The Bennington Museum brings to life a world few people know.
The Bennington Museum, small and off the beaten track in southwestern Vermont, doesn’t have much money. But it proves again and again the value of imagination and grit in making good things happen. Its smart, engaging show “From Crash to Creativity” considers an era from Vermont history that few people know. Understanding how this tiny, isolated state weathered the Great Depression involves a leap beyond a world of green mountains, quaint villages, and maple syrup.
Far from a happy Brigadoon with cows, Vermont suffered mightily. It soon defied its creed of rugged self-reliance and dived into the alphabet soup we call the New Deal. The art the show presents and contextualizes is as solid and sensible as Vermont itself, and as quirky.
In the 1930s Vermonters wryly quipped, “Depression . . . what Depression?” It wasn’t that their economy escaped the searing national disaster. Rather, Vermonters knew the state was in a chronic depression. With stingy, rocky farmland, brutal winters, and hundreds of tiny, depopulating towns tucked in hollows and mountain ridges, Vermont had been among the poorest states for a hundred years. It’s not the tail end of Appalachia for nothing. When Horace Greeley counseled, “Go west, young man” in the 1860s, he spoke as someone who grew up in tiny Poultney. Vermonters might have seen federal-government largesse as the fastest horse cart to servitude, but the state soon caved and took the money.
Some of the art in the show is strictly touristical and charming. Marian Huse from Pownal earned $95 a month from the Federal Arts Project — part of the Works Progress Administration — making serigraphs, a new printmaking technology later called silkscreens. Her views of covered bridges and old churches were quintessential Vermont. FAP also supported paintings in public buildings celebrating a key slice of Vermont’s past: During the American Revolution, the Green Mountain Boys were decisive in the battle of Saratoga and the conquest of Fort Ticonderoga. Many of the FAP paintings invest the Boys with a decorum that would have surprised them. In reality, they were young rogues and farmers, loosely organized guerrillas more than anything else.
Roy Stryker, the creative director of the Farm Services Administration’s famous photography department, owned a summer home on Lake Eden near Vermont’s Canadian border. He worked with his photographers to convey an authentic Vermont with no hint of otherness or cloying sentiment. The FSA’s Vermont is primitive. Most of its farmers worked as their ancestors did. Abandoned houses and cars dot the photographed landscape in far greater numbers than pretty churches. No one is grim, hopeless, or enervated, though. Vermonters are tough, dogged, matter-of-fact, and resilient. Jack Delano’s rare color FSA photographs from 1941 show a rural family in awe at the State Fair in Rutland. The family’s sense of style — pink for girls, blue for boys — is comically obvious and totally inspired.
Another federal project, the Historic American Buildings Survey, paid architects such as Herbert Congdon to photograph old Vermont houses. His work is documentary, to be sure — the program developed a record of “old antique buildings” in the event they were demolished — but his take expressed the spartan side of Vermont character. Few in Vermont ever grew flush with money, much less flashy in its use. The interiors of the 1807 Ransom-Granger house in Castleton are simple and elegant but also have a weird forensic quality, as if Congdon is probing for ghosts he can feel but can’t see.
The most prominent painters are Francis Colburn and Ronald Slayton. Both were on the FAP payroll for most of the 1930s. They’re Regionalists much like Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton, focusing in a realistic style on scenes of everyday life, but with a Vermont spin. Colburn’s From Heath Hill is a view of Barton in the Northeast Kingdom, the state’s big, wild corner. Its palette is too high-keyed to soothe. Together with hills that both roll and roil, it gives the picture a fast pulse. The church, houses, farms, and cemetery in the distance lead to mountains that become a contained, confined space where life’s stories unfold, much like a stage set. Slayton’s The Planter from 1938 tells us a farmer has to be an optimist. Seeding time is a time for hope, for rebirth, and for new beginnings. Some Vermont farmers decamped and went to California. Most stayed and broke their backs with hard work, as if to prove themselves as much a force of nature as a blizzard or a drought.
The show’s strength is its quest for the essential Vermont, a quest a range of artists seemed to pursue concurrently.
It’s no coincidence that Thornton Wilder picked a small, northern New England spot as the setting for Our Town, which premiered in 1938. Grover’s Corners was in New Hampshire, but it might as well have been in Vermont. New England was viewed as the oldest part of the country, the setting of its foundational history, where the Mayflower landed, where patriots fought, where so many good American values were first hewn and still thrived, unpolluted by city life. Norman Rockwell moved to Arlington, near Bennington, in 1937. His illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post used Vermont models and Vermont settings. Rockwell and his masters felt they best expressed America’s ideal types. Grandma Moses, a painter discovered in the late 1930s, lived a stone’s throw from Bennington, as did Robert Frost, who is buried with his family behind the museum. The show’s strength is its quest for the essential Vermont, a quest a range of artists seemed to pursue concurrently. The museum’s display of work by Moses and Rockwell in its permanent collection enriches the show. Frost, of course, is everywhere in Vermont, in every stone wall, dirt road, rundown farmhouse, and rolling pasture.
“From Crash to Creativity” ends with the story of the sweet elderly woman at the cusp of Vermont’s love affair with federal dough. On September 4, 1939, Ida Mae Fuller from Ludlow received the first Social Security check, numbered 000-0000-001. She contributed to the program for only three years before her retirement and lived to 100, becoming a poster child for both a new financial security and the program’s untenable financial model.
Once Vermont was the most Republican state in the country, with an unbroken, unmatched century-long record of supporting a single party in every state election. By 1990, it was sending the socialist Bernie Sanders to Washington. In true Vermont style, lots of peculiar twists and turns happened along the way, but “Crash to Creativity” teaches us that the road to Sanders starts with the Depression.