Electrification Administration extolled the benefits of public power.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tPhotographs, like prints and posters, could be reproduced and widely circulated. They also combined documentary reportage with emotional punch, a match for the Farm Security Administration\u2019s goal of winning public support for its mission to redress rural poverty. FSA photographers fanned out across the country, capturing wrenching scenes of drought-ridden fields, biblical dust storms, and climate refugees\u2014part of a documentary impulse evident in photojournalism, newsreels, and photobooks like the Walker Evans and James Agee collaboration Let Us Now Praise Famous Men <\/em>(1941). <\/em>Most famously, Dorothea Lange photographed Florence Owens Thompson and her children in a pea-pickers\u2019 camp in Northern California, subsuming Thompson\u2019s identity as a Cherokee woman into a Depression-era icon: Migrant Mother.<\/p>\n WHEN FSA PHOTOGRAPHER <\/strong>ArthurRothstein traveled to the predominantly Black community of Gee\u2019s Bend (now Boykin) in rural Alabama, he snapped a picture of Jorena Pettway working on a quilt, part of a tradition acclaimed today for its creative repurposing and visual invention. Yet Gee\u2019s Bend quilts did not enter the FAP\u2019s Index of American Design, an ambitious project that documented, in illusionistic watercolors, everyday objects (weathervanes, chairs, saddles, dolls, dresses) dating from the Colonial era to the Gilded Age. While the Index lauded humble objects made by anonymous artisans, a corrective to art history\u2019s vaunting of individual genius, it was a selective history that privileged Euro-American traditions.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe FAP supported craft, the art of everyday life, as grassroots cultural democracy. The Milwaukee Handicraft Project employed a racially integrated workforce to make books, toys, and textiles for local schools and libraries. The Rochester Museum of Arts and Sciences hired a hundred Seneca artists to record Haudenosaunee cultural and material history. At the Design Laboratory in New York, a Bauhaus-inspired curriculum fused hands-on training with advanced design principles. Timberline Lodge, built with WPA labor on Oregon\u2019s Mount Hood, became a showcase for FAP artisans: a cadre of carpenters,\u00a0 carvers, masons, metalsmiths, and weavers handcrafted the Lodge\u2019s custom furniture, textiles, wood marquetry, and wrought-iron fixtures.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tCommunity art centers (CACs) came closest to achieving the FAP\u2019s goal of cultural democracy. Over a hundred CACs across the country, from New York to New Mexico, offered free classes, lectures, and exhibitions to audiences estimated in the tens of millions. Cahill considered children \u201cintegral\u201d to the FAP, and examples of the art they made in CAC classes were displayed alongside those of adults in the Project\u2019s exhibitions. Students at the Harlem Community Art Center (HCAC)\u2014a vibrant hub for Black creatives like Chicago\u2019s South Side Community Art Center\u2014included the precociously talented teenagers Robert Blackburn and Jacob Lawrence. The HCAC hosted \u201cArt and Psychopathology,\u201da groundbreaking exhibition of art-as-therapy, featuring works made by mental health patients that expanded the concept of art\u2019s social utility.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe HCAC was not a gift bestowed by a benevolent government. It was the culmination of efforts by the Harlem Artists Guild, founded to lobby for Black artists on the federal programs. They were joined in the fight by the Artists\u2019 Union (AU), an advocacy group and bargaining agent that pushed for better wages and job protections. In an era of surging labor activism, the AU adopted aggressive tactics: In New York, over 200 artists were arrested after occupying WPA offices to protest layoffs. \u201cArt has turned militant,\u201d announced FAP printmaker Mabel Dwight. \u201cIt forms unions, carries banners, sits down uninvited, and gets underfoot. Social justice is its battle cry.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tAt the same time, the AU supported efforts to make the art programs permanent, a longstanding hope that the state might, in the words of an early statement, \u201celiminate once and for all the unfortunate dependence of American artists upon the caprice of private patronage.\u201d Yet the value of government support, cautioned art historian Meyer Schapiro, depended on who governed. The totalitarian regimes of Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin used state-controlled art to sanctify leaders and coerce citizens. In a 1936 essay entitled \u201cThe Public Use of Art,\u201d Schapiro warned AU members that state-sanctioned art in the US, with its \u201cnaive, sentimental ideas of social reality,\u201d could blunt the edge of protest and ultimately serve the ruling class.