A New Deal for Art
FAIN: FT-56834-09
Sharon Ann Musher
Richard Stockton College of New Jersey (Galloway, NJ 08205-9441)
"A New Deal for Art" examines the political and cultural significance of New Deal art and culture in the course of American history. The New Deal's heroic portraits of workers challenged the traditional role assigned to laborers and fostered the type of cross-class alliances that justified the creation and maintenance of a welfare state. The art projects furthermore nurtured a number of artists, such as Alice Neel and Richard Wright, who played crucial roles in the nation's post-WWII aesthetic revival. Finally, the art projects provided a blueprint for future federal patronage of the arts. The approaches to art that New Dealers envisioned---art as grandeur, art as enrichment, art as weapon, art as experience, and art as subversion---continue to describe how government-funded art serves society. Similarly, publicly funded art still both stirs controversy and also provides opportunities to make us more thoughtful, satisfied, and engaged citizens.
Associated Products
Democratic Art: The New Deal's Influence on American Culture (Book)Title: Democratic Art: The New Deal's Influence on American Culture
Author: Sharon Ann Musher
Editor: N/A
Abstract: Throughout the Great Recession American artists and public art endowments have had to fight for government support to keep themselves afloat. It wasn’t always this way. At its height in 1935, the New Deal devoted $27 million—roughly $461 million today—to supporting tens of thousands of needy artists, who used that support to create more than 100,000 works. Why did the government become so involved with these artists, and why weren’t these projects considered a frivolous waste of funds, as surely many would be today?
In Democratic Art, Sharon Musher explores these questions and uses them as a springboard for an examination of the role art can and should play in contemporary society. Drawing on close readings of government-funded architecture, murals, plays, writing, and photographs, Democratic Art examines the New Deal’s diverse cultural initiatives and outlines five perspectives on art that were prominent at the time: art as grandeur, enrichment, weapon, experience, and subversion. Musher argues that those engaged in New Deal art were part of an explicitly cultural agenda that sought not just to create art but to democratize and Americanize it as well. By tracing a range of aesthetic visions that flourished during the 1930s, this highly original book outlines the successes, shortcomings, and lessons of the golden age of government funding for the arts.
Year: 2015
Primary URL:
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo19909836.htmlAccess Model: N/A
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978 0 226 2471
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes