New Deal Art Turned Artists Into Public Workers — and Left Murals in Post Offices Nationwide
What if the federal government treated art as infrastructure? Between 1933 and 1943, the United States briefly did just that, commissioning murals, sculptures, paintings, prints, and photographs on a scale that made artists part of the public payroll. The result was not a side note to the New Deal, but one of its most ambitious cultural experiments: art made for schools, libraries, hospitals, and other civic spaces, with more than 1,000 post offices still carrying Section murals above the postmaster’s door.
The Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), launched in December 1933, was the first major expression of that idea. It hired artists to produce work for tax-funded buildings at a moment when the Great Depression had left nearly a quarter of the American workforce unemployed and the banking system near collapse. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had promised a “new deal,” was persuaded by a letter from his Harvard classmate George Biddle, who pointed to Mexico’s public murals by artists such as Diego Rivera as a model for federal patronage.
The program’s logic was practical as well as ideological. Edward Bruce, the PWAP director, argued that artists were workers who “eat, drink, have a family, and pay rent,” rejecting the romantic myth of the starving genius in the attic. But the government also wanted a distinctly American visual language. Officials pushed the so-called “American scene,” a broad and often conservative mandate that favored regional subjects and rural life over European modernism. One administrator dismissed nudes outright; another compared modernism to a burst speculative bubble.
That tension shaped the era’s art. Grant Wood, whose *American Gothic* had recently made him a national figure, ran the PWAP in Iowa and painted polished murals of farmers and haylofts for Iowa State University. Aaron Douglas created *Aspects of Negro Life* in Harlem, while Paul Cadmus’s *The Fleet’s In!* was removed from a PWAP exhibition in Washington, D.C., after an admiral objected. The program also helped support artists who would later define American modernism, including Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Lee Krasner, Jacob Lawrence, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.
The New Deal’s art programs did more than provide jobs. They tested a larger proposition: that culture could be publicly funded without losing its force, and that art might belong not only to collectors and museums, but to the civic life of the country itself.
