Government Priorities

Summary

This review of John P. Murphy’s New Deal Art examines how the U.S. government treated art as a necessity within Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal from 1933 to 1943, using evidence including Seymour Fogel’s mural “Wealth of the Nation,” the Works Progress Administration’s community art centers, Charles White’s “Five Great American Negroes,” and Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother.” It praises the book’s accessible presentation of this rich Depression-era aesthetic tradition while noting that its narrative sometimes becomes mired in bureaucratic detail, and concludes that Pearl Harbor and the shift to wartime priorities ended the government’s capacity and desire to support the arts at the same level.

Highlights

• The vibrant mural, writes John P. Murphy, “offers reassurance that the Depression’s frightening uncertainties have been brought under control by new ‘pioneers’ securing the frontiers of science, technology, and industry”.
• Murphy’s New Deal Art. “World of Art” to provide Americans security in the wake of financial collapse.
• invites readers to linger over the various artworks arrayed alongside the text. the narrative sometimes gets stuck among descriptions of New Deal bureaucracy.
• New Deal Art reveals the rich aesthetic tradition of impoverished times. But the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 changed the calculus. As the US moved toward a war footing, the government’s desires and capacity to boost the arts would be overtaken by the need to defeat fascism.

Source

Publication

The Times Literary Supplement

Reviewed work

New Deal Art by John P. Murphy