Marling

Viithe murals “responded to both aesthetic and socio-political stimuli.”

Viii“ways in which art and ideology intersected.”

Ix“What did it feel like to stand in the newly painted lobby of a post office in the ‘30s? What did the people of Mural America hope to find in the picture on the post-office wall? What did America look like to American eyes during the Great Depression?”

3“This book is about taste in the Depression decade.”

3Section lasted 1934-1943

3-4“When the people discussed here do give an idea a ringing endorsement or react with pleasure to the sentiment conveyed by the style through which a pictorial ideal is manifested, I have taken that expression of taste as a popular vote for the vision of America embodied in the mural – a pleasing image of an operative cultural myth that made life seem more beautiful…. When people register a strong negative opinion on a theme or the manner in which it is presented, I have taken that expression of taste as an indicator of a problematic issue – a sign of tensions which made it harder to stagger through life’s daily grind. And I have pressed on the explore why some visions of America were particularly repugnant to the ‘30s.”

4The Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture became Treasury Section of Fine Arts in 1938 and Section of Fine Arts of the Public Buildings Administration of the Federal Works Agency in 1940

5“study of public taste shows just how artificial are academic efforts to separate moral judgment rigidly from aesthetic design.”

6Chapter on “The Patron, the Painter and the Public,” about “the particular difficulty in creating a social art.”

11-12the many roles of the section – employer, New Deal bureaucracy, aesthetic judge, conduit of public taste, etc

14“The patron shaped the mural to the extent that Washington chose the painter and supervised his or her progress. The painter shaped the mural, but did so under the guidance of varying degrees of pressure from the Section experts and the general public. Then the people spoke. Even if the people played no part in the process until the eleventh hour, their judgment determined whether the mural would enjoy a vital existence in the life of the community.”

14“In the court of public opinion, under the rules of democratic compromise, the autonomy of the mural as an art object broke down completely during the ‘30s. The mural remained a painting, but it was a painting last; first, it was a depiction of objects and scenes, a picture, a symbol, an event. The mural was an aesthetic entity last; first, it was a forum for discussion of national issues, a window on times past and times to come, a mirror of current anxieties and aspirations.”

15“Recording the appearance of a locale was one way to achieve regional accuracy, but a blanket policy calling for reportorial accuracy recognized neither the feelings and values the public associated with seemingly neutral facts nor people’s inclinations to see what they wanted to see when gazing upon their own hometowns.”

15he fact that the small town audience was also “a participant in a new, mass culture.” This affected a locale’s willingness to portray itself in certain terms, even if these terms were accurate

16Taste was the naked admission of a compelling affinity between picture and viewer, between image and self-image, between a meaningful complex of cultural symbols and a culture desperate for some hard, external validation of its worth in the face of economic collapse and social disorder…. Taste offered a choice between now and someday: it meant gazing into a rose-colored mirror to see a well-scrubbed version of the present or peering through a magical winder to see the future.”

16“But prettiness and aesthetic pleasure ultimately seem to have as ittle to do with popular taste in the ‘30s as the mysterious attraction of blueness or clusters of parallel lines….In social art, the character of the picture determined the attractiveness of the painting.” (Do I want to differentiate between picture and painting?)

