“Art for the People: WPA-Era Paintings from the Djikstra Collection” Invites Reassessment of Terms Used to Define Movements in 20th-century American Art
By James D. Balestrieri
Henry Adams begins his fascinating essay in the catalogue that accompanies “Art for the People: WPA-Era Paintings from the Djikstra Collection,” on view at the Crocker Art Museum through May 7, 2023, with the following: “When I was in graduate school, back in the late 1970s, the 1930s were a seemingly untouchable period of American art, often passed over with a shudder. The pervasive view was that most art of the 1930s was not really art at all, and that the government’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) art program was a massive mistake, one that had plastered the walls of America with banal, vapid, patriotic imagery.” Adams goes on to describe how historical attitudes toward American art have shifted—happily—and that the imagery of WPA-era American art is, as it always was, popular with museumgoers.
Hugo Gellert (American, born Hungary, 1892–1985), Worker and Machine, 1928. Oil on panel, 30 x 31 in.
Collection of Sandra and Bram Dijkstra
Having grown up at the same time in Milwaukee, then a blue-collar center of manufacturing, with an older brother who was both a brewery worker and a noted painter and gallerist, and an uncle who had been a WPA artist (whose murals are featured in two post offices, one in Wisconsin and one in Minnesota), I know that the art of the 1930s infused my big-shouldered, industrial-city upbringing. What’s more, as Adams infers, the art-historical animus against WPA-era art seems wrapped up in the eternal war between realism and abstraction, where, up to the 1980s, scholars disdained the regionalism and social realism of 1930s painting because it depicted recognizable subjects (i.e., people, places, things) and because it was sponsored by the government. Because this was the art I grew up with, I don’t look at the Djikstra Collection and immediately think about realism or see illustration, the sort of art that graced the old Saturday Evening Post. The war between realism and abstraction is a distraction from the real challenge, which Adams sums up nicely in this way: “Indeed, it’s always hard, even with art historians, to get people to take the time to look at paintings carefully.”
As part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, federal art programs modeled on the government-sponsored mural projects in Mexico during the 1920s were created. The Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture, the Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP) and the Federal Art Project (FAP), all under the umbrella of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), gave artists opportunities to travel, document, and interpret the nation as its farmers and laborers struggled, suffered, and fought to recover. Artists from the cities, especially on the East and West Coasts, spread out into the continental heartland, while others from the Midwest, South and Southwest found bigger canvases—civic art—and audiences for their work. Government sponsorship did, to some extent, lead to government censorship. Many artists knew what they were being asked, and paid, to do, and sublimated their anger and radical impulses. Nonetheless, in overt and covert, subtle and not-so-subtle ways, the message comes through—the burden of the Depression fell hardest on those who could least afford it.
The comparison between WPA art and German Expressionism has often been noted. The Djikstras, however, have prided themselves on the distinction between the works they have collected and the philosophical impulse behind German Expressionism. Bram Djikstra, as quoted by Adams, asserts: “The artists who painted these works didn’t see them as grim or ugly. They saw them as reality, and they saw beauty in the faces of the people they painted even if they were in desperate straits. It’s different from German Expressionism. The German Expressionists hated humanity. They were puritans who felt that the world had fallen apart into its evil components, so they were painting all the evils that they saw around them.”
The Djikstra Collection is both wide and broad, encompassing art of the period from the East and West Coasts, the Midwest, Southwest, and everywhere in between, but two concentrations in this exhibition—California painters and artists from New York City—transform this exhibition, challenging stereotypes that associate the era’s art solely with the Dust Bowl and subsequent migrations. The New York artists’ works combine deep human empathy with aspects of high modernism, while the California paintings juxtapose the natural beauty of the region with labor and work-based themes. As opposed to the documentary realism of the photographs of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, the paintings in the exhibition lean in the direction of the metaphorical moments in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Out of Mexican muralism, the American scene, regionalism, and social realism, paintings in the exhibition, even when they depict tangible realities, routinely cross the thresholds into magical realism and surrealism.
Julio de Diego (American, born Spain, 1900–1979), Beauty and the Beasts, 1941. Oil on panel, 20 1⁄2 x 27 3⁄4 in.
Collection of Sandra and Bram Dijkstra
The artists in “Art for the People” transform story into narrative and anti-narrative emblems encoded in composition, style, and paint handling. They allude, imply, suggest, and are, perhaps, all the more powerful for it.
