New Deal
The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1939. Major federal programs agencies included the Civilian Con ...
program to fund the
visual arts
The visual arts are art forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, photography, video, filmmaking, design, crafts and architecture. Many artistic disciplines such as performing arts, conceptual art, and textile art ...
in the United States. Under national director Holger Cahill, it was one of five
Federal Project Number One
Federal Project Number One, also referred to as Federal One, is the collective name for a group of projects under the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal program in the United States. Of the $4.88 billion allocated by the Emergency Relief ...
projects sponsored by the
Works Progress Administration
The Works Progress Administration (WPA; renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration) was an American New Deal agency that employed millions of jobseekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to carry out public works projects, i ...
(WPA), and the largest of the New Deal art projects. It was created not as a cultural activity, but as a relief measure to employ artists and artisans to create murals, easel paintings, sculpture, graphic art, posters, photography, theatre scenic design, and arts and crafts. The WPA Federal Art Project established more than 100 community art centers throughout the country, researched and documented American design, commissioned a significant body of
public art
Public art is art in any media whose form, function and meaning are created for the general public through a public process. It is a specific art genre with its own professional and critical discourse. Public art is visually and physically acce ...
without restriction to content or subject matter, and sustained some 10,000 artists and craft workers during the
Great Depression
The Great Depression (19291939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagio ...
. According to ''American Heritage'', “Something like 400,000 easel paintings, murals, prints, posters, and renderings were produced by WPA artists during the eight years of the project’s existence, virtually free of government pressure to control subject matter, interpretation, or style.”
Background
The Federal Art Project was the visual arts arm of Federal Project Number One, a program of the Works Progress Administration, which was intended to provide employment for struggling artists during the Great Depression. Funded under the
Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935
The Relief Appropriation Act of 1935 was passed on April 8, 1935, as a part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. It was a large public works program that included the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Public Works Administration (PWA), ...
, it operated from August 29, 1935, until June 30, 1943. It was created as a relief measure to employ artists and artisans to create murals, easel paintings, sculpture, graphic art, posters, photographs, Index of American Design documentation, museum and theatre scenic design, and arts and crafts. The Federal Art Project operated community art centers throughout the country where craft workers and artists worked, exhibited, and educated others. The project created more than 200,000 separate works, some of them remaining among the most significant pieces of public art in the country.
The Federal Art Project's primary goals were to employ out-of-work artists and to provide art for nonfederal municipal buildings and public spaces. Artists were paid $23.60 a week; tax-supported institutions such as schools, hospitals, and public buildings paid only for materials. The work was divided into art production, art instruction, and art research. The primary output of the art-research group was the Index of American Design, a mammoth and comprehensive study of American material culture.
As many as 10,000 artists were commissioned to produce work for the WPA Federal Art Project, the largest of the New Deal art projects. Three comparable but distinctly separate New Deal art projects were administered by the
United States Department of the Treasury
The Department of the Treasury (USDT) is the national treasury and finance department of the federal government of the United States, where it serves as an executive department. The department oversees the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and ...
Treasury Relief Art Project
The Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP) was a New Deal arts program that commissioned visual artists to provide artistic decoration for existing Federal buildings during the Great Depression in the United States. A project of the United States ...
Abstraction
Abstraction in its main sense is a conceptual process wherein general rules and concepts are derived from the usage and classification of specific examples, literal ("real" or " concrete") signifiers, first principles, or other methods.
"An abst ...
had not yet gained favor in the 1930s and 1940s, so was virtually unsalable. As a result, the Federal Art Project supported such iconic artists as
Jackson Pollock
Paul Jackson Pollock (; January 28, 1912August 11, 1956) was an American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionism, abstract expressionist movement. He was widely noticed for his "Drip painting, drip technique" of pouring or splas ...
before their work could earn them income.
One particular success was the Milwaukee Handicraft Project, which started in 1935 as an experiment that employed 900 people who were classified as unemployable due to their age or disability. The project came to employ about 5,000 unskilled workers, many of them women and the long-term unemployed. Historian John Gurda observed that the city's unemployment hovered at 40% in 1933. "In that year," he said, "53 percent of Milwaukee's property taxes went unpaid because people just could not afford to make the tax payments." Workers were taught bookbinding, block printing, and design, which they used to create handmade art books and children's books. They produced toys, dolls, theatre costumes, quilts, rugs, draperies, wall hangings, and furniture that were purchased by schools, hospitals, and municipal organizations for the cost of materials only. In 2014, when the Museum of Wisconsin Art mounted an exhibition of items created by the Milwaukee Handicraft Project, furniture from it was still being used at the Milwaukee Public Library.Holger Cahill was national director of the Federal Art Project. Other administrators included
Audrey McMahon
Audrey McMahon (1898 – August 20, 1981) was the Director of the New York region of the Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1943;O'Connor, Francis V. "Audrey McMahon." in O'Connor, Francis V., ed. ''The New Deal Art Projects: An Anthology of Mem ...
, director of the New York Region (New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia); Clement B. Haupers, director for Minnesota; George Godfrey Thorp (Illinois), and Robert Bruce Inverarity, director for Washington. Regional New York supervisors of the Federal Art Project have included sculptor William Ehrich (1897–1960) of the Buffalo Unit (1938–1939), project director of the
Buffalo Zoo
Buffalo Zoo is a zoo was located at 300 Parkside Ave in Buffalo, New York, is the seventh oldest zoo in the United States. Each year, the Buffalo Zoo welcomes approximately 400,000 visitors and is the second largest tourist attraction in Western N ...
expansion.