  • 17 “The shiny, red streamlined tractor was, in its own way, a comprehensible stereotype, trotted out at county fairs and the great World’s Fairs of the ‘30s as a romantic panacea for all the problems bedeviling the American farmer.”
  • 17 “Transport machinery nearly dominated mural iconography through 1939” until it became a worn-out theme.
  • 19 “Work in local industries was a very popular mural theme throughout the ‘30s. The industrial murals that aroused the most ardent local enthusiasm, however, strike the eye as the most boring and uneventful of all Depression images. Indeed, the best-loved work murals scrupulously avoided any suggestion of drama, tragic or otherwise, and illustrated with deadpan earnestness the mundane rituals of making a living as a steel-puddler or a cheese-taster….They give tangible hope to a future in which going to work would be the most routine of human activities.”
  • 19-20“Historical themes were the popular alternative to the restless, futuristic motion of the technological mural; the choice of history bespoke a commitment to one’s roots, to coping with the problems of the ‘30s on one’s home ground, rather than fleeing toward some chimerical new frontier. Apart from work fetishes and the occasional landscape, mural iconography of the Depression seldom contended directly with the unpleasant facts of the present, save through the language of metaphor. ‘Now’ is not to be found. The center is missing. Around that missing center, imagery polarized sharply into wishful projections of a wondrous tomorrow and wishful reminiscences of a serene yesterday.”
  • 20 “The American Stuff headings includes depictions of strange events, dubious ‘firsts,’ peculiar doings, and the humble origins of heroes who attained national fame elsewhere. The diverse, often zany topics defy classification, but guidebook themes do share several traits. Their specific themes are defiantly provincial and deliberately obscure: in that sense, American Stuff murals are local ripostes to the cultural homogeneity enforced by media America.”
  • 21 “Although the missing center of New Deal cultural history – the calamitous present – is not portrayed on the post-office wall, the values and especially the hopes of the ‘30s reside in the pictorial contents of these historical tableaus. Working, building, and achieving; snug houses and good things to eat; an orderly life; protection from catastrophe and disaster emanating from outside the community: these are the topics addressed in American Genesis murals.”
  • 22 “The enormity of townspeople’s spiritual investment in historical pageants and the anxieties grounded in them were not always apparent to artists or federal officials.” (Salina Kansas and Safford Arizona)
  • 23 “underlying skepticism about the ability of strangers to treat folks and folks’ hometowns as folks perceiv3ed them, particularly when the strangers were well-known professional artists….Art created by artists…was perceived as representing feelings and attitudes endemic only to artists. Art therefore was pitted against ordinary people’s reality: art was a filtered distortion of the truth. And since the truth was nothing less than the local way of life in America – the value system of the people – then art, until proven otherwise, was fated to be dishonest, elitist, unseemly, indecorous, and potentially immoral. Immorality became the popular, working definition of modernism, a label affixed willy-nilly to all sorts of contemporary painters.”
  • 23 “this folkish link between aliens, art, immorality, and modernism”
  • 24 more on link between modern art, the nude, communism, etc
  • 25 “Modernism was bad and it was snotty. On the other hand, modern conventions of style oozed their way into murals almost unnoticed when the pictures at issue were imagistically legible or when those images corresponded to a progressive, communal self-image.”
  • 25 “It is important to realized that popular reaction to modernism, pro or con, was not premised upon visual evidence or the affinities for shape and color generally associated with taste decisions. Modernism was a formless bugbear.”
  • 25 “It is my central and surely controversial contention, therefore, that questions of art have very little bearing on mural painting in the ‘30s. The Section was not an art program. It was, in the final analysis, a social program that employed artists.”
  • 26 “The artist was an instrument in the creation of a social dialectic; in that respect, his or her relative unimportance to the mural renaissance approximated the marginal significance of the work as art.” (goes on to say how the right-of-center academic artists and the left-of-center radicals/modernists were both left out)
  • 30 “One of the more curious features of ‘30s history is th attention paid to murals and painters by New Dealers engaged in the ideological dialectic between reform and relief.”
  • 30 Economic collapse posed problems for which immediate, short-run solutions were desperately needed; the work-relief programs of the WPA ultimately answered those needs. But disaster also created unprecedented opportunities for a sweeping reform of American life.” (hence the Section)
  • 30 Section officials’ dreams for an “American Renaissance” … “the promise of a democratic, public, people’s art of mural painting”…
  • 43-44“Edward Bruce was a man of many parts – executive, economist, corporation counsel, semi-professional painter and muralist, public servant. He was, as well, a seasoned bureaucrat who understood the ways of Washington…” “The young American nation, he maintained in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, had devoted all its energies to conquering physical frontiers, at the expense of the artistic development associated with states which ‘have left the world richer because they have lived.’ The Depression showed that the United States had reached the limits of material conquest. A spiritual frontier now beckoned…. ‘No great artistic or spiritual movement has ever developed without a patron,’ however, he maintained, and under current conditions, government alone had the power to set artists to work on the task of diverting social energies from the closed frontiers of old. In sum, Bruce believed in federal patronage of art of an enduring quality.” (not of relief)
