Julia Eckel, Born: Washington, DC 1909 Died: Washington DC 1988
oil on canvas 40 1/8 x 55 5/8 in. (102.0 x 141.2 cm.)
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Transfer from the U.S. Department of Labor 1964.1.66
The exhibition highlights a period in American history when the American people organized on a massive scale to bring art to the people. The PWAP employed 3,748 artists during a period of 6 months. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) which would follow the PWAP would not only continue to employ painters, but musicians, actors, composers, and writers. The Federal Music Project, for example, directed by Nicolai Sokoloff, organized concerts and classes throughout the United States. Some cities would establish symphony orchestras for the first time.
The Federal Music Project (FMP) performed primarily symphonic music. John and Alan Lomax documented folk music throughout the country and Zora Neale Hurston collected spirituals and works songs as part of her efforts in ethnomusicology. Jazz was not a strong focus for the FMP, but by the 1935, it would take America by storm. In fact, Jazz was America's popular music. Still riding the waves of the Jazz Age, Americans responded to jazz and swing music in ways that would parallel participation in the WPA. Jazz and American art were both part of the same "communal spirit."
The communal spirit that came about as a result of the widespread acceptance of jazz and American art during the 1930s did not happen in the spirit of homogeneity or social bliss. Rather, both art forms mobilized massive numbers of Americans because they were moved by the infectious rhythms and pulsating sounds of jazz and the plethora of visual art representing various artists, regions and communities throughout American society.
Jazz and American painting shared this parallel universe largely because of the ways that popular culture became infused with both developments. Historically, the popularity of jazz can be attributed to its connection to dance, which has always been a social tradition that brought groups of people together to celebrate and enjoy each others company. Jazz, while deriving its technical innovations and blues feeling from African American culture, with its rich oral tradition of blues and improvisation, would gain its popularity from its integration with popular music, such as ragtime, tin pan alley songs and Broadway musicals.
American painters, on the other hand, while receiving training at formal institutions like the National Academy of Design and the Art Institute of Chicago also worked as illustrators for popular journals and newspapers of the time, representing scenes from everyday life and and contemporary society. Artists like John Sloan, Stuart Davis and George Bellows, while known for their contributions to American painting at the turn of the 20th century produced graphic illustrations for journals such as "The Masses" which put them in closer contact with everyday people and political organizations, like the John Reed Club. The latter developed out the Popular Front movement and anticipated the formation of other organizations like the American Artists' Congress which began to organize in 1935.
Stuart Davis who served as President of the American Artists' Congress and editor of the journal Art Front was one artist who would find a direct correlation between jazz music and the language of painting. In Swing Landscape, created for the Williamsburg Housing project, Davis captured in visual terms the sound and movement of jazz. As Davis once wrote:
. . . I have always liked hot music. There's something wrong with any American who doesn't. But I never realized that it was influencing my work until one day I put on a favorite record and listened to it while I was looking at a painting I had just finished. Then I got a funny feeling. If I looked, or if I listened, there was no shifting of attention. It seemed to amount to the same thing--like twins, a kinship. After that, for a long time, I played records while I painted.1
As a result of these dual movements in jazz and American painting, the 1930s was identified simultaneously as the "Age of Swing" and the "American Scene."
The "Jazz Age" anticipated many of the developments that would take place during the 1930s. During the 1920s, jazz musicians like King Oliver and Louis Armstrong migrated to cities like Chicago to bring the exciting jazz sounds of New Orleans to northern cities like Chicago and New York. In general, African Americans, who provided the early roots of jazz, migrated to northern cities in large numbers, as a part of a large exodus from the south identified as the "Great Migration." This new sound embodied in the music of King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band and Louis Armstrong's cornet was unlike anything the pubic had heard before, as labels such and Victor and Okeh produced "race records" that brought these recordings to a larger public. Meanwhile, in New York, Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson put together some of the finest bands ever assembled, performing in clubs like the Roseland Ballroom and The Cotton Club which catered to white audiences.
