Funding art during the Great Depression: New Deal-era prints from Cleveland

Frank Daniel Fousek’s image of a desolate farm landscape conveys the feelings of melancholy and dejection brought on by the Great Depression. 

Fousek earned employment through the government-funded Federal Art Project (FAP), a branch of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program to help get the population back to work.

Among the programs and reforms of his “New Deal” for economic recovery, Roosevelt set up a government agency titled the Works Progress Administration (WPA). 

This agency organized a series of public works projects, including infrastructural improvements and new construction of public buildings, putting over 8.5 million Americans to work during its existence from 1935–1943.

These programs not only provided economic relief to struggling artists, but also cultivated a sense of pride in American art, which until then had always seemed to defer to the dominance of Europe’s artistic trends.

In order to strengthen ties between artists and their communities, many FAP artworks were circulated among local schools, libraries, and municipal buildings for educational purposes and to create an art-minded public.

The printmaking teams employed approximately four times as many artists as the mural painting division. The Cleveland FAP printmakers produced more than 6,000 printing plates and 150,000 individual prints.

Terminal Tower was the largest building outside of New York City at the time, a testament to Cleveland’s wealth and renown. Other prints in this series show plasterers, cement pourers, and bricklayer. 

The series was meant to show hope for labor at a time when many Americans were unemployed.

The restaurant’s windows are now boarded up. While smoke billows from several chimneys in the factory in the background, it appears largely abandoned as well. Perhaps the restaurant once served a lively crowd of factory workers, now dwindled to only two.

Prices for crops and livestock drastically dropped and bankrupt farmers abandoned their farms and seeking work in other places. Ferench’s image presents a bleak landscape, dead trees standing like haunting reminders of a once-prosperous former life.

By 1933, approximately 50% of industrial workers in Cleveland were out of a job. This situation is reflected in Kálmán Kubinyi’s print The Worker, which shows a lone worker sitting on the ground in front of an imposing factory. Feelings of loss and dejection fill the scene.

Gross-Bettelheim’s print centers on three figures in the employment office—two men and a woman, all appearing around middle-age. 

With the status of labor so uncertain, people could often only find work for a day at a time and had to return constantly to the employment office in search of their next job.

Visible in the print are the balconied apartment buildings and small shops that can still be found in the neighborhood today, as well as Holy Rosary Church on the left, known for drawing dense crowds to its annual Feast of the Assumption. 

Not much has changed in this area of Cleveland even eight decades later.

Kepets’s print depicts a time when Cleveland counted only a few thousand in its population and the central area of Public Square was designed as a New England-style public meeting space. 

This print offers a calm, provincial scene that is not at all indicative of the sprawling metropolis that Cleveland would become in the following century.

The figures could all represent the same dancer at different moments in time as she sweeps through her choreography. As a dancer herself, Guilbeau may have been intrigued by the challenge of depicting the movement of dance in the static visual medium of printmaking.

The FAP program reminds us today that even in the most challenging of times, art can offer a signal of hope and comfort for both maker and viewer.