How the New Deal Treated Art as Essential to Democracy
An ARTnews article recounts how, during the New Deal era from 1933 to 1943, the US government treated art as a public resource and employed artists as part of broader economic relief during the Great Depression. It says the programs produced hundreds of thousands of works—murals, paintings, sculptures, prints, and photographs—by artists who later became prominent, including Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Lee Krasner, Jacob Lawrence, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. The piece situates the effort in the crisis facing Franklin D. Roosevelt when he took office in March 1933, with nearly a quarter of the workforce unemployed, and notes that painter George Biddle urged Roosevelt to follow Mexico’s example of commissioning public murals. It also cites an earlier precedent: in 1817 Congress paid John Trumbull $32,000 (about $800,000 today), a purchase that drew criticism, and describes the Public Works of Art Project launching in December 1933 to hire artists to create work for tax-funded buildings.
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This story was covered in Democracy’s Art Wars and Border Boycotts