Books in Brief: Wall-to-Wall America

Wall-to-Wall America: A Cultural History of Post Office Murals in the Great Depression, by Karal Ann Marling (University of Minnesota, 348 pp., $35; paper, $14.95). The murals that were painted in post offices from Kennebunkport to Los Gatos during the decade 1932-1942 were commissioned by a section of the Treasury Department, partly to provide work relief and partly to advertise the New Deal’s social philosophy. With few exceptions they were pedestrian and have been deservedly forgotten. One problem was

that the New Deal had no coherent social philosophy. Another was that the project’s paymasters could never decide whom to please: the middle-class public, which generally wanted to see its ideals of material progress and family togetherness bodied forth in familiar styles ranging from Tiepolo to Maxfield Parrish, or the artists, who were gingerly sidestepping such minefields as Abstraction and Bolshevism. In the end, few were pleased, not even the would-be artists who were handing out the federal bureaucracy’s modest plums. Miss Marling tells the complex story with unflagging gusto, wit, and learning, but in her effort to be even-handed she fails to make the point that the public, with its insistence on historical kitsch, got what it deserved. Or was it that the bureaucrats were too timid to fight for good art? Or that few of the artists were capable of producing it? Interesting murals by Wendell Jones, Fletcher Martin, Loring Thompson, Marion Gilmore, Stefan Hirsch, and Seymour Fogel are ascribed to the National Archives. One would like to know whether they are still in the post offices for which they were painted. The great Ben Shahn series painted for the Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts in the Social Security building at Independence Avenue and Third Street in Washington, D.C. is not mentioned. Are there others of that caliber we should know about, and can still see?

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Wall-to-Wall America: A Cultural History of Post Office Murals in the Great Depression, by Karal Ann Marling (University of Minnesota, 348 pp., $35; paper, $14.95). The murals that were painted in post offices from Kennebunkport to Los Gatos during the decade 1932-1942 were commissioned by a section of the Treasury Department, partly to provide work relief and partly to advertise the New Deal’s social philosophy. With few exceptions they were pedestrian and have been deservedly forgotten. One problem was

that the New Deal had no coherent social philosophy. Another was that the project’s paymasters could never decide whom to please: the middle-class public, which generally wanted to see its ideals of material progress and family togetherness bodied forth in familiar styles ranging from Tiepolo to Maxfield Parrish, or the artists, who were gingerly sidestepping such minefields as Abstraction and Bolshevism. In the end, few were pleased, not even the would-be artists who were handing out the federal bureaucracy’s modest plums. Miss Marling tells the complex story with unflagging gusto, wit, and learning, but in her effort to be even-handed she fails to make the point that the public, with its insistence on historical kitsch, got what it deserved. Or was it that the bureaucrats were too timid to fight for good art? Or that few of the artists were capable of producing it? Interesting murals by Wendell Jones, Fletcher Martin, Loring Thompson, Marion Gilmore, Stefan Hirsch, and Seymour Fogel are ascribed to the National Archives. One would like to know whether they are still in the post offices for which they were painted. The great Ben Shahn series painted for the Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts in the Social Security building at Independence Avenue and Third Street in Washington, D.C. is not mentioned. Are there others of that caliber we should know about, and can still see?