Designing Radicalism: The Popular Front, Modernist Aesthetics, and the Problem of Patronage

Chapter 4 turns to efforts to transform the material and visual cultures of consumer capitalism during the 1930s and early 1940s. One of the most important of these endeavors was the Design Laboratory, which opened in 1935 in New York City as the country’s first comprehensive school of modernist design. Initiated under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, the Laboratory attracted left-leaning faculty and students who disapproved of the streamlined style that typified much of the material culture of consumer capitalism at the time. In contrast, they developed a functionalist modernism that reflected their social-democratic ideals of utility, affordability, and sustainability. White-collar unions in New York as well as Consumers Union promoted this aesthetic of social consumerism as well. Public patronage for cultural initiatives like the Design Laboratory proved unreliable, however, especially as the federal government turned its attention from the Great Depression to the Second World War.

Federal Art Project

The Federal Art Project (FAP) was a branch of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a work relief agency established in 1935 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Second New Deal. Aimed at mitigating unemployment during the Great Depression, the WPA hired 8.5 million Americans for public works projects, focused mainly on infrastructure improvements. The WPA’s Federal Project Number One—which comprised the FAP, the Federal Writers’ Project, Federal Theater Project, Federal Music Project, and Historical Records Survey—subsidized the creative activities of 40,000 artists, writers, actors, and musicians. The FAP commissioned 5,000 visual artists to paint murals in public buildings; create easel paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings that were displayed in traveling exhibitions; teach in newly established Community Art Centers; document the activities of the WPA photographically; and design posters promoting New Deal policies. In addition to providing financial aid to destitute artists, the FAP aimed to preserve their skills and encourage a thriving American artistic tradition at a time when there were few private commissions. Though it operated nationwide, the FAP was concentrated in New York City, where 3,000 artists participated in the project, including many who went on to achieve international recognition after World War II as part of the Abstract Expressionist movement. By 1941, the FAP was limited to the production of war propaganda and training aids, and in 1943, President Roosevelt terminated all WPA projects.

Guston, Philip (1913–1980)

American artist Philip Guston is best known for the comic-strip-inspired paintings he created during the last decade of his life. Though they prompted scathing reviews when first exhibited in 1970, Guston’s late works became a precedent for 1980s Neo-expressionism. Born Philip Goldstein to Jewish-Ukrainian immigrants in Montreal, Guston was raised in Los Angeles, where he attended the Otis Art Institute, as well as the Manual Arts High School with Jackson Pollock. Inspired by Italian Renaissance frescoes and Mexican muralism, Guston began his career painting political murals—first in California and Mexico, and later in New York as part of the WPA’s Federal Art Project. While teaching at the University of Iowa and Washington University in St Louis in the 1940s, Guston gained critical acclaim for his allegorical street scenes. In 1951, he moved to New York and began producing gestural abstractions in the manner of Willem de Kooning. His return to figuration in the late 1960s, prompted by the social and political unrest of the period, combines the iconography of his early paintings; specifically, these works feature hooded figures and brick walls, with an expressionist style marked by his signature short, thick brushstrokes.

Abbott, Berenice (1898–1991)

Berenice Abbott was a photographer, theorist, teacher, and inventor who first learned photography as Man Ray’s studio assistant in Paris. In 1926, she established an independent portraiture studio in Paris, attracting clients from international avant-garde circles. She befriended French photographer Eugène Atget and, after his death, acquired thousands of his prints and negatives with help from Julien Levy. Through her advocacy, Atget’s oeuvre became a touchstone for avant-garde and documentary photography in Europe and the United States. Returning to the United States in 1929, Abbott embarked on a study of New York City titled Changing New York (supported by the Federal Art Project 1935–1939), while developing unique theories of documentary photography and realism predicated on "communicative interaction". She taught photography at the New School for Social Research and was active in the Photo League, which comprised a number of New York photographers who had similar political, social, and aesthetic interests. Often collaborating with Elizabeth McCausland, she authored pioneering essays about the history and theory of photography including the pedagogical text, A Guide to Better Photography (1941).

Pollock, Jackson (1912–1956)

Jackson Pollock was one of the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism in mid-twentieth century America. He began his career working for the Federal Art Project, but is predominantly known for pioneering the ‘‘drip’’ technique in which, using sticks and brushes, the artist dripped paint onto the horizontal canvas. Hans Namuth famously filmed and photographed Pollock painting in 1951. Pollock was the focus of a number of American art critics in the 1950s, particularly Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg. Although unnamed, Pollock’s method of working was the implicit content of Rosenberg’s ‘‘The American Action Painters’’ (1952), in which the act of painting becomes the central focus of the work. It is Pollock’s canvases that take center stage in Greenberg’s historicization of ‘‘modernist painting’’ which followed a formalist trajectory of French painting through to contemporary American painting in the 1950s (this was later expanded in the 1960s to include the ‘‘high modernist’’ painters who developed from Pollock). The attention given to Pollock’s method of painting further fostered the scrutiny of Pollock himself. His subsequent characterization in popular culture as a manic-depressive who struggled with alcoholism clouded an understanding of his contribution to modernist painting in later years.

Democracy .. a challenge – the WPA Federal Art Project Poster

WPA Federal Art Project Poster