Committed artists of the 30s [Long]

[davemarc]

> From: Joseph Cerrato <100443.1223 at CompuServe.COM>
> To: Pynchon List <PYNCHON-L at waste.org>
> Subject: Committed artists of the 30s 
> Date: Tuesday, February 18, 1997 4:16 PM
> 
> Sorry for introducing an entirely unrelated topic but I thought some of
you
> might be of help.

This is not an "entirely unrelated topic," as will be shown momentarily.

>  Yesterday in Paris, I went to see an exhibition of American artists of
the
> thirties  (New Deal Art). About 100 engravings  and lithographs were
shown. I
> knew nothing about that form of committed (and subsidized) art which
presents a
> picture of the American working class at the time of the depression years
and
> the New Deal. Some of them brought to mind themes familiar to a Pynchon
reader.
>  The curators for the exhibition had chosen to move from the  somewhat
naively
> optimistic representations of machines and technology of  engravings
close to
> Machinism and Fururism in their exaltation of progresss and industry, to
a more
> somber  and desperately ironic vision  leaving little if any room for
hope. I'd
> like to have more information about artists like Hugo Gellert (His  _By
> Products_  is definitely Pynchonesque IMHO), Harry Sternberg, Thomas Hart
> Benton, Howard Cook, Alexander Hogue, Benton Murdoch Spruance. 
> References on these artists and others working in the same line who  held
> congress in 1936 ( so the exhibition leaflet says) would be appreciated. 
> Anyone?
> 
This artwork in this exhibit was produced as part of the Works Progress
Administration, an agency that arose under FDR's New Deal to employ the
otherwise unemployed on public projects during the Depression.  Under Harry
Hopkins, the multi-billion dollar WPA, which was renamed the Work Projects
Administration in 1939, "undertook extensive building and improvement
projects to provide work for the unemployed" from 1935-43. In the year that
the exhibit's artworks were created, the WPA peaked in size with more than
three million primarily unskilled workers--about one third of the
"unemployed."  (So-called "professionals" like teachers and dentists were
also put to work under the WPA).  Like all government agencies, the WPA has
been criticized for inefficiency, and during its existence it was under
constant attack; nevertheless, completed projects included 116,000
buildings (including schools, hospitals, and auditoriums), 78,000 bridges,
and 651,000 miles of roadway.  Parks, docks and airports also came into
existence (or were improved) under the WPA.  

In Vineland, Pynchon writes "The orchard Vato and Blood were looking for
was on the other side of Shade Creek, meaning the usual difficult passage
over the ruins of the old WPA bridge, where somehow, mysteriously, at least
one lane was always open.  Sometimes entire segments vanished overnight, as
if floated away downriver on pontoons--detours were always necessary, often
with the directions crudely spay-painted onto pieces of wall or old plywood
shuttering, in the same bristling typeface as gang graffiti."

The WPA is perhaps best remembered for its funding of artists and writers
through such programs as the Federal Arts Project, Federal Theatre Project,
and Federal Writers' Project.  

Regarding the Federal Arts Project, H. H. Arnason's History of Modern Art
sez that it was "influential, perhaps because of its bureaucratic
governmental patronage, in the vast expansion of a kind of literal,
understandable subject matter.  The Art Project was also enormously
influential in that it permitted many of the pioneers of the following
generation to survive as artists."

Reiterated in the same volume:  "From the point of view of the art
produced, the 1930s may seem a bleak and reactionary time in the United
States.  The crucial event of this decade--indeed, a catalyst transcending
even the Armory Show--was the establishment, by the United States
government, of a Federal Art Project.  It enabled many of the major
American painters to survive; and a large percentage of the younger artists
who created a new art in America after World War II might never have had a
chance to emerge had it not been for the Project."  

(Part of the premise in Arnason is that the move to abstraction was
progressive.  Arnason acknowledges that WPA move to "literal" subject
matter was part of a worldwide tendency in the Thirties and the war years. 
It can be safely said that social realism was ascendant during this
period.)

