David A. Horowitz | The New Deal and People's Art Market Planners and Radical Artists | Oregon Historical Quarterly, 109.2

The New Deal and People's Art

Market Planners and Radical Artists

by David A. Horowitz

RESPONDING AFTER THE 1932 election to 25 percent unemployment, falling demand for goods, demoralizing deflation, and massive evaporation of investment, Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal committed the federal government to unprecedented intervention in a peacetime economy with an agenda of relief, recovery, and reform. Banks, public utilities, stock exchanges, mines, agriculture, and working conditions all now came under regulation from Washington. Agencies like the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) expanded or rebuilt elements of the nation's infrastructure such as Oregon's Pacific Coast Highway and Mt. Hood's Timberline Lodge. New Deal policies backed industrial labor unions, enacted minimum wage laws, established the social security system, and provided work and cash relief to needy families. Millions of others were assisted through low-interest loans and refinanced farm and home mortgages.

Almost all of these activities, from social welfare subsidies to public works, were designed to revitalize or protect the economy by stimulating mass purchasing power. By the late-1930s, a coalition of retail, banking, and labor interests, led by Federal Reserve Board Chair Marriner Eccles, had worked with administration economists to enact fiscal and monetary policies embracing deficit spending, huge public investment, progressive tax policies, and relief programs. By distributing government benefits, credit, and infrastructure grants, they hoped to stimulate private investment, get people back to work, and reinvigorate the market. As reformers, New Dealers believed that the economy could be salvaged through intelligent planning and constructive social action. One result was the social security system of unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, assistance to single mothers, and help for the physically disabled. The final example of their work was the GI Bill of 1944, the massive public investment in education, aid, training, and home financing for World War II veterans that facilitated the rise of the post–World War II middle class.

The New Deal sought to accomplish these goals through a discourse emphasizing the government's role in unifying the people around common citizenship and service to the nation. Although mainly directed toward European ethnics, particularly Roman Catholics and Jews, in contrast to African American, Hispanic, or Asian minorities, Roosevelt rhetoric identified citizenship with "the people," whose strength and common purpose were to lift the nation out of the Depression. Public art was to be compatible with this newly emerging national culture. New Deal officials saw art as a public commodity. They believed that the government could take the lead in popularizing the production and consumption of art among ordinary Americans so that the arts would no longer be the privileged preserve of the rich. Articulating a philosophy of aesthetic populism, federal administrators hoped to bring representational art to the masses through works that addressed the lives of ordinary people and the experiences of an authentically American culture.

Artistic realism contrasted with the revolution in abstract canvases that had begun in the 1910s with Cubists like Pablo Picasso — who painted images from multiple perspectives, a phenomenon viewed as an unwelcome symbol of social and cultural fragmentation by Roosevelt arts officials. New Dealers preferred genres like the mural — which could deliver images to people in public arenas like housing projects, schools, hospitals, correctional institutions, or post offices. Roosevelt era projects often relied on print reproductions to make art accessible to millions of Americans. The federal government even created an Index of American Design — a collection of twenty-two thousand graphic recreations (usually watercolors or drawings) of handicraft artifacts dating as far back as the eighteenth century. These exhibits were displayed in popular gathering places such as department stores. More than half of the five hundred participants in the federal government's Painting Project were involved in documentary photography or applied arts like stage design or archival documentation. Art was further brought to the people through six hundred local art centers across the nation, including facilities in Salem, La Grande, and the Oregon Coast.

Martina Gangle's The Homesteaders, one of two mural panels of The Columbia River Pioneer Migration, was installed in 1940 at Portland's Rose City Grade School under the auspices of the federally funded Oregon Art Project.

Bill Allen, photographer

Inaugurated under the WPA in 1935, the Federal Arts Project (FAP) shared the consumerist and populist aesthetic goals of the Roosevelt administration. There were some practical reasons for this approach. First, the administration believed that economic recovery depended upon restoration of employment for all workers — including those who made their living in the arts. Four thousand painters and sculptors were on relief and another fifteen hundred without means of support when the WPA initiated the FAP. To qualify for the program, artists were required to get on relief except for the 10 percent of participants who could be selected as instructors or administrators without regard for financial need. Second, Roosevelt officials saw the arts as an industry whose ability to market products aided the long-run health of capitalism. If Americans learned to become art patrons, the arts could become self-supporting, returning artists to work and contributing to enhanced economic activity. To accomplish this, however, New Deal leaders insisted that the arts had to be restructured through democratization.

