Today's economic woes pale in comparison with the trauma that sparked the New Deal. In 1933, the national unemployment rate hit 25 percent. Factories stood idle, shipyards empty, farms bankrupt after years of drought, insect plagues and falling crop prices. Out-of-work businessmen queued up for free food in suits and ties while the more destitute lined their worn-out shoes with newspapers. Rabble-rousers stoked fear and preached revolution.
Who needed art in such volatile times?
Strange as it may seem today, President Franklin Roosevelt figured that paintings were just the ticket. They were among the many things he threw at the problems of a hungry, despairing country. Launched in December 1933, the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) lasted only seven months but in that short time 3,750 artists turned out 15,600 artworks that went to libraries, schools and public offices nationwide.
More than 50 of the pictures are on view in "1934: A New Deal for Artists" at the Minnesota History Center through Sept. 30. They're all on loan from the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., which organized the show and published its well researched catalog ($34).
As snapshots of their time, the paintings present a surprisingly varied landscape that includes One Percenters at play, as well as the 99 percent at work (or not). Artists were urged to document the "American scene" and help reknit the nation's frayed social fabric. They headed for the subways and the byways, depicting street festivals, tenements and workers where they found them -- in barbershops, cotton fields and coal mines. There are vistas of country roads, small towns, freshly plowed fields and even a marvelous pair of mountain lions.
In a loosely cubistic style, Colorado artist Ila McAfee Turner shows the lions gazing down from a rocky ledge at the magnificent forests of Colorado's Black Canyon of the Gunnison. Just the sight of them, sleek, powerful, yet contented, lifts the spirits today as it must have then. If creatures like that can thrive in America, surely people can, too, the picture seems to say.
In his lively "Racing," Gerald S. Foster depicts sleek yachts zooming across Long Island Sound, taut sails dipping in stiff breezes as clouds scuttle overhead and waves tumble over pink and aqua hulls. Agnes Tait wraps an aura of happiness, if not prosperity, around families sledding and skating in Central Park as twilight falls, lights twinkle on and a soft glow silhouettes New York's skyscrapers. Likewise, Morris Kantor infuses "Baseball at Night" with cheerful camaraderie, and subtly emphasizes what was then a novelty -- light grids atop tall poles -- as a colorful crowd watches a minor-league game.
Men at work