https://www.theartstory.org/definition/federal-art-project-of-the-works-progress-administration/

Summary of Federal Art Project of Works Progress Admin

(Click on the links for Social Realism and Regionalism for explanations of what these terms represent.)

During its years of operation, the government-funded Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) hired hundreds of artists who collectively created more than 100,000 paintings and murals and over 18,000 sculptures to be found in municipal buildings, schools, and hospitals in all of the 48 states. Additionally, nearly 100 community art centers throughout the country provided art classes for children and developing artists. The FAP was part of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal during the Great Depression, in which he sought to put as many unemployed Americans back to work as possible and to buoy morale of the citizens. Some of the 20th century's greatest visual artists were employed by the FAP, along with many nascent Abstract Expressionists.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

One of the main aims of the Federal Arts Project was to invoke familiar images that spoke of shared values and American progress, including technological wonders, fertile farmlands, small town life, and big city vibrancy. Additionally, the program hoped to foster the role of the arts in public life and to bring the artist closer to everyday, American life.

The FAP allowed many artists for the first time to work exclusively as artists without taking up side jobs, and it brought the art they created in a variety of styles to communities and cities around the country through murals, easel paintings, photographs, posters, and sculptures.

The Federal Art Project tended to favor more realistic styles, including Social Realism (Social Realists created figurative and realistic images of the "masses," a term that encompassed the lower and working classes, labor unionists, and the politically disenfranchised.)  and Regionalism, (These works were figurative and narrative, returning back to an ideal of art-as-storytelling, rendered in precise detail.) Still, many of the younger painters expressed more abstraction in some of the mural designs. 

https://inthesetimes.com/article/the-lively-politics-of-1930s-art

Extracts based on The Lively Politics of 1930s Art

ALEX MCLEESE SEPTEMBER 16, 2016

(Click on the links in the text to view the artwork referred to. Most links redirect you to a second link.)

During the Cold War, much of the political art of the 1930s was overlooked, overshadowed by other artistic movements like Abstract Expressionism. Now, however, the period is receiving more attention.

According to several art historians, 1930s art was meant to appeal to popular audiences. ​“Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton were making serious artistic statements at the same time as they were addressing the American public,” (Henry Adams, art history professor, Case Western Reserve University.) ​ But not just popular audience: “By the time of Abstract Expressionism, artists were delighted that the general public didn’t understand what they were doing and were aiming at an elite audience...​Painting in the 1930s resonated with the lives Americans actually lived.”

Artists of the 1930s often engaged their audiences in the contentious political issues of the day. ​“American audiences were welcoming to a variety of voices, a variety of conversations about politics, that were clamped down in the 1940s and 1950s.” (Carmenita Higgenbotham, art professor at Virginia professor.) ​“In the 1930s, the entire culture received a lot of different information...People  had a difficult conversation about what was happening.”

The Art Institute of Chicago exhibit included Abstract, Precisionist, Regionalist, Social Realist, Magic Realist and Social Surrealist works. Each form related to the ​“real” in its own way, and each displayed a distinct capacity for expressing political messages.

The Precisionist and Abstract art featured in the exhibit tended to avoid direct social criticism.

The Precisionist Charles Sheeler’s paintings were commissioned by businessmen and Henry Luce’s Fortune magazine. Precisionists, who drew from other traditions such as Cubism and Futurism, paid special attention to the industrialization and modernization of the United States. Sheeler’s paintings of industrial scenes, such as ​“American Landscape,” included clean lines and simplified elements. ​“Sheeler was interested in the heroic quality of American industry” and was less political than Regionalists. (Henry Adams)

People were absent in Sheeler’s work. ( American University professor Helen Langa )  ​"...leaving out the human labor presence is an abandonment of political analysis...pro-technology, which ends up having a capitalist element to it, portraying machines not workers." (Langa)

The Modernist painter Stuart Davis, by contrast, engaged with Marxism, although much of his art is not explicitly political. Still, "Davis himself saw his work as political because he depicted everyday life, and sought to engage, educate and activate his viewers." (Boston University professor emerita Patricia Hills)

Davis combined abstraction and realism, championed European modernism and sharply criticized American Regionalism. Davis maintained that modernist practices were inherently radical,  but he rejected works that were entirely abstract. ( Univ. College of London professor emeritus Andrew Hemingway ) ​“Even as Davis embraced the idea of art as autonomous, he remained conflicted about pure abstraction, which he felt disregarded art’s social role.” (Whitney Museum of American Art notes)

Regionalist art avoided radicalism. Regionalists Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood promoted traditional agrarian values in paintings of rural America. Their work provoked great controversy. ​“The disputes between Regionalism and the Left were very fierce, especially with Benton, a self-aggrandizing person who was the Donald Trump of 1930s painting,” (Hemingway.) ​“The ruralism of the Regionalists was hokey. They were roundly attacked by the Left and also by many liberal critics.” Regionalism was publicized by Luce’s Time magazine, and was criticized for being conservative, parochial and provincial by left-wing critics such as Davis.

