From Nothing to the New Deal: How Boris Johnson Could Follow FDR and Save the Arts.

As the United States struggled with the Great Depression in 1933, 25 artists were commissioned to paint murals depicting aspects of Californian life on the walls of Coit Tower in San Francisco. They were paid at least US$$ 25 per week – the equivalent of around £400 today. Charged with beautifying public buildings, artists jumped at the chance for some mischief. Bernard Zakheim's mural shows a library worker, spoiling a newspaper with one hand and picking up Das Kapital from a shelf with the other. Clifford Wight's triptych depicts capitalism, the New Deal and communism, with the last panel containing a hammer and sickle and the caption “Workers of the world unite”. After a virulent press campaign, the hammer and sickle was removed a year later.

The Coit Tower murals were the pilot initiative of the Public Works Arts Project, created to provide work for struggling artists. Harry Hopkins, Franklin D Roosevelt's secretary of commerce and one of the architects of the New Deal, said, "Hell, they need to eat like other people!" Thus began the first New Deal arts project, part of a decade of artist banking that has nurtured some of America's greatest painters and photographers.

Since the beginning of the UK lockdown, the trustees have called for similar funding for the arts here. They received an unexpected boost when Cabinet Minister Michael Gove recently argued that FDR's New Deal had succeeded in "saving capitalism, restoring faith in democracy, actually extending its rule, renewing government's reputation, putting his country on a path to increase prosperity and equality of opportunity. for decades.” Boris Johnson later told a radio interviewer that it was time for a "Rooseveltian approach to economics".

Will the Johnson government's rescue package, which promises £1.57 billion for the arts, be as ambitious and far-reaching as FDR's programme? In just a few months, America's Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) hired 3,749 artists and produced 15,663 paintings, murals, prints, crafts and sculptures for government buildings. This and successive projects gave the arts a huge financial boost — and revolutionized the way artists engaged with the American people.

One program was the Federal Writers' Project, which employed writers to interview the last living African Americans who had been enslaved, providing vital oral history. Musicians funded by the Federal Music Project recorded folk and jazz field music and taught music lessons. The Federal Theater Project introduced touring shows in places professional drama had not yet reached.

The Federal Art Project developed the skills of 10,000 artists, including Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, Alice Neel, Ad Reinhart and Mark Rothko. a time of few private commissions. Krasner, who worked as a waitress and model for artists before being hired to work on often unrealized murals (her assistant was her husband, Jackson Pollock), once said the initiative saved her life. It certainly gave her and other artists' careers a timely boost.

No less significant was the photography project of the Farm Security Administration, a New Deal agency created to combat rural poverty. Gordon Parks, Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange were among the photographers hired to document the plight of poor farmers. Lange's famous image of Florence Owens with two children, entitled Migrant Mother, was one of hundreds of thousands of images taken.

Parks' iconic photograph of an African-American government cleaner was taken while documenting black lives in Washington DC in 1942. "I had experienced a kind of bigotry and discrimination here that I never expected," he said. “At first I asked [Ella Watson] about her life, what it was like and [it was] so disastrous that I felt I needed to photograph this woman in a way that would make me feel or the audience feel what Washington D.C. was like in 1942. So I I placed her in front of the American flag with a broom in one hand and a mop in the other. Parks called it an American Gothic, satirically riffing on Grant Wood's 1930 painting of the same name.

It is worth remembering how the New Deal for the arts ended up in the sights of conservatives. The Federal Theater Project was accused by the House Committee on Un-American Activities of being infiltrated by communists and staging plays with socialist messages. In 1937, the Works Progress Administration closed The Cradle Will Rock, a musical play written by Marc Blitzstein and directed by Orson Welles as part of the Federal Theater Project. The government was accused of censoring the Broadway production because it told a pro-union story about steel workers fighting their evil boss.

Some 200,000 works of New Deal artwork - murals, paintings, sculptures, crafts, theater sets, posters and photographs - still exist. In the post office in Plymouth, Pennsylvania, for example, there remains a mural called Meal Time With the Early Coal Miners by Jared French. A group of bare-chested prospectors in tight pants wash and clean themselves. If you look to the right, there's a naked man on a boat with a hat over his genitals.

"People go to the post office to buy their stamps," Barbara Bernstein, founder of the New Deal Art Registry, told the New York Times dryly, "and there's this homoerotic artwork on the wall." Bernstein seems a bit skeptical, but surely this is precisely the kind of stimulus package we need post-lockdown.

Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, takes a more philosophical perspective in his call for the British government to fund the arts as America did. “At this time, it is particularly important for art institutions to think about how they can reach beyond their walls and reach everyone.” He quotes the American philosopher John Dewey, who feared that “the rise of capitalism has been a powerful influence in the development of the museum as a suitable place for works of art and in promoting the idea that they are separate from ordinary life. ”.

For this to happen, art must free itself from the idea that it consists of luxury products for collectors or inscrutable objects in museums – and reconnect with the people. Art for millions, not for few. “Dewey wanted to recreate a continuity between the refined forms of experience he attributed to the work of art and the everyday events that shape our experience,” says Obrist. A new deal would not just help artists' bank balances, it would enrich lives. Obrist calls this possibility the Great Transition – to “a new era of social imagination”.