Notable artists
Some 10,000 artists were commissioned to work for the Federal Art Project. Notable artists include the following:
* William Abbenseth
*
Berenice Abbott
Berenice Alice Abbott (July 17, 1898 – December 9, 1991) was an American photographer best known for her portraits of between-the-wars 20th century cultural figures, New York City photographs of architecture and urban design of the 1930s, and ...
Gertrude Abercrombie
Gertrude Abercrombie (February 17, 1909 – July 3, 1977) was an American painter based in Chicago. Called "the queen of the bohemian artists", Abercrombie was involved in the Chicago jazz scene and was friends with musicians such as Dizzy Gille ...
*
Benjamin Abramowitz
Benjamin Abramowitz (also known as "Ben Hoffman" during the late 1930s and early 1940s) was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor. First recognized for his contribution at age 19 as senior artist with the Federal Art Project of the Work ...
Ivan Albright
Ivan Le Lorraine Albright (February 20, 1897 – November 18, 1983) was an American painter, sculptor and print-maker most renowned for his self-portraits, character studies, and still lifes. Due to his technique and dark subject matter, he is of ...
*
Maxine Albro
Maxine Albro (January 20, 1893 – July 19, 1966) was an American painter, muralist, lithographer, mosaic artist, and sculptor. She was one of America's leading female artists, and one of the few women commissioned under the New Deal's Federal A ...
Harold Ambellan
Harold Ambellan (1912–2006) was an American sculptor. Born in Buffalo, New York Ambellan provided sculpture for New Deal-era projects and served as President of the Sculptors Guild in 1941, prior to his service in the U.S. military. Ambellan e ...
Bruce Ariss
Bruce Wallace Ariss, Jr. (October 10, 1911 – September 11, 1994) was an American painter, muralist, writer, illustrator, editor as well as theater and set designer, amateur playwright and actor, and overall icon on the Monterey Peninsula, Calif ...
Jozef Bakos
Jozef Bakos (1891–1977) was an American painter best known for his Western landscapes.
Bakos was one of Los Cinco Pintores, who worked in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Bakos studied art with John E. Thompson at the Albright Art Institute in Buffalo, ...
*
Henry Bannarn
Henry Wilmer "Mike" Bannarn (July 17, 1910 – September 20, 1965) was an African-American artist, best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance period. He is known for his work in sculpture and as a character artist in the various paint m ...
*
Belle Baranceanu
Belle Goldschlager Baranceanu (July 17, 1902January 17, 1988) was an American painter, teacher, muralist, lithographer, engraver and illustrator.
She was born Belle Goldschlager in Chicago, Illinois (Baranceanu was her mother's maiden name). Her ...
Harrison Begay
Harrison Begay, also known as Haashké yah Níyá (meaning "Warrior Who Walked Up to His Enemy" or "Wandering Boy") (November 15, 1914 or 1917 – August 18, 2012) was a renowned Diné (Navajo) painter, printmaker, and illustrator. Begay speciali ...
Aaron Berkman
Aaron Berkman (23 May 1900 – 1 March 1991) was an American Social Realist and Modern painter who was involved in the Federal Art Project, which was the visual arts arm of the Great Depression-era New Deal. Although born in Hartford, Connecti ...
*
Leon Bibel
Leon Bibel (1913–1995) was a Polish-born American painter and printmaker during the Great Depression. His themes were the social condition of workers and the politics of protest and war, although cityscapes and landscapes were included among h ...
Arnold Blanch
Arnold Blanch (June 4, 1896 – October 3, 1968), was born and raised in Mantorville, Minnesota. He was an American modernist painter, etcher, illustrator, lithographer, muralist, printmaker and art teacher.
Life
His modernist paintings are ...
*
Lucile Blanch
Lucile Esma Lundquist Blanch (December 31, 1895 – October 31, 1981) was an American artist, art educator, and Guggenheim Fellow. She was noted for the murals she created for the U.S. Treasury Department's Section of Fine Arts during the Great ...
*
Lucienne Bloch
Lucienne Bloch (January 5, 1909 – March 13, 1999) was a Switzerland-born American artist. She was best known for her murals and for her association with the Mexican artist Diego Rivera, for whom she produced the only existing photographs o ...
*
Aaron Bohrod
Aaron Bohrod (21 November 1907 – 3 April 1992) was an American artist best known for his trompe-l'œil still-life paintings.
Education
Bohrod was born in Chicago in 1907, the son of an emigree Bessarabian-Jewish grocer. Bohrod studied at ...
Adele Brandeis
Adele Brandeis (1885–1975) was an American art administrator from Louisville, Kentucky.
Work
In 1911, Brandeis presented a paper on "The Development of Art in Cincinnati" to the Women's Club of Louisville, where she highlighted the crucial ...
Manuel Bromberg
Manuel Abraham Bromberg (March 6, 1917 – February 3, 2022) was an American artist and Professor Emeritus of Art, at the State University of New York at New Paltz. He was a 1946 Guggenheim Fellow.
Life
Bromberg was born in Centerville, Iowa, to ...
Giorgio Cavallon
Giorgio Cavallon (March 3, 1904 – December 22, 1989) was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists and a pioneer Abstract Expressionist.
Biography
Giorgio Cavallon was born March 3, 1904 in Sorio, a hamlet of the municipality of Ga ...
*
Daniel Celentano
Daniel Celentano (1902–1980) was an American Scene artist who made realistic paintings of everyday life in New York, particularly within the Italian neighborhood of East Harlem where he lived. During the Great Depression he painted murals ...
