What Was the Art of the 1930s in America

Culture and Arts during the Depression

The Depression led not only to new arts funding, but a radical rethinking of how to express the social experience of the Depression itself. "Mission Business firm, Skid Route, Seattle, Wash. 1930," watercolor by Ronald Ginther. (Belongings of Washington State Historical Society, all rights reserved.)

The 1930s were a catamenia of intense creative experimentation, as new forms and methods were explored, transformative cultural institutions were founded, and artists self-consciously sought to reach broader layers of the public. The rise of social unrest during the Low heightened the political concerns of artistic works, while New Deal programs gave artists both federal recognition and the funding and space to work out new cultural forms. Technical changes, like the popularization of the radio, changed how accessible civilisation was and to whom, and an international intermission from formalism and modernism besides worked to produce a popularized, socially witting tendency in American fine art. During the Depression decade, Washington State, oft seen equally marginal to national art history, hosted some of the most innovative theatre, musical, and performing arts work in the nation, with sometimes global resonance.

It is one of the ironies of the Great Depression that the emblematic cultural institution of Washington State, the Seattle Fine art Museum, was created and privately funded during the darkest days of the economic crisis, when tens of thousands were losing jobs and homes. SAM was a gift to the metropolis from art collector Richard Fuller and his wealthy mother Margaret Fuller. In 1931, they hired UW architect Richard Gould to design a museum sited in Volunteer Park and pledged much of their personal art collection to the metropolis. The building, which now houses the Seattle Asian Art Museum, opened to the public in 1933.

The SAM story reminds us that not everyone suffered or fifty-fifty lost money during the Low and reminds united states likewise that philanthropy accelerated in the 1930s, as some of those who retained wealth gave to charities to assist the unfortunate and others gave to the arts to rescue cultural institutions that struggled amidst the economic decline.

Simply more important than philanthropy was the new role that government funds and regime programs would play after 1933. For the first fourth dimension in American history, art was accounted worthy of public support, and New Deal federal dollars enabled an explosion of artistic endeavors, from painting to music to theatre to architecture. The 1930s would evidence to be a pivotal decade for Washington State's arts and culture, leaving the region with new institutions, lasting artistic accomplishments, and a new public understanding that fine art was no longer just for the wealthy.

Cornish College

Washington's cultural ferment of the 1930s and the New Deal era would not have been possible without the being, decades before, of smaller institutions and artists collectives, most notably the small-scale and struggling private Cornish College of the Arts, in Seattle. Founded as a music schoolhouse in 1914 by Nellie Cornish, the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle grew to comprehend all the performing and visual arts, and served as the center of the Northwest's growing art scene. Despite its financial and social ties to the more traditional Seattle Fine Arts Society, and the sometimes-conservative leanings of its Board of Directors, Cornish also hosted performing artists who were breaking from traditional forms and experimenting with new modes of performance, presentation, and manner.

From a glance at the list of kinesthesia and students during the 1930s, information technology is clear that Cornish was a seedbed for both regional equally well every bit national cultural transformations during the Depression years: modern dancer Martha Graham taught at Cornish in the summer if 1930 and was commissioned to give a solo Seattle functioning; innovative composer John Cage taught at the school and developed his "prepared piano" at that place in 1938; Seattle native Merce Cunningham began his dance preparation at Cornish in 1937-1939, and was discovered there by Martha Graham, who promoted his career in New York; and hosted Northwest native and modernist photographer Imogen Cunningham as an artist-in-residence in the late 1920s; and Florence and Burton James began their theatre experiments as kinesthesia at Cornish earlier founding the Seattle Repertory Playhouse. [one] The "Northwest School" of painters—Morris Graves, Mark Tobey, Guy Anderson, and Kenneth and Margaret Callahan—based at Cornish and in the rural Skagit Valley, sought out a new artful that combined natural forms with the influences of Asian art, and added another dimension to the innovations of 1930s and 1940s culture.

