Works Progress Administration(WPA) Murals

In the mid-1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression, the U.S. federal government initiated a series of programs that were meant to provide economic relief to unemployed visual artists. The first such program was the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), a Treasury Department initiative under the direction of Edward Bruce. Launched in December 1933 and terminated the following spring, the PWAP was short-lived; even so, several hundred murals were completed under its auspices. In October 1934 the Treasury Department launched a second program, initially called the Section of Painting and Sculpture. Unlike the PWAP, which hired artists and paid them weekly wages, the new program sponsored competitions and awarded commissions to selected artists. Over 1000 post office murals were commissioned by the Treasury Section between 1934 and 1943, the year of the program's demise. The Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was established in May 1935 and also survived until 1943. In addition to employing painters, sculptors, and graphic artists, the FAP provided funding for community art centers and exhibitions, operated a design laboratory, and supported indexing and bibliographic projects. Artists employed in the Mural Division were assigned projects in schools, hospitals, prisons, airports, public housing, and recreational facilities, and altogether produced over 2500 murals. Under a fourth program, the Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP), in existence from July 1935 until June 1939, fewer than 100 murals were created.

As a popular art form, mural painting was in its ascendancy in North America in the 1920s and 1930s. In the early 1920s, the Mexican government began to subsidize the painting of murals celebrating Mexican history and the ideals of the Mexican Revolution. Artists such as Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco participated in this effort and later were privately commissioned to paint murals in the United States. Rivera, in particular, gained notoriety in the United States when, in 1933, he chose to include a portrait of Nikolai Lenin in a mural he had been invited to paint in the new Rockefeller Center in New York. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who had commissioned the mural, ordered the portrait removed. Rivera refused, and the mural was subsequently destroyed. The Rivera debacle, according to Karal Ann Marling, forced painters, critics, and ordinary citizens "to weigh the principle of freedom of expression against the countervailing rights of a majority that did not share Rivera's communistic faith." Issues surrounding the mural artist's responsibility to the public versus his or her right to creative autonomy would surface frequently in discussions of government-sponsored mural painting in the 1930s and 1940s.

The government did not officially dictate the style of the murals it sponsored; however, it did encourage its artists to paint with the public in mind. An artist commissioned to paint a post office mural by the Treasury Section, in particular, was expected to spend time in the community for which the mural was destined and to solicit suggestions for themes from community members. Most of the government-sponsored murals were realistic in style. Several abstract murals were, however, sponsored by the FAP, including Aviation: Evolution of Forms under Aerodynamic Limitations by Arshile Gorky (1904-1948), which was installed at Newark Airport, in New Jersey, in 1937. A typical mural reflected the influence of American Scene painting, a development in American art that emerged in the late 1920s as a reaction against European modern art and gained impetus in the 1930s. The most influential American Scene painter was Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), who painted four sets of murals between 1930 and 1936—including America Today for the New School of Social Research in New York City, and The Social History of the State of Missouri for the State Capitol Building in Jefferson City—but never worked on any federally sponsored projects. American Scene paintings often depicted regional landscapes, local customs, and ordinary, hard-working people. This was exactly the sort of subject matter deemed appropriate by agency officials for government-sponsored murals. In the murals produced, the settings were both contemporary and historical, but the values reflected in either case were traditional. Across the country, murals depicting Abraham Lincoln, the frontiersman Daniel Boone, the poet Carl Sandburg, the explorers Lewis and Clark, and the social reformer Jane Addams were produced. Often the subject chosen had local significance, as in the Jane Addams Memorial painted by Mitchell Siporin (1910-1976) for the Illinois FAP. This was also true of The Role of the Immigrant in the Industrial Development of America by Edward Laning (1906-1981), done under the auspices of the FAP for the Dining Room of Ellis Island. Subjects related to the processing and delivery of mail, in the present and in the past, were frequently represented in post office murals: Philip Guston (1913-1980), for example, painted Early Mail Service and the Construction of the Railroad for the post office in Commerce, Georgia.

Although conservative opposition to the federal art projects had existed from the start, it increased throughout the 1930s, and by the start of World War II, the nation's priorities began to shift. By 1943 the federal government had essentially ended its patronage of art. In slightly less than a decade it had sponsored some 4000 murals, a large and diverse body of work that contributes to our enduring awareness of the value of public art.

—Laural Weintraub

Further Reading:

Baigell, Matthew. The American Scene: American Painting of the 1930s. New York, Praeger, 1974.

Bustard, Bruce I. A New Deal for the Arts. Washington, D.C.,National Archives and Records Administration in association with University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1997.

Harris, Jonathan. Federal Art and National Culture: The Politics of Identity in New Deal America. New York, Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Marling, Karal Ann. Wall-to-Wall America: A Cultural History of Post-Office Murals in the Great Depression. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1982.

McKinzie, Richard D. The New Deal for Artists. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1973.

O'Connor, Francis V., editor. Art for the Millions: Essays from the 1930s by Artists and Administrators of the WPA Federal Art Project. Greenwich, Connecticut, New York Graphic Society, 1973.

Park, Marlene, and Gerald E. Markowitz. Democratic Vistas: Post Offices and Public Art in the New Deal. Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1984.