August 5, 2020 – IN 2009 CELEBRATING 75 YEARS OF WPA ART

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WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 5th, 2020

Our 122nd ISSUE

FROM THE ARCHIVES

1934: A NEW DEAL FOR ARTISTS

PART 1

1934: A NEW DEAL FOR ARTISTS
SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM
EXHIBITED IN 2009

ALL IMAGES ARE PROPERTY OF THE SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM, WASHINGTON, D.C.

In 1934, Americans grappled with an economic situation that feels all too familiar today. Against the backdrop of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration created the Public Works of Art Project—the first federal government program to support the arts nationally. Federal officials in the 1930s understood how essential art was to sustaining America’s spirit. Artists from across the United States who participated in the program, which lasted only six months from mid-December 1933 to June 1934, were encouraged to depict “the American Scene.” The Public Works of Art Project not only paid artists to embellish public buildings, but also provided them with a sense of pride in serving their country. They painted regional, recognizable subjects—ranging from portraits to cityscapes and images of city life to landscapes and depictions of rural life—that reminded the public of quintessential American values such as hard work, community and optimism.

1934: A New Deal for Artists was organized to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Public Works of Art Project by drawing on the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s unparalleled collection of vibrant artworks created for the program. The paintings in this exhibition are a lasting visual record of America at a specific moment in time. George Gurney, curator emeritus, organized the exhibition with Ann Prentice Wagner, curator of drawings at the Arkansas Art Center.

ROSS DICKINSON

Long before Ross Dickinson received any formal training, he experimented with oil paint and educated himself through reading. Awarded a scholarship to the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, Dickinson studied with Frank Tolles Chamberlin (1873–1961) and became interested in mural painting.

In 1926 Dickinson spent nine months in New York City studying with John Costigan at the Grand Central School of Art and Charles Hawthorne at the National Academy of Design; he also received a scholarship from the Tiffany Foundation. Dickinson returned to California later that year and studied at the Santa Barbara School of Fine Arts, where he received his first mural commission. He soon married sculptor Daisy Hanson, and they established themselves, albeit under adverse financial conditions, as artists and teachers in Santa Barbara. Dickinson depicted the varying California landscape and men and women at work, which often aligned him with California regionalism.

By 1934 he was involved in the Public Works of Art Project, which led to numerous mural commissions in the mid-1930s. His later work displays a stylistic change, as he moved toward freer brushwork in fast-drying acrylics through the 1950s and 1960s. He continued to work and exhibit in the southern California area until his death in Santa Barbara in 1978.

New York artist Martha Levy trained at the Art Student’s League and attended their summer program in Woodstock, NY from 1926 to 1932. There she focused on landscape painting and honed her skills with her chosen medium, oil over a base of tempera. During the 1930’s, Levy joined the Public Works of Art Program to supplement her income. in 1935, she joined the WPA Federal Art Project where she worked on murals commissioned as part of the New Deal program. Her views of the Maine seaside are painted in the same style as her Woodstock work and are similar to the Realism employed in many WPA mural projects of the time. (Invaluable.com)

Born and lives in California. Painter, etcher, illustrator, designer, who has received numerous prizes for his work. Charles Sullivan, ed American Beauties: Women in Art and Literature (New York: Henry N. Abrams, Inc., in association with National Museum of American Art, 1993) Millard Sheets studied art in California and became one of the state’s foremost artists and architects during his lifetime. He worked hard to make a name for himself early in his career, and by 1935 he had already shown his work in twenty-seven museums across the country. One critic titled a review of Sheets’s New York debut ​“A Name to Remember.”

Sheets supplemented his income working with architects as a color consultant and designer, and during World War II he worked as an illustrator for Life magazine, traveling to India and Burma. When he returned from the war, he organized an exhibition featuring the work of German and Japanese artists as a gesture of reconciliation. Over the course of his career, Sheets designed numerous buildings, including banks, malls, schools, and private homes. He also produced watercolors, prints, and mosaics while serving as chair of the art department at Scripps College and Claremont Graduate School, and he later directed the Otis Art Institute. (Steadman, Millard Sheets, Scripps College, 1976

CARL GUSTAF NELSON  CENTRAL PARK  1934

Carl Gustaf Simon Nelson , born January 5, 1898 in Hörby , Skåne, died in 1988 in Elmhurst , Illinois, was a Swedish-American painter and illustrator . He was the son of the carmaker Johan Nilsson and Christina Olsson. Nelson came to America at the age of five and grew up in Sioux City, Iowa. He began studying art around 1920, first for two years at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and then at the Art Students League in New York for five years. He then undertook a study trip through 15 of Europe’s countries.

