Peer Reviewed Articles of Culture During the Great Depression

Culture and Arts during the Depression

The Depression led not only to new arts funding, merely a radical rethinking of how to limited the social feel of the Depression itself. "Mission Firm, Skid Road, Seattle, Wash. 1930," watercolor by Ronald Ginther. (Holding of Washington State Historical Lodge, all rights reserved.)

The 1930s were a period 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 Depression heightened the political concerns of creative 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 culture was and to whom, and an international intermission from formalism and modernism also worked to produce a popularized, socially conscious tendency in American art. During the Depression decade, Washington Land, often seen every bit marginal to national fine 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 Smashing Depression that the emblematic cultural establishment of Washington State, the Seattle Art Museum, was created and privately funded during the darkest days of the economical crisis, when tens of thousands were losing jobs and homes. SAM was a souvenir to the city from fine 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 fine art drove to the city. 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 even lost money during the Depression and reminds us also that philanthropy accelerated in the 1930s, as some of those who retained wealth gave to charities to aid the unfortunate and others gave to the arts to rescue cultural institutions that struggled amidst the economic decline.

But more important than philanthropy was the new role that regime funds and government programs would play after 1933. For the first time in American history, art was deemed worthy of public support, and New Deal federal dollars enabled an explosion of creative endeavors, from painting to music to theatre to architecture. The 1930s would testify to be a pivotal decade for Washington State's arts and civilisation, leaving the region with new institutions, lasting artistic accomplishments, and a new public understanding that 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 beingness, decades earlier, of smaller institutions and artists collectives, most notably the small and struggling private Cornish College of the Arts, in Seattle. Founded equally a music schoolhouse in 1914 by Nellie Cornish, the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle grew to encompass 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 Lath of Directors, Cornish also hosted performing artists who were breaking from traditional forms and experimenting with new modes of functioning, presentation, and way.

From a glance at the list of faculty and students during the 1930s, information technology is clear that Cornish was a seedbed for both regional besides equally national cultural transformations during the Depression years: modern dancer Martha Graham taught at Cornish in the summer if 1930 and was deputed to give a solo Seattle operation; innovative composer John Cage taught at the school and adult his "prepared piano" in that location in 1938; Seattle native Merce Cunningham began his trip the light fantastic training 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 equally an artist-in-residence in the belatedly 1920s; and Florence and Burton James began their theatre experiments as kinesthesia at Cornish earlier founding the Seattle Repertory Playhouse. [i] The "Northwest Schoolhouse" 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 aesthetic that combined natural forms with the influences of Asian art, and added another dimension to the innovations of 1930s and 1940s civilization.

Cornish School of Music in 1920, downtown on Broadway and Pine, before relocating to Roy St. on Capitol Hill. Nellie Cornish founded the school in 1914, and it functioned as a heart of new arts movements in Seattle. (Photo courtesy of the Museum of History and Industry)

With the market 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. Every bit Kenneth Callahan, a member of the loose Northwest School and assistant manager of the Seattle Fine art Museum wrote in 1936, "Since 1929 artists, for the greater role, take come to the realization that in that location is no longer a market for their output. Whereas formerly artists attempted to come across, interpret and execute their work and way 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 gimmicky artists. As a result, more and more painters are devoting themselves to problems of painting, crafts, and interpretation." [2]

New Deal Arts Funding

Every bit office of the public relief programs of the New Bargain, artists, musicians, actors, and writers were employed past the federal government in an array of projects designed to create jobs. These programs started in a small way in 1933 then became more common afterward 1935. Piece of work relief was one of the goals, only leaders of these programs often besides hoped to sponsor ethnic, regional talent and encourage the growth of a national, pop artistic culture. The guiding philosophies of the Federal Art, Federal Theatre, Federal Writers', and Federal Music Projects (all 1935–1939) promoted publicly engaged and publicly attainable arts. New ideas about the social responsibilities of artists and new styles and subject matter—conveyed by the artistic label "social realism"—were part of this aesthetic transformation.

The artistic legacy of the New Deal can be seen today in the murals that adorn public buildings throughout the state, including schools, libraries, and post offices. Hundreds of artists worked on these murals, which in the spirit of the fourth dimension, were usually painted in a realistic style and depicted groups of men and women working together in common cause, 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, oftentimes interested more in nature than people, exploring the low-cal and color of the Puget Sound with tones and techniques strongly influenced by Japanese artist traditions. They would give the region its showtime widely recognized artistic movement—minor in the scheme of American art history—but an important contribution to regional pride and forth with Cornish (where several taught) a gene that would, in the future, concenter artistic talent to the region.