*
Dane Chanase
Riccardo Dane Chanase (October 21, 1894 - July 15, 1975) was an American painter and printmaker.
Life
Chanase was born in Palermo, Italy.
He exhibited at the Salon d'Automne.
He served in World War I. He married artist Sheva Ausubel (1896– ...
*
Fay Chong
Fay Chong (1912–1973) was a Chinese Americans, Chinese-American artist and educator, well known for his printmaking and watercolor painting. He was also known for his activities as an arts organizer, arts educator and WPA-era artist. Chong was ...
*
Claude Clark
Claude Clark (November 11, 1915 – April 21, 2001) was an American Painting, painter, Printmaking, printmaker and art educator. Clark's subject matter was the diaspora of African American culture, including dance scenes, Street children, street ...
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Max Arthur Cohn
Max Arthur Cohn (1903–1998) was an American artist, born in England. His family emigrated to the United States when he was two years old.
Cohn was one of the artists employed by the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Gre ...
Arthur Covey
Arthur Sinclair Covey (1877–1960) was an American muralist whose paintings depicted industrial workers doing their jobs.
Personal life
Covey was born in Leroy, Illinois on June 13, 1877
and was married to Mary Dorothea Sale from 1908 until h ...
Robert Cronbach
Robert Cronbach (1908 – 2001) American sculptor and teacher, born in St. Louis, Missouri where he began his art studies. He is best remembered for his medals, architectural sculpture and other works. His art studies continued at the Pennsy ...
James Daugherty
James Henry Daugherty (June 1, 1889 – February 21, 1974) was an American modernist painter, muralist, children's book author and illustrator.
Life
Daugherty was born in Asheville, North Carolina. He later lived in Indiana, Ohio, and at the a ...
Burgoyne Diller
Burgoyne A. Diller (January 13, 1906 – January 30, 1965) was an American abstract painter. Many of his best-known works are characterized by orthogonal geometric forms that reflect his strong interest in the De Stijl movement and the work of ...
Fritz Eichenberg
Fritz Eichenberg (October 24, 1901 – November 30, 1990) was a German-American illustrator and arts educator who worked primarily in wood engraving. His best-known works were concerned with religion, social justice and nonviolence.
Biogra ...
George Pearse Ennis
George Pearse Ennis (July 21, 1884 – August 1936) was an American artist. He is known for his watercolors and for the stained glass window he designed for Washington Hall, the cadet mess hall at West Point.
Life
Ennis studied at Washington U ...
Philip Evergood
Philip Howard Francis Dixon Evergood (born Howard Blashki; 1901–1973) was an American painter, etcher, lithographer, sculptor, illustrator and writer.
He was particularly active during the Depression and World War II era.
Life
Philip Evergo ...
*
Louis Ferstadt
Louis Goodman Ferstadt (7 October 1900–August 1954) was an American muralist and comics artist.
Biography
Louis Goodman Ferstadt was born in Berestechko in the Russian Empire on 7 October 1900. His early childhood coincided with a pogrom and ...
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Alexander Finta
Alexander Finta (1881–1958) was a Hungarian-born American artist. Finta received his early education in Europe before moving onto Columbia University. He settled in Los Angeles, California in 1939 and proceeded to mainly create marble and bronz ...
Seymour Fogel
Seymour Fogel (August 24, 1911 – December 4, 1984) was an American artist whose artistic output included social realist art early in the century, abstract art and expressionist art at mid-century, and transcendental art late in the century ...
Todros Geller
Todros Geller (Yiddish: טודרוס געלער; July 1, 1889 – February, 23 1949) was a Jewish American artist and teacher best known as a master printmaker and a leading artist among Chicago's art community.
Early life and education
Gel ...
Enrico Glicenstein
Enrico Glicenstein (24 May 1870 – 30 December 1942) was a Polish-born sculptor who lived in Italy and the United States.
Life
Glicenstein was born in Turek, Poland in 1870 and named Enoch Hendryk Glicenstein. His father was a teacher who also w ...
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Vincent Glinsky
Vincent Glinsky (December 18, 1895 – March 19, 1975) was an American sculptor. He is especially noted for his architectural decorations.
Life
Vincent Glinsky was born in Russia on December 18, 1895 and emigrated to America just before World ...
Arshile Gorky
Arshile Gorky (; born Vostanik Manoug Adoian, hy, Ոստանիկ Մանուկ Ատոյեան; April 15, 1904 – July 21, 1948) was an Armenian-American painter who had a seminal influence on Abstract Expressionism. He spent the last years of hi ...
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Harry Gottlieb
Harry Gottlieb (September 23, 1895 – July 4, 1992) was an American painter, screen printer, lithographer, and educator.
Biography
Gottlieb was born in Bucharest, Romania on September 23, 1895. He immigrated to America in 1907, and his family s ...
Morris Graves
Morris Graves (August 28, 1910 – May 5, 2001) was an American painter. He was one of the earliest Modern artists from the Pacific Northwest to achieve national and international acclaim. His style, referred to by some reviewers as Mysticism, ...
*
Balcomb Greene
Balcomb Greene (1904–1990) was an American artist and teacher. He and his wife, artist Gertrude Glass Greene, were heavily involved in political activism to promote mainstream acceptance of abstract art and were founding members of the Am ...
*
Marion Greenwood
Marion Greenwood (April 6, 1909 – August 20, 1970) was an American social realist artist who became popular starting in the 1920s and became renowned in both the United States and Mexico. She is most well known for her murals, but she also pra ...
Philip Guston
Philip Guston (born Phillip Goldstein, June 27, 1913 – June 7, 1980), was a Canadian American painter, printmaker, muralist and draftsman. Early in his five decade career, muralist David Siquieros described him as one of "the most promising ...
Marsden Hartley
Marsden Hartley (January 4, 1877 – September 2, 1943) was an American Modernist painter, poet, and essayist. Hartley developed his painting abilities by observing Cubist artists in Paris and Berlin.
Early life and education
Hartley was born ...
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Knute Heldner
Knute Heldner (1875 – November 5, 1952) was a Swedish-American artist.
Biography
Knute August Heldner was born in the village Vederslöv in Växjö Municipality, Kronoberg County, Sweden in 1875; some sources say 1877, or 1886 (also giving ...
Magnus Colcord Heurlin
Magnus Colcord "Rusty" Heurlin (July 5, 1895March 10, 1986) was a Swedish-American
Swedish Americans ( sv, svenskamerikaner) are Americans of Swedish ancestry. They include the 1.2 million Swedish immigrants during 1865–1915, who formed tig ...
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Hilaire Hiler
Hilaire Harzberg Hiler (July 16, 1898 – January 19, 1966) was an American artist, psychologist, and color theoretician who worked in Europe and United States during the mid-20th century. At home and abroad, Hiler worked as a muralist, jazz mu ...
Donal Hord
Donal Hord (February 26, 1902 – June 29, 1966), an American sculptor, was born Donald Horr in Prentice, Wisconsin.
Early life
In 1914, Hord and his mother moved west, to Seattle, Washington. Shortly thereafter he contracted rheumatic fever, ...
Allan Houser
Allan Capron Houser or Haozous (June 30, 1914 – August 22, 1994) was a Chiricahua Apache sculptor, painter and book illustrator born in Oklahoma.
*
Eitaro Ishigaki
was an American artist.
Life
Eitaro Ishigaki was born in Taiji, Wakayama, Japan in 1893. At the age of sixteen he emigrated to America in to live with his father in Seattle. A year later, in 1910, they moved to California, and in 1912, Ishigaki ...
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Edwin Boyd Johnson
Edwin Boyd Johnson (November 4, 1904 – 1968) was an American painter, designer, muralist and photographer.
Edwin Boyd Johnson was born on November 4, 1904, in Watertown, Tennessee,. Not long thereafter, the family moved to Nashville, Tenne ...
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Sargent Claude Johnson
Sargent Claude Johnson (October 7, 1888 – October 10, 1967) was one of the first African-American artists working in California to achieve a national reputation.
Reuben Kadish
Reuben Kadish (January 29, 1913 – September 20, 1992) was an American artist, specializing as a sculptor, draughtsman, muralist, painter, and printmaker. In his later career he also taught art history and sculpture in New York City.
Biograph ...
David Karfunkle
David Karfunkle (1880–1959) was an American artist. He is known for his mural, "Exploitation of Labor and Hoarding of Wealth", painted in 1936 at the Harlem Courthouse.
Biography
He was born in Vienna.
He studied with Ludwig von Herterich, ...
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Leon Kelly
Leon Kelly (October 21, 1901 – June 28, 1982) was an American artist born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is most well known for his contributions to American Surrealism, but his work also encompassed styles such as Cubism, Social Realism, ...
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Paul Kelpe
Paul Kelpe (; January 15, 1902 – December 8, 1985) was a German-born American abstract painter. His constructions integrating found objects into paintings were the first such works created in the United States and he painted two of the fi ...
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Troy Kinney
Troy Sylvanus Kinney (December 1, 1871 – January 29, 1938) was an American artist, etcher, and author. Troy Kinney was most notable for his works portraying dance performers, fanciful subjects, and classically styled nudes. He worked with da ...
Karl Knaths
Karl Knaths (October 21, 1891 – March 9, 1971) was an American artist whose personal approach to the Cubist aesthetic led him to create paintings which, while abstract, contained readily identifiable subjects. In addition to the Cubist painte ...
Lee Krasner
Lenore "Lee" Krasner (born Lena Krassner; October 27, 1908 – June 19, 1984) was an American abstract expressionist painter, with a strong speciality in collage. She was married to Jackson Pollock. Although there was much cross-pollination be ...
Yasuo Kuniyoshi
was a Japanese-American painter, photographer and printmaker.
Biography
Kuniyoshi was born on September 1, 1889 in Okayama, Japan. He immigrated to the United States in 1906, choosing not to attend military school in Japan. Kuniyoshi original ...
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Jacob Lawrence
Jacob Armstead Lawrence (September 7, 1917 – June 9, 2000) was an American painter known for his portrayal of African-American historical subjects and contemporary life. Lawrence referred to his style as "dynamic cubism", although by his own ...
Michael Lantz
Michael Lantz (born April 6, 1908 – April 1988) was an American sculptor and medalist.
Lantz attended the National Academy of Design and the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, and also worked as a "handy boy" in the sculptor Lee Lawrie's New ...
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Blanche Lazzell
Blanche Lazzell (October 10, 1878 – June 1, 1956) was an American painter, printmaking, printmaker and designer. Known especially for her Woodcut#White-line woodcut, white-line woodcuts, she was an early modernism, modernist American artist, ...
William Robinson Leigh
William Robinson Leigh (September 23, 1866 – March 11, 1955) was an American artist and illustrator, who was known for his painted Western scenes.
Biography
William Robinson Leigh was born on September 23, 1866, at Maidstone Manor Farm, B ...
