The Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) was a New Deal program designed to employ artists that operated from 1933 to 1934. The program was headed by

Edward Bruce Edward Bruce, Earl of Carrick ( Norman French: ; mga, Edubard a Briuis; Modern Scottish Gaelic: gd, Eideard or ; – 14 October 1318), was a younger brother of Robert the Bruce, King of Scots. He supported his brother in the 1306–1314 s ...

, under the

United States Treasury Department 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 ...

with funding from the

Civil Works Administration The Civil Works Administration (CWA) was a short-lived job creation program established by the New Deal during the Great Depression in the United States to rapidly create mostly manual-labor jobs for millions of unemployed workers. The jobs were ...

. The PWAP served as way to employ artists, while having competent representatives of the profession display their work in a public setting.''provided by John R. Graham, Curator of Exhibits, Western Illinois University Art Gallery, 1 University Circle, Macomb, Illinois 61455'' Although the program lasted less than one year, it had employed 3,749 artists, who produced 15,663 works of art. In an art exhibition that featured 451 paintings commissioned by the PWAP, 30 percent of the artists featured were in their twenties, and 25 percent were first-generation immigrants. Coit Tower, San Francisco (2013) - 07

Agnes Tait, Skating in Central Park, 1934, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Astronomers Monument at Griffith Observatory

Overview and purpose

The purpose of the Public Works of Art Project was "to give work to artists by arranging to have competent representatives of the profession embellish public buildings." Artworks from the project were shown or incorporated into a variety of locations, including the White House and the House of Representatives. Artists were paid an average of $75.59 per artwork, and the PWAP used a total of $1,184,400 to pay artists for their work. Participants were required to be professional artists, and in total, 3,749 artists were hired, and 15,663 works were produced: 7,000 easel paintings; 700 mural projects; 750 sculptures; and 2500 works of graphic art were commissioned by the PWAP. The PWAP sought to produce images focused on the "American Scene", and commissioned paintings and murals that depicted "optimistic visions of America during a time of economic desperation." However, many artists disliked the idea of creating art that focused only on the positive aspects of living in America, as people were still experiencing dire hardships and personal tragedies from the Great Depression. This created a community of PWAP artists who aspired to create artworks depicting both the "haves" and "have nots" of America, referred to as Social Realists. The project was succeeded by the

Federal Art Project The Federal Art Project (1935–1943) was a New Deal program to fund the visual arts in the United States. Under national director Holger Cahill, it was one of five Federal Project Number One projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administrati ...

of 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).

Art from the Public Works of Art Project

Coit Tower Murals

The largest of the projects sponsored by the PWAP were the murals in San Francisco's Coit Tower, employing a total of 44 artists and assistants, begun in December 1933 and completed in June 1934. Many of the muralists were faculty members or former students of the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA). Among the lead artists were

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 ...

, Victor Arnautoff, Jane Berlandina
Ray Bertrand
Roy Boynton
Ralph Chesse
Ben Cunningham, Rinaldo Cuneo
Harold Mallette DeanParker Hall

Edith Hamlin Edith Ann Hamlin (June 23, 1902 – February 18, 1992) was an American landscape and portrait painter, and muralist. She is known for her social realism murals created while working with the Public Works of Art Project, Federal Art Project and th ...

, George Albert Harris
William Hesthal
John Langley Howard, Lucien Labaudt
Gordon Langdon

Jose Moya del Pino José Moya del Piño (1891–1969) was a Spanish-born American painter, muralist and educator. He associated with the Post-impressionists of Spain and the Depression-era muralists in the San Francisco Bay Area. He taught classes at the San Fran ...

Otis Oldfield Otis William Oldfield (July 3, 1890 – May 18, 1969) was a San Francisco painter, printmaker and art educator. Early life and education Otis William Oldfield was born on July 3, 1890, in Sacramento, California, Sacramento, California. He att ...

Frederick E. Olmsted Frederick Erskine Olmsted, also known as Fritz Olmsted, (November 8, 1872 – February 19, 1925) was an American forester and one of "the founders of American forestry". He is credited with helping to establish the National Forest system in th ...

Suzanne Scheuer Suzanne Scheuer (1898 – 1984) was an American fine artist, best known for her New Deal-era murals. She painted one of the murals in Coit Tower, ''Newsgathering''. Biography Suzanne Scheuer was born in San Jose, California on February 11 ...

, Ralph Stackpole
Edward TeradaFrede VidarClifford Wight
and

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 ...

. After a majority of the murals were completed, the Big Strike of 1934 shut down the Pacific Coast. Though it has been claimed that allusions to the event were subversively included in the murals by some of the artists, in fact the murals were largely completed before the strike began and none of those that were not completed by that time show any reference to the strike.

Griffith Observatory's ''Astronomers Monument''

''The Astronomers Monument'', commissioned by the Public Works of Art Project in 1933, sits outside of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, California. ''The Astronomers Monument'' was designed by

Archibald Garner Lorraine Archibald “Archie” Garner (February 24, 1904 – May 7, 1969) was an American sculptor. During the New Deal he was commissioned by the Public Works of Art Project and Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture to create several not ...

, and created by Garner and five other artists. Each artist was responsible for sculpting one of the astronomers featured in the monument, and in total the monument features six influential astronomers:

Hipparchus Hipparchus (; el, Ἵππαρχος, ''Hipparkhos''; BC) was a Greek astronomer, geographer, and mathematician. He is considered the founder of trigonometry, but is most famous for his incidental discovery of the precession of the e ...

