Looking behind the scenes at the personalities and policies of such
venerable institutions as the Federal Arts Project and the Museum of
Modern Art, A. Joan Saab discerns a broad-based democratic modernism
inspired by and engaged with the social life of the period.
In the summer of 1935 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt established
the Federal Arts Project under the aegis of the Works Progress
Administration. The project's goal was, in the words of its director
Holger Cahill, to get people all over the United States interested in
art as an everyday part of living and working. In addition to this
endeavor, the project would also provide work for artists who, as a
project press release stated, had been hit just as hard by unemployment
as any other producing worker. Meanwhile, as director of the newly
opened Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr was instituting his philosophy
of democracy in design through a series of ambitious exhibits that
focused on informed consumption in the marketplace.
The idea of treating the artist as a producing worker and art as an
everyday part of living and working was a novel one in 1935 and
illustrated a broad shift in the social roles of both. Prior to the
1930s, art in America had resided principally in the domain of the
cultural elite. The upheaval of the Depression era, however, challenged
this authority. Throughout the decade, government officials, museum
professionals, educators, and artists worked together to determine not
only what role artists would play in society but also what forms
democratic art would take and how widely it would be disseminated, thus
fundamentally redefining the relationship between art and society. This
egalitarian artistic movement of the 1930s stands as a significant
moment in the ongoing dialogue over the relationship of art and public
life that continues today.
