Art: In the Business District

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The late George Wesley Bellows was once sketching at Mouquin’s, a Manhattan restaurant favored by society in his day. Bellows liked Mouquin’s less for its food and company than for its mirrors. Hunched at the bar with a sketch pad concealed on his knee, he could use the other patrons as his unconscious models. On this occasion a furious little gentleman approached the artist and charged that Bellows was ogling his wife. Bellows was very peaceable but very tall. He rose, slowly. When he reached six feet the challenger blanched and turned away.

Like Bellows in Mouquin’s, the typical U. S. professional in the fine arts for many years worked in the world but was not of it. He kept his methods to himself; when plain people noticed him at all they suspected him; few people had a chance to discover his dignity, and when discovered it was usually misinterpreted. Much has happened in the last few years to alter this national condition.

Last week in Wilmington. N. C. (pop. 32,270), a downtown building recently occupied by an undertaker’s parlor was undergoing a cheerful change. Carpenters and painters were remodeling it into studios, workshops and an art gallery. In Salt Lake City, Utah (pop. 140,267), the old Elks Club building near Brigham Young’s Theatre had by last week undergone a similar transformation. In Spokane, Wash. (pop. 115,514), a downtown store building, rebuilt into galleries, studios and work rooms, was preparing for its first art show. For these cities the appearance of Art in the business district was absolutely unprecedented. It was likewise unprecedented in the 50 other U. S. neighborhoods where, during the past two years, the same thing has happened.

This autumn there is no fresher news in the world of art than the mushrooming of these Community Art Centres. Among the least publicized concerns of the Federal Art Project, they are fast becoming its most cherished offspring. Located mainly in cities where no art museums or schools previously existed, they have had an attendance so far of about 4,000,000 people—almost equal to the combined two years’ attendance at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum and Chicago’s Art Institute. They are designed to be, and promise to be, permanent; for they belong not to the Government but to the communities they serve. As they flourish and multiply, millions of U. S. adults and children are being taught to think differently about artists and art.

Executive. Nobody asked or expected the Federal Art Project to do more than keep unemployed artists at presentable work. It has successfully done more than this because it is directed by an energetic, ruddy little man who knows the history of American art more intimately than anyone else and who uses refined horse sense in his designs on the country and its people.

Born in St. Paul, Minn. in 1893, Edgar Holger Cahill (whose first name is officially dropped but survives as “Eddie”) followed up his first excitement over modern art with a highly unusual investigation of “folk” art in the U. S. In 1921 he became an assistant to the late John Cotton Dana, director of the Newark Museum, and soon afterward began a friendship with the Midwest’s great thinker and teacher, Thorstein Veblen. From Dana, Holger Cahill caught the conviction that an art museum or gallery should mean a great deal more to a community than a treasure house to get bored in on Sunday afternoon. From Veblen, he learned to value handicraft as art, U. S. handicraft as a lost tradition. As for writers on esthetics, he now says: “Some day when I’m old I may go back to them for a little quiet crepuscular solitaire.”

Despite a series of abdominal operations which, he says, left his midriff “looking like a Paul Klee,” Holger Cahill had by 1933 achieved eminence in his field. For Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art he arranged memorable exhibitions of American folk art, American sources of modern art, American painting and sculpture. He then set off on his most fascinating job—18 months in the South, combing junkshops and attics to find choice Colonial handicraft for the Paradise House Folk Art Collection in the Rockefeller restoration of Williamsburg, Va.

In August 1935, Holger Cahill returned to Manhattan all aglow with his mind made up to leave his old flat on West nth Street, go off by himself and devote his life to literature. In the midst of his packing Washington called. Harry Hopkins requested him, to his great vexation, to come down for a conference on WPA aid to artists. Cahill went to the conference and observed flatly that what the Government had been doing for U. S. artists in Depression was “unimportant.” He was asked to take the job of making it important. Back in Manhattan he called up his friend, Director Francis Taylor of the Worcester Art Museum. “Don’t take it,” said genial Francis Taylor, “you’ll get so many dead cats thrown at you that you’ll never live it down.”

Project. During the three years since Holger Cahill disregarded this warning, the Federal Art Project has heard the whoosh of many a dead cat. Emphasis of its predecessor, PWAP (Public Works of Art Project), had been on finding jobs for good artists. Under Holger Cahill and the advisory committee of first-rate artists and museum directors which he quickly marshaled to assist him, the question of how “good” an artist was became secondary. Any artist could qualify for their project who could qualify for relief. One result was that many an ill-trained dauber, many a demoralized artist whose hand was out, spent the winter of 1935-1936 at a Government easel instead of shoveling snow. First WPA art exhibitions gave critics a chance to pound “mediocrity” for all they were worth.

Director Cahill and advisers were untroubled by this expected criticism, because in the first month of the project they had laid down a long-range program. The Project’s personnel, they decided, was to be drawn from relief rolls in four classes: professional, skilled, intermediate and unskilled. As by their works they became better known, skilled men were employed in research, teaching and craft work, intermediates formed an apprentice class for training, and unskilled personnel came in handy in various ways.

Back of the whole set-up was a belief that the more plain workmanship with canvas, wood, stone, metals, textiles, clay and color goes on in a country, the finer fine arts it may produce. Holger Cahill is fond of using a fact of nature to illustrate his theory of national art: “You don’t often find mountains where there is no plateau.” Hostile critics have rejoined that plateaus and genuine art movements alike are beyond the power of governments to create. But even such critics admit that the Federal Art Project has gone about its job in an orderly manner.