Since 1935, he has participated in numerous group exhibitions in New York, Boston and Phiadelphia and in the Swedish-American exhibitions in Chicago. He was awarded the Tiffany Foundation Scholarship 1931-1933. In addition to his own creations, he worked as a teacher at the Boris Mirski Gallery in Boston 1945-1947 and the Cambridge School of Design in Cambridge 1948-1952. His art consists of still lifes , figurative motifs,landscapes and non-figurative compositions in oil , gouache and tempera .

Nelson is represented at the US Department of Labor in Washington, the Smithsonian American Art Museum
and the Worcester Museum of Art in Massachusetts.

Maril was a modernist painter whose style reduced figures and objects to their essence. Subjects ranged from urban landscapes to coastal seascapes. Maril’s art from the beginning showed a consistent development: it was nature-based, abstractly organized, and simplified in form and content. The noted artist and critic Olin Dows, wrote about the then 26-year-old artist, “Herman Maril’s painting is reserved, and, like most good painting, it is simple. He is interested in the essentials. Each picture has its core; each is beautifully conceived and organized. It is clothed in a certain poetry.”

Karl Fortess came to America from Belgium and studied art in Chicago and New York. In 1937 the Works Progress Administration sent him and several other artists to Alaska to document the towns, villages, and remote wilderness landscapes (Pemberton, ​“Alaska art museum collects WPA’s Depression works from the territory,” Columbia Daily Tribune, November 9, 2003). Fortess taught at many different schools, including Boston University School of Fine Art, where he also created an archive of interviews with more than two hundred and fifty American artists.

New Yorkers, including the city’s artists, through the worst hardships of the Great Depression. Looking from the dock of a harbor island, Thomas Delbridge showed the dark mouths of Manhattan’s ferry terminals; above them ever taller buildings climb out of red shadows into gold and white sunshine. The crisply outlined forms evoke such famous structures as the Woolworth Building to the left and the Singer Building to the right without placing the buildings precisely or describing specific details. The skyscraper at the center suggests the mighty Empire State Building as it had stood incomplete before its triumphant opening on May 1, 1931. Even as the stock market foundered and thousands were thrown out of work, New Yorkers had gathered in excited throngs to watch their tallest tower rise. The Manhattan skyscrapers in the painting appear to be pushing back dark clouds, creating an oasis of brilliant blue around the island. Image: Thomas James Delbridge, Lower Manhattan, 1934, oil on canvas 26 1/8 x 30 ¼ in. (66.3 x 76.9 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the U.S. Department of Labor.

Many of us recognize the Empire Stores in t he foreground. The buildings were used as coffee and sugar warehouses from the 1920’s to 1950’s.  Abandoned for decades, the buildings were re-imagined into communal and dining spaces in the last few years and continue the restoration of the Brooklyn waterfront, minus the ships, cargo and heavy industry.

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 in the same style for the Public Works of Art Project and the Federal Art Project.

The son of Italian immigrants, Daniel Celentano was born into a large family within an Italian neighborhood of Manhattan.
A childhood polio attack left him with only partial use of his right leg. Made homebound by this disability he was unable to attend school and, recognizing his artistic skill while he was still a boy, his parents were able to arrange for art teachers to tutor him at home.
Through hard work and perseverance he regained control over his leg by the age of twelve and at that time became the first pupil of the social realist painter Thomas Hart Benton.

In 1918 he won scholarships that enabled him to attend Charles Hawthorne’s Cape Cod School of Art in Provincetown, Massachusetts, New York School of Fine And Applied Art in Greenwich Village, and the National Academy of Design in New York’s Upper East Side. The Cape Cod School taught students during the summer months and the other two gave classes during the rest of the year.