Jack Levine
Jack Levine (January 3, 1915November 8, 2010) was an American Social Realist painter and printmaker best known for his satires on modern life, political corruption, and biblical narratives. Levine is considered one of the key artists of the Bos ...
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Monty Lewis
Monty Lewis (born January 2, 1963) is an American football coach. Is the head football coach at Winfield High School in Winfield, KS. Lewis served as the head football coach at Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas from 1993 to 2001 and F ...
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Elba Lightfoot
''Elba Lightfoot'' (1910-1989) was an African-American artist known for her work on the Works Progress Administration (WPA) murals at Harlem Hospital.
She was born in Evanston, Illinois. In 1935, together with Charles Alston, Augusta Savage (who ...
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Abraham Lishinsky
Abraham Lishinsky (19051982) is an American artist of the 20th Century, a painter and playwright, best known for seven murals completed for the federally funded agencies of the New Deal programs of the 1930s and 1940s.
Born in the Russian Empir ...
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Michael Loew
Michael Loew (May 8, 1907 — November 14, 1985) was an American Abstract Expressionist artist who was born in New York City.
Career
In the late 1920s, Loew studied at the Art Students League with the Ashcan School and was a recipient of a Sadi ...
Louis Lozowick
Louis Lozowick (1892 – 1973) (ukr: Луї Лозовик) was a Ukrainian-born American painter and printmaker. He is recognized as an Art Deco and Precisionist artist, and mainly produced streamline, urban-inspired monochromatic litho ...
Stanton Macdonald-Wright
Stanton Macdonald-Wright (July 8, 1890 – August 22, 1973), was a modern American artist. He was a co-founder of Synchromism, an early abstract, color-based mode of painting, which was the first American avant-garde art movement to receive inte ...
Kyra Markham
Kyra Markham (born Elaine Hyman, 1891–1967) was an actress, figurative painter and printmaker. Markham was briefly married to the architect Lloyd Wright, and five years later, married the scenographer David Stoner Gaither. She worked for the F ...
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Jack Markow
Jack Markow (1905-1983) was an American cartoonist who also wrote instructional books about cartooning, comic strips and comic art. For three years, he was the cartoon editor of '' Argosy''.
Born in London, Markow was a New Yorker from the age ...
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Mercedes Matter
Mercedes Matter (née Carles; 1913 – December 4, 2001) was an American painter, draughtswoman, and writer. She was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists, and the Founder and Dean Emeritus of the New York Studio School. ...
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Jan Matulka
Jan Matulka (7 November 1890 – 25 June 1972) was a Czech-American modern artist originally from Bohemia. Matulka's style ranged from Abstract expressionism to landscapes, sometimes in the same day. He has directly influenced artists like Doro ...
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Dina Melicov
Dina Melicov (1905–1969) was an American sculptor, and painter who studied at The Educational Alliance Art School. She graduated from Wadleigh High School for Girls, and studied with Solon Borglum. She married Samuel Gould.
Dina Melicov was ...
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Hugh Mesibov
Hugh Mesibov (December 29, 1916 – March 25, 2016 ) was an American abstract expressionist artist who began his career as a federal artist for the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression and later became a member of the 10th St ...
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Katherine Milhous
Katherine Milhous (1894–1977) was an American artist, illustrator, and writer. She is known best as the author and illustrator of '' The Egg Tree'', which won the 1951 Caldecott Medal for U.S. picture book illustration. Born into a Quaker fa ...
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Jo Mora
Joseph Jacinto Mora (October 22, 1876 – October 10, 1947) was a Uruguayan-born American cowboy, photographer, artist, cartoonist, illustrator, painter, muralist, sculptor, and historian who lived with the Hopi and wrote about his experiences in ...
Louise Nevelson
Louise Nevelson (September 23, 1899 – April 17, 1988) was an American sculptor known for her monumental, monochromatic, wooden wall pieces and outdoor sculptures.
Born in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Kyiv Oblast ...
Phillip Pavia
Philip Pavia (1911-2005) was a culturally influential American artist of Italian descent, known for his scatter sculpture and figurative abstractions, and the debate he fostered among many of the 20th century's most important art thinkers. A foun ...
Jackson Pollock
Paul Jackson Pollock (; January 28, 1912August 11, 1956) was an American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionism, abstract expressionist movement. He was widely noticed for his "Drip painting, drip technique" of pouring or splas ...
Gregorio Prestopino
Gregorio Prestopino (1907–1984) was an American artist. According to the art historian Irma B. Jaffe, he was "one of the major American painters who refused to reject the image, ndhas devoted his career to depicting the human condition with a ...
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Mac Raboy
Emmanuel "Mac" Raboy (April 9, 1914 – December 12, 1967) was an American comics artist best known for his comic-book work on Fawcett Comics' Captain Marvel Jr.Brent Frankenhoff & Maggie Thompson ''The Greatest Comic Book Covers Of All Time''. I ...
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Anton Refregier
Anton Refregier (March 20, 1905 – October 10, 1979) was a painter and muralist active in Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project commissions, and in teaching art. He was a Russian immigrant to the United States.
Among his best-kn ...
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Ad Reinhardt
Adolph Dietrich Friedrich Reinhardt (December 24, 1913 – August 30, 1967) was an abstract painter active in New York for more than three decades. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists (AAA) and part of the movement center ...
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Misha Reznikoff
Misha Reznikoff was an American-Ukrainian artist noted for such pictures as ''The End of the Horse – Or New Deal'' (1934) and ''The Solidity of the Road to Metaphor and Memory'' (1935).Smithsonian American Art Museum http://americanart.si.edu/s ...
