The Art of the (New) Deal

To forge a new social contract is one thing. To explain it to people is another. The bureaucrats of the New Deal understood that very well. They also knew that art and architecture could be powerful spreaders of political ideas. As it brought America out of the Depression, the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration built or funded courthouses, post offices, town halls, gyms, pools, auditoriums, and much more—tens of thousands of public buildings and facilities—and its arts programs employed as many as 10,000 artists to decorate them.

The Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, originally the Social Security Board Building, exemplifies New Deal art and architecture at their best. It’s the “Sistine Chapel of the New Deal,” in the words of the founder of the Living New Deal, an organization dedicated to documenting and preserving the history and culture of the period. In 1935, Roosevelt’s Social Security Act changed the covenant between the American people and the state. Social Security enshrined a new right to be protected against economic vicissitudes, reversing the assumption that Americans would scrape by on the strength of “rugged individualism”—a phrase made popular by Roosevelt’s predecessor Herbert Hoover, who was being blamed for America’s woes. Seeking muralists and sculptors to work on the new building, the office in charge of the most prestigious commissions, the U.S. Treasury’s Section of Fine Arts, held competitions and published an essay that effectively provided the theme. Its title was “The Meaning of Social Security.”

The result is an uncommonly lovely New Deal mission statement. The Cohen building (it was renamed in 1988 for the first professional employee of the Social Security Board, who later became the secretary of health, education, and welfare) is a 1.2-million-square-foot edifice covering a city block across from the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The architect, Charles Z. Klauder, gave it strong, modernized classical lines and Egyptian Revival and Art Deco flourishes. It is a vision of big government rooted in the past and reaching toward the future. The interior proclaims the beauty of efficient bureaucracy. Once inside the door, the presumed public servant is led straight to bronze-clad elevators and escalators, and from there whisked to his duties. Green marble covers the walls, rounding corners with sinuous Art Moderne curves.

Ben Shahn and Philip Guston, who went on to join the ranks of the most-renowned American artists of the 20th century, won plum commissions on the ground floor, as did Seymour Fogel, a respected muralist. (Ethel and Jenne Magafan, Colorado painters, collaborated on a mountain landscape for the fifth-floor boardroom.) Shahn got the most prominent assignment: two murals, each roughly 70 feet long and 24 feet high, on either side of a central corridor. One wall is a somber portrait of Americans suffering the effects of child poverty, old age, and unemployment. The other is a paean to life after Social Security: basketball games, public works, a bountiful harvest. Shahn named the murals simply The Meaning of Social Security. He considered them his best, and many critics agree.

Now, however, the building may be sold, and quite possibly demolished. If so, Shahn’s and Fogel’s murals, painted directly onto the walls, would be very hard to remove. Last year, the Cohen building was added to a list of federal properties marked for “accelerated disposition,” meaning fast-tracked sale. Living New Deal is leading the campaign to save the building, but the battle will be tough. According to sworn testimony, the Trump administration is already soliciting bids to tear down the Cohen and three other federal buildings, bypassing the usual reviews. Meanwhile, the regulations meant to protect historic buildings are being weakened.

The current president is just as adept as Roosevelt was at using public space to define the state. That is why Trump razed the White House’s East Wing and plans to replace it with a huge gilded ballroom; wants to erect a triumphal arch; and has announced that his overhaul of the Kennedy Center will take the structure down to “the steel.” We don’t know whether Trump would be involved in putting up another building should the Cohen be leveled, but he is clearly not finished remaking Washington in his image.

Culture made by government fiat is generally labeled propaganda, especially when it promotes unpopular ideas. In a liberal society, it is an article of faith that only totalitarian regimes force artists to shape public opinion, airbrushing this, glorifying that, especially the great leader. Critics dismissed New Deal art as propaganda in its day, and for decades afterward. The complaints came from the right (the art was Soviet-adjacent) and from the left (it glossed over harsh realities and shored up capitalism). Later, criticism also came from arbiters of high modernism, such as Clement Greenberg, who wrote off New Deal art as kitsch for the masses.

