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DANIEL AARON
"social, political, and artistic climate," but he also concedes the "wann
feeling of boon companionship in a common enterprise, even though we
didn't recognize that it was for high stakes." Rosalind Bengelsdorf
Browne attributes "the frenzied art explosion today" to the "unprece–
dented, unequaled product of the Depression, the WPA Federal
Art
Project," and sees "the most unpopular
avant-garde
minority" of those
times, the abstract artists, as the principal beneficiaries.
Other contributors to the volume support these claims, as do many
of the skillfully selected and rarely seen illustrations from the work of
the Project artists. And yet as the anthology shows, the artists paid a
price for their rescue and yielded some of their independence to the
holders of the purse. They did not have to cope with
an
official aesthetic
or with the kind of ferocious censorship imposed on their Soviet counter–
parts (whose lot the Left artists mistakenly exalted), but they had in
certain instances to submit to the tastes of their clients. Audrey
McMahon could not always protect them from WPA administrators like
General Brehen Somervell who hated artists or from the threat of peri–
odic firings. The WPA not only dispensed funds.
It
also let loose a
plague of investigators and time-keepers and bureaucrats - perhaps the
forerunners of an even more unlovely breed who surfaced in the 19505.
When the United States went to war, the mural painters still in the
Project designed camouflage patterns, and the graphic artists turned
out propaganda posters. In 1943, the Project was "finalized." Thousands
of WPA paintings which had been placed in storage, some of them by
now celebrated artists, were sold as so many pounds of canvas. Scholars
like Mr. O'Connor are working indefatigably to recover the lost work
of those years, but the experiences of publicly supported artists in the
1930s can serve as a caveat as well as a hope for those who now look to
Washington as Protector and Curator of the arts.
Daniel Aaron
PARK GALLERY
Currently, Sandra Stern and Joel Rudnick;
December I, Elizabeth Delson; December 15, Miniatures.
Seventh Avenue and Park Place, Brooklyn, N.Y.
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