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Mischa Richter
Mischa Richter (1910 – March 23, 2001) was an American cartoonist best known for his numerous cartoons published in ''The New Yorker'' over decades.
Early life
Richter was born in Kharkov, Russian Empire, where his father was the city's ...
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Diego Rivera
Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez, known as Diego Rivera (; December 8, 1886 – November 24, 1957), was a prominent Mexican painter. His large frescoes helped establish the ...
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José de Rivera
José Ruiz de Rivera (September 18, 1904 March 12, 1985) was an American abstract sculptor.
Life and career
José Ruiz de Rivera was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and grew up in New Orleans. He dropped out of high school, but finished at a board ...
Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko (), born Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz (russian: Ма́ркус Я́ковлевич Ротко́вич, link=no, lv, Markuss Rotkovičs, link=no; name not Anglicized until 1940; September 25, 1903 – February 25, 1970), was a Latv ...
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Alexander Rummler
Alexander Joseph Rummler (July 25, 1867 – 1959) was an American painter best known for his work on murals and billboards.
Rummler was born in Dubuque, Iowa to German immigrants Joseph and Rosalia Rummler. In 1888 Rummler traveled to ...
Concetta Scaravaglione
Concetta Scaravaglione (July 9, 1900 – September 4, 1975) was an American sculptor. Her parents immigrated from Calabria, Italy, and Concetta was the youngest of nine children. She is known for her monumental figurative sculpture, her work fo ...
*
Louis Schanker
Louis Schanker (1903 – May 7, 1981) was an American abstract artist.
Early life
He grew up in an Orthodox Jewish environment in the Bronx, New York. His parents, Sam, a tailor, and Fannie Schanker, were of Romanian descent. He had five sibl ...
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Edwin Scheier
Edwin Scheier (November 11, 1910 – April 20, 2008) was an American artist, best known for his ceramic works with his wife, Mary Scheier.
Early life
Edwin Scheier was born in The Bronx, New York, to a Jewish German immigrant father, and an ...
Carl Schmitt
Carl Schmitt (; 11 July 1888 – 7 April 1985) was a German jurist, political theorist, and prominent member of the Nazi Party. Schmitt wrote extensively about the effective wielding of political power. A conservative theorist, he is noted as ...
Georgette Seabrooke
Georgette Seabrooke (aka Georgette Seabrooke Powell; August 2, 1916 – December 27, 2011), was an American muralist, artist, illustrator, art therapist, non-profit chief executive and educator. She is best known for her 1936 mural, ''Recreation ...
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Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn (September 12, 1898 – March 14, 1969) was an American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as ''The Shape of Content''.
Biography
Shahn was bor ...
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William Howard Shuster
William Howard Shuster Jr. (1893–1969) was an American painter, sculptor and teacher.
Early life
Shuster was born November 26, 1893, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as the second of three children.
Career
He served in the U.S. Army during ...
John French Sloan
John French Sloan (August 2, 1871 – September 7, 1951) was an American painter and etcher. He is considered to be one of the founders of the Ashcan school of American art. He was also a member of the group known as The Eight. He is best known ...
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Joseph Solman
Joseph Solman (January 25, 1909 – April 16, 2008) was an American painter, a founder of The Ten, a group of New York City Expressionist painters in the 1930s. His best known works include his "Subway Gouaches" depicting travelers on the New ...
Isaac Soyer
Isaac Soyer (April 26, 1902 – July 8, 1981) was a Russian-born American social realist painter and educator. His art work often portrayed working-class people of New York City in his paintings.
Biography
He was born as Isaac Schoar on April 26, ...
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Moses Soyer
Moses Soyer (December 25, 1899 – September 3, 1974) was an American social realist painter.
Biography
He was born as Moses Schoar and both he and his identical twin brother, Raphael, were born in Borisoglebsk, Tambov, a southern province of R ...
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Raphael Soyer
Raphael Zalman Soyer (December 25, 1899 – November 4, 1987) was a Russian-born American painter, draftsman, and printmaker. Soyer was referred to as an American scene painter. He is identified as a Social Realist because of his interest in men ...
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Ralph Stackpole
Ralph Ward Stackpole (May 1, 1885 – December 10, 1973) was an American sculptor, painter, muralist, etcher and art educator, San Francisco's leading artist during the 1920s and 1930s. Stackpole was involved in the art and causes of social realis ...
Joseph Stella
Joseph Stella (born Giuseppe Michele Stella, June 13, 1877 – November 5, 1946) was an Italian-born American Futurist painter best known for his depictions of industrial America, especially his images of the Brooklyn Bridge. He is also ...
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Harry Sternberg
Harry Sternberg (1904–2001), was an American painter, printmaker and educator. He taught at the Art Students League of New York, from 1933 to c. 1966.
Biography Childhood, family life, and education
Sternberg's parents had immigrated from Ru ...
Albert Swinden
Albert Swinden (1901–1961) was an English-born American abstract painter. He was one of the founders of the American Abstract Artists, and he created significant murals as part of the Federal Art Project.
Life
Albert Swinden was born in Birmi ...
*
Rufino Tamayo
Rufino del Carmen Arellanes Tamayo (August 25, 1899 – June 24, 1991) was a Mexican painter of Zapotec heritage, born in Oaxaca de Juárez, Mexico.Sullivan, 170-171Ades, 357 Tamayo was active in the mid-20th century in Mexico and New York, ...
Lenore Thomas Lenore may refer to:
__NOTOC__ Arts and entertainment
* "Lenore" (poem), by Edgar Allan Poe
*Lenore, an unrelated character in the poem "The Raven", also by Edgar Allan Poe
* "Lenore" (ballad), a 1773 poem by Gottfried August Bürger
* "Lenore" (mel ...
