For the People: American Mural Drawings of the 1930s and 1940s
by Patricia E. Phagan
During the 1930s and early 1940s, a flowering of mural painting took place in an economically depressed United States, resulting in thousands of murals decorating the nation's buildings. With little private patronage and an art market that had collapsed, a great many artists lived precariously, though the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project and other initiatives were soon established to employ them. Artists competed to create murals in post offices or other government properties, and they were paid, through public or private wages, to paint murals across the country in various venues, including museums, hospitals, high schools, housing projects, colleges, music halls, even ships and nightclubs. At the same time, artists sought to connect more with the everyday public, as in Mexico where painters created murals for a government-supported revival of wall painting.
American muralists in this era generally followed an academic model of preparation, making a series of different kinds of drawings, including sketches of individual figures, compositional studies in black and white, and also in color, studies squared for transfer to a larger composition, and full-scale drawings, or cartoons. For the People presents around thirty drawings, paintings, and sketchbooks used in preparation for making murals during this period as well as numerous archival photographs of completed works and paintings in progress. Interest in acquiring these mural drawings for Vassar College began over thirty years ago, and, now, the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center has in its permanent collection over sixty preliminary sketches for murals of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal era, many by Connecticut artist James Daugherty. While a majority of the works in the exhibition comes from the permanent collection of the Lehman Loeb Art Center, there are notable loans from public sources and private collections as well.