(about 150 BC); Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543);

Galileo Galilei Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642) was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath. Commonly referred to as Galileo, his name was pronounced (, ). He ...

(1564–1642);

Johannes Kepler Johannes Kepler (; ; 27 December 1571 – 15 November 1630) was a German astronomer, mathematician, astrologer, natural philosopher and writer on music. He is a key figure in the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, best known for his laws ...

(1571–1630);

Isaac Newton Sir Isaac Newton (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1726/27) was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, Theology, theologian, and author (described in his time as a "natural philosophy, natural philosopher"), widely ...

(1642–1727); and

William Herschel Frederick William Herschel (; german: Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel; 15 November 1738 – 25 August 1822) was a German-born British astronomer and composer. He frequently collaborated with his younger sister and fellow astronomer Caroline ...

(1738–1822). One of the artists, George Stanley, was also the creator of the famous " Oscar" statuette presented at the Academy Awards. On November 25, 1934, about six months prior to the opening of the Observatory, a celebration took place to mark the completion of the ''Astronomers Monument''. The only "signature" on the ''Astronomers Monument'' is "PWAP 1934" referring to the program which funded the project and the year it was completed.

''Muse of Music, Dance, Drama''

Entrance to Hollywood Bowl, Hollywood, Calif (70194)

This

Art Deco Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the Unit ...

style monument serves as the gateway to the

Hollywood Bowl The Hollywood Bowl is an amphitheatre in the Hollywood Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. It was named one of the 10 best live music venues in America by ''Rolling Stone'' magazine in 2018. The Hollywood Bowl is known for its distin ...

, and is said to be the largest of hundreds of monuments in Southern California constructed during the New Deal. The 200-foot long, 22-foot high sculpture is also a fountain and was constructed with concrete and covered with slabs of decorative granite. The structure was completed in 1940 by George Stanley, also a contributor to the Griffith Observatory's ''Astronomers Monument'' and who is better known as the sculptor who molded the original

Academy Awards The Academy Awards, better known as the Oscars, are awards for artistic and technical merit for the American and international film industry. The awards are regarded by many as the most prestigious, significant awards in the entertainment ind ...

' Oscar statue. The structure was refurbished in 2006.

''Golden Gate Bridge''

This painting, titled ''Golden Gate Bridge,'' was commissioned by the Public Works of Art Project in 1934. The artist,

Ray Strong Ray Stanford Strong (January 3, 1905 – July 3, 2006) was an American painter from Corvallis, Oregon. He associated with the New Deal muralists in the San Francisco Bay Area. Early life and education Ray Strong was born in Corvallis, Oreg ...

, painted a depiction of the Golden Gate Bridge while it was under construction. Building the Golden Gate Bridge seemed impossible at the time it was built, due to the wind and overall complexity of the bridge design. This painting was commissioned as a tribute to the engineering and design feats undertaken during the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. This painting represents the American Idealism art style.

''Connecticut Barns''

This 1934 painting was not recognized as being the work of

Charles Sheeler Charles Sheeler (July 16, 1883 – May 7, 1965) was an American artist known for his Precisionist paintings, commercial photography, and the avant-garde film, '' Manhatta'', which he made in collaboration with Paul Strand. Sheeler is recognized ...

until a

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 ...

art researcher found it in an Interior Department closet in 1983. It was not known that Sheeler had been employed by the Public Works of Art Project because the artist's name had been misspelled in government records. He was paid $221.85 for ''Connecticut Barns''. Its title distinguishes it from a similar watercolor—''Connecticut Barns in Landscape''—measuring 4 by 5 inches, which is thought to be a study for this oil canvas.

Additional works

*
Figures
' (1934) by Josef Presser. *
Inside a Lumber Mill
' (1934), by Claire Falkenstein. *
Lumber Mill
' (1934), by Claire Falkenstein. *
Oyster Shuckers
' (1934) b
Catherine M. Howell
*
The Factory
' (1934), by Louis Hirshman. *
The Timber Bucker
' (1934), b
Ernest Ralph Norling
*
The Storm
' (1934), by

Abram Molarsky Abram Molarsky (also Abraham; September 25, 1880 – May 4, 1955) was an American Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artist, known primarily as a landscape painter and a colorist. His work is characterized by rich hues and strong, textured ...

. *
Upstream Boulder Dam
' (1934), b
Adrian D. Clem
*
Valley Farms
' (1934), by Ross Dickinson.

References

External links

*
Public Works of Art Project. Report of the Assistant Director of the Treasury to Federal Emergency Relief Administrator, December 8, 1933 – June 30, 1934
' (

HathiTrust HathiTrust Digital Library is a large-scale collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries including content digitized via Google Books and the Internet Archive digitization initiatives, as well as content digitized locall ...

)
The Living New Deal Project
a digital database of the lasting effects of the New Deal founded in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley (including an interactive map featuring detailed information on public artworks created as a part of the New Deal)

1934: A New Deal for Artists
a link to Anne Prentice Wagner's article, "1934: A New Deal for Artists" in the Spring 2009 issue of Antiques and Fine Art Magazine. * Additional photographs of th
Coit Tower murals
by

, Victor Arnautoff, et al. {{DEFAULTSORT:Public Works Of Art Project New Deal projects of the arts New Deal agencies Public art in the United States 1933 in the United States 1934 in the United States