Such sweeping judgments went too far. The huge body of work produced for arts relief programs during the Depression varied widely in quality. Among the most experienced muralists were the Cohen building artists, and the phrase social security held out untapped possibilities for invention. The gist seemed simple: By safeguarding citizens against penury, the good nation ensures that they flourish. But flourishing comes in many forms. If you’re looking for the meaning of social security, you won’t find it here.

[From the December 2020 issue: Sarah Boxer on photography and race in the Great Depression]

I visited the Cohen building on a sunny day in February to see for myself what it had to say. Four delicate bas-reliefs in granite embellish the pediments over its four entrances. Sunlight bounced off the snow and the building’s monumental limestone facade, and the friezes almost disappeared in the glare. I paused to study one called Family Group, by Emma Lu Davis, an unusually domestic tableau to see on the exterior of a public building. A worker holding a lunch box places his free hand on the shoulder of his seated wife, as if to say goodbye for the day. She looks up at him, and the toddler at her feet looks up at her and tugs her dress, and the three form a circle. But the story doesn’t end there. They are in turn encircled by a thin line, which I realized after a moment is the profile of a man. He bows his head in thoughtful concern, and I understood that he represents the benevolent paternal state; he holds the family in his thoughts. A rather claustrophobic image, I felt, until it occurred to me that during the Depression, being held close by the government would have come as a relief. Like any historical artifact, the Cohen building demands that you enter into the spirit of the past.

The building in its current state was disturbing. The main entrance is now closed, so I went in through another and found myself in a cramped, dim vestibule. Still bedazzled by the bright, hopeful exterior, I felt as if I had entered a much-diminished present. The main hallways were wide but silent and empty. When I toured the upper floors, I grasped the dimensions of the emptiness. One of the building’s longtime occupants, the Department of Health and Human Services, has been gutted by the Trump administration. The other occupant, Voice of America, the federal news agency founded to combat Nazi propaganda, has been slashed by the president, who has called it “a total left-wing disaster.” All but a few of its radio programs have shut down, and those few barely operate. (A federal judge has since voided the VOA layoffs.) I opened doors into unlit newsrooms and broadcast studios. In some of them, the equipment had been ripped off the walls, leaving cut wires dangling and bits of plastic scattered across desktops and floors. Occasionally, I passed a clump of engineers and, more rarely, a lone broadcaster talking into a microphone.

What sense of life remains in the building radiates from the murals on the ground floor, especially Shahn’s post–Social Security mural. In the foreground of an urban scene, young men leap into the air, vying for a basketball. They’re slightly oversize, as if almost too close to us, and their muscular heft is underscored by smaller figures playing handball in the background. Nearby, men drill the girders of a bridge; the iron beams make bold crisscrosses, moving the eye diagonally. Farther along, the frame of a house and the carpenters reaching to hammer its beams sweep the eye upward. The mural fills the entire wall, punctuated only by three doors, and Shahn cleverly integrates their lintels into his narrative. Bricklayers build a wall on top of one. In another scene above a door, a mother seems to have brought a baby and two sons to watch some construction workers. One of the sons leans on the lintel; behind them, an older man—their grandfather?—gets ready to kiss the baby.

By contrast, the opposite wall, which shows America before Social Security, is divided into separate panels, and its figures are still. In one panel, children maimed or exhausted by labor stare out bleakly; in another, unemployed men in a small industrial town sit or stand around. This mural ought to feel static, and yet here, too, Shahn creates a sense of motion. Behind the children, we see that a door opens onto a vista of men working in a mine. In another panel, a man and child walk away from the town along a railroad track that curves up and to the left, and then disappears. The jury that chose Shahn liked his entry because of “the variety in the tempo and texture.”