<\/p>\n \n\tThe New Deal art programs, however, were temporary relief measures tangled in party politics. A 1938 bill to establish a permanent Bureau of Fine Arts ran aground in the House as anti-New Dealers in Congress accelerated efforts to liquidate Federal One. The newly formed House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) deployed a red-baiting playbook, asserting that tax-funded cultural programs were wasteful boondoggles and Communist fronts. It worked: In 1939, Congress axed the Federal Theatre Project and transferred control of the remaining projects to the states.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe entry of the US into the war against the Axis powers in late 1941 shifted the economy from workfare to warfare. The art programs were repurposed to serve the war effort (an \u201cartsenal for defense,\u201d joked one Project artist), but funding and public support withered. Artists might continue to be \u201cchampions of the things of the spirit,\u201d as a Section official wrote, but the material needs of the national defense took priority.\u00a0The WPA dissolved in 1943, \u201cwith the satisfaction of a good job well done,\u201d according to Roosevelt, having earned \u201can honorable discharge.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n THE POSTWAR TRIUMPH <\/strong>of Abstract Expressionism consigned New Deal art to the proverbial dustbin\u2014an irony, given how many Ab-Ex artists got their start on the FAP. The McCarthyist Red Scare recast the socially conscious and figurative art of the 1930s in the light of Soviet socialist realism. In this Cold War atmosphere, Barbara Rose, the author of the 1967 survey American Art Since 1900<\/em>, concluded that the \u201cWPA programs produced almost no art of any consequence that has survived.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe claim, though easily refutable, is beside the point. The programs\u2019 primary goal was not to produce \u201crare, occasional masterpieces,\u201d as Holger Cahill put it, but rather to weave art into the fabric of a pluralistic society. In many respects, they fell short. Government work was precarious: Artists might be fired or furloughed with waves of WPA cutbacks. Structural racism and sexism persisted, even when official rhetoric promised progress. Public murals endorsed settler narratives of conquest, racial hierarchy, and resource exploitation. (Controversy still flares up over how to handle murals with dated or insensitive imagery.)<\/p>\n \n\tHowever flawed, the New Deal remains a necessary precedent, given that prospects for cultural democracy are vanishingly remote. Even as culture is made and consumed more than ever before, most artists today are freelancers\u2014unprotected by unions, navigating a precarious gig economy alongside rising housing and healthcare costs, all while facing existential threats posed by new technologies. Meanwhile, the federal government has never been more hostile to the concept of art as a public good.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe federal art programs of the past serve as urgent reminders that the US government once considered art a public resource, like electricity or education, and paid artists from diverse backgrounds a living wage to make art for public benefit. The stereotype of the artist as an isolated genius or dissolute bohemian gave way to the artist as a \u201cworker with a brush\u201d\u2014a social necessity, just like a plumber with a wrench or a carpenter with a hammer. As debates rage today about the affordability crisis and the crisis of the humanities, the New Deal\u2019s vision of cultural democracy stands ready to be reclaimed and updated for the present.<\/p>\n \n\tImagine a world where the government supports art as essential to human flourishing and a healthy democracy. The New Deal helps us picture it. \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-in-america\/features\/new-deal-democracy-philip-guston-works-progress-administration-steward-davis-jacob-lawrence-1234780013\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/ART3670-1.jpg?w=1024″] Imagine a world where an artist is considered an essential worker. The government commissions murals and sculptures for schools, libraries, and hospitals. Taxes fund free classes in pottery and printmaking at a community art center. The president of the United States promotes art as vital to a healthy democracy.\u00a0 This world flickered […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1867303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1867303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1867303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1867303\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1867303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1867303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1867303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Aaron-Douglas-default.jpg?w=400\")
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