It's an amazing story, The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was created in 1935 in response to the gaping financial crisis of the Great Depression. The government program was established in 1935. The goal of the program was to put unemployed Americans back to work.

The WPA was initially headed by President Roosevelt's trusted aide, Harry Hopkins. The program's initial budget was 4.9 billion (mind you that was in 1935 dollars), close to 7% of the nation's GDP. The goal was to rebuild infrastructure across the U.S., creating improvements to national parks, building schools and roads, and over 10,000 bridges.

A small part of the WPA included the Federal Project Number One, employing musicians, artists, writers, actors, and directors. Part of the Federal Project Number One was the Federal Art Project, a relief measure designed to employ artists and artisans to create murals, easel paintings, sculpture, graphic art, posters, photography, theater scenic design and arts and crafts.

During the 8 years of the Federal Art Project, approximately 10,000 otherwise unemployed artists produced over 400,000 pieces of art, with virtually no pressure to control subject matter, interpretation or style.

The Dijkstra Collection now at Sacramento's Crocker Museum gives us a taste of what these WPA artists produced. The collection includes works from the 1920's through the WWII years and includes examples of American regionalism, scene painting, social realism and American expressionism. Much of the period's imagery focused on laborers and the poor and marginalized. Taken together, these paintings show how Americans dealt with the exceptionally hard times of the Great Depression and WWII.

Sandra Dijkstra has worked as a literary agent, and Bram Dijkstra is a retired professor of English literature, an author, art collector and curator. Together, they are a San Diego based philanthropic couple and are students and collectors of art, literature and music. Bram is best known for two of his books, Idols of Perversity and Evil Sisters, both which discuss vamp imagery, femmes fatales and similar threatening images of female sexuality.

Below, some of their collection now on display at Sacramento's Crocker Museum. The exhibition is on view through May 7, 2023.

Millard Sheets studied at LA's Chouinard Art Institute and taught art at Scripps College in Claremont. He later became the Director of the Los Angeles County Art Institute. In 1960, he moved north to the Mendocino County coast, with his dream home hugging the coast north of Gualala. Sheets created idyllic scene paintings of California and today Sheets is considered one of the stars of California scene painting.

At times his paintings dealt with social and political commentary. In Alcatraz, Sheets shows an ominous view from San Francisco, showing the cloud-covered Bay and ill defined prison buildings of Alcatraz Island. It is easy to get a sense of movement with a ship and tug boat headed toward the Golden Gate. The new Golden Gate Bridge is not in this scene. Sheets submitted this painting to San Francisco's 1939/40 Golden Gate International Exposition.

In 1934, Mervin Jules came to New York from Baltimore to study with Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. He became a professor of art at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. In 1969, he became chairman of the art department at the City College of New York. His work is known for using caricature to confront unjust social conditions.

Florence Ballin Cramer is known for landscapes, still lifes, portraits and nudes expressing mood or attitude. She studied at the Art Students League in New York. Laid Off captures the pain experienced by so many who lost their jobs during the Great Depression. This woman is at a loss, thinking to herself, "Now what?"

Phil Dike was not a WPA artist, although his scene painting and other works were of the WPA era. At the time, he was a well established artist, teaching at LA's Chouinard Art Institute, and working as a top artist at Disney Studios. He also taught in-studio art classes at Disney Studios for animators.

In Back Country Conversation, Dike captures a region in transition. The cowboys are silhouetted against a brightly lit gas station. The age of horses and hitching posts is fading as the age of gas fueled automobiles is on the rise. The weathered picket fence in the foreground and old buildings connote the passage of one era into another.

Jan Matulka was from Bohemia, now part of the Czechia. At age 17, his family emigrated to the Bronx. He studied art at the National Academy of Design. He married Lida Jirouskova, who worked at the New York Public Library where she was head of the Czechoslovak literature section. She assisted her immigrant husband to connect to the larger cultural community in New York. The couple often traveled to their native Czechoslovakia, Germany and France. In Paris, Jan was a friend of Gertrude Stein. He maintained studios in both New York and Paris, where he painted stark and jazzy cityscapes. During the Public Works of Art Project, he painted both murals and canvases. Harlem Cows shows a common scene in New York during the early 1930's. In those days, farm animals were often kept on bits of land amid a landscape dominated by crowded city buildings.

William Newport Goodell was from a Quaker family living in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In 1942, he enlisted in the Navy and soon headed the art department of the Naval Training Station's Visual Aids Section in Newport, Rhode Island. He created many WW II scenes of Navy life. In Under the Sign of Ballantine, a drunken sailor sits outside the bar after closing. The orange sign with three intersecting circles is the logo for a popular east coast brewery, P. Ballantine and Sons Brewing Company. The three black cats in the foreground add some action to this lone drunken sailor.

Hugo Gellert was a Hungarian-American illustrator and muralist. He was a radical member of the Communist Party of America and a political activist. His family moved to New York when he was 14 years old. He organized "Artists for Defense" during WWI and later he was Chairman for "Artists for Victory." He was among a group of artists who protested Nelson Rockefeller's destruction of Diego Rivera's Man at the Crossroads Mural at Rockefeller Center.