Cornish Schoolhouse of Music in 1920, downtown on Broadway and Pine, before relocating to Roy St. on Capitol Colina. Nellie Cornish founded the school in 1914, and information technology functioned as a center of new arts movements in Seattle. (Photo courtesy of the Museum of History and Manufacture)

With the marketplace crash of 1929, the drastically contracted market for the arts and lack of money for patronage may have prompted some of the independence and radical revisions of artistic forms and new visions of what music, images, and movement could be. Equally Kenneth Callahan, a member of the loose Northwest Schoolhouse and assistant director of the Seattle Art Museum wrote in 1936, "Since 1929 artists, for the greater part, have come up to the realization that in that location is no longer a market place for their output. Whereas formerly artists attempted to see, translate and execute their work and fashion that conformed to the tastes of the moment, many thereby making a fair living, today the situation is very different… [T]here is little bodily buying of the art of contemporary artists. Equally a result, more and more than painters are devoting themselves to issues of painting, crafts, and interpretation." [2]

New Deal Arts Funding

Every bit part of the public relief programs of the New Deal, artists, musicians, actors, and writers were employed by the federal government in an array of projects designed to create jobs. These programs started in a small way in 1933 then became more mutual after 1935. Work relief was one of the goals, but leaders of these programs often as well hoped to sponsor indigenous, regional talent and encourage the growth of a national, popular artistic culture. The guiding philosophies of the Federal Fine art, Federal Theatre, Federal Writers', and Federal Music Projects (all 1935–1939) promoted publicly engaged and publicly attainable arts. New ideas well-nigh the social responsibilities of artists and new styles and subject area matter—conveyed past the creative characterization "social realism"—were part of this artful transformation.

The artistic legacy of the New Deal can be seen today in the murals that beautify public buildings throughout the land, including schools, libraries, and postal service offices. Hundreds of artists worked on these murals, which in the spirit of the time, were usually painted in a realistic style and depicted groups of men and women working together in common crusade, either in 1930s contemporary scenes or in re-visions of the past history. See Visual Arts in the Great Low, a special section of this website.

The painters of what became known equally the Northwest School worked in a different aesthetic, frequently interested more than in nature than people, exploring the light and colour of the Puget Sound with tones and techniques strongly influenced by Japanese artist traditions. They would give the region its kickoff widely recognized artistic move—small-scale in the scheme of American art history—but an important contribution to regional pride and forth with Cornish (where several taught) a factor that would, in the hereafter, attract artistic talent to the region.

William Cumming may be the most significant of the new artists of the Great Depression. A protégé of the Northwest School, he veered back and forth between modernism and social realism, committed to what biographer Matthew Kangas calls "the paradigm of consequence, that is, subjects that ordinary people could relate to in their own lives, images that could resonate without the taint of moralizing propaganda." [3]

Propaganda was precisely the purpose of two other artists who have left us riveting images of street life and political activism of the 1930s. Woodcut creative person Richard Correll began illustrating the Seattle Communist Party'southward paper, the Vox of Activeness, producing a new artistic style and political statement with broad appeal. Indeed, Correll's work became and then popular that he began teaching woodcutting classes. Dark, powerful, and complex, his remarkable graphics tell stories of strikes and struggles for economical and social justice. [iv]

Ronald Ginther painted in obscurity throughout the 1930s. A self-taught artist who worked with ink and watercolors, his collection of more than eighty vividly colored scenes are a unique resources, depicting the rough life of Hoovervilles and homeless men, of jails and soup kitchens, unemployed demonstrations and police attacks, strikes and radical protests—all of which he knew well.

Theatre, Photography, Music, Motion-picture show

As discussed in Theatre Arts in the Not bad Depression, a special section of this website, Washington'due south sectionalization of the Federal Theatre Project was i of the nation's most successful and extensive programs that drew on quondam Northwest theatre traditions like vaudeville equally well as Low-era civil rights concerns to shape its programs. Washington State's Federal Theatre Project included a traveling vaudeville visitor, the all-African American Negro Repertory Company, a Children'south Theatre, and produced "Living Newspapers" that dramatized regional current events.

Seattle's jazz culture flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in the multiracial neighborhood culture of Jackson Street in Seattle'due south Primal Commune. Pictured here is Edythe Turnham and her Knights of Syncopation, c. 1925. Turnham toured the Northwest with her band and played up and down the West Coast and on President Line Cruises, embodying travel routes that linked Washington musicians to the residual of the nation and the land. (Image courtesy of the University of Washington Library Digital Collections.)

