Printmakers
were only able to forget the need to sell their art when they were funded
by the federal government, in the Works Progress Administration. The first
program to support the arts was initiated in December 1934 and lasted until
the end of June 1935. The Public Works of Art Project employed 3,749 artists,
working in a wide variety of media, mostly painting but also some graphics.
The Federal Arts Project, set up under the relief programs of the Works
Progress Administration in August 1935, employed artists and developed
projects which ranged from mural paintings, establishing the Index of American
Design to record folk art, WPA Community Art Centers, a Design Laboratory
and creative home planning unit, as well as sixteen Graphic Arts Division
workshops throughout the country. The federal government was not to be
involved in the arts to the same degree until the establishment of the
National Endowment for the Arts in 1965.
The sixteen graphics workshops of the WPA/FAP were located in nine states: five were in New York, four in California, one each in New Jersey, Connecticut, Florida, Maryland, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. While most productive in their first four years, the workshops in all employed over 250 artists, with about 250,000 impressions of 11,000 original prints produced, half of them coming from New York City. Artists of every stripe, age, race and experience were employed, such as Raphael Soyer, Cecil Bell and Kyra Markham. It was in New York that silkscreen printing was developed as a viable artistic medium by Anthony Velonis, and color lithography was popularized by Russell Limbach, both media formerly limited almost entirely to commercial purposes. As no work produced with Federal money could be sold privately, the prints were given to institutions that had contributed material or help to the workshops. Holger Cahill, head of programs, asserted in 1938 that 90,000 prints were on "permanent loan to schools, libraries, hospitals, community centers, and other public agencies."
While federal funding ultimately did not really alter the public's relation to the print world -- graphics simply did not interact with the masses the way movies or magazines did -- it did help printmakers to flourish. Benton Spruance , in an article entitled "The Place of the Printmaker" in 1937, summed up the feeling of printmakers about the power of their art: "When a comprehensive story of American art in the twentieth century is written, the print-maker will be accorded his real place as the precursor of whatever renaissance of creative expression the future holds. More than any of his fellow artists he has realized and worked in the great tradition of western art. This tradition commands all creative men to work, integrated into the civilization in which they live, to use as their symbols the widely understood symbols of the people, and to use them in such a way that their aesthetic value is communicable to all." Spruance went on to declare that the art that contains "the symbol which is composed of such things as the smell of dogs, gasoline, loud speakers, subways, the passion for prevarication, the prairie, the beaches, crowded and lonely, and the hundred other components...will not be in the official salons, nor on the walls of a public building, nor at a lecture on aesthetics, but rather in an exhibition of American prints." You can see this for yourself in the prints that follow.