Government Priorities
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.