William Cumming may be the most pregnant of the new artists of the Cracking Depression. A protégé of the Northwest School, he veered back and along between modernism and social realism, committed to what biographer Matthew Kangas calls "the image of upshot, 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 united states of america riveting images of street life and political activism of the 1930s. Woodcut artist Richard Correll began illustrating the Seattle Communist Party's newspaper, the Voice of Activity, producing a new artistic style and political statement with broad appeal. Indeed, Correll's work became so popular that he began education woodcutting classes. Dark, powerful, and complex, his remarkable graphics tell stories of strikes and struggles for economical and social justice. [four]

Ronald Ginther painted in obscurity throughout the 1930s. A self-taught artist who worked with ink and watercolors, his collection of more than 80 vividly colored scenes are a unique resource, depicting the rough life of Hoovervilles and homeless men, of jails and soup kitchens, unemployed demonstrations and law attacks, strikes and radical protests—all of which he knew well.

Theatre, Photography, Music, Motion-picture show

As discussed in Theatre Arts in the Great Low, a special section of this website, Washington'south division of the Federal Theatre Project was one of the nation's most successful and extensive programs that drew on quondam Northwest theatre traditions like vaudeville also as Low-era civil rights concerns to shape its programs. Washington State'due south Federal Theatre Project included a traveling vaudeville company, 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 civilization of Jackson Street in Seattle's Central District. Pictured here is Edythe Turnham and her Knights of Syncopation, c. 1925. Turnham toured the Northwest with her band and played up and downwardly the West Declension and on President Line Cruises, embodying travel routes that linked Washington musicians to the rest of the nation and the state. (Image courtesy of the University of Washington Library Digital Collections.)

Washington's Depression was likewise the subject for two famous American artists who lent their talents to promote federal projects, mingling their own social and artistic concerns—sometimes uneasily, sometimes happily—with the needs of the New Deal government. Dorothea Lange, whose photographs of California's Low migrants take become iconic images of the Depression, photographed migrant farm laborers in Washington's Yakima Valley in 1939—besides as the later Japanese American internment camps—for the Farm Securities Administration. Folksinger Woody Guthrie was commissioned to write songs promoting public utilities and work relief-built dams on the Columbia River, producing 1941's "Roll on, Columbia," the current state vocal.

The Low years too saw Washington's emergence in national films, as the major Hollywood studios set 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'southward waterfront provided actuality and novelty to Hollywood'due south films. State boosters used the films equally ways to bring tourism to the State, while Hollywood sometimes employed Washington'due south unemployed as temporary motion-picture show crews.

Symphonic music suffered during the Great Depression. Seattle had an undistinguished, mostly volunteer symphony at the start of the decade and despite support from the Federal Music Project, that establishment and other local symphonies would struggle for audiences throughout the decade. Radio was role of the problem for the symphony, but office of the popularization of art in the era: radio networks now delivered music of many kinds straight into the family living room at no toll.

Greek clarinetist Nicholas Oeconamacos, who had performed under John Philip Sousa and the Seattle Symphony conductor Homer Hadley, returned to Seattle during the Great Low to play for change on the street. Federal and regional funding too provided assistance for unemployed musicians, and the Metropolis Council sponsored outdoor concert series in the parks every bit one style to employ musicians. (Seattle PI photograph, 1931, courtesy of the Museum of History and Industry)Bands playing popular music in clubs and dancehalls as well struggled in the early 1930s, only with the end of prohibition in 1933, going to clubs became very popular for those who could afford it. Every bit Jazz evolved into Swing Jazz, dancing became the rage. Jackson Street, the heart of Seattle's black community, was also the heart of the region's Jazz scene. Local bands played the Jackson Street clubs and attracted mixed blackness and white audiences, while touring big bands found larger venues downtown where only whites were immune.

Equally it was in the balance of the country, the Depression-era arts in Washington Land both chronicled people's experiences and gave vocalization to a item vision, born of economic crisis, of social change and renewal. The combination of federal arts funding through the New Deal and the stimulation of social movements for civil 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, civilization, and politics.