This painting is also called “Festa di Monte Carmela.” It was included in an exhibition called “1934: A New Deal for Artists,” in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. During the 1930s and until the outbreak of World War II Celentano participated in group shows at galleries in New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, and other American cities.
His work was first shown to the public in an exhibition of works selected by Alfred Stieglitz that was held at the Opportunity Gallery in 1930. His painting, “Festival,” of a few years later, shows the boisterous community of East Harlem in holiday mode. The Smithsonian’s exhibition label says, “This painting fairly bursts with the raucous sounds, pungent smells, and vibrant characters of Manhattan’s ethnic street life.” Wikipedia

With exhilarating speed yachts sweep across the choppy waters of Long Island Sound, the water foaming white against their hulls. In the foreground, three small Atlantic-class boats lean precariously to stay on the course of their race. In the middle ground, a pair of larger craft catch the wind in bellying spinnakers as they sail in nearly the opposite direction.

Artist Gerald Sargent Foster, an avid yachtsman, often depicted yacht races. He knew every rope and spar of these boats, but minimized such technical details to avoid distracting the eye from the clean geometric shapes that dominate the painting. The artist repeated and overlapped the streamlined hulls and taut sails of the boats, creating an elegant pattern silhouetted against blue sky and water. Yet the geometry is not cool and detached—every line and color speaks of the keen excitement of yacht racing. Even in the teeth of the Depression, this sport of New York’s wealthy continued to be popular.

Lily Furedi (May 20, 1896 – November 1969) was a Hungarian-American artist. A native of Budapest, she achieved national recognition for her 1934 painting, The Subway, which is a sympathetic portrayal of passengers in a New York City Subway car. Light-hearted in tone, the painting depicts a cross-section of city dwellers from the viewpoint of a fellow commuter.

When Lili Furedi was 31 years old she debarked from the ship Cellina at the port of Los Angeles. She came from Budapest by way of Trieste and on the ship’s manifest she reported her occupation as painter. There is no record of art training she may have received either before or after her arrival in the United States. There is no doubt she was working as a professional artist, however, because in 1931 she won a prize for her painting, The Village, at the annual Christmas show held by the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors at the Argent Gallery in January of that year.

In 1932 and for much of the rest of the decade she placed paintings in group exhibitions, including: a 1932 exhibition by Hungarian-American artists in which she showed works called Hungarian Village and Hungarian Farm,a 1935 exhibition of the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors in which she showed a painting called Interior,(3) a 1936 exhibition by the New York Municipal Art Committee, and a 1937 exhibition at the Woman’s Club of Glen Ridge, New Jersey. Reviewing the 43rd annual Women Painters and Sculptors show of 1934,

Lily Furedi, The Subway, 1934, oil on canvas, 39 x 48 1/4 in. (99.1 x 122.6 cm.), created for the U.S. Public Works of Art Project Early in 1934 Furedi was accepted into the Public Works of Art Project. This pioneering federal program employed artists at craftsmen’s wages to make pictures on the theme of “the American scene.

“Her contribution to the project was the painting called The Subway. The picture was one of twenty-five selected for presentation as gifts to the White House. It was also in a group that President and Mrs. Roosevelt had themselves selected as being among the best in the show. Beginning in 1935, when it accompanied a book review in The New York Timeshe painting has frequently been used as an illustration in books, articles, news accounts, and Internet web sites. In examining Furedi’s The Subway, critics and other observers have found much to say. The painting was said to be cheerful and the artist’s interest to be sympathetic. It was seen as vibrant, bright, and optimistic. Its scene was said to be playful, clean, and decorous and its design elements as idealistically deployedOne reviewer saw an influence of “Cézanne’s cubes and cones” in a scene which tells a compelling story of a projected “society in which sex and race are comfortably, if nervously, aligned”and a poet, using the ekphrastic poetic technique, declared that the painting showed the “best in mass transit,” in which “we get to meet, greet, / and saunter through / time and space together.” The poem, by Angie Trudell Vasquez, is called “Eyes Alive.” It closes: “see what beauty / we can make / when all is lit up with color / warm and welcoming, / beckoning you / into the picture, / offering you a seat.” Following the 1934 touring show in which it appeared, The Subway was not again included in a public exhibition until 1983 when it appeared in “Social Concern and Urban Realism: American Painting of the 1930s” at Gallery 1199 in New York’s Martin Luther King Labor Center. It appeared again in “1934: A New Deal for Artists,” a touring exhibition put together by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2009

