Federal Art and National Culture
Federal Art and National Culture
The Politics of Identity in New Deal America
Jonathan Harris
, Keele University
February 1996
Unavailable - out of print July 2005
Hardback
9780521442688
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Hardback
This book examines the role of the visual arts in the United States during the 1930s. Analysing the Federal Art Project, a New Deal agency that organised workers in programmes designed to put the unemployed back to work, it draws on theories of the state, cultural production, and ideology as they pertain to Roosevelt's social agenda. It also considers visual art of the Depression years in the context of a broader American culture, at a time when radical politics of the left and right were rampant. It engages, moreover, with debates over modernism and modernity in culture and the visual arts.
- Only full-length study of the Federal Art Project
- Examines the political character of US culture in the Depression
- Analyses the development of modernism in the USA in the period before the rise of the Abstract Expressionists
Product details
February 1996Hardback
9780521442688
250 pages
237 × 160 × 23 mm
0.61kg
8 b/w illus.
Unavailable - out of print July 2005
Table of Contents
- 1. The Depression and the New Deal: artistic production in the early 1930s
- 2. The administrative organisation of the Federal Art Project: power, possession and State 'cultural populism'
- 3. Nationalising art: The Community Art Center Program
- 4. 'Technologies of the Soul': Federal art in institutions
- 5. Indexing American design: the construction of national historicity
- 6. State cultural strategies: 'community', 'planning' and the New York World's Fair of 1939–40
- 7. The end of the Federal Art Project: art, politics and the State.