*
Dox Thrash
Dox Thrash (1893–1965) was an African-American artist who was famed as a skilled draftsman, master printmaker, and painter and as the co-inventor of the Carborundum printmaking process.Donnelly, Michell"The Art of Dox Thrash" The Encyclopedia ...
*
Mark Tobey
Mark George Tobey (December 11, 1890 – April 24, 1976) was an American painter. His densely structured compositions, inspired by Asian calligraphy, resemble Abstract expressionism, although the motives for his compositions differ philosophi ...
Edward Buk Ulreich
Edward Buk Ulreich (February 12, 1884 – July 17, 1966) was an American artist. Born in Hungary, his work includes murals at the United States Courthouse (Tallahassee, Florida, 1936) completed in 1939. His work is also at the National Museu ...
*
Charles Umlauf
Charles Umlauf (July 17, 1911 – November 19, 1994) was an American sculptor and teacher who was born in South Haven, Michigan. His sculptures can be found in churches, numerous public institutions, outdoor locations, and museums, including the ...
John Augustus Walker
John Augustus Walker (1901–1967) was a well-known Alabama Gulf Coast artist of the Depression era who was commissioned to undertake several art projects for the Works Progress Administration.
Early life
Born in Mobile, Alabama, Walker was first ...
Edgar Yaeger
Edgar Louis Yaeger (1904–1997) was an American modernist painter from Detroit, Michigan.
Yaeger studied under Robert A. Herzberg at the Detroit School of Fine and Applied Arts, by which he was awarded the Founder's Society Purchase Prize. Subse ...
*
Bernard Zakheim
Bernard Baruch Zakheim (April 4, 1898 – November 28, 1985) was a Warsaw-born San Francisco muralist, best known for his work on the Coit Tower murals.
Early life and immigration
Zakheim was born to a Hasidic Jewish family in Warsaw, then part ...
*
Karl Zerbe
Karl Zerbe (September 16, 1903 – November 24, 1972) was a German-born American painter and educator.
Biography
Karl Zerbe was born on September 16, 1903 in Berlin, Germany. The family lived in Paris, France from 1904–1914, where his fat ...
Community Art Center program
The first federally sponsored community art center opened in December 1936 in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Index of American Design
The Index of American Design program of the Federal Art Project produced a pictorial survey of the crafts and decorative arts of the United States from the early colonial period to 1900. Artists working for the Index produced nearly 18,000 meticulously faithful watercolor drawings, documenting material culture by largely anonymous artisans. Objects surveyed ranged from furniture, silver, glass, stoneware and textiles to tavern signs, ships's figureheads, cigar-store figures, carousel horses, toys, tools and weather vanes. Photography was used only to a limited degree since artists could more accurately and effectively present the form, character, color and texture of the objects. The best drawings approach the work of such 19th-century
trompe-l'œil
''Trompe-l'œil'' ( , ; ) is an artistic term for the highly realistic optical illusion of three-dimensional space and objects on a two-dimensional surface. ''Trompe l'oeil'', which is most often associated with painting, tricks the viewer into ...
painters as
William Harnett
William Michael Harnett (August 10, 1848 – October 29, 1892) was an Irish-American painter known for his trompe-l'œil still lifes of ordinary objects.
Early life
Harnett was born in Clonakilty, County Cork, Ireland during the time of the Gr ...
; lesser works represent the process of artists who were given employment and expert training.
"It was not a nostalgic or antiquarian enterprise," wrote historian
Roger G. Kennedy
Roger George Kennedy (August 3, 1926 – September 30, 2011) was an American polymath whose career included banking, television production, historical writing, and museum administration, the last as director of the Smithsonian Institution's Nati ...
. "It was initiated by modernists dedicated to abstract design, hoping to influence industrial design — thus in many ways it parallelled the founding philosophy of the Museum of Modern Art in New York."
Like all WPA programs, the Index had the primary purpose of providing employment. Its function was to identify and record material of historical significance that had not been studied and was in danger of being lost. Its aim was to gather together these pictorial records into a body of material that would form the basis for organic development of American design — a usable American past accessible to artists, designers, manufacturers, museums, libraries and schools. The United States had no single comprehensive collection of authenticated historical native design comparable to those available to scholars, artists and industrial designers in Europe.
"In one sense the Index is a kind of archaeology," wrote Holger Cahill. "It helps to correct a bias which has tended to relegate the work of the craftsman and the folk artist to the subconscious of our history where it can be recovered only by digging. In the past we have lost whole sequences out of their story, and have all but forgotten the unique contribution of hand skills in our culture."
The Index of American Design operated in 34 states and the District of Columbia from 1935 to 1942. It was founded by
Romana Javitz
Romana Javitz (January 28, 1903–January 1980) was an American artist, librarian, and Superintendent of the Picture Collection at the New York Public Library.
Biography
Early life
Romana Javitz was born in Russia to Polish parents and imm ...
, head of the Picture Collection of the
New York Public Library
The New York Public Library (NYPL) is a public library system in New York City. With nearly 53 million items and 92 locations, the New York Public Library is the second largest public library in the United States (behind the Library of Congress ...
, and textile designer
Ruth Reeves
Ruth Marie Reeves (1892–1966) was an American painter, Art Deco textile designer and expert on Indian handicrafts.
Early life and education
Ruth Marie Reeves was born in Redlands, California, on July 14, 1892. She attended the Pratt Institute ...
