- Art for the Millions: Essays from the 1930's by Artists and Administrators of the WPA Federal Art Project (1975)Our PickBy Francis V. O'Connor
- A New Deal for the Arts (1997)Our PickBy Bruce Bustard / In depth look at the arts initiative, based on the 1997 exhibit at the National Archives and Records Administration
- When Art Worked: The New Deal, Art and Democracy (2009)By Roger Kennedy / A summary of the objectives that put the WPA into action
The Important Artists and Works of Federal Art Project of Works Progress Admin
Aerial Map (1935-37)
Aerial Map is one of two surviving murals that Gorky painted for Newark Airport's Administration Building. Originally ten murals comprised the cycle, entitled Aviation: Evolution of Forms under Aerodynamic Limitations. Drawing on his study of Pablo Picasso and Fernand Leger, Gorky's composition relies on bold colors and simple, superimposed shapes to convey a sense of the terrain that one would see from the air or perhaps the shape of the airport itself. The short black dashes and dots in the white shape at the center of the canvas, which roughly resembles the outline of the United States, call to mind flight routes that one would map out. While Gorky's mural was controversial at the time because of its abstract nature, Gorky insisted that an art of the future was necessary to depict the transportation of the future.
The murals were painted over when the airport was turned into a military base during World War II. They were thought lost, but in 1972 they were rediscovered, concealed under fourteen coats of paint that had been applied over the years as part of regular maintenance. Two of the panels were recovered and restored and now on view at the Newark Museum.
Untitled (The Subway) (1937)
Here, Mark Rothko depicts the eerily quiet and still interior of a subway station. The space is punctuated by evenly spaced columns that recede quickly into the background. The people depicted do not interact or speak with one another. The women on the bench, with their fancy hats and pointy shoes, are completely self-involved. The man who stands near the platform edge practically melds with the column he stands near. Rothko thus captures the isolation and loneliness that can befall one in a big city.
Untitled (The Subway) is probably one of the more realistic paintings Rothko created before he evolved to paint large abstract canvases with floating, sometimes translucent, rectangles stacked on top of each other. Even in this early painting, though, one can see the way in which Rothko manipulates color and space to evoke human emotions, an aim that he carried throughout his artistic career.
Cotton Pickers (c.1935)
Few of Pollock's paintings that he created for the FAP survived, and those that do, like Cotton Pickers, have fairly traditional subject matter. Here, Pollock depicts the laborers, shielded from the sun in large hats and long sleeves, doing the back-breaking work of picking cotton. Pollock presents the plight of the workers in a sympathetic light. Solidarity with other impoverished workers was a staple of much WPA work.
The curves of the laborer's bodies and their simplified forms call to mind the style of Pollock's mentor, Thomas Hart Benton. Benton was a proponent of Regionalism and American Scene painting, which focused less on urban scenes and more on Midwest small town and farming communities. Combining this subject matter with some of the more abstract forms of modern European art, Benton forged a uniquely American art that Pollock quickly mastered and surpassed.