After the Public Works of Art Project was closed down in 1934 Furedi joined the Federal Art Project. She is recorded as being employed in this program in 1937–1939[39] and, specifically as a muralist, in 1940. Furedi’s work was reviewed infrequently after the mid-1930s. In 1941 she painted an altar mural called The Galley Slave which she donated to a Hungarian church in New York. She died in New York at the age of 73 in November 1969.

Gale Stockwell was a cartoonist for his high school paper, then studied at the Kansas City Art Institute. In 1933 he was hired by the Public Works of Art Project, which paid a small wage to many struggling artists during the Depression. He lost track of a lot of his work after giving it to the government and many years later was not only surprised to find one of his images on a jigsaw puzzle, but also discovered that this same painting was hanging at the White House! Stockwell worked in advertising until 1954, when he retired to devote all of his time to painting colorful images of Missouri towns and landscapes

Oil on photograph on canvas mounted on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the Internal Revenue Service through the General Services Administration , 1962.8.41

The street and sidewalks are empty; not a person, car, or even a stray dog is to be seen. What is the viewer supposed to see in this unpopulated street illuminated by glowing street lamps? Do the yellow street sign and the modest fireplug have some unexpected significance? The real subject of the painting turns out to be a newly built underpass designed to safely route cars under the train tracks in Binghamton, New York. During the 1930s several underpasses around Binghamton were upgraded by federal and New York State agencies working to improve city infrastructure while providing employment to those thrown out of work by the Great Depression.

The stark lighting of street lamps at night shows off the clean lines of the freshly cast concrete as if the underpass were a modernist sculpture or an elegant new office building. The Smithsonian owns two other paintings documenting railroad underpasses built elsewhere in the country during the same era. All three were painted by Smithsonian American Art Museum artists working over photographs printed on canvas. Through documentary projects of this kind civil works became allied to artworks, providing employment for builders and artists alike. 1934: A New Deal for Artists exhibition label

This painting was created for the Federal Art Project, a branch of the Works Progress Administration developed to give financial and moral support to artists during the Depression. There is no information about who the painter was, but in 1981 a visitor to the Museum recognized the underpass as one near his home in Binghamton, New York. The artist printed a photograph of the scene onto the canvas, then painted over it in careful detail. The glowing streetlights are like stars brought down to earth from the distant skies, drawing the viewer into the image and through the brightly lit tunnel. The road seems less like an ordinary street in the city and more like a portal into the great empty blackness above

Born Columbus, Ohio Died Glens Falls, New York born Columbus, OH 1904-died Glens Falls, NY 1968 Nationalities American Linked Open Data Linked Open Data URI Douglass Crockwell spent a good part of his career creating illustrations and advertisements for the Saturday Evening Post. His paintings appeared in promotions for Friskies dog food and in a poster for the American Relief for Holland, which won him a gold medal from the Art Director’s Club in 1946. Crockwell created murals and posters for the Works Progress Administration during the Depression, and also experimented with short flip-card films that could be viewed through a mutoscope. A few years before he died, Crockwell estimated that he had drawn four hundred full-page images, of which more than three billion prints had been made (New York Times, December 2, 1968).

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EDITORIAL

We thank the Smithsonian for having marvelous resources of art and the exhibits that were on view . Enjoy these works from 1934.
The stories behind these works are fascinating, especially Lily Furedi’s “Subway”.  The painting was exhibited and admired and then vanished for decades.  Furedi’s other works are just as wonderful as this non-social distancing view or the New York subway in 1934.

Millard Sheets has quite a collection of mosaics. Anyone who has visited Los Angeles has see the Home Banks buildings with mosaics on them. They were done by Sheets.

The mystery behind the “Underpass” is fascinating and many of us know highways that look like this underpass image. Remind me of road leading to the George Washington Bridge in NJ.  

More to come tomorrow,

JUDITH BERDY

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Text by Judith Berdy
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Edited by Deborah Dorff

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