Art-history encyclopedias generally associate New Deal art with Socialist Realism, a dourly idealizing style identified with Soviet communism, but it was only one influence among many. Artists took imagery and iconography from Regionalism—think Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton—which leaned toward heartland nativism. German Expressionism and Surrealism, deemed degenerate by Nazis and Soviets alike, show up in stylized figuration, spatial distortion, and a dreamlike atmosphere. Shahn, Philip Guston, and Seymour Fogel also learned from the masters of an older generation of revolutionary Mexican muralists. Shahn and Fogel assisted Diego Rivera on his doomed Rockefeller Center project in 1933 (the Rockefellers destroyed it when he would not remove Lenin’s face). Rivera produced monumental, socially conscious murals, but he borrowed exuberantly from other sources: Aztec art, Renaissance frescoes, Cubism, and more.

The subject matter of New Deal art was more constrained and at times boosterish. According to John P. Murphy’s excellent introduction, New Deal Art, Edward Bruce, the founder of Roosevelt’s arts programs, prided himself on giving artists their freedom— as long as they eschewed abstraction, nudity, and overtly political proselytizing. What he wanted to see was “the American scene in all its phases”—city and countryside, farmers and factory workers, fields and recreational spaces, mines and railroads. The packet that Bruce assembled for the Social Security competition stressed that government support shored up the traditional family the way that pioneering families had helped one another; the effect was to associate the new policy with the American frontier, rather than radical collectivism.

[From the August 1935 issue: Edward Bruce on art and democracy]

Shahn more or less ignored the hint. The only family in his murals was the one squeezed atop the lintel. His interest lay in society and its diversity—a very familiar notion today, but not back then. Murals commissioned by the Section of Fine Arts (especially in the South) tended to shy away from the realities of Black life, and Black people were often shown in subservient roles. Shahn didn’t make a big point of integration, but his people are Black and brown as well as white. Their bodies are squat and bulky, tall and alarmingly skinny. The beneficiaries of Social Security don’t exhibit fake cheer—they aren’t sad, but they don’t smile, either; they are intent on their work. Those still in need of assistance are grim but have their dignity. In a nice touch by Shahn, a swarthy man in a fedora who assumes a proud, defiant stance—his arms are crossed and he scowls, as if to say, “Show me!”—appears in both murals unchanged. In the before scene, he waits in a line of unemployed men. In the after, he waits in a line of men signing up for Social Security. He’s a skeptic; he’ll wait and see. That’s his right, and Shahn respects it.

Shahn’s realism extended to noting Social Security’s flaws. To win votes from Southern Democrats, Roosevelt had agreed to deny Social Security to agricultural and domestic laborers—excluding a large percentage of Black workers. Laura Katzman, an art-history professor at James Madison University and the curator of a recent Shahn retrospective whom I spoke with, pointed out that Shahn made sure to include farmworkers and a caregiver in his cast of characters. In one of the pre–Social Security panels, a woman holding a child “looks Latino” and is probably a nanny, Katzman said, observing that “the child is very blue-eyed” and has red hair. I noticed later that the woman’s white dress resembles a maid’s uniform.

Fogel’s murals, two frescoes just inside the original main entrance, weave a streamlined Futurism and bright Mexican Modernism into their Socialist Realism. Wealth of the Nation depicts a utopia peopled by broad-shouldered heroes of the new economy—a scientist, an architect, two construction workers, and, in the background, a giant, half-naked proletarian, back muscles popping as he strains to pull the lever for two huge cogwheels. Security of the People demonstrates what the wealth of the nation is for: to provide respite to the nuclear family, shown outdoors engaged in leisure activities.

On further inspection, though, the mood changes. In both murals, each figure occupies a separate space. Nobody looks at anybody else, with one exception: In Security of the People, a woman holding a naked child gazes balefully at a man immersed in his newspaper. In early studies for the project, Fogel had depicted Dickensian insecurity (a starving woman, homeless men, a punishing workplace). The dystopian gloom seems to have infected the new Eden. Perhaps Fogel, a fervent leftist, chafed at having to celebrate the family, that bourgeois institution.