In American painting the "American Scene" began with the Ashcan school. A group of artists led by Robert Henri broke away from the formalism established by official schools like the National Academy of Design. After their historic debut at the Macbeth Gallery in 1908, American audiences began to see depictions of urban life, in many cases representing poor and working class people. This diverged from the more genteel tastes of the American Impressionists. And during the 1920s a group of artists that would later be defined by Alfred H. Barr Jr. as "Precisionists" focused not on people and their communities, but on the industrial landscape, and the machinery and architecture of New York City. Charles Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand collaborated to produce the short film titled "Manhatta," a film about the industrial setting of New York, and artists like Charles Demuth and Ralston Crawford (in the Montgomery Museum's permanent collection) focused on factories and buildings, rendered in simple geometric forms, reminiscent of "Futurism" in Europe, but with a specific American focus.
The Harlem Renaissance would play a key role in this development, as well, as black artists, inspired by the music of the illustrious jazz bands would produce a wave of artistic activity described as the "New Negro Movement." Painters like Aaron Douglas, Lois Mailou Jones and Archibald Motley, and writers and poets like Zora Neal Hurston. Langston Hughes and Claude Mckay would inject a new vitality into the art world.
Ironically, the Prohibition era unleashed a spirit of freedom and unfettered expression that would completely contradict what it set out to do. Women, who were never seen drinking in saloon's would drink alongside men in thousands of "Speakeasies" that would be established all over the country. In Manhattan alone there would be over 5000 speakeasies. At these venues, people would drink freely, ignoring Prohibition Laws, in which Federal Law agents, ill-equipped to enforce such a law, would go after bootleggers. Speakeasies also provided tons of work for jazz musicians. Since these events largely occurred after hours, musicians could freely develop their talents and experiment and challenge one another. Speakeasies also provided opportunities for whites and blacks to intermingle, another taboo that would be discouraged throughout the 1930s, until the Civil Rights Movement and the landmark decision "Brown versus Board of Education," which would challenge the "separate but equal" laws of "Jim Crow."
During the Great Depression, which began with the stock market crash of October 1929, Jazz and American art, contrary to what one would expect during periods of poverty and unemployment, would begin to reach the Americans on a grand scale. During the 1920s, the record industry would experience a boom in record sales, but would decline drastically in the 1930s. Americans turned to broadcast radio where they could hear the great sounds of jazz from their living rooms. Broadcast radio would also be the vehicle throughout which President Roosevelt would feature his "Fireside Chats" to educate the public about his New Deal programs and his plans to put Americans back to work.
The first program that set these actions into motion was the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) led by Director Edward Bruce. During this period, programs sponsored by the Civil Works Administration (CWA) and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) - an extension of the ERA under President Hoover, would create large-scale construction jobs, building roads, bridges and buildings. And, in spite of the response from critics, artists were included in these relief programs. As Harry L. Hopkins, Director of FERA would say "Hell! They've got to eat just like other people."
Artists who participated in the PWAP program were instructed to paint the "American scene" but were free interpret it as they wished. Artists like Philip Evergood, employed by New York's PWAP division led by Juliana Force, was in charge of the easel division. Evergood would come to represent a new kind of American artist who identified strongly with the masses of homeless and unemployed people. Artists like Evergood embraced a new form of social realism that integrated more thoroughly their artistic concerns with the dominant concerns of the American people. The people and scenes depicted were less neutral and more integral to the artists' own life and social millieu. For example, Evergood recalls a period when he spent time with the Hooverville "jungle dwellers" at 5th and Christopher streets in New York City in 1933:
"I was terribly impressed by these men without any shelter at all, sitting huddled around a fire of broken crates…. I was terribly upset and depressed by their poverty. And I got up from the fire and walked home to 49 Seventh Avenue where we were living at the time, and got a drawing board and lot of paper and walked back and started to draw."
Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution.
Evergood also distinguished himself from artists like Reginald Marsh who he viewed as a transitional figure between Ashcan school painting and American scene painting: "But when Marsh painted his Bowery bums, he was not seeing them through the eyes of a social observer and not through the eyes of a social thinker. […] My bums, which I painted at the same time as Marsh, were dangerous bums, discontented bums, because mine had not accepted their lot."
This new identification with the masses, coupled with the massive implementation of arts organizations and committees throughout America, would become the zeitgeist that would inspire the same developments in jazz.
