WHO OWNS WPA PRINTS?
TRANSCRIPT OF PANEL DISCUSSION HELD AT THE PRINT FAIR
NOVEMBER 4, 2000 -- page 2
This painting's history and fate raises pertinent questions about the ownership of government property that has been taken into private custody by a government official and then inherited by an institution, and the propriety of violating both the government property regulations on the one hand and the good faith transactions years after the fact.
Similar unsupervised dispersal of art, on a much larger scale, happened on the WPA Federal Art Project. It's art was used to lobby for appropriations, lent to various government agencies, sent to embassies abroad, destroyed by and sometimes privately collected by project administrators, and finally loaned in bulk to whatever institutions would take it, with the residue auctioned off or trashed after the projects ended.
Two examples will suffice here: One describes the vamping of Congress for votes, and the other, the wanton destruction of a mural for specious political reasons. The WPA/FPA was subject to yearly re-appropriations by Congress. This required lobbying, and the Project's chief lobbyist was a handsome, young woman in her early thirties. As she once told me with a sly twinkle in her eye, she would visit Congressmen who needed a bit of persuasion about the future of the WPA Federal Art Project with a supply of photographs of art created on their state's projects. Perching on the edge of their desks, she would go through the photographs with them explaining how they might choose what they wanted to decorate their Washington and local offices.
This method of securing wavering votes was apparently quite effective, and whatever the Congressmen wanted, they got. The loan records are now in the Archives of American Art and indicate that between the years 1936 and 1941, nearly 1,500 works were lent, and that only about 110, or 7 %, were ever returned. The GSA argues that the Constitution gives Congress the sole right to dispose of government property although the GSA never involved Congress in the disposition of its inventories. The point is that no effort was made by the Project to get this art back.
This is yet further evidence that Project Art was expendable as expedient, that no one gave much thought to its return, whatever the paperwork might say or suggest, and the idea of government property was almost a meaningless notion to New Deal idealists who were not out commissioning art, but employing artists and inducing a national cultural revolution.
My second example is the outright destruction of government property by the government itself. On Sunday, July 7, 1940, The New York Times ran a story headlined "Red Propaganda in WPA Murals at Floyd Bennett Field Charged." The very next day, despite protests from the artists and local project officials, the murals were destroyed by the order of a certain Colonel Brehon Somervell, the head of the New York WPA.
The charges that the murals were Communist propaganda were specious. An alleged portrait of Stalin turned out to be that of a famous test pilot. Somervell was well known for his administration of the late years of the WPA Project. He considered all artists Communists, and he once tried to forbid Project artists from signing their works on the theory that they were creating government property! Yet he had no scruples about destroying government property that he saw as politically incorrect. The Floyd Bennett Murals were summarily burnt, with no vestige of due process or appropriate paperwork. Nevertheless, according to loan records, Somervell himself received 11 works of WPA/FPA Art in 1941 and returned none - and went on from terminating the WPA to crown his career supervising the construction of the Pentagon from an office presumably decorated with "Communist" art. (But of course, Stalin was an ally by then.)
Finally, it ought to be noted that the Treasury Section murals and monumental sculpture in federal buildings housing the Treasury Department were less threatened by dispersal. They did, however, suffer from wanton neglect over the years and. The establishment of the US Postal Service in 1970 which permitted post office murals to be sold to private citizens and dubious attempts at conservation, has resulted in serious damage, such as to the Ben Shahn murals in the Bronx Central Post Office.
All the projects were terminated during the war years. After the war, tendencies to view the projects as hotbeds of Marxist ideology and Communist subversion - ideas already used against them in the 1930s - reduced New Deal art to "poor art for poor people." And, the depiction of poor people was considered subversive illustrations of national weakness. Postwar artistic tendencies such as Abstract Expressionism eclipsed art of social concern and depictions of the "American scene". New Deal art was forgotten and by the late fifties, the Projects were a dim memory.
Early in the sixties, a few small exhibitions of New Deal Art promoted new interest. The very first one of these was of New Deal prints at the Ira Smolin Gallery in 1961. Later in 1966, I organized a comprehensive exhibit of New Deal Art at the University of Maryland, and at that time, I came across Karel Yasko at the GSA, who told me that he was establishing an inventory of New Deal Art. He had been an architect and he built a career saving New Deal Art at the GSA. By the early 1970's he was working to establish GSA ownership. He cultivated the press, wrote articles boasting of his new finds, restored New Deal murals on the cheap, such as the Shahn's, and staged exhibitions of project art. He almost did himself in by hijacking the University of Maryland's collection of New Deal art, that it had obtained on permanent loan from his own agency in early 1960s. Restored to power in the 1980's, he stopped a Christie's auction of prints in 1983 and demanded duplicate prints from museums that had received legitimate project allocations.
Yasko died in the late 1980's, but his successors at the GSA continue to pursue anyone known to possess New Deal art. The GSA has recently published inventories of New Deal art in non-federal institutions, which I mentioned earlier, and has expressed a dubious legal theory of ownership based on ambiguous regulations from the old projects whose nature, policies, and motives, they have deliberately distorted.
As for the 1999 Inventory, it contains catalogues of 42 institutions, yet I received 19 such allocations and their names have been on the public records since 1965. Why only 35% have been inventoried remains a mystery - since the information has been on the public record since 1969.
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