“To see Regionalism as any form of realism would be a mistake. (Washington University in St. Louis professor Angela Miller.) ​“It featured idealized fantasies about rural life, and was precisely intended in many instances to dispel anxieties about the Dust Bowl. There’s no relation between Thomas Hart Benton and what was really going on.” Works such as Wood’s ​“Fall Plowing” and ​“Young Corn,” and Benton’s ​“Cradling Wheat” and ​“Haystack,” portrayed idealized landscapes, (ignoring) modern conditions of erosion, poverty and tractors.

1930s critics accused Regionalism of promoting nationalism. But Regionalism, other historians say, defied easy categorization. Regionalist Grant Wood’s attitude towards traditions was complicated. “Wood was sophisticated and playful in a way Benton wasn’t and with a more original style.” (Hemingway) Wood did, however, engage critically with American history and tradition in multiple paintings, ​“Parson Weems’ Fable” self-consciously acknowledging the role of mythmakers in shaping a story about George Washington.

Another historian suggests that Thomas Hart Benton, too, displayed a complicated politics. ​“People talk about Benton representing an idealized view of American life,” (Henry Adams) ​“However, in a Missouri mural, (link to highly recommended fascinating short PBS video) a fur trader is selling whiskey to an Indian. It ends with a Kansas City boss sitting in a nightclub with trustees of art. This mural does not idealize American life, but is rather self-aware and critical. Most viewers missed the point. It’s startling the degree to which people reversed the actual message of what was going on in his painting.”

Many modernist and Regionalist paintings addressed national and regional identities. Wood’s ​“American Gothic” was among the Art Institute’s most popular paintings. Works such as this fulfilled  psychological purpose. ​“In art, national identity fills a need for the community...rallying cry for a country trying to heal itself from trauma.” (Higginbotham )

At the time, some feared that the nationalism expressed in art could be dangerous. Works about national identity might be used to deflect, defeat, and suppress alternative radical voices, voices seeking to reexamine the nation and what it stands for.” Nationalism in art ​might be used “not only as a source of optimism and unification, but also a source of political suppression.” (Higginbotham)

Social Realists directly criticized the capitalist order. Philip Evergood depicted the terrible conditions facing the poor in ​“Dance Marathon.” Ben Shahn protested the verdict of a controversial legal case against two anarchists in ​“The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti.” Joe Jones portrayed the oppression of black workers in ​“Roustabouts.” Alice Neel painted the powerful figure of a labor organizer in ​“Pat Whalen.” Later, during the early Cold War, many of these radical realists were accused of Communist Party activities, sometimes accurately. According to Langa, these radicals painted realistic works because realism — as opposed to certain modernist tendencies — ​“made their themes more understandable to working-class viewers.”

"Evergood’s work is important because of the way it distorts the reality. ​ Social realism is an expressive statement about the ways in which capitalism distorts the natural order,”   (Angela Miller)  ​“Painters used formal devices to bring home how distorting the forces of capitalism were, to what extent you cannot capture the world around you in naturalistic language, cannot express the realities of a world in crisis, facing fascism. Expressive distortion was one of the most important contributions of Radical Art of the 1930s.” (Angela Miller)

Artists pushed the boundaries of the real in other ways. Social Surrealists and Magic Realists explored these new styles as they were introduced to America, employing them to warn against fascism. In his controversial ​“The Eternal City,” Magic Realist Peter Blume caricatured Mussolini’s head as green and grotesque. Eventually, the Museum of Modern Art bought Blume’s painting for its permanent collection. The ​“Proletarian Surrealist” O. Louis Guglielmi, in his painting ​“Mental Geography," portrayed the Brooklyn Bridge under fascist attack.

Historians argue that Surrealism was able to explore the dark psychology of the period’s politics. Surrealism combined particular details with fantastic exaggeration. For painters in the mid-1930s, it was ​“a particularly effective tool for suggesting something ominous was going to happen, including fascism.” (Henry Adams)

​“Surrealism seemed to be a great form to convey a radical political agenda, and was also highly emotional.” (Higginbotham) ​“able to visually articulate irrational violence or political situations that operated on heightened emotions and fear.”