ReadyMade: Instructions for everyday life

Poster Children

ReadyMade asks five artists to reimagine the populist poster art of the first Great Depression
Introduction by Steven Heller

by Steven Heller

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Download all five posters

“State-sponsored art” conjures the specter of menacing regimes and authoritarian leaders imposing turgid styles on “official artists.” Conform or else! But 75 years ago, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched his plan for national recovery with the founding of the New Deal, under whose auspices the Works Progress Administration (WPA) oversaw the Federal Art Project (FAP), state sponsorship was not a dictatorial command but a generous invitation for artists of all stripes to take part in the moral rejuvenation of a United States besieged by economic calamity—or what Jon Stewart dubs “the first Great Depression.”

American art has never been so liberally supported by government as it was during the critical years between 1933 and 1943. The FAP served a dual purpose: It gave unemployed artists work while demonstratively branding the virtues of the nation through rousing mass communication. The WPA Poster Division was mandated to promote the cultural and social programs that FDR’s administration took great pains to foster. The posters supported hygiene, education, sports, vacations, conservation, community, theater, dance, and music; they cautioned about workplace safety and venereal disease. Although many artists were employed by a slew of different regional agencies as disparate as the New York City Art Project; the Cleveland Division of Health, Food and Drug Administration; and the San Francisco Junior Chamber of Commerce, a WPA graphic style was fairly consistent across the board. It was not as overly rendered as socialist romanticism or as dramatically gritty as American Ashcan School realism. Instead, WPA artists turned to an early form of universal symbolism that involved a streamlined variant of art moderne (or art deco), a hint of Russian constructivism, a smattering of cubism, and a dose of surrealism that gave the posters the aura of timely modernity. The style was a nod to the progressive approaches introduced in the 1920s by European avant-garde art and design movements.