The new deal for artists.

the long version

"Willem de Kooning and Anton Refregier were reduced to painting goldfish and palm trees on the walls of speakeasies in the early years of the Great Depression; most artists had no work at all. Thousands of artists were kept alive, and their skills preserved, by programs of the Works Porgress Administration (WPA). Richard D. MicKinzie recreates the turbulent history of these programs to examine their origins, the personalities that shaped them, their effects on the artists they employed, and public and official reaction to the art they produced. The administratiors of the WPA struggled with an uncertain future, fluctuating funds, and the problems of organizing the work of artists according to bureaucratic methods. Both administrators and artists were confronted with criticism ranging from the assertion that Mother Goose murals in a children's hospital were "unsuitable to the dignity of a public institution," to charges of subversion when a portrait of President Lincoln in a post office mural apparently resembled Lenin. As political opposition to the WPA spread, attempts to establish the Federal Art Project on a permanent basis met with derision in Congress and charges that the WPA was a "hotbed of communisim."--Back cover.