Copyright (c) 2009, Jessie Kindig

Adjacent: Visual Arts in the Great Low

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

	Ronald Ginther Watercolors Ginther produced more than fourscore paintings. They are a unique resource, depicting the crude life of Hoovervilles and homeless men, of jails and soup kitchens, unemployed demonstrations and law attacks, strikes and radical protests.
	The Power of Art and the Fear of Labor: Seattle's Production of Waiting for Lefty in 1936, past Selena Voelker The Jameses founded the Seattle Repertory Playhouse and played a crucial office in the evolution of the Federal Theatre Projection in the state, as well as reimagining the role of theatre in Washington.
	Escape to the Movies: Seattle Cinema in the Great Depression, past Andrea Kaufman Movie houses constitute a diversity of ways to bring people to the cinema during the Depression, from special bargain nights and promotions to new escapistf flick genres.
	When Hollywood Went to Washington: Film'south Golden Historic period in the Evergreen Land by Zachary Keeler Hollywood and Washington State formed a mutually benign human relationship during the 1930s, equally Hollywood films brought tourism and job opportunities to Washington and used its settings to portray the Alaskan Yukon or to stand up in for the rural West.
	Jazz on Jackson Street: The Nascence of a Multiracial Musical Community in Seattle, by Kaegan Faltys-Burr Seattle'south jazz scene flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, especially in the multiracial neighborhood culture of the Central District and Jackson St.
	Dorothea Lange essay series: Social Documentary photography Dorothea Lange visited Washington's Yakima Valley in 1939 to chronicle rural farm life and migrant families during the Depression. • Part ane: Dorothea Lange's Social Vision: Photography and the Corking Depression, by Emily Yoshiwara • Office ii: Dorothea Lange in the Yakima Valley: Rural Poverty and Photography, past Stephanie Whitney
	Dorothea Lange's Yakima Valley Photo Gallery
	Richard Correll and the Woodcut Graphics of the Voice of Activity, by Brian Grijalva Seattle's Communist Party newspaper relied on woodcut artist Richard Correll for many of its illustrations. Correll fine art was stark and unforgettable. He could narrate a strike or particular a militant political position in a unmarried 4 inch past five inch prototype.
	The 1932 Seattle Sports Scene: Helping the Emerald City through Hard Times, by Brian Harris Seattle rallied around 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 City on the "Wet Coast": The Failure of Prohibition in Seattle, by Kayta Katherine Samuels Prohibition failed to control the production, consumption, and enjoyment of alcohol in Seattle and the unabridged "wet coast."
Visual Arts
	Federal Art Projection in Washington State The most ambitious of the New Bargain visual arts programs, the Federal Art Project emphasized work relief for artists too equally public educational activity and documentation of folk traditions. In Washington State, it employed dozens of men and women in diverse pursuits such as easel painting, mural painting, sculpture, instruction, model making and more.
	Public Works of Art Project in Washington State The commencement visual arts program launched during the Cracking Depression, the Public Works of Art Project employed more than 3,000 artists nationwide including 50 in Washington State. It established an important precedent regarding federal government support for the arts and served every bit a model for later initiatives.
	Post Office Murals and Art for Federal Buildings: The Treasury Department of Painting and Sculpture in Washington Land Centrally managed by the Treasury Section in Washington, D.C. the Department commissioned thousands of murals, wood carvings and sculptures for public buildings, including post offices, courtroom houses and federal agency headquarters in the uppercase. As a result of its presence in pocket-sized and large communities, this plan's piece of work is perhaps the best known of any New Deal visual arts initiative.
	New Deal Post Office Murals in Washington Country This google interactive map marks the location of the 18 Washington Land postal service offices that housed art commissioned by the Section. Common motifs include agriculture, logging and western history, featuring images of both Euro-American settlers and Native peoples. For more data on the Treasury program, please see the enquiry written report "The Section of Painting and Sculpture in Washington State,"
	The Spokane Fine art Heart: Bringing Art to the People In improver to providing gainful employment to thousands of unemployed artists, the Federal Art Project (FAP) also stressed art education through community art centers as one of its chief 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 State, 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 country.
	Seattle's Negro Repertory Company: Outside of New York Urban center, Washington's FTP hosted the only all-African American company in the nation, who produced three plays: Stevedore, about a longshore strike; an all-black 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 role in the development of the Federal Theatre Project in the state, also equally reimagining the part 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, past 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 Boom to Bust (Seattle: Charles Press, 1992), 247–251; Cornish College of the Arts, "Making History," <http://www.cornish.edu/about/history/>.

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

[3] Matthew Kangas, William Cumming: The Image of Upshot (Seattle: Charles and Emma Frye Art Museum, 2005), p. 15.

[4] Brian Grijalva, "Richard Correll and the Woodcut Graphics of Voice of Action," Communism in Washington Land 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