FROM COLLECTORS OF THE SAN DIEGO REGION
Exhibit dates: January 28 through March 19, 2006
Wall Street crashed on “Black
Thursday,” October 24, 1929, after five years of feverish
speculation during which many novice investors had placed their
life savings in the stock market. Fourteen billion dollars were
lost in a single day, and during the years that followed the nation
fell into a prolonged economic depression that lasted until the
United States entered World War II on December 7, 1941.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
was elected in a landslide during the fall of 1932, inaugurating
a desperately needed “New Deal.” Twenty percent of the
nation’s labor force was out of work. The Roosevelt administration
therefore instituted the W(orks) P(rogress) A(dministration) in
1933, a series of programs designed to provide a living wage to
the unemployed by earmarking a large percentage of the federal budget
for the construction of roads, bridges and other public service
projects. Since there was virtually no market for artists (or writers)
these soon came to be included among the nation’s workers
through a series of special arts programs.
As a result the WPA era
(1933-1943) became a golden decade for artists. Many of those who
participated in the arts projects later fondly recalled that these
programs allowed them to go their own way without having to worry
about passing fads and fashions. Thus the worst of economic times
proved also to be the best of times for America’s artists:
a time to develop friendships and to engage in creative interaction
with others, without backbiting—for everyone received the
same subsistence wage. Understandably, the artists’ (relative)
good fortune heightened their awareness of social iniquities—an
awareness amply indicated by the work in this exhibition.
But when the wartime need
for weaponry and heavy machinery brought a return to prosperity
the political climate took a sharp turn to the right after 1942.
For obvious economic and political reasons WPA era art came to be
denounced as simplistic and hopelessly inferior to the work of a
new group of “art stars,” the Abstract Expressionists,
whose paintings had no discernible (and hence also no political)
content.
As a result the remarkable
art produced by the painters of the WPA era is today virtually forgotten.
This exhibition hopes to demonstrate that throughout the thirties
and early forties American artists created a superbly variegated
range of works. Local (in our case San Diego), regional (California),
and national movements interacted freely. This democratic coexistence
of styles came to an abrupt end after World War II when a new crop
of corporate collectors chose to rely on the advice of a few powerful
dealers rather than on their own judgment. The commercially motivated
artistic “ranking” system that came to be instituted
then still dominates the “investment” market for art
today.
