Government Inspiration

¶ At Elgin, Ill. last week inmates of the State Hospital for the Insane gazed appreciatively at a newly completed 25-ft. mural showing other inmates weaving cloth. It was paid for with $2,000 of Government money, kept 14 WPArtists busy for four months. Their instructions were to use only the softest shades of primary colors, to "avoid all exciting combinations."

¶ In San Francisco, at the University of California, two huge frescoes were unveiled fortnight ago in the Medical Center's lecture room. By Muralist Bernard Zakheim, they showed the development of modern medicine, from the ancient purifying brazier to the xray. Not far away San Francisco's best known sculptor, Beniamino Bufano, was putting the finishing touches to a 14-ft. statue of Dr. Sun Yatsen, to be erected in Chinatown. Both statue and murals will be paid for with Federal funds.

¶ In Manhattan the sedate Architectural League last week awarded its annual gold medal for decorative painting to another Federal project, a huge fresco in the Evander Childs High School by square-jawed young James Michael Newell. It was similar in subject to the San Francisco mural but better drawn.

¶ In the Department of Justice Building in Washington last week another fresco panel was being finished in the lobby adjoining the Attorney General's office. The work of George Biddle, it boasted the longest title of any Government mural: The Sweatshop and Tenement of Yesterday Can Be the Life Planned with Justice of Tomorrow. In it are the figures of dozens of faithful minors in the New Deal. The mural's "ideal workman" has the face of Artist Biddle's brother Francis, onetime Chairman of the National Labor Relations Board. Mrs. George Biddle is drinking coffee with Malcolm Ross, pressagent for the NLRB. Edward P. Rowan, Chief of the Treasury's Painting & Sculpture Section, is hanging up his coat. For the Attorney General's office Artist Leon Kroll did a mural sketch of "Triumphant Justice," which observers last week thought they could identify as liberal Justice Harlan F. Stone.

¶ Art Director Holger Cahill of the Works Progress Administration announced last week that 4,300 muralists, portrait painters, print makers, sculptors, etc. are now at work under his direction on 327 projects that will cost the Government $3,000,000. The Government has set up free art schools in New York City, Nashville, Raleigh, Oklahoma City, Orlando, Gainesville and Dade City, Fla., Columbus, Grand Rapids, Elizabeth and Newark, N. J., has opened art galleries in New York, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Florida, Virginia.

Today there exist the greatest official interest in art, the greatest production of paintings the U. S. has ever known. A century hence students of U. S. art in the early 1930's will probably write in their notebooks two facts: 1) It was largely a mural art; 2) It was a State-inspired art, born of Depression, fostered by the New Deal.

The new Washington, with its acres of gleaming granite, its vistas of magnificent buildings, was a creation of the Hoover Administration (TIME, May 6, 1929). The only one of the new buildings actually completed before March 1933 was the Department of Commerce Building. Almost ready for occupancy at the change of administration was the nearby Department of Agriculture Building. It was equipped with the sort of mural that Congressional committees had been approving for Federal buildings since the British burned the U. S. Capitol: A great rectangle showing a number of buxom ladies swathed in cheesecloth, standing about a wheatfield (TIME, April 2, 1934). Its painter was Gilbert White, a long-haired U. S. expatriate. Young New Dealers did not like that picture. Secretary of Agriculture Wallace tried hard to have it removed, found that he could not, finally attached to the bottom a small plate: "Approved in 1932 by Andrew W. Mellon and Arthur Hyde." Very few ladies in cheesecloth have found their way into Federal buildings since.

Washingtonians give the main credit for the idea of artists' relief to Muralist George Biddle, War veteran, Harvard law graduate. Early in 1933, recalling a former painting expedition in Mexico, he wrote enthusiastically to President Roosevelt of the hundreds of young painters in the U. S. who, with Government cooperation, could produce as vital a school of mural painting as had the young painters of Mexico.

President Roosevelt favored the idea, referred it promptly to the Treasury. From this letter grew the first organization to assist unemployed artists, the Public Works of Art Project. Its guiding spirit was not George Biddle but his good friend Painter Edward Bruce, onetime San Francisco banker (TIME, July 17, 1933). Many murals were started under PWAP, but for the most part artists were told to go home and paint what they liked in their own studios. PWAP lasted about six months, cost the Government $1,312,177, produced 15,663 works of art, ended with a gigantic exhibition in Washington from which Senators, Representatives and heads of Government bureaus were invited to take what they wanted to decorate their offices.

