Art: Gentle Hogarth

At an annual cost little greater than that of a couple of infantry regiments, the U. S. Government has for about three years been the world’s No. 1 patron of painting. Federal art lovers may or may not be right in thinking that this patronage will be the most fruitful since the Medicis, but in one respect at least it has encouraged a Renaissance. This is in the field of mural painting.

Decorated by Italians of diluted talent or by conscientious U. S. beautifiers, the walls and domes of many a courthouse, library and State Capitol still witness the sad state of mural art during the late igth Century. Strongest and soundest murals of the period were done in 1876 by Henry Adams’ friend John La Farge for Trinity Church in Boston, and later for Manhattan’s Church of the Ascension. But La Farge worked in the European tradition, had little influence on his best successors.

Gifted, vigorous U. S. artists did not begin to climb scaffolding until painters like Sloan, Luks and Bellows had found big subjects in local streets, parks, barrooms, and until the generation of Curry, Wood and Benton had done likewise in the farm and cattle country. The possibility of integrating this material in wall designs was driven home by Mexico’s two great muralists, Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco. Missouri’s Benton completed his first murals in Manhattan’s New School for Social Research in 1930 (TIME, Jan. 5, 1931) and a movement of great and wild vitality was in full swing. By the time Orozco finished his famed, furious panels in Dartmouth’s unoffending library in 1934, hundreds of young painters were trying to master mural technique.

The New Deal recognized this movement and provided an outlet for it. Organized in 1934, the Treasury Department’s Division of Painting & Sculpture has kept up spirited competition between U. S. muralists for the walls of Washington’s huge departmental buildings. For artists on relief, WPA’s astute Art Director Holger Cahill nas found some 500 mural jobs employing more than 1,000 painters. Both Federal agencies are haopy about the results, but the pride of me Treasury is in mural painting alone and in such newly-discovered talents as Frank Mechau, of Colorado, whose Dangers of the Mail was chosen last year for the new Post Office Department building (TIME, March 2, 1936). Current discovery of Treasury art officials is not a young man from the West but a seasoned Connecticut artist whose murals are now waiting to be installed in a low-cost Federal Housing project in Stamford.

Painter James Daugherty, 48, studied in London under Frank Brangwyn when he was 16 and 17. tried commercial illustrating on his return to the U. S. Of this period he says, “The general idea was that I didn’t eat regularly.” During the War he got a job painting camouflage in the shipyards at Newport News, Va. For the last ten years he has lived quietly at Weston, Conn., seen his son Charles through the Yale School of Fine Arts. Both he and Kansas’ eminent John Steuart Curry, who worked with him on some murals for the Philadelphia Sesquicentennial in 1926, can remember with amusement that Daugherty told Curry he ought to learn how to draw.

The only title that hulking, broad-browed Painter Daugherty can think of for his Stamford murals is Democracy of the Machine, and that, says he, is “too high-brow.” Far from high-brow are Daugherty’s panels of the early steam engine, the horseless carriage and the hallowed Model T. Done in subdued blues and terra cotta, swirling with life and small boys, their style resembles that of a somewhat superficial Curry, a gentle Hogarth.