San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Power to the people
Bram and Sandra Dijkstra’s collection of Wpa-era works opens Saturday at the Oceanside Museum of Art
Bram and Sandra Dijkstra love a good story. And after nearly half a century of collecting art, they certainly have plenty. Point to any piece of art that covers nearly every inch of wall space in their North County home, and it’s likely the couple will have an entertaining story about the artist who created it or how they came to purchase it.
“Bram has always been the thinker, the researcher, the one with his eyes on the prize,” says Sandra. “What I bring to the table is practicality.”
With that, they both laugh.
The painting that Bram and Sandra most want to talk about right now, however, is no longer in their home, having recently been moved, along with more than 40 other works, to the Oceanside Museum of Art in anticipation of “Art for the People: WPA-ERA Paintings From the Dijkstra Collection,” which opens Saturday.
Sandra flips to an image of the painting, Joseph Solman’s “Auto Repair Shop, Long Island City.” Even in print, the piece is striking in its rendering of a desolate, perhaps abandoned area of a New York town that was likely once thriving.
This painting, however, was not the one that Bram and Sandra had their sights on purchasing when they visited Solman at his New York City apartment one day in the early 1990s. Bram had seen a printed reproduction of a Solman piece that the artist debuted at the 1939 World’s Fair. He mentioned it to the artist, expressing that the piece had stayed in his mind all these years.
“He gasped and said, ‘Wow, nobody has thought about that painting in years,’ ” Bram recalls.
The Dijkstras’ collective research and practicality has led to many stories such as this one, and while they couple didn’t leave with that particular painting, they did leave with a piece that Solman also produced in 1939 with assistance from the Works Progress Administration, a Great Depression-era federal agency devoted to assisting artists during a time of economic crisis. For the Dijkstras, who have accumulated what is inarguably one of most impressive collections of visual art in San Diego, Wpa-era art has always held a special place in their hearts.
“This collection, within our entire collection, is the most significant portion as far as size and amount,” says Sandra. “We now have 150 works from the WPA era, including about a dozen prints, but mostly paintings. Of our collection, this is the largest portion.”
For Bram (born Abraham Dijkstra), a Dutch immigrant who grew up in Indonesia, it’s easy to understand why he may have gravitated toward these types of works all his life. Many of the artists who benefited from the WPA programs were immigrants themselves and, if not, may have felt marginalized in other ways (some were Jewish, people of color or women). What’s more, much of the subject matter in the works is progressive in nature, depicting the struggles of everyday life and labor.
“Yes, of course it’s a historical show, but it offers San Diego a window to something that is very relevant to our time,” Sandra said.
“It’s the kind of art that’s not just for the people, but an art that people will understand,” adds Bram.
The Dijkstras bring up a salient point in that “Art for the People” is an exhibition that is both timely and timeless. The exhibition debuted last year at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento and will travel to The Huntington Library in San Marino in 2024.
The paintings offer an intimate window into the people of the time — their lives, their work and their modes of transportation. But most are dealing with issues that are still relevant today. Paintings such as Mervin Jules’ “Homeless,” with its stark rendering of three men huddled around a trashcan fire, and Fletcher Martin’s startling “Migrant Woman” portrait from 1938 could very well have been produced today.
As Scott A. Shields, the associate director and chief curator at the Crocker Art Museum, put it in his essay for the “Art for the People” catalog, the works display the “plight of the dispossessed,” the “neglect of the ‘have-nots’ by the ‘haves.’ ” It’s a sentiment
that’s almost certainly welcomed in this day and age, especially among younger generations.
Still, within the artworks presented in “Art for the People,” some works also convey perseverance and democratic fundamentals that are as universal as they are perennial.
“A lot of the artists we talked with about this time, they would all emphasize that they loved that WPA period because the sense of competition had disappeared,” says Bram. “Everyone was helping everybody else, and they were allowed to do what they wanted to do.”
The WPA and Public Works of Art Project were U.S. government programs initiated in 1933 and implemented as part of an executive action by the recently elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt. According to independent art curator and founder of the Artreach Foundation Susan M. Anderson, the formation of the WPA was “the largest and most sweeping of Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies.” Anderson also points out that a supplemental benefit was that the work produced (the programs also benefited playwrights, musicians and writers) would “help unite a nation in turmoil” and enrich a “population that was suffering tremendous social, political and economic hardships.”
Naturally, there was pushback due to the fact that the programs benefited artists who were immigrants, women, Jewish and people of color. Bram points to the racism and antisemitism of the era, and how the WPA and its programs helped support artists who otherwise may have given up on their careers entirely.
“There was no support for them in the culture, in general, and then the WPA came along and basically allowed all these young artists to really develop and gave them a chance to work out their own styles and concepts,” Bram says. “A whole generation of young Jews, many of them immigrants, were given the chance to be part of this movement.”
Bram also points to Charles White’s “Soldier” as a prime example of the benefits of the WPA. A Black artist who benefited from the agency’s programs, White is perhaps best known for his iconic murals, but in “Soldier,” which was painted in 1944, White expresses his frustration with how he and other Black soldiers were treated after enlisting in hopes of fighting in World War II.
“They were thinking they would be sent to the European war, but instead they were sent to Mississippi and told to dig out the mud,” Bram explains. “This painting, in a sense, shows that element of betrayal. The way the bayonet is protective, not aggressive, and with the mud landscape in the background. He’s left alone, by himself, and there’s no way he can be part of this society.”
While the works in “Art for the People” vastly vary in style and subject, they all have a common trait in that they are representative of the overall spirit of the WPA. Whether they’re implicit (a nude portrait by Isabel Bishop or a landscape by Conrad Buff ) or critical and explicit in nature (Harry Sternberg’s visceral “Woman and War”), the pieces on display all deal in the ideas, as Sandra puts it, of “personal feeling and social concern.”
“In Jewish culture, there is the concept of tikkun olam, which means essentially to repair the world, this humanist tradition of caring for one’s neighbor,” says Sandra. “And I think that too was a big part of what the WPA was all about, and I think that’s what drew us to collecting WPA works.”
“It’s a narrative art, and that’s what makes it a populist art,” Bram adds. “People like good stories.”
They certainly do.