Art, a professor told me long ago, should always be thought (and written) about in the present tense.
Huck and Jim are forever drifting down the Mississippi. Blanche DuBois is always boarding a streetcar named Desire. Edvard Munch's screamer is screaming until Judgment Day.
Though all art, memorable or not, evokes an eternal present, the exhibit at the Oceanside Museum of Art captivates in large measure because the paintings, all of a certain age, were quarantined together in the past.
Now don't leap to the wrong conclusion.
“Art of the WPA Era,” which runs through March 19, is not limited to one style or school. In fact, the range of styles in the 64 paintings – from politically charged realism to subconsciously charged surrealism – is fairly striking.
What's more, the subjects, from female nudes to gritty cityscapes, wander all over the map of artistic perception.
No, what isolates this show from others is the times, the uniquely hard times of the Depression, in which the paintings were created.
In this rare case, the art is best thought (and written) about in the past tense.
Thanks to the New Deal's Works Progress Administration, artists were allowed to work when the art market had dried up and blown away. Federal checks of up to $20 a week helped keep the nation's artists from starving.
On Tuesday, I was listening to Beth Smith, the museum's assistant director, while glancing at Phil Dike's “Back Country Conversation,” a luminous painting of a few cowboys hanging out at a Highway 80 gas station on a dark night in 1938.
“We've discovered,” Smith was saying, “that there are so many people a certain age and older who have some association with the time or they know someone who worked with the WPA – not just as an artist but as playwrights and writers and musicians and laborers. All kinds of employment was sponsored through the WPA.
“I got a call in the first part of last week – we were still hanging the show – and this fellow asked me, 'Is it only art that you're showing.' I said, 'Yes, it's all paintings.'
“I could tell he was fishing and I said, 'Is it anything particular you want to know,' and he said, 'Now don't laugh, but my uncle was a circus performer for the WPA circus. Most people don't know the WPA had a circus. My uncle was the WPA lion tamer. I have brochures for his performances.'
“He was wondering if these brochures were something we could use. It's kind of been like that. Everybody has an association.”
As Smith was talking, a gray-haired couple walked by. The man was carrying a small painting. They stopped to chat.
“It's been hanging on my wall ever since I can remember,” the woman said of the painting. They'd come to compare their family treasure (in its original frame) with the historic art on the museum walls.
Though the family heirloom appeared to Smith to be a reproduction, it was this couple's link to hundreds of Depression artists.
Oceanside's graceful museum, designed by legendary architect Irving Gill (and soon to be expanded), likely has never displayed so many paintings at one time, Smith said.
Though the WPA show is studded with distinctly San Diego County paintings – Ivan Messenger's “Julian,” reproduced two years ago for a Cedar fire fundraising poster; Charles Reiffel's industrial-strength “Benson Lumber Yard”; Alfred Mitchell's majestic “El Capitan Dam” – the artistic scope is nationwide.
In a singular sense, however, this is a local show. The paintings, created by 47 WPA-era artists, are all on loan from regional collections.
The curator is Bram Dijkstra, an emeritus literature professor at UC San Diego and author of “Art and Social Change, 1920-1950,” among other books about art.
An ardent collector of Depression art himself, Dijkstra helped me understand why this show seems familiar and yet removed in time.
Partisan politics, he said.
Though out of power in the '30s, Hoover-style Republicans hated the WPA from its inception, Dijkstra said. WPA workers in general, and artists in particular, were seen as leftist freeloaders. In GOP circles, paying artists with tax dollars smacked of socialism.
By the mid-'40s, corporate America was back in the money. Republican politicians and captains of industry had no interest in supporting WPA artists, Dijkstra said.
After a decade, the WPA was scrapped, as was the art itself. One New York official had hundreds of WPA paintings baled and dumped as junk, Dijkstra said.
Turning their backs on the Depression, capitalists and wealthy collectors began to buy abstract art at a record clip. Whatever politics were imbedded in this nonrepresentational form were not obvious enough to worry about in the lobby of a Fortune 500 company.
As the Cold War settled in, the rich body of WPA art might as well have been on aesthetic blacklist. It was as passe as proletarian propaganda.
So that at least partly explains the nostalgic glow over the Oceanside WPA show. These privately owned works feel as if they're seeing the light after a long day's journey into night. Like Cinderella paintings, they're getting another chance to shine.
On Feb. 16, Dijkstra, surrounded by the art he loves without apology, will deliver a 7 p.m. lecture.
You could say it's about time, past time.
Logan Jenkins can be reached at (760) 737-7555 or by e-mail at logan.jenkins@uniontrib.com.