  • 44 Holger Cahill of the WPA’s FAP had a more laissez-faire approach: “art is not a matter of rare, occasional masterpieces” He had a “simple trust that a large quantity of artistic output would cast up something of quality” (not Bruce)
  • 49 “Traditionally, one percent of the moneys appropriated for construction of public buildings was set aside for artistic enrichment. By a formalized gentlemen’s agreement, arrived at wholly within the Treasury hierarchy, funds once spent on decorative radiator covers and chandeliers were diverted to the new mural program…. Hence neither creation nor operation of the Section hinged upon legislative approval, yet it was the vulnerable relief cause which laundered its linen in public and the impervious reform campaign which wrapped itself in a cloak of obscurity….Bruce and his staff cultivated, and largely achieved, anonymity; Cahill’s name was a household word.”
  • 51 “The formal announcement of the 1953 contest for the Barnesville, Ohio, post-office commission is typical: ‘The subject matter should have some relation either to the post, local history, past or present, local industry and pursuits. This may be interpreted freely.’”
  • 52 (primary source: note 70)“each artist is urged whenever possible to visit the community for which his mural … is commissioned. There he talks with the townspeople, gathers their tales of folklore and history, visits the chief industries, and acquaints himself with the architecture and landscape peculiar to that region. From this material, he selects subject matter which typifies that community and which he feels will lend itself to the creation of a vital design. While the aesthetic quality of each completed design rests upon the personal interpretation and ability of the artist, the content is determined by the community for which he is working.”
  • 52 “Bruce’s antipathy for abstract and academic manners guaranteed that decisions affecting ‘personal interpretation’ – style – would not rest with the artists alone. Because the initial installment of the painter’s fee was withheld until preliminary drawings – the locus of content – had been finished and reviewed, artists were reluctant or frankly unable to travel to remote points for consultation with John Q. Public in the depths of the Depression.”
  • 52-53Artists who tried to do research by long distance discovered that postmasters were not always arbiters of local taste; artists who dutifully presented themselves in places far from home found nobody to confer with or fell into the clutches of the town eccentric, the monomaniacal village historian, or a neighborhood faction. Despite a rhetorical commitment to the principle that ‘content is determined by the community,’ the Section neglected to develop routine channels of communication between the artist, the government, and the people.”
  • The interesting story of Goshen, NY’s PO mural – a horse race
  • 55 “The rhetoric of community determination notwithstanding, practice suggested a covert policy of benign indifference to the people’s preferences, save in those instances when locals caught wind of mural schemes afoot.”
  • 56 “back to the facts” (see quote from Watson)
  • 58-61 story of Doris Lee’s countrified scenes made acceptable
  • 62- the Aiken story
  • 68 “The Section found itself in the anomalous position of directing a homogenizing, national Renaissance in an era of ardent belief in sectional distinctions that were both cultivated and challenged by New Deal programs.”
  • 70 the issue of “federal hegemony over Aiken”
  • 81 “the largest nationwide contest in Section history, the 48 States Competition” -- attracted 972 artists sent 1,477 designs “And it aimed to blanket America in murals…murals which would capture, in Edward Bruce’s words, ‘the same feeling I get when I smell a sound, fresh ear of corn,’ murals which ‘make me feel comfortable about America.’”
  • 81 “One small, standard-issue post-office lobby in every state of the Union was to get a mural for the prominent end-wall above the postmaster’s door.”
  • 81-82“The Section contented itself in ‘offering’ several subjects for consideration – ‘The Post; Local History, Past or Present; Local Industries; Local Flora and Fauna; Local Pursuits, Hunting, Fishing, Recreational Activities; Themes of Agriculture or pure landscape’…
  • 83 average commission for 48 states: $725 – the contest had a “rural focus”
  • 84 Artists in the competition designed for a specific locale but were often awarded commissions for a different one. “By 1939, artists had learned from experience with the artistic bureaucracy how to ‘paint Section.’ The 48 States Competition did little to disabuse them of the conviction that local color could be concocted out of thin air so long as mural themes were bland enough to antagonize nobody and mural styles were legible enough to win swift approval from everybody who counted at Washington headquarters.”
  • 85 quote from the Life article about how the artists consult with the locals before designing the sketches. “Regionalism, 48 States-style, was a matter of props, juggled with the perfunctory aplomb of a Hollywood set director.”
  • 86 “Philip Von Saltza’s Wild Horses by Moonlight, designed for Safford [Arizona], was shuttled northeast to Schuyler, Nebraska, and the artist was urged to effect this transplantation by changing stumpy desert cacti into tall prairie poplars. Lew Davis’s band of Indian riders for Safford was adapted to the town of Los Banos, California, by a quick costume change. Muffled in serapes and sombreros, the braves passed for a troop of Spanish caballeros….When the awards were made public [in Life], Nebraskans were puzzled by those cactus plants and Californians rightly wondered at the local relevance of a scene set in the Upper Gila Valley. Life’s illustrated report was a catalyst, in fact, spreading discontent with standard operating procedures hitherto immune from mass scrutiny…”
  • 86 The consulting the citizens thing became a “self-fulfilling prophecy. Life’s readership came to believe themselves entitled to a say about the hometown mural and wasted no time in making their wishes plain. Thus, … 48 States murals can, as Life insisted, by taken as ‘barometers’ of public taste in the 1930s.”