Washington'due south Depression was besides the discipline for two famous American artists who lent their talents to promote federal projects, mingling their ain social and creative concerns—sometimes uneasily, sometimes happily—with the needs of the New Deal regime. Dorothea Lange, whose photographs of California's Low migrants have get iconic images of the Low, photographed migrant subcontract laborers in Washington's Yakima Valley in 1939—as well as the later Japanese American internment camps—for the Farm Securities Administration. Folksinger Woody Guthrie was deputed to write songs promoting public utilities and piece of work relief-built dams on the Columbia River, producing 1941'south "Coil on, Columbia," the current state song.

The Depression years also saw Washington's emergence in national films, every bit the major Hollywood studios set up and filmed many major 1930s films in the State's mountains and waterfronts. Washington'due south mountains served as cheaper stand-ins for the Alaskan Yukon, while scenes of Seattle's waterfront provided authenticity and novelty to Hollywood'due south films. State boosters used the films as ways to bring tourism to the State, while Hollywood sometimes employed Washington's unemployed every bit temporary moving-picture show crews.

Symphonic music suffered during the Great Low. Seattle had an undistinguished, more often than not volunteer symphony at the start of the decade and despite support from the Federal Music Project, that institution and other local symphonies would struggle for audiences throughout the decade. Radio was part of the trouble for the symphony, but function of the popularization of fine art in the era: radio networks now delivered music of many kinds directly into the family living room at no cost.

Greek clarinetist Nicholas Oeconamacos, who had performed under John Philip Sousa and the Seattle Symphony conductor Homer Hadley, returned to Seattle during the Bang-up Low to play for change on the street. Federal and regional funding also provided assist for unemployed musicians, and the City Council sponsored outdoor concert series in the parks as one way to use musicians. (Seattle PI photograph, 1931, courtesy of the Museum of History and Industry)Bands playing popular music in clubs and dancehalls also struggled in the early 1930s, only with the cease of prohibition in 1933, going to clubs became very popular for those who could beget it. As Jazz evolved into Swing Jazz, dancing became the rage. Jackson Street, the heart of Seattle's black customs, was also the heart of the region'due south Jazz scene. Local bands played the Jackson Street clubs and attracted mixed black and white audiences, while touring big bands found larger venues downtown where only whites were immune.

As it was in the rest of the country, the Depression-era arts in Washington Land both chronicled people's experiences and gave voice to a item vision, born of economic crunch, of social change and renewal. The combination of federal arts funding through the New Deal and the stimulation of social movements for ceremonious rights, industrial unionism, and social reform created a new cultural environment, new forms of art, changed understandings of community and individual social roles, and a collapse of distinctions between fine art, civilisation, and politics.

Copyright (c) 2009, Jessie Kindig

Next: Visual Arts in the Cracking Depression

Click on the links below to read illustrated research reports on culture and the arts during Washington's Depression.

