Theory in Practice

Muralism and Modernism: Baker and the Imaginary Modernist Boundaries

Amanda Lahikainen

In January of 1937 the Spanish Republican government asked Pablo Picasso to paint a mural in the Spanish pavilion for the Exposition Universelle in Paris. The result was the famous Guernica, a politically charged criticism of the bombing of a civilian population during the Spanish Civil War. Guernica was completed two years before Baker's The Activities of the Narrragansett Planters (1939), which takes up the politically charged theme of African slavery in the northern United States. While these murals are comparable because they are both government-funded and historically themed, one must reflect on the fact that the comparison is odd when based on the history of modern art as formulated by authors using a modernist lens.

Also composed in 1939 was critic Clement Greenberg's famous essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch. There he wrote of a choice between "the bad, up-to-date old and the genuinely new" and stated that the "alternative to Picasso is not Michelangelo, but kitsch." Under the powerful sway of Greenberg critics relegated public murals like Baker's Activities to the status of kitsch, conceptually separated from avant-garde modern art. [1] Jonathan Harris associates this forgetting of the Federal Arts Project with the tension between public muralism and modernism in the United States. He writes:

the particular modernist premises - the supremacy of abstraction, the 'non-objective' use of color and line, the derogation of narrative and naturalistic modes - that powered and sustained the predominant position from which histories of twentieth-century American art were constructed until recently and that was claimed to culminate in American Abstract Expressionism. [2]

This bias originated in the 1930s, and led Holger Cahill, national director of the Federal Art Project from 1935-1943, to attempt to win public and critical support for publicly funded American art by comparing it to the Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis:

the United States has become the greatest art patron in the world ... government support for art is no new phenomenon ... The great building program in Athens under Pericles, which left an imperishable record of Greek Civilization, employed large numbers of artists, artisans, and craftsmen on government projects. [3]

Over a thousand government funded murals were produced in the United States in the 1930s. Why have so many of them been omitted from the art history books, especially when their counterparts in Germany and Russia receive so much attention? The common answer to this question is that these murals displayed a lack of genius and stylistic innovation. I will suggest that a full answer must consider the political conflicts that marked the Depression Era. Such a consideration exposes the limitations of ahistorical modernist art histories and allows new questions about art in the twentieth century to be posed.

Federally funded art projects often involved the input of local committees. As a result there these commissions sometimes became tangled in political wrangling at the local level over which subject matter would best promote the identity of a particular region. For those "Greenbergian" critics championing the idea of absolute aesthetic value in abstract art, these local squabbles over subject matter only confirmed the inferior artistic quality (and provinciality) of these federal projects. The often boosterish subject matter of local murals, perceived as unsophisticated, reinforced the perception that these were not works high artistic merit, since many citizens likened them to advertisements or promotional images of local history "as Americans wished to believe it was." [4] The views found most agreeable to the committees involved peace, progress, production, American ideals and above all the glorification of work ? they were made during the depression after all. The idea of regional "art by committee" also stood in stark opposition to the widely received notion that true art was produced by solitary, free-thinking geniuses who produced masterpieces in their New York studios.This stereotype was also addressed by Holger Cahill who demanded:

The organization of the [Federal Art] project has proceeded on the principles that it is not the solitary genius but a sound general movement which maintains art as a vital, functioning part of any cultural scheme. Art is not a matter of rare, occasional masterpieces. The emphasis upon masterpieces is a nineteenth century phenomenon. [5]

Another factor historically motivating the genius myth was the fact that private donors had previously identified and funded 'genius,' not the state. By the 1930s both Soviet and Nazi use of art as propaganda problematized the very idea of state sponsorship of the arts. Political echoes of Greenberg's "Kitsch keeps a dictator in closer contact with the 'soul' of the people" lurk behind this kind of judgment about what to add to the art historical norm. [6]

Ironically, many artists later moved from doing federal murals to being successful modern artists, a fact revealing that working on government commissions was not the equivalent of being a pawn of state ideology. Not only did Willem deKooning and Jackson Pollock engage in public muralism, so did Arshile Gorky. An excellent example of his work in an abstract style is the Federal Art's Project mural Aerial Map executed for The Newark International Airport in New Jersey (1936-37). Other federally funded artists working in an abstract style included Ilya Bolotowsky, Byron Browne, Louis Schanker and Balcomb Greene. [7]

