Remembering Hard Times

...At the age of 44 Bruce decided to become a painter, turning his back, Gauguin-like, on glowing opportunities in banking and law...

...With incredible ingenuity, he manages to work in everyone who subsequently became anyone, as well as to acknowledge those who didn't make the major leagues but maybe should have...

...A total believer, Solman rests his case by stating that most of the people he mentions owe their place in history to the WPA...

...Entitled "Federal Support for the Visual Arts: The New Deal and Now," it was set up to collect reports from people who had participated in the WPA program?either administering or receiving aid...

...The distance between artists and bureaucrats is sharply sketched by Audrey McMahon, herself director of the WPA/FAP in New York...

...The second deals with artists' organizations during the Depression and contains the one attempt in the book to discuss the Communist role in their affairs...

...These reminiscences, carefully checked against the official records of the time, form the meat of O'Connor's book...

...Besides writing with an amusing bite, she appreciates art and artists, and appears to grasp what poverty really means...

...Abstract Expressionism was the outcome of Leftwing faith betrayed by the Hitler-Stalin pact: "With nothing left to say, they decided to paint for painting's sake...

...The New Deal Art Projects—An Anthology of Memoirs, edited by Francis O'Connor (Smithsonian, 339 pp., $12.50), is the result of a study he began in the late '60s under a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts...

...The businessman-turned-popular-artist, as director of the Treasury Public Works of Art Project, had the job of bailing out starving painters...

...One hopes these are not the explanations for the absence of testimony in this book from more prominent artists...

...Rivera began his painting day at Rockefeller Center in the late afternoon and frequently had Nelson Rockefeller for company on the scaffold...

...Looking backward, I realize with a certain amount of joy that I must have been as great a burden to him as he was to me...

...She writes of Colonel Somervell, the New York City WPA administrator: "He was not only of the school of critics who felt 'his little Mary could do as well' as, shall we say, . . . Ben Shahn or Stuart Davis, but in addition, he had a profound conviction that to create 'pictures' was not 'work...

...His many vignettes include a good one of Diego Rivera, who looked like "a great unmade bed...

...No doubt unwittingly, in the process each conveys an interesting self-portrait, too...

...The list of artists who painted canvases for the government runs the gamut from Philip Evergood to Pollock and Rothko to Jack Levine...

...Stuart Davis, whose view of him differs considerably from Dows', observes elsewhere that the "uniquely equipped" Bruce held modern art and democratic artists' organizations in "low regard...

...Joseph solman, more temperate than Laning, sheds considerable light on the foundations of contemporary art...

...As it turned out, though, American art came through magnificently and, of course, there was no revolution...

...Although most of the administrators for the Federal Art Projects had some art experience, they tend to write like administrators...

...To present a 'relief voucher' in a shop was to advertise destitution, and many merchants took advantage of the 'voucher' client to shortchange or humiliate him...

...In any case, studying history does at least modify delusions of generational uniqueness...

...Early works on prison or post office walls, especially if done on a relief project, can be an embarrassment to a now successful artist...

...But on the whole, the book is characterized by a striving for accuracy (it would be nice to say the same for the proofreaders) and a strong desire to recreate without nostalgia this strange period of American history as it was experienced by artists...

...By adding opinions and insights to the facts, Edward Laning, Joseph Solman, Robert Cronbach, Jacob Kainen, and Rosalind Bengelsdorf Browne enliven the subject considerably...

...The chief of the Treasury Relief Art Project, Olin Dows, takes pride in this practical approach...

...One might best conclude, therefore, by pointing out that The New Deal Art Projects provides a three-dimensional picture of a period that is getting lost in the fuzz of nostalgia and camp fashions...

...Indeed, The New Deal Art Projects even looks as if it had been produced during the era it describes, being very plain and lacking color illustrations...

...He seems to have been a successful painter and, judging from reproductions, a competent one, if somewhat academic...

...And as some of the writers observe, although they don't make depressions the way they used to, there are parallels between then and now...