PWAP was succeeded by three other alphabetical arrangements for the relief of artists. Their main object has been the mural decoration of public buildings completed under the New Deal throughout the land. As part of the vast WPA appropriation, Director Holger Cahill, who was once on the staff of the Newark Museum, got $3,000,000 with which to employ about 5,000 artists, 90% of whom must be on relief rolls, at wages of from $69 to $105 a month. Simultaneously the Treasury Department quietly set up the first permanent Federal art department in the Section of Painting & Sculpture, which is not a relief project at all. Its jury may commission artists, no matter what their state of affluence, to decorate public buildings on the strength of anonymously contributed sketches.

"WPA's main point is relief," explained Critic Forbes Watson, a member of the jury. "Our's is art."

The Treasury also operates the Ritz of relief projects for artists, known as the Treasury Relief Art Project. TRAP's director is Olin Dows, a bristle-haired young socialite painter from Duchess County, N. Y. He has been given $550,000 with which to provide jobs for no more than 400 artists from relief rolls, to be chosen for artistic ability alone. Already TRAP artists look down their noses at their WPA brethren.

Seeing schools, post offices, jails and town halls gay as Jacob's coat with Government murals, railroads, banks, saloons and department stores have caught the fever and commissioned hundreds of private murals of their own. In the supplement, TIME presents a cross-section of the murals, public & private, now being erected in this country. Their only common denominator is the desire to say something definite about the U. S., to get away from vapid allegory and Artist Gilbert White's ladies in cheesecloth.

In any movement as large as the present one, failures are as startling as successes. Among the best known failures:

1) To find additional murals for the Department of Justice Building, the Treasury held an open competition on the chosen subject: Some aspect of modern justice, without resorting to allegory. Ninety-one sketches were submitted of chain gangs, evictions, third-degrees, electrocutions, battles with gangsters, juvenile delinquents. Not one was found sufficiently suitable for Government acceptance.

2) Only last week Manhattan newshawks discovered a WPA supervisor named George K. Gombarts who had been put in charge of a number of carpenters, plumbers and unemployed artists to remodel a condemned public school as a free art school. At the end of several months they had completed the supervisor's private office with bath & dressing room, imitation Tudor stone fireplace, stained glass windows, hand-painted draperies and a Flemish tapestry of a knight in shining armor striding toward a castle. The knight is George K. Gombarts. "It's a dream we had," said Supervisor Gombarts last week, "a 20-year dream come true. I intended it as a kind of monument."

The best work on the new Government buildings in Washington is being done by artists of established reputation like George Biddle, Reginald Marsh, Henry Varnum Poor, Maurice Sterne.

Artist Poor, who spends most of his time in New City, N. Y., can never decide whether he would rather paint pictures or turn and glaze pottery. For the Department of Justice last week he had nearly completed two knife-narrow panels showing a prisoner entering and being released from a Federal penitentiary. Possibly none of WPA's artists-on-relief could have handled so difficult a space problem so easily.

In no need of relief is bullnecked, freckle-browed Reginald Marsh, whose two panels, one showing muscular workmen loading mail from spiral chutes to a waiting train, the other of an ocean liner transferring mail to a tender in New York harbor, were the first to be completed, set up and accepted in the new Washington Post Office Department Building in Washington.

Closer to the old-fashioned esthete is hollow-eyed, taciturn Maurice Sterne, hard at work in California last week on a panel for the Department of Justice. Once a bottle washer in a Manhattan saloon, he later spent many peaceful years in Italy, taught Edward Bruce, a prime advocate of the Government's new deal for artists, how to paint.

The flood of Government money has yet to uncover a genius. Washington authorities hail as their own particular discovery bearded Frank Mechau Jr., 32, of Glenwood Springs, Colo., whose stirring panel Dangers of the Mail, was chosen for the new Post Office Department Building. Exulted Edward Bruce:

"Frank Mechau's paintings alone would have justified the entire PWAP program!" Artist Mechau pronounces his name "May-show." In his Denver barber-shop his father has hung up a sign: "Mechau, pronounced May-co."

"May-co" Mechau's barbering was sufficiently remunerative for him to send his son to the University of Denver, the Chicago Art Institute, and to start him off on twelve years of study in Paris, Florence, Munich and other European Museums.

"May-show" Mechau returned at length to Denver, won a Guggenheim Fellowship to study the artistic and historic background of the West, and was given his first one-man show by the Denver Junior League. With his brother Vaughan, Artist Mechau is at present working on an illustrated history of the Pony Express. Frank Mechau hates to leave the house while working. "For the past four months," said he, "I never made a journey beyond the garbage can."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.