. Reeves was appointed the first national coordinator; she was succeeded by C. Adolph Glassgold (1936) and Benjamin Knotts (1940).
Constance Rourke
Constance Mayfield Rourke (November 14, 1885 – March 29, 1941) was an American author and educator. She was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and attended Sorbonne and Vassar College. She taught at Vassar from 1910 to 1915. She died in Grand Rapids, ...
was national editor. The work is in the collection of the
National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art, and its attached Sculpture Garden, is a national art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of char ...
in Washington, D.C.
The Index employed an average of 300 artists during its six years in operation. One artist was Magnus S. Fossum, a longtime farmer who was compelled by the Depression to move from the Midwest to Florida. After he lost his left hand in an accident in 1934, he produced watercolor renderings for the Index, using magnifiers and drafting instruments for accuracy and precision. Fossum eventually received an insurance settlement that made it possible for him to buy another farm and leave the Federal Art Project.
In her essay,'Picturing a Usable Past,' Virginia Tuttle Clayton, curator of the 2002-2003 exhibition, ''Drawing on America's Past: Folk Art, Modernism, and the Index of American Design'', held at the National Gallery of Art noted that "the Index of American Design was the result of an ambitious and creative effort to furnish for the visual arts a usable past."
File:Panel from reredos, church of sanctuario at chimayo 1943.8.6818.jpg, church of sanctuario at chimayo-panel from reredos
File:Fly Catcher.jpg, Fly Catcher, 1937.Frank McEntee - National Gallery of Art.
File:Magnus-Fossum-Index-of-American-Design-1940.jpg, Magnus Fossum copying the 1770 ''Boston Town Coverlet'' (February 1940)
File:Boston-Town-Coverlet-Magnus-Fossum-D12855.jpg, ''Boston Town Coverlet'' Magnus Fossum (1935–1942)
File:Poke Bonnet.jpg, Poke Bonnet,Irene Lawson. Index of American Design.National Gallery of Art
File:Daguerreotype case 1943.8.9185.jpg, Daguerreotype Case Index of American Design
File:Age of chivalry circus wagon 1943.8.7735.jpg, "Age of Chivalry" Circus Wagon, c. 1938
File:Noah's ark and animals 1943.8.7806.jpg, Noah's Ark with animals-Sunday toy
Poster Division
The WPA Poster Division was headed by Richard Floethe. The WPA Poster Division is thought to have produced upward of 35,000 designs and printed some two million posters, originally by hand but quickly transitioning to widespread adoption of the silkscreen process. The Poster Division began in New York City and by 1938 had artists in 18 states; the Chicago unit was the second-most productive after New York. According to preeminent New Deal art historian Francis V. O’Connor, only about 2,000 surviving examples of WPA poster art are held in the nation’s library and museum print collections.
WPA Art Recovery Project
Hundreds of thousands of artworks were commissioned under the Federal Art Project. Many of the portable works have been lost, abandoned, or given away as unauthorized gifts. As custodian of the work, which remains federal property, the
General Services Administration
The General Services Administration (GSA) is an independent agency of the United States government established in 1949 to help manage and support the basic functioning of federal agencies. GSA supplies products and communications for U.S. gover ...
(GSA) maintains an inventory and works with the FBI and art community to identify and recover WPA art. In 2010, it produced a 22-minute documentary about the WPA Art Recovery Project, "Returning America’s Art to America", narrated by
Charles Osgood
Charles Osgood Wood III (born January 8, 1933), known professionally as Charles Osgood, is an American radio and television commentator, writer and musician. Osgood is best known for being the host of ''CBS News Sunday Morning'', a role he held ...
.
In July 2014, the GSA estimated that only 20,000 of the portable works have been located to date. In 2015, GSA investigators found 122 Federal Art Project paintings in California libraries, where most had been stored and forgotten.
See also
*
List of Federal Art Project artists
The Federal Art Project (1935–1943) of the Works Progress Administration was the largest of the New Deal art projects. As many as 10,000 artists were employed to create murals, easel paintings, sculpture, graphic art, posters, photography, Inde ...
* DeNoon, Christopher. ''Posters of the WPA'' (Los Angeles: Wheatley Press, 1987).
* Grieve, Victoria. ''The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture'' (2009 excerpt *
* Kelly, Andrew, ''Kentucky by Design: American Culture, the Decorative Arts and the Federal Art Project's Index of American Design'', University Press of Kentucky, 2015,
* Russo, Jillian. "The Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project Reconsidered." ''Visual Resources'' 34.1-2 (2018): 13-32.
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
General Services Administration
The General Services Administration (GSA) is an independent agency of the United States government established in 1949 to help manage and support the basic functioning of federal agencies. GSA supplies products and communications for U.S. gover ...
short documentary about efforts to recover WPA art
Posters for the People online archive of WPA posters at the
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library is ...
Smithsonian American Art Museum
The Smithsonian American Art Museum (commonly known as SAAM, and formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds o ...
George Mason University
George Mason University (George Mason, Mason, or GMU) is a public research university in Fairfax County, Virginia with an independent City of Fairfax, Virginia postal address in the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area. The university was origin ...
American Abstract Artists
American Abstract Artists (AAA) was formed in 1936 in New York City, to promote and foster public understanding of abstract art. American Abstract Artists exhibitions, publications, and lectures helped to establish the organization as a major fo ...
University of Michigan Museum of Art
The University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor, Michigan with is one of the largest university art museums in the United States. Built as a war memorial in 1909 for the university's fallen alumni from the Civil War, Alumni Memorial Hall ori ...