  • 88 “Depiction of the human present called for extraordinary caution; documentary fact, the forthright accuracy of which militated against assumption of a debatable point of view on the part of the artist, was the federal patron’s safeguard against the possible displeasure of the public patron. The federal realism of the 48 States Competition, grounded in deadpan realism,…”
  • 89 a discussion of the Grant Wood brand of regionalism: “an art of national stereotypes” (unlike the particularized realism of Section painting.)
  • 97 Use this for Artists section – a letter from artist of Corning mural to Edward Rowan describing her experience – great
  • 103a letter from a Corning resident praising the mural – use also?
  • 108“Not all sectional stereotypes were so benign.” The mural in Arkansas of the sharecropper. “In Vorst’s sketch, Arkansas Parisiens saw an old, hackneyed picture of the Ozarks revived. That he had seen this particular tenant cabin, that he had reported the facts accurately, was beside the point. Arkansans had seen this place often enough before, too, but far from serving as a unifying principle in which the Paris community could take pride, the tenant cabin was reckoned an outlander’s joke, a denigration of home, the latest instance in a tradition-laden conspiracy to misrepresent a backward Arkansas.”
  • 113a description of the more acceptable mural that Arkansas got instead
  • 117Life’s reference to the lack of industrialism in the sketches
  • 120-122Description of Seneca, Kansas mural Men and Wheat - use for gallery
  • 124“On the wall of the Seneca, Kansas, post office, the farmer saw limitless, unrestrained production and assurance that he and his machines would beat the odds.”
  • 124-125Statement about realism – the squinting farmer represents agriculture rather than “the prop symbol of the Greek goddess with her cornucopia.”
  • 126How the residents of Jackson Missouri raised a ruckus over their contented cows and haystacks and therefore got a more active stock-loading mural instead.
  • 126-127 a potentially good quote that ends: “But the train never stopped at Depression, USA.”
  • 134“a mural America obsessed with the migrations of the frontier era.”
  • 138 “And so the pictorial nineteenth century strode, galloped, chugged, and wheezed into the 1930s, ever moving, questing, building.” More…
  • 140“Indeed, few topics were more assiduously plumbed during the opening years of the mural campaign than the transportation history of the U. S. postal service.”
  • 154-157extended criticism by the public of the Towson, Maryland, PO mural “Milestones in American Transportation” (This would be great to use, but the images are poor.) – called “side-show banners” (156)
  • 157-158Marling’s explanation of the Towson incident
  • 161about “the tension between home and industry”
  • 163-166how Westerly wanted granite subject but got a RR underpass
  • 169industry and history came together to create a usable present history for people of the ‘30s
  • 174-179about Mine Rescue (use for gallery) – poor picture of the replacement mural on page 182
  • 191How “Alfred Kazin noted an identical penchant for oddities among the social researchers of the Federal Writers’ Project” (the state guides series)
  • 192“A historical mural like Carney’s revels in peculiar localisms because they are peculiar and local. Painted history was a counterforce to the powerful tides of big agriculture, big business, and bog government. In murals, regional separateness and local idiosyncracies, however offbeat, buttressed home against the creeping currents of national homogeneity.”
  • 193“Whatever regions they explored, substantial numbers of Section muralists went looking for the ‘stuff’ of a unique and various American experience, the oddball, cockamamie facts and the tall stories, delight in which revealed a ‘childlike, fanciful’ side of the American character but appealed to its prideful instincts as well.” “claims to distinction”
  • 193 bottommore on American Stuff
  • 197“There is an intense, almost defiant, provincialism at work in these murals. From a strictly visual standpoint, the pictures are local rebuses, secret codes with the arcane appeal of a Masonic handshake.” – how this is entirely different from the recognizable stereotypes of Regionalism
  • 199“Historical kitsch” is only one category of American Stuff – names others
  • 203one artist’s diatribe against American Stuff as being ultimately un-American because its entirely parochial (continues on 204) – nice
  • 206 “The roadside history of the ‘30s, despite lapses into trivia and cabalistic provincialism, was nevertheless history as people conceived it.” Continues…
  • 207-208How the Art Class of Auburn, Nebraska made suggestions for and judgments on their mural – nice
  • 209“The past was a source of pride and comfort at a new point in time, when both were welcome anodynes to hard times.”
  • 210 (and through 211) Painting themes of local history and American genesis themes exhibited a “collective act of faith in tomorrow.” “Historical themes spoke to the issue of historical continuity. The murals were bridges, anchored at one end in the past and vaulting over the present into the world of tomorrow. To be sure, today was carefully hidden from sight…”
  • 211the “vision of purposeful history on the post-office wall pledged a legacy of confident faith to ‘those who are to come.’” (in the words of the postmaster of Kewaunee, Wisconsin)
  • Section eventually complete app. 1116 murals (with TRAP completing an additional 89)
  • 211-212“The overwhelming majority of the murals contained some fragment of historical imagery, some bit of local lore, a glance at early times, a famous forbear, or a comparison between then and now.” “…more than sixty which dealt exclusively with one facet of history: the decisive day and deed that created the American hometown of the ‘30s.”
  • 216-218 (notes 66-68 on p. 240): muralist Wendell Jones’ 1940 essay on mural painting entitled “Article of Faith”

These are such distracting times that the artist who has always dealt with the aspirations and hopes of man is suffering from palsied inspiration. Fear grips the whole world. The sense of continuity is broken. The future is uncertain to a degree that few generations have ever experienced…. Compared with the new morality of total war our old virtues have the smell of the sacristy. A way of life is breaking up and those who have the fibre to hope for good dread the chaos of its destruction….