TRANSCRIPT OF PANEL DISCUSSION HELD AT THE PRINT FAIR
NOVEMBER 4, 2000
Grace Glueck (Moderator), art critic at The New York Times
Will Barnet, former WPA artist
Hersh Cohen, managing director, Smith Barney Asset Management and print collector
Sylvan Cole, print dealer specializing in American Prints
Franklin Feldman, lecturer of art law, Columbia Law School
David Mickenberg, Director of the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University
Francis O'Connor, art historian and WPA expert
Richard Solomon: IFPDA is honored that Grace accepted our invitation to moderate this distinguished panel that will delve into the convoluted situation regarding the prints that were commissioned under the WPA. On behalf of all of us, please welcome Grace Glueck, The New York Times art critic.
Grace Glueck: I want to say immediately that we are sorry that no representative of the General Services Administration could be found who was willing to come to our session today, and I think it is a great loss on their part. But we will proceed without them. Let's start with Francis who is going to give us the history and background of this situation.
Francis O'Connor: I want to address the historical background of the General Services Administration's recent attempts to claim government ownership of fine prints created under the New Deal Art Projects during the 1930's. These claims that encompass all New Deal Art, not just prints, rely on a theory of ownership historical evidence suggests is bureaucratically self-serving and not in the public interest. These claims are certainly open to challenge.
Let me make it clear, however, that I am not advocating breaking the law. Rather, we are challenging a specific theory of law developed by the GSA over the last 60 years, a presumed absolute ownership of its predecessor's property. As a consequence, the GSA demands that anyone possessing artwork such as WPA prints turn them over to the GSA or give this material to a public institution. The GSA has produced an inventory of New Deal Art in non-federal buildings and documentation of its legal theory.
In order to understand the GSA's theory of ownership, we have to understand the history and policies of the several New Deal visual arts projects that operated, for the most part, parallel to each other, between 1933 and 1943. Unlike the Federal Writers' Project, Theater Project, and Music Project, there were four visual art projects, one under the WPA, and three under the Treasury Department.
First, an important distinction: The New Deal Administration was the first to support the government's production and promotion of art by artists from all over the country. This change was specific to the Public Works of Art Project and the WPA Federal Art Project, both of which were work relief projects that paid directly for art with wages rather then patronage projects that acquired specific works of art by contract, as did the Treasury Department's Section of Painting and Sculpture when it commissioned Post Office or Courthouse murals or sculptures. The New Deal's new policy of relief production and popular promotion both required, and in fact inhibited, the formulation of comprehensive and consistent regulations concerning how the government owned what it was paying for.
These regulations officially assumed government ownership, but there were three big problems. First, they unofficially allowed many ambiguously articulated exceptions required by the nature of the art form -- artist's proof prints for instance -- or the fact that a mural became ipso facto the property of its wall's owner. Second, the tumultuous administration of the relief projects caused problems and led to a certain inevitable lack of attention as to who owned what. Third, there was a tendency, especially on the WPA Federal Art Project, to ignore the specifics of ownership, since the WPA administrators were more interested in helping indigent artists and promoting the creation of art around the country. The bottom line is that an idealistic cultural bureaucracy fudges the rules.
This was especially true of the first project, the Public Works of Art Project, PWAP. It planned, according to its early documentation, to allocate its creations to public facilities. Being short-lived - it only existed between December 1933 and June of 1934 -- it ended before it could supervise such placement, so the art was more or less abandoned, taken in by other government agencies or regional officials, given away, lost - or in one very famous case, purloined.
Consider the fate of The Fleet's In!, painted by Paul Cadmus in 1934. It depicted a group of six sailors, six young women, one dapper gentleman lighting a sailor's cigarette, and a censorious old woman. The picture was to be included in the PWAP's exhibition of its best work at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington in June of 1934. That is until an irate admiral wrote to the Secretary of the Navy protesting that the painting cast aspersions on the virtue of American sailors. The PWAP reluctantly removed the work from the exhibition, and agreed to transfer it to the Navy. The Assistant Secretary of the Navy, who just happened to be a certain Henry Latrobe Roosevelt (a fifth cousin of the President), immediately rescued it from the Corcoran before it could walk the plank at the Navy department, and hung it at his own home. Thus, he started the habit of well placed New Dealers dealing themselves a hand of art. When he died in 1936, Henry Roosevelt bequeathed the painting to the Private Alibi Club in Washington, where it hung until 1980. Then, the GSA managed to get it back into Federal custody on the grounds of its claim to universal ownership, and deposited it at the Naval Historical Center in Washington, D.C.
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