Update 7/1/2019: I've added some additional murals at the bottom of the post, all references from commenters. I'm continuing to look for others.
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I've mentioned before that my wife enjoys spending an occasional summer afternoon walking around quaint downtown areas with "cute shops". There are several of these tourist traps within a short driving distance of where we live, including in the town of Geneva, IL. A couple of years back, I agreed to come along on one of these jaunts and supplied my two appointed constructive contributions, i.e. carrying packages and keeping my tart thoughts to myself as we browse among the Christmas ornaments, Irish sweaters, jars of spices we'll use once and then never again, tea services decorated with images of cats, and similar nonessentials.
On this particular outing, I made myself useful a third way: I drove, and managed to parallel-park along the downtown strip. The parking spot happened to be right in front of the village's tiny downtown post office, and for some reason I no longer recall, it seemed opportune, before plunging into retail purgatory, to duck inside to buy some postage stamps.
As I say, on these outings I'm under strict orders not to offer running commentary, but what I saw inside the post office loosed my tongue. A large mural adorned one of the walls. When we saw it, an involuntary "Ooh", or perhaps it was an "Aah", escaped me. I've pasted a photo of it at the top of the post.
We were the only customers inside the post office, and the worker behind the counter was willing to chat with us. He agreed with us that it was fine work, and told us it went back to the Depression era, and was funded by the one of the New Deal programs.
Later, I read up on it a little. The work is entitled "Fish Fry in the Park". Geneva is situated on the Fox River, and it's quite likely that fishing the river would have been a popular recreation during the Depression - perhaps, for some, more than recreation. The mural was executed in 1940 by an artist by the name of Manual Bromberg. Remarkably, Bromberg is still alive, or was earlier this year - he's now over 100 years old.
The work was commissioned by the Section on Painting and Sculpture of the United States Treasury Department. If you're wondering whether the Treasury Department still has a Section on Painting and Sculpture which commissions public works of art, I invite you to reflect on the political divisiveness during our lifetimes on the topic of the government funding artists, writers, public television, radio and the like (hint - the Section was shut down prior to the end of World War II).
It seems that the Geneva post office isn't unique: creating post office murals was a government thing during the Depression.
This memory of encountering something creative and beautiful in the midst of tasks as mundane as buying stamps was rekindled this week when I went on a college visit with one of my children to Iowa State University. Iowa State's college library, the Parks Library, is graced by some large murals by Iowa artist Grant Wood, best known for his farmer-with-pitchfork-and-daughter painting "American Gothic".
Iowa State is Iowa's primary college for engineering and agriculture, and Wood's murals depict those ideals as they existed in the first half of the 20th century.
The murals, commissioned by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), one of Roosevelt's New Deal agencies, were based on a theme originally articulated by Daniel Webster: "When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow." That sentiment, rooting the arts in the working man's toil, may be worth a bit of reflection.
In the 1930s, a Home Economics Department at Iowa State taught the science of running the family home to the state's young women. That science is reflected in Wood's mural depicted directly above - see the women in the panels farthest to the right. A Home Economics building still exists today at the university. Personally, I think it would be useful if the university required all undergraduates of all possible sexes and gender identities to take a course on cooking, sewing, cleaning house, tending lawns and gardens, and many other practical household skills for which gaps are legion among the young 'uns these days.
I depart from conservative orthodoxy when it comes to government sponsorship of the arts. I want to live in a culture in which the arts flourish. Rich individuals and institutions (for-profit and not-for-profit) are indispensable for this purpose. In my view, democratic government funding can and should supplement these other sources of arts funding. Public-spiritedness isn't always in plentiful supply among wealthy individuals and corporations, and its neglect among the funders of art can't help but breed its neglect among the artists who depend on patrons.
I'm grateful for public artwork that adorns libraries, post offices, train stations and other public spaces - not to mention churches. I wish government funding was more plentiful for the arts.
Update July 1 9:55 am: several commenters have provided links to public art in their local area, or from their past. As I'm able to find time, I'll try to hunt up images and paste them here.
Patrick mentioned the murals at the Kane County Courthouse in Geneva, IL. I looked around a very little bit but couldn't find any good photos in Google of the individual murals. I believe I'm running into the same issue that I encountered in seeking photos of the mural in the train station in my hometown, Jackson, MI: that station, like the Geneva courthouse, is considered architecturally important, or at least interesting, so there are plenty of images of the outside of the building, but I couldn't find the inside detail that I was seeking. For some reason, architecture trumps murals in however Google ranks results.
