The Federal Arts Project (FAP) began in 1935 as a New Deal program to facilitate the growth of art in the US. It was under the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and was among five other projects initialized to oversee the development of various sectors in the New Deal. The primary purpose of the project was to employ artists for mural creation, paintings, sculptures and all aspects of art.
WPA created over 100 art centers in the country to document, research and study the American culture and get to showcase it publicly through art. The exercise was very successful because ten thousand artists were under the program during the great depression.
During its tenure, more than 100,000 paintings were collected and well over 18000 sculptures. Most of the artists who did not have the financial capability to support themselves were employed and supported in their art by this project.
In the 1930s and 1940s, abstract art was not very popular. The federal arts project preferred figurative art. Pollock, an abstract painter, was supported by the project when his art was not very lucrative. The art centers that the federal arts project had begun all over the country educated children, artists, and upcoming artists.
The federal arts project succeeded in bringing awareness of art to the public. It gave hope to so many aspiring artists and provided job opportunities for thousands of artists in the short span of time that it was functional. So many artists got to learn and better their art skills through the project.
Works accomplished under the federal art project
During the early years of FAP, over 1000 artists began to work with WPA. In those years, the success of FAP was realized almost immediately from the quality of art produced and the impact that it made on the public. The artists would get their payments depending on their work and those who needed financial support.
Arshile Gorky is among the first most notable artists to work with FAP. Since the start of FAP, he collaborated with the mural division and earned up to $103 per month. He was assigned a job in 1935 by the head of the painting division to provide sketches for the Floyd Bennett Field administration building in Brooklyn.
The murals were to be aviation inspired and were supposed to include stories of man aspiring to fly in a romantic setting; it would also show man’s attempts at building a flying machine. Gorky took up the assignment and internalized it; he decided to give people a feel of flying and not just show people in airplanes.
His first idea was a ten-panel mural that he gave the name “Aviation: evolution of forms under aerodynamic limitations.” His vision for the piece was that it would be spread across four walls and have photos of aeronautical figures. After several months working on the sketch, he came up with more than 50 designs and his ideas and visions for the projects kept on growing.
Gorky did not agree with the idea of incorporating photos into his project, and he therefore began convincing FAP why he should be allowed to work on his mural, the site for the project then changed to Newark airport. In 1937, there was the unveiling of the murals that were selected together with the photographs by David Wyatt.
The work of Gorky was significantly recognized and appreciated. The WPA opened an art gallery called the Federal Art Project Gallery in New York. Some of the earliest works that were in the gallery were the watercolors by Jackson Pollock.
There were over 6000 artists employed by WPA by 1936, among them Willem de Kooning who quit his job at a shoe store as the designer for the store’s window to join FAP. He was able to work with Harold Rosenberg once he joined WPA.
Mark Rothko in the same year presented portraits for the Treasury relief art project. It was also part of the WPA projects. The paintings included “two women at the window” and “subway” both in 1937. The many workers in the WPA caught the eye of the government, and the government announced that every employee of WPA had to be an American citizen.
Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning had to stop working any further with FPA because of their citizenships. Most of the non-citizen employees continuing to work regardless of the announcement, but Willem opted to resign from the job.
In 1939, FPA began to lay off some of its workers. Gorky was able to continue working as he got his citizenship but Mark was laid off from FAP. In 1940, WPA came up with a new rule stating that artists should be in constant rotation. Every artist that have been in service for 18 consecutive months was to be laid off for at least one month. It saw the departure of Pollock temporarily.
These were the days that began to mark the end of FAP and WPA. Pollock returned in 1940 and on the first of January in 1943, Lee Krasner was laid off, and less than a month later Pollock was also laid off. In June of the same year, the FPA stopped supporting artists.
At the end of 1943, most of the WPA-funded paintings were on sale at auction by the government and that marked the dissolution of WPA. The WPA and FAP left a mark on the people from the number of artists that had gotten opportunities from the program.
The FAP went down as a project that mostly supported figurative artists rather than abstract art. During the years that WPA and FAP were working, they came up with over 200, 000 art pieces. A majority of those art pieces got lost or destroyed during the dissolution of the program.
All the art that got funding from WPA remains federal property to date. The General Services Administration works together with the FBI and artists to find and recover the works. The GSA is the custodian of the arts and carries the task with keeping an inventory of all federal art.
By 2014, the GSA had managed to gather only 20,000 of the artwork. The search for the WPA arts still continues although most are destroyed and of poor condition. There were 122 FAP paintings recovered from libraries in California in 2015.
For more be sure to check out the Library of Congress Federal Arts Project page.
