POUGHKEEPSIE, NY.- The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center will present For the People: American Mural Drawings of the 1930s and 1940s, on view January 12-March 11, 2007. During the 1930s and early 1940s, a flowering of mural painting in the economically depressed United States took place, resulting in thousands of murals decorating the nation's buildings. Many artists, who had often been isolated from public society, sought at that time to become a significant part of it, as in Mexico where artists had established a politically inspired movement in wall painting. Largely spurred during the Great Depression by President Franklin Roosevelt's ambitious New Deal programs, artists took part in competitions to create murals in post offices or other government properties. They were paid through public or private wages, to paint murals across the country for museums, hospitals, high schools, housing projects, colleges, music halls, even ships and night clubs, among numerous other public places.

American muralists in this era followed the Renaissance model and made a series of different drawings in their work process, including sketches of individual figures, compositional drawings in both black and white and color, as well as full-scale drawings made for transfer to the wall. The new exhibition For the People: American Mural Drawings of the 1930s and 1940s, presents approximately thirty drawings, paintings, and sketchbooks used in preparation for making murals during this period, as well as numerous archival photographs of both completed murals and works in progress. The exhibition features such varied and noted artists as Charles Alston, Milton Bellin, James Daugherty, Willem de Kooning, Olin Dows, Arshile Gorky, Marion Greenwood, Juanita Rice Marbrook Guccione, Rockwell Kent, Anton Refregier, Lewis Rubenstein, Andrée Ruellan, Louis Schanker, Ben Shahn, and Judson Smith.

For Vassar College, interest in acquiring mural drawings from these decades began over thirty years ago, and now the college's Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center has in its permanent collection over 60 preliminary sketches for murals of the New Deal. While a majority of the works in the exhibition come from the permanent collection of the Lehman Loeb Art Center, there are notable loans from the Archives of American Art, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in New York, Plattsburgh (NY) State Art Museum, and private collections.

As a theme for the exhibition, "for the people" suggests democratic, open values directed toward every citizen, a social ideal closely aligned with the notions of the New Deal, according to curator Patricia Phagan. "This was an era when national identity played an overriding role in Western culture, and especially so in American art. In the midst of a devastating depression, the identity of the nation became of overwhelming concern, especially for Roosevelt's New Deal administration with its broad work programs to aid the unemployed and re-build faith in the nation's democratic ideals. Artists, writers, photographers, folklorists, and others employed by the federal government or working on their own documented and interpreted American life, paying special attention to distinctive cultures, traditions, and histories," said Phagan, the Philip and Lynn Straus Curator of Prints and Drawings.

These issues of national identity were invariably tied to audiences, observed Phagan, though the original audiences are no longer intact as a viable group. "Who were the original audiences for these murals, why were particular themes chosen, and how did artists go about conceptualizing their designs? Attempting answers to these questions is integral to the exhibition. The one constant is that where a mural was placed provided the audience and the strategy for the work," she said.

The most popular aesthetic approach to the American mural during this period was an accessible, realistic style called the American scene, perhaps most recognizable today in the work of Thomas Hart Benton. This manner of painting was encouraged by government projects such as the Public Works of Art Project and the Section of Painting and Sculpture, which sponsored murals for post offices and several other government properties. A group of drawings in the exhibition are examples of this vital way of interpreting the everyday world. It includes Milton Bellin's large, full-scale charcoal from 1940, Office Scene, rooted in an illusionistic realism he learned at the Yale School of Fine Arts. Bellin made the study for a five-panel mural for the main building (Davidson Hall) at Teachers College of Connecticut in New Britain, now known as Central Connecticut State University. As artist-in-residence at the time, he chose models for his murals from the college population, his audience. In Office Scene, the final design for his panel on business education, he portrayed women students either busying themselves with duties or lost in reverie.

Andrée Ruellan's sunny entry for the Special 48 State Mural Competition evolved through her love of light and color, and the direct observation of people at the heart of American scene painting. The Section of Fine Arts had invited artists to submit unsigned designs for forty-eight post offices across the country. In Ruellan's oil sketch, farmers and children engage in activities across an open landscape lively with brushed colors in a narrative meant to connect directly to the Delhi, NY public in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains. Ruellan made her sketch expressly for the lobby of the Delhi Post Office in rural New York, though another design was ultimately selected.

These straightforward American scene drawings and paintings are outnumbered in the exhibition by works that, while emphasizing specific locales, draw upon other ways of seeing, including humorous and political cartoons, politics, and European modernism.
Closely related to the American scene approach is the area of cartooning, since both American cartoons of the early twentieth century and the roots of the American scene lie in magazine illustration, where so many American artists received their early training. The highly readable shapes and lines of cartoons became a staple of American magazines and newspapers in the 1920s, a golden age of American cartooning, and they made an early impact on several artists whose works are in the exhibition. For instance, James Daugherty, in his American scene murals for Stamford (CT) High School, made studies that reach back to his days as a cartoonist at the New Yorker (where as "Jimmie the Ink" he created drawings dense with scenes, patterns, and caricatures). Music, a Stamford sketch by Daugherty in the exhibition, has a jumping rhythm that celebrates differing American musical forms, including spirituals, jazz, opera, and folk. Made for the school's music auditorium, Daugherty expressly chose students and faculty as models to solidify his connection to the local audience.

As with Daugherty's murals for Stamford High School, the vast majority of American murals during this period were made for local audiences with themes tied to regional history, contemporary life, or the land. For the nationwide competition to paint the history of San Francisco in the Rincon Annex of the San Francisco Post Office, Anton Refregier chose to depict a range of historical scenes for his extensive mural series. In his working drawings, he sometimes relied on the cartoon languages of concise images and class symbols to hone his design. In one Refregier sketch on view, a capitalist fights with other San Franciscans in a web of colliding lines, participating in a local riot over the question of the U.S. Civil War -- the sketch implies this was an issue that affected people throughout the city.

Other artists in For the People also looked to cartoons for inspiration. As one of his sketchbooks in the exhibition shows, the longtime Vassa