Additionally, Diego Rivera, the most famous muralist of the time, cast a highly politicized shadow over muralism (See Racialized Bodies). In a tumultuous political environment anything painted in a realist style using simplified shapes, bold colors, technological themes and heavy symbolism ran the risk of being associated with Rivera and his known espousal of communism. Even America?s favorite muralist Thomas Hart Benton, a great promoter of regionalism, fell into disfavor with the New York art scene because of his unfavorable alliance with Marxism. Francis O?Connor relates the reaction to three murals done in 1930-33 for New York and Indiana:

These murals spurred violent controversy over their style and politics [...] His populist and Marxist sympathies were misunderstood by New York artists radicalized by the Depression, to whom Regionalism, with its sometimes ironic panoramas of rural America, did not appear sufficiently in step with the politics of the Popular Front. [8]

A once favored artist, Benton could not overcome the politics attached to his style. Regionalism and the depiction of local histories in public murals, like Baker?s mural using an obviously Benton-like style, must have been associated to some degree with these increasingly unpopular politics.

This politically driven dichotomy of modernist versus anti-modernist muralism comes to the fore in the case of Barnett Newman, the well known abstract expressionist who painted mural sized canvases. Newman quite literally fulfilled Greenberg's standard of "retiring from public altogether" to "maintain the high level of his art." [9] He also refused to join the WPA because it went against his personal philosophy. During an interview with Karlen Mooradian he explains the need to execute his paintings outside of any institutional space: "I was against the idea of a [WPA] project for myself. So I went out and taught high school kids...I was trying to do something that was extremely personal and that was not involved in any programmatic notions of what painting should be." [10] In 1933 Newman ran for Mayor of New York on a platform against communist ideology naming himself a leader to whom intellectuals should turn - remarkably, his cultural program called for (among other things) free music and art schools, a city conservatory, a planetarium, a civic art gallery and local playground and parks system. Newman was in fact running on a socialist platform, but not aligned with the party names 'socialist' or 'communist.' He was an artist not against WPA murals, but outside them.

The question of how modernism came to overshadow muralism is far from answered and still deserves much committed scholarly attention. We at least have a partial answer: socialist ideologies and accompanying fear and stereotypes of government funded murals created a rift that institutionally favored the modernist discourse in the post-war period. From our present perspective, The Activities of the Narragansett Planters would hardly seem to promote a socialist vision of past or present society, but as a post office mural it was subject to the power of these lingering stereotypes embedded in the cultural climate of the 1930s, Greenberg's writing and later art historical readings of the past. Considering the complex phenomenon of writing and rewriting history, both textual and visual, questions of eugenics and the exploration of local identity - it is a terrible shame that a set of unwritten criteria influenced the evaluation of an art movement that shaped America. Baker's work, representative of many post office murals and yet exceptional in its depiction of the individual character of Narragansett, can help us come to a better understanding of the numerous social factors at play in Rhode Island today.

Notes

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[1] Clement Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch. Partisan Review, New York, VI no.5, Fall 1939 cited in Art in Theory 1900-2000 second edition ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Blackwell Publishing, 2003) p.?539.

[2] Jonathan Harris, Federal Art and National Culture: The Politics of Identity in New Deal America (Cambridge, England and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p.5.

[3] Museum of Modern Art ( New York, N.Y.) and Holger Cahill, New Horizons in American Art (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1936), p.17.

[4] Sue Bridwell Beckham, Depression Post Office Murals and Southern Culture: A Gentle Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), p.164.

[5] New Horizons in American Art, p.18.

[6] Greenberg, p.548.

[7] Belisario R. Contreras, Tradition and Innovation in New Deal Art (London and Toronto: associated University Press, Inc., 1983), p.194-195.

[8] Francis V. O?Connor: "Benton, Thomas Hart" Grove Art Online. Oxford University Press, 1 April 2005, http://www.groveart.com/

[9] Greenberg, p.541.

[10] Karlen Mooradian, The Many Worlds of Arshile Gorky (Chicago: Gilgamesh Press Limited, 1980) p.180 .