RENEWED SPIRIT
Oklahoma City Museum of Art exhibit showcases Great Depression-era works
George Washington perches heroically on his white steed, Native Americans in colorful regalia gather for a ceremonial dance, and verdant green fields glisten in the bath of a summer storm on the walls of the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.
A sense of hope and rebirth emanates from many of the paintings, prints, photographs and sculptures featured in the eclectic exhibition “Renewing the American Spirit: The Art of the Great Depression.”
“The exhibition examines the diverse responses to the social upheaval and economic distress that characterized American life in the 1930s,” said Assistant Curator Jessica Provencher.
“The government recognized art's ability, its power, to enliven the broken American spirit at this time. ... They realized that these artists that were working for the New Deal could create art that would be reassuring and have this distinctly American subject matter that people could identify with. And that it might help divert some of the anxiety at the time about the poverty and give people hope.”
Setting the scene
The exhibit opens with a series of iconic, affecting photographs by the likes of Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee and Walker Evans, who worked for the Farm Security Administration or its predecessor, the Resettlement Administration, New Deal agencies created to counteract rural poverty during the Depression.
“(They were) bringing attention to their struggles, but also showing that there was a need for relief,” Provencher said. “We're giving it some context so you understand what the artists in the rest of the exhibition ... were responding to.”
“Renewing the American Spirit” is giving the museum the chance to showcase some of its familiar works, like Walt Kuhn's colorful 1932 portrait “Tiger Trainer,” in a new context.
“This is a time when a lot of artists drew from popular entertainment, so the circus, amusement parks, even music, particularly in some of the ones that were
made through the New Deal, because they didn't necessarily want artists making negative images that might just bring down morale,” Provencher said. “They wanted to help build morale. It was particularly the Depression-era artists that weren't making works for the New Deal that would portray kind of the strains and the disillusionment.”
Hidden messages
The exhibition includes portraits, landscapes and historical scenes, with widely varying styles and moods. Regionalist painters like Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry preferred to create picturesque landscapes, while other artists painted pastoral scenes that close up revealed a darker side.
“Some of them were painting these idyllic Midwestern landscapes with rolling prairies and bountiful farmland. ... Some of them look so cheerful from far away, but when you get up close and look at the details, you see the people hitchhiking and there's trash piles, a dilapidated barn, this broken tree,” Provencher said, pointing to Aaron Bohrod's “Barn and Signboard.”
“It's kind of like the consequences of living in the Depression but it's under this very beautiful bright blue sky. ... Then you had, of course, artists like Alexandre Hogue, who wanted to focus on the devastation of the Dust Bowl and humanity's exploitation ... of the land.”
Massive murals
“Renewing the American Spirit” includes paintings from a number of Native American artists, including Acee Blue Eagle, Stephen Mopope and James White Buffalo, as American Indian artists began gaining prominence in the 1920s and `30s.
The exhibit also includes murals like Curry's “The Oklahoma Land Rush,” a large oil sketch made in preparation for a New Deal mural at the Department of the Interior, and Pueblo painter Tonita Pena (Quah ah)'s “Eagle Dance,” a depiction of a ceremonial dance by the only woman in New Mexico's San Ildefonso Self-Taught Group of Native American artists.
But the exhibit's largest mural and spotlight piece is the massive “Triumph of Washington” by the late Gardner Hale. Measuring 14 feet high and 24 feet wide, it is on view for the first time in more than 80 years.
Hale painted “Triumph of Washington” for the 1932 George Washington bicentennial. The monumental mural turned out to be one of the last works by Hale, a respected muralist and fresco painter who died in December 1931 at the age of 37 when his car plunged 500 feet off a cliff near Santa Maria, California.
“It was exhibited at the
... bicentennial birthday of George Washington at the Smithsonian, and then we're not sure exactly what happened after that,” said Maury Ford, the Oklahoma City Museum of Art's registrar.
In 2017, Deedee Wigmore, owner of D. Wigmore Fine Art, the New York gallery
where the mural ended up, offered to gift the painting to the Oklahoma City museum, which last year received Bank of America Art Conservation Project grant to have a conservator repair and preserve the vast artwork.
“People are very surprised by the size. I mean, they love it. I think it's incredible,” Provencher said. “It's a good example of one of the themes that artists were interested in at the time. They were looking to the past and looking to examples of inspirational figures from history who had triumphed over adversity. Those types of scenes could be a reminder that current difficulties could be overcome.”