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On view through May 23, 2015
Gallery Loan
Exhibition:
WPA*JOBS
CCP executive director
and exhibition curator Laura Einstein selected the show from our extensive
WPA-era collection. A percentage of the proceeds of sales from the exhibition
will be donated to the Center.
Link to Gallery
Site for Show Loans:
http://www.susantellergallery.com/cgi/STG_art.pl?artist=wpa
Center for
Contemporary Printmaking,
299 West
Avenue, Norwalk, CT.
The Center is
located in the old carriage house of the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion.
The show
features prints made in the WPA-era. Louis Schanker and Lynd Ward, who served
as supervisors of the relief division in NYC, are both featured, as are Will
Barnet, Riva Helfond, Michael J. Gallagher, and Harry Sternberg, who also held
teaching or administrative positions. In addition to New York, Pennsylvania,
California, and Ohio are also represented.
Below is a
selection of remarks from my talk on Sunday, April 19:
The
Michael J. Gallagher, Boot-Leg Coal, 1935, speaks to the desperate
situation in which so many Americans found themselves. For all the heartbreak
and tragedy that was to follow, those terrible years of the 1930s never fail to
tug at our collective memory – they effected every family in different ways but
their lasting effects are equally profound.
 |
| Michael J. Gallagher, Boot-Leg Coal, 1935 |
People on the WPA were employees of the Federal Government. The New Deal programs were wide reaching and varied. It became the largest employer in the country -- building or repairing hospitals, schools, bridges, dams, playgrounds, swimming pools and wading pools, and over 600 and 50 thousand miles of highways and roads. It is still a wonder that artists were included along with engineers and authors, map makers and ditch diggers, but it is thanks to one man, FDR’s fellow Groton classmate, the artist George Biddle. Biddle reminded Roosevelt that artists are workers too.
The many
art programs in New York City included mural painting, easel painting,
photography, and printmaking. Printmaking was under the direction of Gustave
von Groschwitz. It was further divided into lithography, intaglio (that is
etching and engraving), relief printing which is to say woodcut and linocut,
and serigraphy.
Each
workshop in each town operated in its own way, but in general an artist would
make a print and submit it for consideration. If the subject was approved for
publication, it would be printed in an edition, usually 25 impressions, and
then sent to public institutions such as libraries and schools. It is thanks to
this practice that there are still troves of this material to be found across the
country, especially in libraries. In New York the artist personally received
three impressions; some other cities allowed only one. Also New York used a
varied of ink stamps – usually with the words “Federal Art Project.” This stamp
appears several times in this exhibition, but its use was not consistent. It’s
generally placed at the lower left, just under the image, but sometimes it’s on
the back of the sheet at the center, and there are many WPA prints without the
stamp. Some cities used a blind stamp and others such as Philadelphia never
seem to have ever had a stamp at all.
Artists
like Will Barnet or Harry Sternberg, both teachers at the Art Students League,
could be brought on for special roles and so by-pass the means test. This
provided a large pool of trained teachers and administrative personnel.
Furthermore artists like Sternberg were still free to submit proposals to the
Treasury Department. He, Hugh Mesibov, Louis Lozowick, and others also worked
on enormous mural projects.
In NY,
with the large pool of applicants, many from other states, the WPA was able to
diversify and thrive, while the typical artists’ network, a huge web of
connections, grew. Riva Helfond (one of the less than 14% of WPA employees who
were female) was among the women who benefited from the program and in turn she
made an enormous contribution. She not only made prints published by the WPA
but was hired as a master printer and teacher of lithography at the Harlem Arts
Center. There she mentored Robert Blackburn who would later start the
Printmaking Workshop with Will Barnet. At the League she was instrumental in
guiding Sternberg to the anthracite-mining region of northeastern Pennsylvania
and he in turn took many of his students there. The etchings and lithographs
they produced, the urban or industrial views of work sites and weary laborers,
are accepted as hallmarks of WPA printmaking. Further, the images clearly
resonated in a country where unemployment had reached 25%.
The
modernism found in Louis Lozowick and Hyman Warsagers’ lithographs also
flourished in New York‘s Relief Division. Run by the printmaker and sculptor
Louis Schanker along with the book artist Lynd Ward, their shop produced
innovative and ambitious prints that paved the way for a woodcut revival in the
1940s and 50s.
The
California-born woodcut artist Fred Becker made loose open linocuts as well as
incredibly detailed wood engravings. He had friends from other WPA divisions –
especially the artist Abe Hirschfeld and actor Zero Mostel. Becker, who said he
had taken a Pauper’s oath to be accepted, remembered the joy of getting a
weekly paycheck and felt enormously fortunate. At the end of the week he
usually had enough left over to buy a bottle of wine and a jazz record.
Nationally the average salary was $41.57 a month (or $2 a day), but it varied
by location and specific role.
The
serigraphy or screenprinting division was the brainchild of Anthony Velonis. He
had encountered the medium while working for a wallpaper manufacturer and then
was able to suggest its use as a creative process on Mayor LaGuardia’s Poster
Project that pre-dated the WPA. He then re-introduced the medium on the WPA and
was given his own division. He brought it up yet a third time, to make posters
while he was in the Army. Serigraphs featured in-expensive equipment, true
colors, and a short learning curve.
Philadelphia’s
workshop was particularly successful. The director was Michael J. Gallagher. He
came from the same Pennsylvania Scottish-Irish American mining communities that
captured the imagination of Sternberg and his Art Students League classes.
Trained at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art, he and his wife
had supported their family through the 1920s by doing artwork for magazines
such as the Ladies Home Journal and the New Yorker. As the Depression worsened
their income dwindled, but as an already skilled printmaker he was an ideal
candidate for the role of head of the WPA printmaking shop.
In an
unusual move, he shared this role – he made Hugh Mesibov, of eastern
European-Jewish background, and Dox Thrash, an African-American, his
co-directors – a rare example of ethnically diverse authority. Further he
encouraged them to bring in other artists they knew and so Black artists like
Claude Clark and Raymond Steth found a welcome.
The shop
thrived. Gallagher, Mesibov and Thrash together developed an entirely new
printmaking process, the carborundum print, using the industrial abrasive that
had been donated for grinding down the stones. The carborundum print was a
medium perfectly suited to their industrial yet intimate subject matter. The US
Government recognized their success when their shop was selected to represent
the WPA in a travelling exhibition to Mexico in 1942. The other side of the
story is that very, very few women show up on the Philadelphia roles.
Cuts to
the programs were made as early as 1937 and were firmly in place by 1939. And
as the country anticipated the war and the economy improved, this pressure to
shut down the New Deal projects became more intense. By 1942 the pink slips
went out to most workers. At best the programs had reached about 25% of the
unemployed. By 1943 the WPA (now under the title Works Projects Administration)
was completely over and the country was geared up to make military equipment
and to fight the Second World War.
