New Deal Art in Arizona (review)

Although almost eighty years have passed since the first New Deal art projects were commissioned in America, the murals, photographs, prints, and sculptures that were created under the auspices of federal patronage continue to spur scholarly interest. In this insightful and amply illustrated study, Betsy Fahlman, professor of art history at Arizona State University, chronicles New Deal art production in Arizona from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, and considers how an "iconography of state identity" was shaped by various American artists (14).

Sponsored by the federal government and enacted at state and local levels, New Deal arts projects were especially intended as "work relief" measures: as projects aimed at employing, and keeping busy, Americans who might otherwise take to the streets to challenge established economic, political, and social norms. By extension, much New Deal art focused on engendering national unity by restoring confidence in American patterns of capitalism and democracy, and bolstering American assumptions about work and family. Images of strong, manly workers and the fruits of their labors, like the scenes of ranching, mining, and dam building depicted in Joseph Morgan Henninger's 1934 mural Industrial Development in Arizona (featured on the cover), helped deflect Depression era anxieties about unemployment and undercut worries about the roles and responsibilities of masculine breadwinners. Photographs of subsistence-level farm workers, like Dorothea Lange's pictures of migratory cotton pickers in Pinal County, documented hard times and helped make the case for New Deal relief measures in Arizona and throughout the United States.

Yet as Fahlman details, New Deal art in Arizona was often more complicated than these political/cultural mandates might suggest, and occasionally sparked controversy. The youngest of the 48 contingent states to join the union (in 1912), Arizona was known to outsiders as a tourist destination of stunning scenery, plentiful sunshine, and exotic Indians, especially as stereotyped in magazines like Arizona Highways (founded in 1921) and movies like John Ford's Stagecoach (1939). Natives, however, understood that for all of Arizona's natural grandeur and ancient history, copper and cotton dominated its economy and the federal government was its largest landowner. Artists who came to Arizona on various New Deal assignments juggled these multiple images and identities, sometimes reifying and sometimes challenging expectations. In 1939, for example, Seymour Fogel sketched an elegant scene of Southwest Indian dancers for a post office mural in Stafford, Arizona. Local Anglos harboring resentful memories of Apache raids, however, deemed Fogel's design an "abomination," and the artist substituted a stereotypical picture of wagon trains and pioneers (58).

Divided into chapters examining the development of art centers and museums, the production of specific murals and sculptures, and the circumstances that drove certain documentary photography projects, New Deal Art in Arizona importantly recounts the cultural "scope of federalization" in a Western state where, especially today, identity-claims are often based on virulent anti-federal government attitudes. As Fahlman reminds us, Arizona's "art history is emblematic of the story of the modern West" (154), and the art of the New Deal is fundamental to that narrative.