In 1935, at the pit of the Great Depression, the United States government took the strangest hiring decision in its history: it put painters on the payroll. Not war artists, not propagandists — painters, sculptors, muralists and printmakers, thousands of them, employed by the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project at a wage of roughly $23.60 a week to make art for schools, hospitals, libraries and post offices. When an official questioned whether artists deserved relief money, WPA chief Harry Hopkins gave the programme its enduring epitaph: "Hell, they've got to eat just like other people." To qualify, most had to certify themselves as paupers on the relief rolls — a humiliation thousands of future household names duly swallowed, clocking in and submitting work to government supervisors like any other employees.
The Federal Art Project, directed by the curator Holger Cahill, ran from 1935 to 1943 as one arm of Federal Project Number One, alongside programmes for writers, musicians and theatre people — siblings that produced the WPA state guidebooks, the recorded testimony of formerly enslaved Americans, and the young Orson Welles's legendary Harlem stage productions. At its height it employed around 10,000 artists, and its output was stupendous: roughly 2,500 murals, tens of thousands of easel paintings, sculptures and prints, and hundreds of thousands of silkscreen posters whose bold designs are collectors' items today. It built and staffed some hundred community art centres in places that had never hung an original picture, on the Cahill doctrine that art was not "a matter of rare, occasional masterpieces" but a daily habit of a democratic people.
The relief rolls that fed a revolution
The programme's deepest legacy is its staff list, which reads like the index of a book on modern American art. Jackson Pollock served years in the easel division; Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Arshile Gorky, Alice Neel, Jacob Lawrence and Louise Nevelson all drew the federal wage; Willem de Kooning joined but had to resign because he was not an American citizen — project rules were strict — and later credited the WPA with letting him first live as a full-time painter. The project's reach ran beyond paint: Berenice Abbott shot her celebrated Changing New York photographic survey on its payroll. Gorky's abstract aviation murals for Newark Airport — mostly lost for decades under later layers of paint and renovation, with only fragments recovered — became emblematic of both the project's daring and its fragility. The unglamorous truth beloved of art historians is that Abstract Expressionism — the movement that would move the capital of art from Paris to New York — was incubated on government relief.
There was also the quieter, stranger masterpiece: the Index of American Design, which paid hundreds of artists to produce around 18,000 meticulous watercolour renderings of American folk objects — weathervanes, quilts, ships' figureheads, Shaker furniture — building a national visual archive while keeping trained hands employed. It was make-work as scholarship, and it remains a standard resource at the National Gallery of Art — arguably the era's shrewdest bargain, since the index cards and renderings preserved a folk heritage that the Depression itself was scattering to junk shops.
What the WPA didn't paint
Quiz setters, beware two traps. First: most of the famous "post office murals" were not WPA at all, but the work of the Treasury Section of Fine Arts, a separate New Deal programme that awarded commissions — over a thousand murals in post offices across the country — by competition rather than by relief status. Second: Diego Rivera's destroyed Rockefeller Center mural, with its unauthorised portrait of Lenin, was a private commission wrecked in 1934, before the WPA existed — though the affair hangs over the whole era of American mural politics. Politics dogged the real WPA too: congressional committees sniffed for communists, funding shrivelled as war industry absorbed workers, and the project died in 1943. Its ending was shabby — stacks of federally owned canvases, stamped as government property, were sold off by the pound as scrap after the programme closed, with some later recognised and rescued by sharp-eyed dealers — but its arithmetic is unanswerable: for the price of relief wages, America bought murals for a thousand towns, an archive of its own folk imagination, and the generation of painters who would go on to conquer world art. No public dollar, before or since, has ever been stretched further.
Quiz nuggets
- The WPA Federal Art Project ran 1935–43 under Holger Cahill, employing about 10,000 artists at roughly $23.60 a week.
- Alumni include Pollock, Rothko, Krasner, Gorky, Neel, Lawrence and Nevelson; de Kooning had to resign for lacking US citizenship.
- Harry Hopkins defended the scheme: "Hell, they've got to eat just like other people."
- The Index of American Design produced about 18,000 watercolours of American folk objects.
- The celebrated post-office murals were mostly commissioned by the separate Treasury Section of Fine Arts, not the WPA.