Nine year-old Miki Hayakawa came to America from Japan with her parents in 1908. She studied art in the Bay Area and had a thriving art career until WWII. Like many other well established Japanese-American immigrants, her parents, who were U.S. citizens, were moved to a detention center at the Tanforan Assembly Center, and then moved to Topaz Camp, south of Salt Lake City, UT. Miki Hayakawa escaped detention, leaving San Francisco and moving to Sante Fe, NM where she continued her artistic career. This painting is of happier days in SF before the war.

In 1922, Louis Ribak came to New York with his Russian Jewish family. He studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Art Students League under Ashcan artist, John Sloan. In 1933, he was an assistant artist working with Diego Rivera on his famous mural, Man at the Crossroads, later destroyed by Nelson Rockefeller. He is remembered as a social realist and abstract painter and was a member of the Taos Moderns. Hooverville on East Tenth Street shows countless homeless people created by the Great Depression who managed to maintain a semblance of normal life. In this scene, a clothesline is filled with laundry while one man carries water. The enduring hardships and indignity of being discarded is evident, and this painting serves as an indictment against how the wealthy allowed "Hooverville" to happen.

William Ashby McCloy was raised in China before coming to the United States at age 13 in 1926. At age 17, he began his formal art training at the University of Iowa. He earned an advanced degree in the Psychology of Art. He taught at both Drake University and the University of Iowa. He worked closely with John Steuart Curry, assisting on three mural projects. He later continued his academic career as Director of Art at the University of Manitoba. Here, the weariness on these two faces tells the tale of the Great Depression.

Fletcher Martin was a painter, illustrator, muralist and educator, best known for images of military life during World War II. In the 1920's, he taught at LA's Otis Art Institute. His focus was on the problems of the working class and the sense of loss people had when they lost their livelihoods due to the Great Depression. Martin was no stranger to hard work and struggle. He worked as a lumberjack, a mule team driver and he was a boxer. After a stint in the Navy, he studied with David Alfaro Siqueiros at LA's Chouinard Art Institute.

Joe Jones was a native of St. Louis, MO, moving to New York at age 27 where he spent the rest of his life. He is considered an American Regionalist in a style similar to that of fellow Missourian Thomas Hart Benton. He painted murals in Missouri Post Offices for the WPA. He was a successful painter, and was commissioned to do two covers for Time Magazine. This scene in Mining in the Mountains is typical of his colorful regionalist style.

Emanuel Romano was born Emanuel Glicenstein in Rome, the son sculptor Henryk Glicenstein. He was raised in Switzerland, Germany, England and Poland. In 1926 at the age of 29, he came to America, first staying in Chicago where he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago before moving on to New York. In 1936, he painted murals for the Federal Art Project and taught art at the City College of New York. In 1953, Romano moved to Safed, Israel to set up a museum to his father, the Glicenstein Museum. Later, it became the Israel Bible Museum. Paintings by Eugéne Delacroix, Édouard Manet and Paul Cézanne are in the museum's collection.

Joshua Meador's Tending the Net is not part of this exhibition, but is pictured here for its similarity to Emanuel Romano's Construction Workers: Solidarity in Action. We have no indication that Joshua Meador knew, or knew of, Emanuel Romano, but one cannot help but wonder if there was a cross pollination of ideas when it came to these two paintings. Meador was not a WPA artist, at least not for long. He did paint some murals in the Chicago Area after graduating from the Art Institute of Chicago, but by 1937, he was hired by Walt Disney Studios in Hollywood. He soon became the Studio's Director of Animation Effects. His IMDB film credits include a long list of Diseny film classics.

Harry Sternberg was a Jewish immigrant whose family came from Russia via Hungary. He grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and in Brooklyn and studied art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Art Students League. His first studio was in Greenwich Village. His first exhibition was at the Whitney Museum of American Art. After meeting Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Sternberg became more socially active. In his work for the Federal Art Project of the WPA, Sternberg took on telling the story of Pennsylvania coal miners near Pittsburgh. At first, he was drawn to the patched blue jeans and weathered blouses worn by miners and their families. But in short order, he became sensitive to the hardships and conditions these people endured. In this Coal Miner and his Family, the miner works below the very house where his wife and children reside. He risks cave ins and black lung disease working below ground, while his family above are at risk from cave ins caused by collapsing mining tunnels below them.

Mitchell Siporin was born in New York to Polish immigrants, and grew up in Chicago. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. In the mid-1930's, he painted for the Illinois Art Project, part of the Works Progress Administration. He was the artist of the largest post office mural awarded for a post office, done at the central Post Office in St. Louis, Missouri. In WW II, he was a sergeant in the Army Artist Unit, sending back drawings and watercolors from North Africa and Italy. After the war, he founded the Department of Fine Arts at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. In Homeless, the homeless figures seem to be waiting for something. The sky and ruins behind the figures say that the status quo cannot last. Although this painting offers no clue as to its time or place, we know that in 1939 bits of news of the Nazi Holocaust were becoming publicly known.