Guston’s Reconstruction and the Well-Being of the Family—a triptych on wood panels—is mounted on the stage of the auditorium and dominates the hall like an altarpiece in a nave. The painting is erudite; it packs in allusions. The father stretches out his arms, Jesus-like, evoking the Last Supper, and the mother holds a toddler on her lap, face forward, the way the Madonna might present the Christ child. The side panels show men at work, one digging in a surreal desert, two breaking Cubist-looking rocks. All of the figures have elongated limbs, Picasso-style, and they gaze into the middle distance like early-Renaissance saints (Piero della Francesca was one of Guston’s favorite painters). In the early 1940s, as Guston was painting this mural, he had begun to turn away from political art to introspective easel painting, and one wonders whether the religious references idealize the New Deal family or half-mock its idealization.

Compared with the other muralists in the Cohen building, Shahn comes off as the ultimate New Deal artist. He is the least subversive, the most sincere. And yet his murals have aged the best. His individuals are truly individual; they have an unquenchable vitality and collectively convey an adamant humanism, a subversive ideology in its own right. Shahn had worked for an art journal with Communist Party ties in the early 1930s, but he turned against the party after Stalin’s show trials and pact with Hitler later in the decade. And Shahn had just spent three years working as a photographer for the Resettlement Administration, later the Farm Security Administration, traveling around the country in the company of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and others to document the American people. The job changed both Shahn’s politics and his paintings.

The trips brought him into contact with the particulars of a reality that was beyond his imagination. He met idiosyncratic characters he couldn’t have made up, and saw suffering he hadn’t understood before—perhaps because he had prioritized political theory over direct experience. “Everything I had gotten about the condition of miners or cotton pickers I’d gotten on Fourteenth Street,” he said in a 1965 interview, presumably alluding to his own neighborhood, New York’s Greenwich Village, then home to many radicals. Photography made him abandon Social Realism for what he called “personal realism,” he wrote in his book The Shape of Content.

[From the September 1957 issue: Ben Shahn on nonconformity]

Shahn had a radical’s take on political art, though. He refused to accept that art is not art if it is propaganda. All that claim meant, he said, is that the art had social content. And even if it was intended to persuade, that didn’t make it bad. “Propaganda is to me a noble word,” Shahn said in a 1968 oral history. “It means you believe something very strongly and you want other people to believe it; you want to propagate your faith.” No one claims that European art was the worse for having propounded Christian theology, he continued. “When Giotto did the frescoes in Assisi, you know, that was as propagandistic a work of art as there was.”

By 1940, when the Social Security competition took place, the New Deal was already coming to an end. Shahn and his partner, the painter Bernarda Bryson, who collaborated with him on several projects, set out for Washington to begin the murals on December 8, 1941—one day after Pearl Harbor. Instead of the Social Security Board, the War Department moved into the building, which got so crowded that desks filled the corridor where Shahn was painting. Conservators later found burn marks on the walls where people had stubbed out their cigarettes. Perhaps the air of gravitas evident in all the building’s murals, and the ambivalence hinted at in Guston’s and Fogel’s, reflects the anxieties of the time. While Shahn was working, people came up to him and said that what he was painting was what they were fighting for.

Over the course of the early ’40s, funding for New Deal arts programs dried up. Shahn’s The Meaning of Social Security, completed in 1942, were his last murals for the Roosevelt administration. The painters who became Abstract Expressionists—many of them former New Deal artists themselves—rejected the sentimentality of “American scene” art. Then again, they did their work after the war, when democracy seemed to be winning the day. Eight decades later, as nations inch toward despotism, an art animated by democratic impulses makes a stronger case for itself. It proposes a mutual bond between Americans and their government—a vision of the security we are due and the loyalty we owe in return. That reciprocity remains very much an unfinished project. Right now, government is being torn down, rather than built up. If the Cohen building is not demolished, it could remind future generations what patriotism looked like.

This article appears in the May 2026 print edition with the headline “The Art of the (New) Deal.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.