Six Assistants to the National Director were placed as Regional Directors over the West Coast, the Rocky Mountain States, the Midwest, the South, New England and Metropolitan New York (including New Jersey). At a top salary of $3,500 a year, these Directors have supervised the employment of as many as 5,300 artists in 44 States and have authorized a total expenditure of $3,757,000 in 1936, $5,838,000 in 1937 and $4,550,000 in 1938. Artists’ wages, determined by the cost of living in each locality and by union rates, have varied from $103 per month in Manhattan to $39 per month in Alabama, Mississippi and Florida. Top wage is now $98 per month, bottom wage, $45. By selecting plain, large quarters for rental, by mimeographing catalogues, manuals and books instead of printing them, and in general by going easy on creature comforts, the Project has not only saved money but has avoided artiness so completely that its various units in operation resemble sober workmen’s guilds.

Centres. Beyond keeping artists at work under capable direction, Holger Cahill had two principal aims for the Art Project: 1) to clarify, by research, “the native background of the arts,” and 2) to break up the big city monopoly on Art by getting people all over the U. S. interested in art as an everyday part of living and working. To accomplish the first aim, the Index of American Design was set up in January 1936, and to date has employed about 500 watercolorists and draftsmen in digging up old wood carving, weathervanes, costumes, toys, needlework, china, and other craft objects of which more than 8,000 renderings, of marvelous exactitude, have already been made. This compilation is to U. S. design what the Code Napoléon was to French law.

In carrying out his second aim, Director Cahill has shown himself a remarkably astute social engineer. His first move was to make hefty, dark-eyed, Thomas C. Parker of Richmond, Va., his Assistant and Regional Director for the South. Parker, like Cahill, was devoted to the idea of building up community art centres. They began in the South, where Holger Cahill had observed the greatest need. The First Federal-sponsored community centre was started by Director Parker in Raleigh, N. C., in January 1936. Since then Assistant Parker, operating from his office in the Project’s old building on Washington’s G Street, has planned and planted centres from Harlem to Key West and in ten western States. In all cases the project starts by getting the community itself worked up over the idea. Pleasant Mr. Parker or his live-wire field man, Daniel Deffenbacher, arrives in town, confers with everybody from the mayor down. When, and only when, a local steering committee has raised a minimum of $2,500 and has acquired a building deemed suitable by the Project, the Project consents to help plan the centre and recruit a staff of Project-trained men.

One important rule is that the location selected be in the business section and preferably on the ground floor. Another is that no Centre may consist merely of a gallery; it has to have studios and work shops, too. A third is that the Centre, once opened, shall relate its exhibitions and teaching directly to what everybody knows in the community, not to what everybody ought to know. High-hatting is taboo.

Directors Cahill and Parker are them selves surprised at the way small towns and cities have responded. In Sioux City, Iowa, last winter the local Plumbers’ Union, WPA carpenters, the High School manual training classes, a local fur dealer and the Junior League all labored together to give Art a fitting home. In Salem, Ore., a retired professor contributed the first $100 and 2,000 school children chipped in. In Greensboro, N. C., the Community Centre was established in a busted bank and is now regarded by adjacent businessmen as a far greater asset in the location than the bank ever was. Laid out by experts from Washington, such a Federal art gallery as that in Laramie, Wyo. has all the elegance of Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art. In Miami, Fla., Negro children at a Negro extension gallery have life classes.

In Flushing, L. I. white children, left while their mothers shop, get a chance to paint murals. Of the total attendance at community centres, more than half is composed of children and adults who actively participate in workshops and classes in local crafts such as Spanish-colonial woodcarving and embroidery in New Mexico. The Project has sent the centres 226 traveling exhibitions.

Arts in Democracy. Agreeable as it may be that some 4,000,000 U. S. citizens who seldom saw an oil painting in their lives are now not only seeing plenty but learning such things as the reason paintings crack (more oil in bottom layers of pigment than in top layers), the question remains as to how firmly rooted this program is. One answer to that question is political and obvious. Another answer can be made only when time has had a chance to sap the present enthusiasms of the school children of Salem, Oregon, the Junior League of Sioux City, Iowa, and their counterparts in other communities.

No matter what happens, however, the Project as a whole has certain permanent achievements to its credit. About 42,406 easel pictures produced by its artists have been lent to 13,458 tax-supported public institutions, ranging from the Senate office building in Washington to the State Penitentiary in Joliet, Ill., most of which were previously unbrightened by art. Project muralists have worked on 1,150 mural projects.

Critics no longer insist on the Project’s mediocrity. The level of workmanship has undoubtedly risen with practice, and last month’s big WPA exhibition in Chicago (TIME, Aug. 8) showed nothing but professional competence. A more valid criticism of Project painters now is that they are turning out exercises instead of fully formed work, and for this the usual Project requirements of one oil or two watercolors every six weeks have been blamed. Holger Cahill wants to increase Project flexibility, not only for slow-working artists but for a considerable number of creative first-raters who are too repelled by bureaucracy to join the WPA, though they starve without it.

“I think we are not yet a bureaucracy,” says Director Cahill. No bureaucrat, convivial Director Cahill held friendly conference in Chicago last week with Assistant Parker, Advance Man Deffenbacher and Midwest State Directors. Their subject: how to make community art centres sprout in the grass roots. By their decisions not only will Advance Man Deffenbacher begin to drop in on the Midwest this autumn, but the community art centre program will be broadened where possible to include local musical, theatrical and hobby activities.