Jean contributed the mural entitled "Fabricating Steel", by Henry Bernstein, which used to be in the Midland, MI post office, and now is in the Smithsonian Museum. It seems the date of its creation isn't known with certainty, but it certainly dates from the New Deal era. I love this picture, because steel work (drop forging, to be particular - blacksmithing on an industrial, automated scale) was the business my father's family was in when I grew up in Michigan. I did some of that work during my college summers.
Katherine mentioned this mural in the post office in her hometown, Ogallala, NE, entitled "Long Horns", by Frank Mechau, from 1938:
Tom's reference to the West Palm Beach post office is the real prize - six panels by Stevan Dohanos from 1940. I managed to find images of most of them, although one of them is black and white - Tom, I'm assuming that's not the coloring of the original. Anyone who thinks that mail delivery is a cushy job should check out these murals:
I don't know how far you are from Galena, but give it a try. It is quite "quaint". I was raised near there and back in the 1950s and 1960s it was a run-down-at-the-heels backwater. Then it was "discovered" by folks from Rockford and Chicago and the rest is history. The restaurant prices there now rival those of San Francisco!!!
ReplyDeleteJim - yep, we've done Galena. It's definitely on my wife's list! For the history-minded (which I suppose I am), it is also the home of Ulysses S Grant and six other Union generals from the Civil War.
DeleteI live about two miles north of Geneva in St Charles. You should tell me the next time you come down and I'll get you a cuppa at Graham's.
DeleteAbout two blocks south of the PO is the old county courthouse, which also has some interesting murals. These were painted in 1911 and it is interesting to contrast them to the post office. The 1911 murals are idyllic scenes of small town life....with no people. I suspect because when one includes people, the art becomes "controversial". But you should check them out next time.
Speaking of Galena, in the little mall down the street from the courthouse closer to the train station is a wine shop specializing in wine from Galena. Since Galena started in the 19th century as a lead mining town one doesn't think of it as a wine producer. The wines are all very sweet. But you can get them by the glass and drink it on the patio. It's a nice way to get mildly sloshed on a summer day, if you are so inclined.
That is indeed an interesting painting. I'm glad that these paintings, which are a slice of history, are still around.
ReplyDeleteMy hometown (Ogallala, NE) also has a New Deal era mural in its post office. It is one of 12 towns in Nebraska which have post office murals commissioned under the Treasury Department's Section of Fine Arts. These were often mistaken for WPA art, but this was a separate program. The picture in Ogallala's post office depicts cowboys herding longhorn cattle. Entitled "Longhorns", it was painted by Frank Mechau in 1938. It is said that the artists were paid between $600 and $800 dollars for one of these paintings. Back then that would have been a significant amount.
Bless you, Jim Pauwels, for your support of public art.
ReplyDeleteWe used to have a 30s era mural at the PO when I was a kid. When the PO was torn down, my brother did some digging and learned that the mural was saved, though not by the town I was raised in, whose captains of industry saw government works projects as a leftist scandal.
I remember also looking at the Rivera murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts as a kind of Where's Waldo game when I was little and we would go there to visit family.
I later learned that the Ford family, whose son Edsel sat on the DIA board and commissioned the works, despised them. What saved them was their huge popularity with autoworkers. Which made me enjoy them for different reasons.
They're still there.
Here's a pic of the mural from the of PO: https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/fabricating-steel-mural-study-midland-michigan-post-office-1973
ReplyDeleteThat's a neat mural, I'm glad someone saved it when the building was torn down.
DeleteThe West Palm Beach Post Office still has the six murals of the Barefoot Mailman, painted around 1940 by Stevan Donahos. You can see them, somewhat, here: https://www.palmbeachpost.com/article/20150930/NEWS/812069865 The barefoot mailmen -- there were several -- covered the distance between Miami and West Palm Beach (68 miles) basically (at least one of them got all the way to Jupiter) by walking barefoot along the beach. In some places, they had to cross inlets in boats. This was in the 1890s, when there were no roads around here. It is said that at times they walked with more clothes missing than their shoes and socks.
ReplyDeleteThe WPA programs that produced the art were controversial in their day. The 1999 movie "The Cradle Will Rock" fairly accurately tells the story of a play by that name that was cancelled by order of Congress. The cast, crew and audience walked a few blocks from the padlocked theater near Broadway and performed it uptown, in a church, I think. Mark Blitzstein, who was a name in those days, wrote the music.
