Trump is about to sell off a D.C. cultural treasure — or see it destroyed

Painted figures haunt an empty building. A boy leaning on a pair of crutches. A father and son wandering a barren railroad track. A nuclear family at a picnic table. These poignant scenes were painted by two of the foremost American artists of the 20th century, Ben Shahn and Philip Guston. No one is around to see them. They are on the walls of the Wilbur J. Cohen Building in Washington, D.C., one of 45 federal properties currently earmarked for sale. The staff who worked in the building have been mostly fired, furloughed, or relocated. Only the murals remain — and perhaps not for long.

The Cohen Building has been called the “Sistine Chapel of the New Deal” for its ambitious mural cycles. Shahn and Guston, as well as Seymour Fogel and Ethel and Jenne Magafan, gave indelible form to New Deal tenets: the dignity of labor, the benefit of public works, and the need for a social safety net.

A detail of Fogel’s Wealth of the Nation, painted for the lobby, is on the cover of my survey of New Deal art: it crystallizes the period belief in the mutual power of mind and muscle to secure a prosperous future. If the Cohen building is sold, these masterpieces of public art will be in peril. As Timothy Noah has reported, a private developer is unlikely to bear the cost of renovating and maintaining the building, much less the murals. It would be cheaper to tear the whole thing down.

Is it frivolous to worry about art when the world is on fire? The Franklin D. Roosevelt administration didn’t think so. In the midst of the Great Depression, the worst economic calamity in the country’s history, FDR’s New Deal invested in culture as essential to a more “abundant life” for US citizens.

The government paid struggling artists like Shahn, Guston, Jacob Lawrence, Alice Neel, and Jackson Pollock to create artworks for post offices, schools, hospitals, and airports across the country, in big cities and rural hamlets. New Deal art extolled American livelihoods and landscapes in an accessible style, reassuring anxious viewers about the state of the nation and the economy. “In encouraging the creation and enjoyment of beautiful things,” FDR said in a 1939 address, “we are furthering democracy itself.”

The Cohen murals, like all New Deal art, were made by and belong to the people. They tell us about who we’ve been, who we are, and who we aspire to be.

The Cohen murals were among the New Deal’s highest-profile works. Commissioned by the Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts, the agency that oversaw art for federal buildings (such as your local post office, which may house a New Deal mural), the murals celebrate the Social Security Act of 1935.

The landmark law established retirement benefits and unemployment insurance at a time when most Americans worked until they dropped and risked starvation if fired or injured. When Shahn learned he’d won the commission, he wrote to the head of the Section:

“To me, it is the most important job that I could want. The building itself is a symbol of perhaps the most advanced piece of legislation enacted by the New Deal, and I am proud to be given the job of interpreting it, or putting a face on it.”

Shahn and Guston knew social insecurity firsthand. Both came from immigrant Jewish families in flight from persecution. Sympathy for the poor and downtrodden is a leitmotif of Shahn’s career, made vivid by the recent retrospective at the Jewish Museum in New York. Guston, also the subject of a major traveling retrospective, was ten years old when he found his father’s dead body hanging from a noose in the backyard shed: a suicide of despair after a protracted struggle to find work.

Guston might have met a similar fate if the federal art projects hadn’t “kept me alive and working.” As he recalled, “It was my education.” Their murals combine humanist conviction with visual invention (“The best work I’ve done,” in Shahn’s estimation), testaments to the idea that art, like social security, should be a shared resource to benefit the public.

Security of the People, Study for mural, Old Social Security building, Washington, D. C., by Seymour Fogel. Public domain.

It is a tragic irony that murals meant to represent the contract between the government and its citizens — the Social Security that over 70 million Americans rely on today — would be sold to the highest bidder rather than preserved for posterity. The Cohen building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which should require a review and consultation before it’s sold or torn down — but wasn’t that also true of the White House’s historic East Wing? While the nonprofit Living New Deal has taken steps to intervene and issued a petition to save the murals, the administration’s “move fast and break things” ethos may run roughshod over due process.

So it must be said: The Cohen murals, like all New Deal art, were made by and belong to the people.

They tell us about who we’ve been, who we are, and who we aspire to be. Preserving them would not only steward a significant chapter of American cultural history — itself a civic responsibility — but also keep alive the New Deal dream of social security for all, especially for society’s most vulnerable.

This was Roosevelt’s definition of liberty: something that required “a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.” While Social Security has helped hundreds of millions of Americans earn “enough to live by,” the Cohen murals help us see what Americans “live for”: peace, prosperity, and mutual aid for our fellow citizens.

• John P. Murphy is the Philip and Lynn Straus curator of prints and drawings at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College. His survey, New Deal Art: Culture and Crisis in the Great Depression, was recently published by Thames & Hudson through its World of Art series.