High on the snowcap of Oregon's Mount Hood sits the majestic Timberline Lodge. During the Great Depression, the Timberline was a WPA project employing thousands of Oregon workers. Oregon artisans and artists were chosen to create paintings, murals and carved wood appointments and furnishings.

This majestic ski resort rivals the beauty of similar WPA projects such as the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite, Grand Canyon Lodge, and Old Faithful Lodge in Yellowstone.

One of the Timberline Lodge's signature artist works is its Blue Ox Bar, featuring glass mosaic murals by WPA artist Virginia Darcé.

The construction of the Lodge began in 1937, a logistic challenge for the ages, coordinating bringing building materials and construction workers up to the 6,000 foot level of Mount Hood. In the brief 4 months of summer, the building was framed and roofed. The following year, interior work was done.

Much of the artwork for the hotel was designed and created on the flatlands below and brought up to the hotel for installation. Murals, paintings and carvings were done by some of Oregon's most accomplished artists including Darrel Austin, C.S. Price, Howard Sewall, Charles Heaney, Erich Lamade, Florence Thomas, Virginia Darcé, and Douglas Lynch.

Virginia Darcé was an illustrator, designer and writer. She was art critic for the Oregon Spectator and during World War II, she wrote for the Spokane Review. In Portland, she worked as a stained glass artist for the W.P. Fuller Glass Company. She was chosen by the WPA to produce stained glass for the Blue Ox Bar located inside the Timberline Lodge.

At the time, Darcé probably gave no thought that over 80 years in the future, people would enter the Blue Ox Bar and marvel at her work. Like the many other WPA artists during the height of the Great Depression, she was pleased to have an opportunity to work.

As an accomplished glass artist for the Fuller Glass Company of Portland, she brought her skills to the Blue Ox Bar project. Previously she had painted a 70 foot long mural for the Oregon City Library.

When it came to creating a stained glass design for the Blue Ox Bar, she decided to do a mosaic in a technique called "opus sectile," often used in medieval and ancient mosaics where materials were cut into large irregular pieces and made into a picture. This technique is easily distinguished from the more familiar tessellated mosaics made of uniformly small pieces.

The very bright and bold colors chosen by Darcé for her mural really enlivened the small cave-like space given for the Blue Ox Bar. Babe the Blue Ox was given a rich cobalt blue coat and the blazingly orange squares in Paul Bunyan's large flannel checkerboard shirt add a striking contrast.

The Blue Ox bar is small, an intimate nook tucked away in a corner of the first floor, a cozy place to have a pizza and a pint. The Paul Bunion murals really add fun to the place. The heavy wooden furnishings are original, crafted by WPA workers some 85 years ago.

As a painter, Virginia Darcé worked in watercolors and tempera as well as stained glass. Her paintings are rare at auction. Spring Landscape is a well-executed masterful use of wet into wet watercolor technique with a pleasing stylistic interpretation of a rural hill, farm buildings, fences and trees. Its sketchy quality adds to this painting's dreaminess. We are pleased to offer Spring Landscape 1944 by Virginia Darcé. It is a most pleasing scene of a site she would have seen in rural Oregon, done in a watercolor style consistent with scene painters of the early to mid 20th century.

Below are other works by Virginia Darcé: her mural at the Oregon City Public Library and two tempera paintings in the collection of the Portland Art Museum. Sadly, the Oregon City Public Library mural no longer exists, and as far as I know, it was not well documented or photographed properly for an historic record. What a loss for Oregon City and the rest of us.

For gallery owners like myself, a sad truth is exemplified by this mural. Not all art work survives and thrives over time. As paintings and other pieces of art move through different owners and different circumstances, a lot of art gets damaged, lost, neglected, misplaced and forgotten.

The two paintings above are in the collection of the Portland Art Museum. Both are done in tempera, one on paper, the other on board. The Market shows a busy scene of well dressed people milling about with abundant displays of produce and a pickle barrel, reminiscent of other WPA paintings such as those at the base of Coit Tower in San Francisco.

The Waterfront appears to have been done on a Sunday with not much going on, only two individuals and a small dog. One can't help but wonder if Virginia Darcé had been influenced by Edward Hopper and his paintings of empty New York streets. The only hint of a ship is a smoke stack behind some wharf styled structure and some cabled rigging.

We highly recommend a visit to the Timberline Lodge. The whole hotel building is itself a piece of art. Stepping inside is taking a step into history. The hotel's paintings, furnishings, carvings and of course, the Paul Bunyan murals of the Blue Ox Bar, all remind us of what is possible by people working together through hard times.

Recently, we looked back at the phenomenal Edward Hopper exhibition held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008. Now, a new major Edward Hopper exhibition is in New York City. Hopper lived in New York for almost 60 years. This exhibition at the Whitney Museum looks at Hopper's paintings of New York. And yes, Night Hawks will be there!

Bentonville, AR
Crystal Bridges
Museum of American Art

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