A Crisis is a Terrible Thing to Waste: Funding Art in the Great Depression

Abstract

In The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture, Victoria Grieve presents an important chapter in the history of a grand idea: the self-consciously noble effort to democratize culture in the United States. Examining the many different programs of the New Deal's Federal Art Project (1935-43), Grieve's larger aim is to chart the motivations that lay behind them. She argues that the Great Depression offered latter-day Progressives a unique, laboratory-like opportunity to try out, on a broad scale, the sociological and educational theo- ries that had once been the narrow purview of school teachers and reformers. Grieve gestures forward, too, showing how Progressive-era do-goodism begat not only New Deal liberalism, but also the middlebrow cultural aspirations of the postwar period. Ultimately, Grieve seeks to demonstrate that, when the federal government got in the business of bringing art to the people, it also legitimized a set of cultural ideals and aesthetic values that would later be described as middlebrow. These included: an emphasis on national tradition and patrimony; faith in the beneficence of democratic community; reliance on experts for cultural guidance; and the belief in the marketplace as the public's most viable meeting ground. The book combines intellectual history with cultural history in order to assess material that might also be claimed by art history. The intermingling of specialized fields of knowledge recalls the ethos of the New Deal itself. Fertile cross-pollinations were the aim of FDR's think tanks, and they occur here, too—to similar effect: bringing innovative forcefulness, but also the risk of putting off disciplinary specialists. To the latter point, a discussion of John Dewey's Hegelianism might irritate intellectual historians who see this as a vestigial tail of the philosopher's undergraduate education (and so not really operative during the period Grieve considers); and art historians might ask for clarification on how, exactly, the clean, crisp, modernist style of New Deal posters might have paved the way for the emergence of abstract expression-