Because Roosevelt's economic recovery plan required the restoration of psychological morale and social solidarity, creation of a cultural democracy was an essential goal of the federal arts program. Art could be accessible to ordinary people if artists engaged the national spirit by depicting the experiences and aspirations of common citizens. Such an effort could also serve to portray the dignity of ordinary people, whose economic empowerment as consumers was an essential part of the New Deal recovery scheme. Visual imagery, moreover, could be used to cement the administration's political base by documenting the social and economic conditions that it hoped to improve. Such a populist emphasis no doubt discomforted some political conservatives but served the strategic needs of Roosevelt Democrats.

The importance of cultural democracy received full exposure by Holger Cahill, the director of the FAP's Painting Project. The program's organization, wrote Cahill, proceeded "on the principle that it is not the solitary genius but a sound general movement which maintains art as a functioning part of any cultural scheme."¹ A long exposition on WPA arts projects in Fortune magazine in 1937 expounded on these insights. Federally subsidized art programs, it suggested, functioned "not only to let the artists produce art, but to educate and interest the masses of the people and prepare ... the kind of soil in which 'a genuine art movement' might be expected to flower."² Although the article expressed concern that government sponsorship might encourage stylistic rigidity and even isolation from public taste, it acknowledged that the New Deal had induced a cultural revolution by bringing the American audience and artist face to face.

Representational artists C.S. Price, Charles Heaney, Doug Lynch, Lucia Wiley, Louis Buntz, Andrew Vincent, Rachel Griffin, Harry Wentz, Martina Gangle, and Arthur and Albert Runquist were among the thirty-three painters and artisans to participate in the Oregon Federal Arts Project. Between 1935 and 1938, government subsidies resulted in over seventy-five murals and paintings for the state's public schools and libraries, colleges and universities, hospitals, military installations, and facilities like the Port of Portland and Timberline Lodge. Unlike most of their colleagues, who accepted federal sponsorship primarily out of economic necessity, three of the program's artists, Arthur and Albert Runquist and their colleague Martina Gangle, came to their work as self-conscious political radicals associated with a communist movement that viewed art as a medium for advancing social consciousness and class solidarity.

To understand why decided critics of capitalism could eagerly participate in a reformist New Deal program to bolster a faltering market and sustain social morale, one must understand that the inception of the Federal Arts Project coincided with the advent in 1935 of the People's or Popular Front, the broad coalition promoted by the international communist movement to forge a united stance against fascism. To be a Communist in the late-1930s was to stand for antifascism, world peace, industrial labor solidarity, and racial/ethnic pluralism as well as to support liberal governments like the New Deal. At the American Writers' Congress of 1935, literary figures like Kenneth Burke and Edmund Wilson asked leftists to shift their focus from the "worker" to the "people" and to replace sectarian calls for "revolution" with appeals to humanism and democracy.³

Martina Gangle works on a sculpture for the Benjamin Franklin statue at Portland's Franklin High School.

Courtesy of Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon; on loan from the WPA Negatives Collection

As Michael Denning has suggested, a broad "cultural front" of progressives emerged alongside the "popular front." For these working-class activists, culture represented an act of self-development that promised to prepare them for tasks beyond menial labor. At the same time, progressive culture focused on proletarian themes and experiences and conveyed a "labor metaphysic" that asserted the dignity and beauty of working-class arts and entertainment, the involvement of the arts in the union movement, and a defense of arts and crafts against commercial exploitation. The "cultural front" would leave a distinctly vernacular influence on American fiction, theater, film, broadcasting, and painting.⁴

About a year after leaving Portland's Museum Art School in 1934, Martina Gangle joined the Communist Party. One of seven children, she had been born in 1906 into a poor Roman Catholic family near Woodland, Washington. At first, she attended a country grade school and worked with her family as a migrant fruit picker before moving to live with her grandmother in the Lents district of southeast Portland, where she attended Franklin High School while working as a domestic. Considered a promising artist by teachers, she borrowed two hundred dollars to attend the Oregon Normal School (now Western Oregon University) for a year, followed by a brief stint as an elementary school teacher. Unmarried, she gave birth to a son in 1926 and supported herself for four years by helping to run a boarding house.

With meager savings and a personal loan, Martina gained admission to the Portland Art Museum School in 1931, where she eventually earned a scholarship for two years. There she came under the influence of the legendary painter and teacher, Harry Wentz, who taught students to take an intuitive approach to their surroundings once principles of color and design were mastered. While most of her classmates hailed from the local social elite, Gangle had to work as a domestic during the school years and pick fruit during the summers. Despite these disadvantages, Wentz helped her get on the federal government's Public Works of Art program in 1934, for which she was paid twenty-five dollars a piece for three oil panels depicting her mother feeding chickens, road laborers, and a group of prune orchard pickers (the latter is on permanent display in the Portland Art Museum's American Art Collection).