Participants in the Federal Arts Project included Arshile Gorky, Willem de
Kooning, Philip Guston, Adolph Gottlieb, Franz Kline, Stuart Davis, James
Brooks, Philip Evergood, and William Gropper.  Of the artists mentioned by
Joseph Cerrato, Thomas Hart Benton is probably the best known.   Here's a
Benton bio courtesy of Bill Gate's Encarta Encyclopedia:

Benton, Thomas Hart (1889-1975),  regionalist American painter, known for
his vigorous, colorful murals of the 1930s, mostly of rollicking scenes
from the rural past of the American South and Midwest.
Benton was born in Neosho, Missouri, and named after his granduncle, the
famed pre-American Civil War senator [who opposed the extension of slavery
and was nicknamed Old Bullion for opposing paper currency.]  He studied at
the Art Institute of Chicago and then spent three years in Paris. Living in
New York City after 1912, Benton turned away from modernism and gradually
developed a rugged naturalism that affirmed traditional rural values. By
the 1930s he was riding a tide of popular acclaim along with his fellow
regionalists Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry. Benton's masterpiece, the
mural Modern America (1931, New School for Social Research, New York City),
presented an optimistic portrayal of a vital country filled with earthy,
muscular figures.
Benton returned to Missouri, taught at the Kansas City Art Institute, and
continued to paint both panels and murals. His mural in the state capitol
in Jefferson City (1935) stirred protests because of its open portrayals of
some of the seamier facets of Missouri's past. Other Missouri murals are in
the Truman Memorial Library, Independence (1961), and in Joplin (1973).
Benton's most famous student was Jackson Pollock, who studied with Benton
at the Art Students' League in New York City from 1929 to 1931.

Unfortunately, I don't have much information about the other artists
Cerrato mentioned.  At first glance, it seems they haven't received much
attention in the United States, where these days the most popular WPA work
may well be that of its photographers--who, if memory serves, weren't
necessarily employed as artists but may instead have been affiliated with
the development programs and the administrative offices themselves
(documenting their work).  I believe that one can get inexpensive prints of
work by Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Eudora Welty(!), and other outstanding
shutterbugs through the National Archives.  

The Federal Theater Project constituted the first effort of the US
government to fund theater.  Under the direction of Hallie Flanagan, the
Vassar-based champion of the avant-garde (FDR called her the third most
powerful woman in America), it was one of the most controversial WPA
undertakings, breathing its last in 1939 after a battle with the House
Un-American Activities Committee.  "The highlight in this Congressional
farce-tragedy came," wrote Edmond Gagey in Revolution in American Drama
(1947), "with the question by Representative Joe Starnes as to whether
'this Marlowe--author of Dr. Faustus (1588)--was a Communist.'"  Flanagan
wrote about her FTP experience in Arena:  The Story of the Federal Theater
(1940).  

Jeffrey St. Clair may be distressed to be reminded that government money,
channeled through the FTP, played a key role in the careers of Orson
Welles, John Houseman, and Joseph Cotten as well as wild woman Arlene
Francis, Will Geer, John Huston, Arthur Miller, Virgil Thomson, Marc
Blitzstein, and Elmer Rice.  Besides the revival of Dr. Faustus,
productions of the FTP (which also came to include a Federal Dance Project)
included the "voodoo Macbeth" by the Negro theatre (mentioned recently by
some Chris or other), the Living Newspaper, the U.S. premiere of Murder in
the Cathedral, and Sinclair Lewis's controversial adaptation of It Can't
Happen Here, which opened simultaneously in more than 22 cities.

The Federal Writers' Project was most active from 1935 to 1939. 
Participants included James Agee, Conrad Aiken, Saul Bellow, Erskine
Caldwell, John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Archibald MacLeish, Edmund Wilson,
and Richard Wright.  Its projects included almanacs, historical tracts, and
folklore collections.  But it's best remembered for its invaluable American
Guides to the states.  When a certain Long Island-born writer wanted to set
a short story in a part of the country he'd never visited, he "found the
details...in the regional guide to the Berkshires put out in the 1930's by
the Federal Writers Project of the WPA."

In the introduction to "Slow Learner," Pynchon continues, "This is one of
an excellent set of state and regional volumes, which may still be
available in libraries.  They make instructive and pleasurable reading.  In
fact, there is some stuff in the Berkshire book so good, so rich in detail
and deep in feeling, that even I was ashamed to steal from it."

The last time I looked, WPA Guides to New York City were still available in
bookstores.  

(Note:  Much of the preceding was shamelessly stolen from a variety of
standard reference sources.)