# 4

The Art of The New Deal

Monday-10:00 A.M.                                                         Winter 2012 (2d 7 Weeks)
Coordinator: Alton Leib                                                    Co-Coordinator: Nan Lewis                                               

Course Description
These days, it’s hard to imagine our government trying to reduce unemployment
by paying painters to paint, actors and musicians to perform, and photographers to show the plight of the jobless and homeless.

          But that’s what FDR’s New Deal did.  The WPA, headed by Harry Hopkins, employed thousands of artists and performers  who had been deprived of work by the depression or replaced by the phonograph, radio and the movies. It supported new cultural enterprises rather than existing arts organizations, encouraged art unconstrained by European conventions, and fostered the pursuit of exciting ideas like those of Mexican muralists.  It was open to abstract as well as representational painting, supporting Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner and other avant garde artists.  It created art for  schools, hospitals and libraries, adorning America with still eye-pleasing art deco post offices and train stations.

The WPA”s Arts Division also produced the photographs of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks---indelible images of what Depression-era America was like---and the highly original work of diverse talents such as Ben Shahn, Virgil Thomson, Saul Bellow, and Studs Terkel.

Hopkins chose Hallie Flanagan, a Vassar professor, to lead the WPA’s Federal Theater
Project, and they pledged that it would be “free, adult and uncensored,”   The Federal Theater Project [FTP]  supported regional theater and employed playwrights such as Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan.  It was responsible for producing Marc Blitzstein’s “The Cradle Will Rock” and Clifford Odet’s “Waiting for Lefty”, and The Mercury Theater of John Houseman and Orson Welles.  The FTP included “The Negro Theater Project” whose most popular production was 1935's Haitian or “voodoo”  Macbeth, which Welles directed.  It developed the “Living Newspaper”, which dramatized current and politically  controversial issues, often from the progressive or left-wing viewpoint which characterized many of its plays, inciting angry criticism in the press, Congress, and the State Department, leading to its loss of funding in 1939.

Sequence of Presentations

New Deal politics and politicos behind the WPA projects —Harry Hopkins worked with
Eleanor Roosevelt on programs conceived by academics and social policy experts

     against opposition from the press and Congress, from within the administration
[Harold Ickes] and the arts establishment.

2.  The Federal Theater Project: Aimed to present regional as well as Broadway theater that was            socially and politically relevant, and was free or popularly priced.  It produced the acclaimed              productions of “The Cradle Will Rock” and T.S. Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral”.

3.  The Federal Art Project---Painting: Helped Milton Avery, Stuart Davis, Mark Rothko,  Willem           deKooning, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston and others who have achieved worldwide fame. 
It also employed artists to create murals, paintings and sculpture for public buildings.

4.   The Federal Art Project– Photography:  Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, John Vachon and                Marion Post Walcott were among the photographers whom the program assigned to

  document the WPA and left a vivid record of American life during the Depression.  

   5.   The Federal Writers Project:  Saul Bellow, Studs Terkel, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, John   Cheever and Zora Neale Thurston.

6.    The Federal Music Project:  Musicians were particularly hard-hit by the economic turndown.
The project employed 16,000 at its peak, enabling them to perform thousands of concerts.

            The Project, headed by Nicolai Sokoloff, offered music classes, organized the Composers    Forum Laboratory and created 34 new orchestras.

      7.     Death Knell:  The Federal Theater Project lost its funding in consequence of investigations     by the House Un-American Activities and Dies Committees. whose chairmen, Martin Dies   and J. Parnell Thomas, claimed that the program was a subversive den of Communists

       churning out New Deal propaganda. 

     

Recommended reading:  There is no “core book” which embraces all of the WPA’s arts projects, but participants can choose from a wealth of materials on the WPA work of many painters, performers, writers and photographers.   “Violins & Shovels----The WPA Arts Projects”, by Milton Meltzer. is an excellent introduction to the subject.   Used copies are available inexpensively through Amazon and other internet vendors.

Pease Note è Three of the presentations [#3, 4, and 6] require projection of images by
Powerpoint or other means.

Organizational Pre-Meeting:          Monday, December 19 at 10 AM