Gangle's conversion to radicalism occurred that same year, when she came across a Portland demonstration on behalf of imprisoned San Francisco labor activist Tom Mooney. Frustrated at slim Depression prospects for making a living in the vocation she loved and horrified at the widespread poverty of the 1930s, she joined the Party. Socialism, she believed, incorporated the Christian ideals taught by her mother and seemed to offer the chance that her dreams of a better society could be turned into practical reality.

In 1936, Wentz helped Gangle secure a ninety-dollar-a-month position with the Federal Arts Project. She was assigned to the Timberline Lodge project, the ambitious new ski lodge and tourist facility that the WPA was building on Mt. Hood. Over the next three years, Gangle contributed to the project with a series of wildflower watercolors and several woodcut engravings including Sunrise, Wood Carvers, and Mess Hall, each of which was included in Builders of Timberline, a pamphlet published by the WPA in 1937. Other Timberline works by Gangle included a linoleum block entitled WPA Workshop and a wood carving of cherry pickers.

Initially assigned to a Communist club of intellectuals and artists, Martina met the Runquist brothers, who, as she once reminisced, "took me under their wing and educated me about life in general and helped me with my art work."⁵ Gangle soon became treasurer of the Oregon branch of the Union of Cultural Workers, joined the Oregon Arts Guild, became secretary of the Workers Alliance of Oregon, sat-in at welfare offices on behalf of Dust Bowl migrants, and was arrested in Portland as part of an antifascist protest against a visit by a Japanese training ship. She loved to paint flowers, trees, chickens, and nurturing women, the latter no doubt a tribute to her beloved mother. By the late 1930s, however, her work reflected a decided progressive political consciousness. A block print entitled Fruit Tramps was included in the 1937 Portland exhibition of the radical American Artists' Congress. Her County Hospital, a linoleum cut of poor people patiently waiting for emergency room care, was accepted for the 1939 New York World's Fair American Art Today Exhibition. Workers Alliance Conference, an oil painting, was shown at the Portland Art Museum in 1940.

Just as Martina Gangle assumed a radical political persona, anti–New Deal sentiments and an attempt to purge communists from federal agencies led Congress to virtually abandon the WPA in 1939 by turning the Federal Arts Project over to the states. By the "eighteen-month ruling," no employee in these programs could be retained for a total of eighteen months. Hired under the Oregon Art Project in 1940, Gangle was assigned to complete two murals for Portland's Rose City Grade School. Entitled The Columbia River Pioneer Migration, the work consisted of two panels depicting Homesteaders and Rafting. Although arts administrators steered mural content toward historical themes with as little political controversy as possible, the Rose City panels enabled Martina to emphasize the egalitarian cooperation among ordinary men and women that sustained her radical faith.

When Gangle assisted the Runquists on Early Oregon (1941), an Oregon Art Project mural for Pendleton High School, the depiction of western Indians and cattle drivers in idealized harmony was one that appealed to the sensibilities she shared with the brothers. Albert and Arthur had been born to Swedish dairy farmers in the Aberdeen, Washington, area during the 1890s. Coming to the University of Oregon to play football, they became fascinated by painting and later studied with Harry Wentz at the Portland Art Museum and with John Sloan at the Art Students League of New York. After brief stints as commercial artists, the brothers settled in at Wentz's house on Portland's Northeast Clackamas Street. Between 1934 and 1941, Arthur completed easel paintings for New Deal arts projects such as Early Portland Fire Drill (1937) and Homesteaders (1939). Murals included the Pendleton project as well as The Tree of Knowledge (1937), a work placed on the main stairway at the University of Oregon Library, as well as installations at the Sedro Woolley, Washington, post office (1940) and the Tongue Point Naval Air Station near Astoria (now a Job Corps Center).

Like their politicized comrade, Martina Gangle, the Runquists pursued projects independent of government sponsorship. Arthur's Pensioned, a portrait of working-class destitution and despair, was featured at the 1939 World's Fair exhibition followed by Scrapped (1941), a symbolic lament over the exploitation of labor. Once the United States entered World War II, Arthur signed on as a welder and crew supervisor at the Kaiser Shipyards in Vancouver, Washington, where Gangle worked as a welder and occasional drafting room technician. Involving an antifascist alliance between the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, the war took the shape of a people's crusade against dictatorship and tyranny. Indeed, the term "free world" was invented by Roosevelt administration liberals to depict those countries free of the horrors of Nazi, Fascist, and Japanese imperialism.⁶ Both Arthur Runquist and Gangle produced an incredible number of gouache paintings, watercolors, and drawings documenting the work of the Vancouver yards, which employed 38,000 people at one point and produced 141 Navy ships. Their work profiles the grandeur of the shipbuilding process as represented by the mighty cranes and construction "ways." It also pictures the dignity of the yard's diverse work force, the private moments and shared jokes of the labor crews, and the price that long hours and dangerous work exacted on the crews.