...Because of an overscrupulous attention to detail about the various organizations and procedures involved, some of the memoirs are less interesting than others, at least for the general reader...

...McMahon is something of an exception among administrators...

...That, he feels, accounts for his lighthearted approach to life and art...

...Overall, though, Laning regards the Depression as a golden age, "the only humane era in our history . . . when the stealing stopped, but only because there was nothing left to steal...

...Among other things, the future governor told him: "I'm of the last generation in which a great fortune will be in the hands of a single family...

...He notes as well the "tendency among former employes of the [WPA Federal Art Projects] and to a lesser extent among those who worked on the Treasury programs, to disavow or obscure their relationship with them...

...Other worthwhile pieces in the book include a graceful essay by Robert Cronbach on sculpture, similar in tone to Solman's, and two articles by Lincoln Rothschild...

...There is also the fear . . . that association with the WPA will insinuate their affiliation with 'subversive' organizations...

...More gratifyingly, it is a throwback to an earlier type of art book that used text as a vehicle for information only, not for filler, and if for no other reason than this, represents foundation money well spent...

...The first is a discussion of the Index of American Design, an ambitious attempt to record American artifacts through drawings that was headed by Rothschild...

...Laning started out rich from a couple of oil wells...

...The pun may or may not be intentional...

...The event, properly treated in society-page style by New York Times art critic John Canaday (who was careful to mention the high prices fetched by de Kooning paintings), was simply another example of an elite having a little sport in a good cause...

...On Art REMEMBERING HARD TIMES BY VIVIEN RAYNOR Forty-six artists, including such notables as Adolph Gottlieb and Willem de Kooning, gathered last month in Easthampton, Long Island, to paint two large canvases that were to be used as backdrops for a local theatrical show and then auctioned off in aid of the McGovern campaign...

...Whether the New Deal projects were disinterested attempts to keep art alive or, as some have suggested, a move to keep the possible leaders of a revolution busy, must remain a matter for conjecture...

...The Roosevelts' love of art, taken for granted by others, is doubted by Laning: "What is true is, first, that they were great humanitarians and, second, that they were loyal to their friends," of whom George Biddle, the originator of the art project, was one...

...After studying art in Italy, he returned to New York, where he enjoyed 10 successful years before being called to serve the New Deal...

...It is impossible to take up, let alone do justice to, all of the pieces in O'Connor's collection in the space of a column...

...In addition, the book should change many people's opinions about the art of the time: The chunky worker of Depression sculpture becomes more than a period mannerism...

...The system presupposed the inability of the individual to handle his own funds, merely because he had none of his own to handle...

...He also tells us how participants looked upon their role in the program: The artist of the Depression was a "self-esteemed citizen of his country feeling his product was a viable commodity and beneficial to it...

...Not surprisingly, the artists' memoirs are the best, really deserving a review to themselves...

...But it attracted my attention because I had just finished reading an excellent book on Depression art, and studying that Easthampton guest list, I recognized a dozen people whom I had last seen, as it were, beginning their careers in the WPA for $23 a week...

...the brownish American scene paintings, the socially realistic prints, and the fumbling beginnings of abstraction are suddenly no longer just pathetic precursors of the real, international thing...

...Of course, attacking government bureaucracy these days is fair and safe game, but it is impossible not to enjoy Mc-Mahon's descriptions of home relief investigators checking refrigerators for surplus food, or monitoring the general activity of an entire family, since "some child might have secured a newspaper route or someone might be baby-sitting clandestinely...

...And according to him...

...The anthology concentrates on New York City and State since, as O'Connor explains, most of the government money was spent where the majority of the artists were...

...Also included is a taped conversation between five of the writers, discussing art and museums in the '30s and today, personalities, politics, and so on...

...He is crisp, lucid and sometimes unconsciously funny, as in his reasons for considering his colleague, Edward Bruce, "uniquely equipped" to implement the idea of government participation in the arts: Bruce, after all, had been both a football star and honor law student at Columbia, proved his worth by going on to practice law and publish the Manila Times, and later lived in China while presiding over the Pacific Development Company...