John Costigan’s c. 1931 oil, Wood Interior, is a particularly deceptive work. It’s rife with possibility yet evades any semblance of certainty. On a computer screen, or perhaps on this page, a quick glance might make you ask what this work has to do with the Depression, with the WPA, or with any of the isms one would expect—social realism, regionalism, etc. From a distance, it’s a gorgeous piece of painting: a creamy, dreamy old-growth bit of forest with wonderful paint movement and splashes of electric blue that serve as spotlights. Nothing about it screams realism. It isn’t until you take a closer look that you even see the two people, a woman and a man, who might be younger (a son, perhaps?) and the small herd of goats they tend. Suddenly, we’re in Millet and Van Gogh territory, with a hint of social commentary. The autumnal browns and looming, leering tree trunks seem to indicate hardship, a lack of pasture for the animals, impending privation, perhaps. Even in the best times, these are people whose livelihoods, and lives, operate at the margins of the economy. They are dependent on the weather, on the health of their animals, and on a market that can fluctuate in a heartbeat. Wood Interior nests a hardscrabble life inside beauty and beauty inside a hardscrabble life.
Fletcher Martin’s 1938 painting, Migrant Woman, seems like a response to Dorothea Lange’s seminal 1936 photograph, Migrant Mother, down to the hand-on-chin pose. But where Lange’s “mother” is claustrophobically hemmed in by her children, Martin’s “woman” is alone in a hostile landscape. Seeing the woman sitting on the edge of a dry wash beside a raging river, the viewer wonders whether this is a river she must cross. What lies on the other side are windswept trees and a steep, barren hill. The landscape here might well be the churning psyche inside Lange’s Migrant Mother. And yet, perhaps because the psyche is expressed, exposed, and made manifest, Martin’s Migrant Woman seems to be finding a moment of repose, maybe a moment to dream inside her exhaustion as she looks into the middle distance with her right arm and hand hanging in a somewhat relaxed position. The landscape, despite its perils, offers a sense of space and, perhaps, hope.
Philip Reisman (American, born Russia, 1904–1992), Coal Region, 1940. Oil on board, 18 x 28 in.
Collection of Sandra and Bram Dijkstra
Harry Sternberg’a 1938 painting, Coal Miner and Family, is one of the more bleak, works in the exhibition. The miner, whose dangerous labor is not only insufficient to feed his malnourished family, actually “undermines” their home and the community in which they reside. The irony is tragic, and there is little hope here; however, Sternberg’s compositional artistry gives, or should give, the viewer pause. To take one gesture in the painting, consider the piece of wood the miner uses to prop up the sagging ceiling of the coal seam. Follow that line up to the leaning wall of the house. The wood in the mine props up the house. All may be about to collapse, but it hasn’t collapsed yet. Once you see this, the realism of the scene and the narrative we attach to it transform and emerge as metaphorical, symbolic. Coal Miner and Family isn’t a photograph. It’s an idea, a plea, not merely to sympathize with the poor and downtrodden, but to feel, empathetically, the precariousness of the human condition—theirs and our own.
Emanuel Romano (Italian, 1897–1984), Construction Workers: Solidarity in Action, 1940. Oil on board, 48 x 36 in.
Collection of Sandra and Bram Dijkstra
By 1941, the preoccupation with the Depression receded as World War II raged and the United States was about to be drawn into the international conflict. Julio de Diego’s 1941 painting, Beauty and the Beasts—a story that would become thematic in the arts during the war—is more Max Ernst or Giorgio de Chirico than any of the isms that characterize WPA art. Keeping in mind that de Diego was married to famous ecdysiast Gypsy Rose Lee, the central idea of the painting—that men will only take a break from warmongering and war-making for the promise of sensuality—is compounded by the woman’s classical turned-away contrapposto pose. She isn’t a stripper; she’s a work of art, statuary. The document she holds might just be an edict, perhaps a plea for peace—or art, since she herself is a work of art—one that has fallen on deaf ears, until, that is, she stepped out of her drapery. But the soldier coming over the wall isn’t listening; he’s looking, lusting, and missing the point. The scene is surreal, as is the painting, but the message is clear—make art, not war.
The nude in Beauty and the Beasts is a woman, a classical statue, a symbol of sensuality, an emblem of art, and, perhaps, an advocate for peace. Yet she is still just paint, applied by an artist who could have made a thousand other choices. She takes us back to the eternal realism vs. abstraction contest. Looking at the works in “Art for the People: WPA-Era Paintings from the Djikstra Collection,” it seems that we either have to expand and refine our definitions of those terms, or, preferably, abandon them altogether. If those terms alone mark works as worthy and unworthy of our attention, then we aren’t, to paraphrase Henry Adams, “looking carefully.”