	Ronald Ginther Watercolors Ginther produced more than than eighty paintings. They are a unique resource, depicting the rough life of Hoovervilles and homeless men, of jails and soup kitchens, unemployed demonstrations and police force attacks, strikes and radical protests.
	The Power of Art and the Fear of Labor: Seattle's Product of Waiting for Lefty in 1936, by Selena Voelker The Jameses founded the Seattle Repertory Playhouse and played a crucial function in the evolution of the Federal Theatre Project in the state, likewise equally reimagining the office of theatre in Washington.
	Escape to the Movies: Seattle Movie theatre in the Great Low, by Andrea Kaufman Moving picture houses found a variety of means to bring people to the picture palace during the Depression, from special bargain nights and promotions to new escapistf film genres.
	When Hollywood Went to Washington: Film's Golden Age in the Evergreen Country by Zachary Keeler Hollywood and Washington State formed a mutually beneficial relationship during the 1930s, every bit Hollywood films brought tourism and task opportunities to Washington and used its settings to portray the Alaskan Yukon or to stand in for the rural West.
	Jazz on Jackson Street: The Birth of a Multiracial Musical Community in Seattle, by Kaegan Faltys-Burr Seattle's jazz scene flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in the multiracial neighborhood civilization of the Cardinal District and Jackson St.
	Dorothea Lange essay series: Social Documentary photography Dorothea Lange visited Washington'southward Yakima Valley in 1939 to chronicle rural farm life and migrant families during the Depression. • Function 1: Dorothea Lange's Social Vision: Photography and the Great Depression, by Emily Yoshiwara • Part ii: Dorothea Lange in the Yakima Valley: Rural Poverty and Photography, past Stephanie Whitney
	Dorothea Lange's Yakima Valley Photograph Gallery
	Richard Correll and the Woodcut Graphics of the Vocalization of Action, by Brian Grijalva Seattle's Communist Party paper relied on woodcut artist Richard Correll for many of its illustrations. Correll art was stark and unforgettable. He could characterize a strike or detail a militant political position in a single 4 inch by five inch prototype.
	The 1932 Seattle Sports Scene: Helping the Emerald City through Difficult Times, by Brian Harris Seattle rallied effectually its sports teams and prospective Olympic athletes as a symbol of community life and leisure during the Depression, despite loss of funds for many sports programs.
	The Rainy Urban center on the "Wet Declension": The Failure of Prohibition in Seattle, by Kayta Katherine Samuels Prohibition failed to control the product, consumption, and enjoyment of alcohol in Seattle and the entire "wet declension."
Visual Arts
	Federal Art Project in Washington Land The well-nigh ambitious of the New Deal visual arts programs, the Federal Fine art Project emphasized work relief for artists as well as public teaching and documentation of folk traditions. In Washington State, it employed dozens of men and women in diverse pursuits such as easel painting, landscape painting, sculpture, pedagogy, model making and more than.
	Public Works of Art Project in Washington Country The outset visual arts programme launched during the Great Depression, the Public Works of Fine art Project employed more three,000 artists nationwide including fifty in Washington State. It established an of import precedent regarding federal government back up for the arts and served every bit a model for later initiatives.
	Mail service Part Murals and Fine art for Federal Buildings: The Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture in Washington Country Centrally managed by the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C. the Section commissioned thousands of murals, wood carvings and sculptures for public buildings, including post offices, court houses and federal bureau headquarters in the capital. As a effect of its presence in modest and large communities, this programme's work is perhaps the all-time known of any New Deal visual arts initiative.
	New Deal Postal service Office Murals in Washington State This google interactive map marks the location of the xviii Washington State post offices that housed art deputed by the Section. Common motifs include agronomics, logging and western history, featuring images of both Euro-American settlers and Native peoples. For more information on the Treasury program, please see the research report "The Section of Painting and Sculpture in Washington State,"
	The Spokane Art Heart: Bringing Art to the People In addition to providing gainful employment to thousands of unemployed artists, the Federal Art Project (FAP) also stressed art education through customs art centers equally 1 of its primary objectives. I of the most successful sites, hosting lthousands of visitors and hundreds of classes, was located in Spokane, Washington.
Theatre Arts
	Federal Theatre Project in Washington Country, by Sarah Guthu The FTP in Washington was one of the most vibrant in the country, including the Negro Repertory Unit of measurement, Living Newspaper theatre journalism, a Children's Unit, and hosted traveling productions to New Deal public works programs around the state.
	Seattle's Negro Repertory Company: Exterior of New York City, Washington's FTP hosted the only all-African American company in the nation, who produced 3 plays: Stevedore, about a longshore strike; an all-blackness production of Lysistrata, which was closed down for its "scandalous" scenes; and a production written by the Negro Unit based on the life of poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. • Stevedore , by Sarah Guthu • Lysistrata, by Sarah Guthu • An Evening with Dunbar, by Sarah Guthu
	The Jameses and the Playhouse, by Sarah Guthu The Jameses founded the Seattle Repertory Playhouse and played a crucial function in the development of the Federal Theatre Projection in the state, as well as reimagining the function of theatre in Washington.
	Living Newspapers: These productions combined theatre with journalism, and brought regional controversies to life, including battles over public and private power; the regulation of syphilis; and immigration. • Ability, by Sarah Guthu • Spirochete, by Sarah Guthu • One Third of a Nation, by Sarah Guthu

Notes

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[1] Richard C. Berner, Seattle, 1921–1940: From Blast to Bust (Seattle: Charles Printing, 1992), 247–251; Cornish College of the Arts, "Making History," <http://world wide web.cornish.edu/about/history/>.

[2] Callahan's review quoted in Berner, Seattle, 1921–1940, 248.

[three] Matthew Kangas, William Cumming: The Paradigm of Event (Seattle: Charles and Emma Frye Art Museum, 2005), p. 15.

[four] Brian Grijalva, "Richard Correll and the Woodcut Graphics of Phonation of Activeness," Communism in Washington State History and Memory Project, <http://depts.washington.edu/labhist/cpproject/correll.shtml>.

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Source: https://depts.washington.edu/depress/culture_arts.shtml

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