The Project: Depression Era Art in CT

CT Has over 5,000 Depression Era Works and They're Not What You'd Think

By Lizzie Warren

Published: May 28, 2010

Slideshow

A mural of Winkin, Blinkin and Nod in the hall of the Charter Oak Academy.

Lizzie Warren

A large painting of Hanzel and Gretel hangs in the library of Charter Oak.

Lizzie Warren

Suggestions for mural subjects appropriate for children were sent out across the state.

Lizzie Warren

Each artist's personal history, artistic background and style were recorded throughout the Project.

Lizzie Warren

Each artist had a table where the title, dimensions and material of each work were kept. Start and end dates were recorded as well as where each piece was allocated.

Tobey's fresco at Hartford's Camp Field Library depicts Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe; Each author is depicted alongside their home and their most famous characters.

Lizzie Warren

In the Town Clerk's Office in West Hartford Town Hall, there is an extensive mural depicting the founding and development of Connecticut.

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General Washington and others meet in Wethersfield on May 19, 1781 to plan the siege of Yorktown.

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Information went out about getting a mural for one dollar per square foot. Other mediums were more expensive.

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Letters of support came in from numerous institutions who had received art works.

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This graph shows the number of people who were employed by the state. For most artists, the state FPA was a stop along their career.

Lizzie Warren

The Project is an ongoing series of article about WPA art in Connecticut. The series is so titled because writers and artists, in their letters and other communication, referred to the WPA as such. The series is inspired by the Art Inventory Project that has been underway for more than two years, as well as the Library of Congress's complete database of FSA photographs.

Americans don't favor Depression era art. There's something foreign to those of us living in the 21st century about murals portraying barrel chested men doing farm work in wheat fields.

"We thought, going in, that we were going to find works that were drab and brown, but we've really found a diversity of styles," said Cynthia Roznoy, a Curator at the Mattatuck Museum.

Ms. Roznoy's Museum, along with the State Library and the New Haven Museum and Historical Society, received a grant in 2007 from the CT Humanities Council to create an inventory of the more than 5,000 works created under the Connecticut WPA.

The Works Progress Administration (later Works Projects Administration) was started by FDR in June of 1935. By the following November over 15,000 people were on the rolls in this state alone. And by the end of March 1936, 28,671 people were working on 963 different projects in Connecticut, according to statistics cited on the state library's website.

In terms of visual art, the state Federal Arts Project was based in New Haven and employed more than 170 artists who were paid hourly for all kinds of work.* A final report from August 1942 showed that there were: "107 murals covering more than 20,983 square feet; 3,464 pieces of easel art; 166 sculptures, 171 prints, 796 signs, 217 posters; 10,768 photographs and 2, 929 negatives; 1,519 crafts; 460 pieces for the Index of American Design; 200 stencillings."

Despite the incredible number of works, Connecticut has one of the most complete sets of records of any state.

"It's by pure luck," said the Project's Coordinator, Mark Jones, of the Connecticut State Library. After the FAP was closed at the start of WWII, all of the records were given en masse to the State Library, and thus still exist in a coherent order. Each artist was described on an artist card that includes his or her personal history, a section about the artist's career and a description of his or her style.

Beatrice Cuming, a Precisionist who traveled around France, Italy and North Africa before working for the FAP in Connecticut, was described as having a "virile style...made doubly strong by the nature of her subject matter---industrial and city life rather than green pastures."

In addition to the artist cards, tables were used to record the work of each artist. The date and title of each work created for the Project, as the artists and writers called it, was recorded in a grid in addition to the medium and where the work was allocated.

There are also over 1,000 black and white negatives of works located at the New Haven Historical Society and Museum that are being transferred to an online database.

"Only 20-30 percent of the art was allocated. And of course, the art vanished from various places," Jones said. Many works have been tracked down by Deb Edwards, who is currently in France. "She's been our detective," Roznoy said.

Works went to schools, asylums, hospitals and other institutions around the state. While the project managers know where the works went intitially, that was more than 70 years ago.

"This was a democratization of art," said Jones. This art was not only for the public to enjoy, the types of art that were accepted as well as the backgrounds of the artists reflected changes in the make-up of the American population. Heads of institutions wrote to officers within the WPA about the experiences their students, patients or citizens were having with the paintings.

"The transformation of bare wall spaces in wards for mentally sick patients created by these valuable works of art is, I assure you, of real aid to our treatment," one doctor wrote to W. W. Williams, the State Director of Art in 1940.

"It was an incredibly inclusive art. The artists as well as the styles were very diverse. There were folk scenes and legends. They hired people with very different styles. There were even surrealists," said Jones.

"We haven't just found Social Realism," Roznoy said. "We've found Surrealists and Precisionists."

According to Roznoy, the current Recession has sparked people's interest in Depression Era Art. "We're feeling the kind of pressures that we felt then, it's a prompt for people to look back," she said. "This was also the first federal arts funding in our history and people are questioning how art is being funded now," she added.

An exhibit regarding the project, as well as a book of relevant essays, will come out in the fall of 2011. The Inventory Project's funding ended on May 30 of this year. "Somehow, we are going to figure out how to keep going," Roznoy said.

*This is also referred to in some of the artist cards as the Connecticut WPA Project.

The Project: Depression Era Art in CT

CT Has over 5,000 Depression Era Works and They're Not What You'd Think

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