Duke Ellington Band
The big band era was already in full swing thanks to the most prestigious bands in the business, such as the Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson bands. The "Duke" hired exceptional musicians like Bubber Miley, who provided memorable great solos in compositions like "Black and Tan Fantasy" and the Fletcher Henderson band continue to excite audiences with musicians like Coleman Hawkins and the new addition of Louis Armstrong in 1924. The "Swing Era" synonymous with the "Big Band Era" was identified by many historians as beginning with Benny Goodman's appearance at the Palomar Ballroom in 1935. Goodman's performance electrified young audiences throughout the country, bringing as as well a dance craze that would include dances like the Suzy Q, the Balboa, and the Lindy Hop, also known as "jitterbugging." The iconic image that best captures this dance craze is a photo by Marion Post Wolcott titled "Jitterbugging." Building on the success of black bands who had been playing this kind of music for years, Goodman would catapult jazz into mainstream culture.
This mass mobilization of Americans around two art forms, jazz and American painting, helped to transcend regional, class and racial boundaries, reaching people from all walks of life. America benefited from the cross-cultural exchanges that came out of these two movements, with white musicians from the North side of Chicago absorbing the music of King Oliver's band, and Benny Goodman building on the earlier precedents established by artists like Duke Ellington whose composition "It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing" would become the themes song for the era. Likewise, American painters, who would became more and more sensitive the diversity of their surroundings, would begin to derive inspiration from African American folk culture and black life in general. As a matter fact, the paintings in the Smithsonian exhibition not only would include representations of black people, but Native Americans, women, and ethnic communities throughout the country.
In spite of these unprecedented developments, racial divisions in America, while providing opportunities for cultural exchange, continued to relegate blacks to the margins of society. Throughout jazz history, for example, white bands would claim the fame for jazz's success in American culture. During the early part of the 20th century, The Original Dixieland Jass Band claimed to be the "Creators of Jazz." During the 1920s Paul Whiteman would be proclaimed the "King of Jazz", and during the 1930s Benny Goodman would be giving the prestigious title the "King of Swing." As Ken Burns' documentary reveals, black musicians werre exposed to all sorts of prejudices. Black jazz musicians performed in clubs for white audiences only and they were barred from restaurants and restrooms, while traveling on the road. Billie Holiday, while performing with the Count Basie band in Detroit was asked to darken her face because her high yellow skin would mistake her for being white, and it would make audiences uneasy to see a "white" vocalist singing with a band of black musicians.
Billie Holiday with the Count Basie band.
The New Deal programs likewise encountered similar types of exclusions. Out of the 3,748 artists to be employed by the PWAP, only 10 artists were African American. The Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC) employed 300,000 workers between 18 and 25, but excluded women and placed rigid quotas on blacks. In spite of these ongoing inequities, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) included ethnic and marginal groups, including politically disenfranchised, geographically dispersed, and women and children. The Harlem Community Arts Center, for example, founded by the great African American sculptor, Augusta Savage, impacted the lives of many artists, like Jacob Lawrence and Robert Blackburn, providing exhibitions, classes and lectures to thousands of people. Artists like Dox Thrash, working in the Print Division in Philadelphia, also benefited from the opportunities that the WPA would provide by contributing new innovations in printmaking with his invention of the Carborundum Mezzotint.
World War II would usher in a new decade of world conflict, with artists and musicians forced to disperse and find new alignments. Big bands under the leadership of Count Basie and Duke Ellington continued to thrive for decades, but the era of the big band would be eclipsed by a jazz movement known as "bebop." Likewise, the WPA sponsored arts programs would finally come to an end and artists would form new relationships with galleries, museums, art critics and dealers. Jackson Pollock, supported by critics like Clement Greenberg, would come to represent a new kind of painting that would reflect the renewed vitality of the American economy during the post war period.
American art and jazz continues to touch our lives in many ways, but the 1930s stands out as a unique period in American history when Americans from diverse backgrounds and regions of the country responded to jazz and American art with an unprecedented degree of popular participation that would never be duplicated in scale or intensity.
Timothy Brown is Curator of Education at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in Montgomery, Alabama. A list of museums who will feature the traveling exhibition "1934: A New Deal for Artists" can be found on the Smithsonian's website:
Sources:
Donna M. Cassidy, Painting the Musical City: Jazz and Cultural Identity in American Art, 1910-1940, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, 1997.
Kendall Taylor. Philip Evergood: Never Separated from the Heart, Bucknell University Press, 1987.