Martina Gangle assists in painting the idealized Early Oregon (1941), an Oregon Art Project mural for Pendleton High School by Arthur and Albert Runquist.

Courtesy of John Wilson Special Collections, Multnomah County Library, Portland, Oregon

Following the war, Gangle temporarily returned to the fruit orchards and, after marrying merchant seaman and logger Hank Curl, took on a full agenda of social and political causes both inside and out the Communist Party until her death in 1994. Meanwhile, the Runquists survived at Wentz's North Coast cottage at Neahkahnie Beach between 1945 and 1963, where their paintings focused on the resilience of nature amid logging clear-cuts and commercial development. Eight years after they returned to Portland, the bachelor brothers both died in 1971.

Arthur Runquist, The Tree of Knowledge (1937), a Federal Arts Project mural for the University of Oregon Library

Bill Allen, photographer

As committed socialists and politically sensitive artists, the Runquists and Gangle seldom sold paintings, more often trading them for bail money for demonstration arrests, medical assistance, or other needs. It is perhaps ironic that the spiritual roots of their artwork were nurtured in the Age of Roosevelt, that period from 1932 to 1945 when a pragmatic and consumerist-oriented government in Washington, D.C., fostered a reformulated capitalist agenda that could include radical artists with socialist allegiances. Most likely, such a combination would not have been possible were it not for the fact the strategic interests of Popular Front communism pushed the movement toward reformism and democratic humanism while a global war brought communists and capitalist internationalists together in the same coalition. The resulting fusion of energies left Oregonians and the world with a rich legacy of publicly sponsored art and privately initiated work that met the needs of both parties by dignifying ordinary people and expressing the hope of a better life.

In later years, Gangle complained that upper-class Federal Arts Project administrators had exploited artists like herself and denigrated the political activists amongst them. Yet, New Deal and World War II art was not about the artists or a revolutionary view of society. Rather, these works offered a creative way to work toward the reconstruction of an ailing economy, the healing of broken spirits, the dream of a peaceful life following a terrible war, and the restoration of hope. From hindsight, the melding of pragmatism and idealism in these paintings, drawings, and prints provides important clues to the way the visual arts provided a bridge between government policy and radical visions in the Age of Roosevelt.

NOTES

An earlier version of this essay was presented before the Labor Arts Forum on the Art of the Roosevelt Era at the Portland Art Museum, October 9, 2004.

^1.� Holger Cahill, quoted in "Unemployed Arts: WPA's Four Art Projects: Their Origins, Their Operations," Fortune (May 1937), 114.

^2.� Ibid., 115.

^3.� The most definitive treatment of the manner in which 1930s Popular Front radicals brought the celebration of "the people" to expressive culture can be found in Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London, New York: Verso, 1997), esp. 123–25.

^4.� Ibid.

^5.� Martina Gangle to Tillie Aune, n.d. [circa 1988–89], Papers of Martina Gangle Curl, Museum of People's Art: Labor, Life, and Landscape of the Pacific Northwest, Bay City, Oregon.

^6.� For the context of the term "free world," see David A. Horowitz, America's Political Class under Fire: The Twentieth Century's Great Culture War (New York: Routledge, 2003), 85.

Suggested Readings (Horowitz)

    New Deal emphasis on the restoration of consumer purchasing power is one of the main themes of Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). For public arts programs, see Jonathan Harris, Federal Art and National Culture: The Politics of Identity in New Deal America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Bruce I. Bustard, A New Deal for the Arts (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997). See also the relevant sections of Francis Pohl, Framing America: A Social History of American Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002).
    For Oregon's public art programs during the 1930s, see Carolyn Howe, "The Production of Culture on the Oregon Federal Art Projects of the Works Progress Administration" (M.A. thesis, Portland State University, 1980). Overviews of the state's role in creating a regional art tradition can be found in Roger Hull, "The Lure of Pacific Northwest Art," American Art Review 11:1 (1999), 168–77, and in Rachael Griffin, Art of the Pacific Northwest from the Thirties to the Present (Washington, D.C.: National Collection of Fine Arts for the Smithsonian Institution, 1974). See also Ginny Allen and Jody Klevit, Oregon Painters: The First Hundred Years, 1859–1959 (Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1999).
    For two of the region's radical painters, see Katrina Lee Gilkey, "Observations of Resilience and Defeat in Arthur Runquist's Paintings of Labor and the Land" (M.A. thesis, Reed College, 2004), and David A. Horowitz, Martina Gangle Curl: People's Art and the Mothering of Humanity (Portland: Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission, 2004). Samples of the work of Martina Gangle and others can be found in The Builders of Timberline Lodge (Portland, Ore.: Works Progress Administration, 1937) and in Chauncey Del French, Waging War on the Home Front: An Illustrated Memoir of World War II (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press and Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission, 2004).

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