The Federal Writers Project employed (and maybe kept alive), at various times Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, Nelson Algren, John Cheever, Zora Neale Hurston and a bunch of others I don't remember at the moment. Frank Yerby was another. Oh, and Ralph Ellison. Followers of current-day politics will recognize what was wrong with them: Conservative Congress members called them socialists.
La plus change...
As a teenager I read some of Frank Yerby's historical novels. Didn't know until later that he was an African American. I enjoyed his books, I don't remember them as being political.
DeleteTom, those are wonderful. I like the one with the shipwreck.
DeleteNebraska has some beautiful PO murals! There's a coffee table book by Robert Puschendorf. And the Florida ones of the barefoot mailman are also great. I like the one with the shipwreck.
ReplyDeleteI didn't know there was a book about the murals, I'll have to see if our library has it.
DeleteOops, speaking of murals: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/opinion/sunday/san-francisco-life-of-washington-murals.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
ReplyDeleteTrigger warning: History may be hurtful, even if the kids don't mind. Something about this world may offend somebody.
I hate the idea of destroying art, no matter what the subject. If the murals were on canvas, they could be removed to another venue, if they were causing a hissy fit where they were. But probably they were painted as frescoes, which is a way more complicated thing to preserve. Especially if the PTB didn't want them preserved.
DeleteTrigger warning, pfft. Wonderful and provocative. Scrubbing our history, pretending there was never any n-word, and freaking out about statues in undress strikes me as ludicrous when the kids can look up all manner of depravity on free porn sites.
DeleteI always liked that style, a kinder, gentler version of Soviet Realism. It seemed rather ubiquitous in my childhood and pleasing. Paintings of people doing work. I remember a stylized sculpted version on the walls of a supermarket chain in the Philly area. The supermarket was Penn Fruit. Muscular figures grasping wheat and meat products. I call it Big Biceps Art.
ReplyDeleteYes, I like that, too. There are a few of these in concrete bas relief on some of the old state buildings in Lansing. Big Biceps is a good term!
DeleteI don't know how many of you have been to Denver International Airport. It has some seriously trippy murals by artist Leo Tanguma. The pieces have spawned their own collection of conspiracy theories, involving Illuminati and Free Masons and all that fun stuff. Though they are 20-plus years old, one of them seems eerily contemporary, what with events going on at the border.
ReplyDeleteAlso at DIA, don't forget to check out the 32 foot horse sculpture, nicknamed Blucifer, whose eyes glow red in the dark. The murderous mustang killed his creator when a piece of the sculpture fell on him during its creation. The children of the sculptor finished the work.
I see that one of the Tanguma murals has been removed, not because of its shock value, but to carry out preservation. It will be put back in place in 2021.
DeleteGreat art, but as someone with a severe phobia about air travel, those paintings would make.me turn right around and get on a bus.
DeleteYeah, my sister has to pick her daughter up at DIA fairly often. She dislikes Blucifer, calls him the demon horse. Of course it's often at night when his eyes are glowing. We were joking that he's a pooka, though I don't think he was Irish inspired.
DeleteJim, Thanks for adding the mural photos. Henry Bernstein wrote a nice little bit of his father, who also did the Frankfort PO, in your neck of the woods. http://www.wpamurals.com/bernstei.htm
ReplyDeleteJean, that was an interesting article about Henry Bernstein. I'm sympathetic toward people with artistic talent who suppress it for the sake of making a living, and then seek other outlets for it. I wrote recently about a couple of high school friends/classmates who went "all in" in stage acting and succeeded, but there are many more who go "all in", never reach that level and end up doing something else. And many others beyond them who set aside the paintbrush or the clarinet or whatever when adulthood comes along, and then live lives of regret for the next 50 years.
DeleteOne sad fact that you and I might agree on is the dearth of money for community art and architecture that brings pride and beauty to a community. I think the WPA was supposed to get that ball rolling, but now it's all about doing stuff on the cheap.
DeleteFormer neck of the woods, near Traverse.City.
ReplyDeleteAh, but then there is this: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/opinion/sunday/san-francisco-life-of-washington-murals.html
ReplyDeleteJim, that is an interesting situation. I guess his art is still relevant! Misunderstood, though, and considering these are educators making this decision, it's sort of depressing ...
DeleteSanity expresses itself sooner or later: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/nativeson/article/It-starts-with-painting-over-murals-and-removing-14074876.php
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