One of the more interesting legacies of FDR’s New Deal spending was the money spent on public art & promotion of interstate tourism, to put some people to work but mostly to promote American lifestyles, cultures and stuff we ought to be proud of having even though our economy was in the dumper. I got to thinking about the preservation of post office wall murals when doing research for Phigg & Clyde Save Room For Dessert, after discovering how a Mary Cassatt mural painted especially for one of the buildings of the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition/World’s Fair was actually LOST when the building got dismantled and put into storage. I wonder if it’s still packed up in some government warehouse, mislabeled.
A lot of government buildings and sidewalks and such were built, and a lot of the buildings got decorated by artists hired to depict themes reflecting whatever community they were in. Post offices naturally worked with this motif best, spread out all over the country into various communities. And most of the post office buildings that date back to the 1930s have preserved the wall murals painted there by local artists depicting things associated with the surrounding area.
Barse Miller was a southern California artist who got the gig to paint the inside of the downtown Burbank post office, now renamed for Bob Hope (How ‘BOUT that post office? It’s wild!). The place is a wonderful old 1930s building that makes a nice companion piece for the old art deco city hall up the street on Olive Avenue. I lived in that area of Burbank for many years, and always used the place, which still features the wood framed & iron grilled service windows surrounded by painted decorative tiles that depict desert scenes.
Miller mostly worked as a watercolorist and did magazine illustations. His paintings have a small cubist influence with sharp black lines reminiscent of George Rouault. The two murals in the Burbank post office depict the two major industries found there back in the 1930s: moviemaking & aviation. The lobby mural (above) shows the engineer & crew working on airplane parts. The mural near the service windows depicts the filming of a movie with Mexican/Western themes thrown in for good measure.
Public art is a subject with many facets, one of which is how a lot of contemporary public art being commissioned in the present day, oftentimes replacing older pieces, essentially ranges from mediocre/uninspiring to outright garbage. At least in the writers’ & artists’ programs of the Great Depression, we got a lot of interesting stuff – like the post office murals I mentioned (link to the list of all of them here), tour guides for each of the 48 states at the time (I snagged the Rhode Island one at a Burbank library sale long ago. Fascinating look at what there was to see via 1937 road trip through my home state.), as well as some Orson Welles plays and other material. Nowadays, we get a LOT of money spent on stuff the public often is repulsed by – sort of the opposite end from the former intent of public art, which was art for the shared public space. Art the public space would welcome, that the public could feel was part of their community, etc etc.
And there’s always the controversy over government spending money on art to begin with. When I taught first amendment issues, one topic I liked to kick around after everyone nodded & agreed that government grants for symphonies and museums were a good thing to keep them alive – was the concept that if the government gives money for art, it therefore decides what is art and what isn’t. After all, who gets the money? Someone gets it (art) and someone doesn’t (not art). Do we want the government telling us what art is? Do we want an official state definition of art, or even worse, it’s only art if it actually serves the state? etc etc. These issues would arise most often in cases where a government grant was denied on grounds that the content was not art but most often obscenity – but “not art” can also mean a lot of other things too.
But public art certainly goes all the way back to ancient times, across world civilizations. We HAVE to create or we just fold up as a species. So we like to decorate our surroundings. My surroundings are the usual suburban ones – often sneered upon as a cultural wasteland and the like, but not by me. The only cultural wasteland is an empty mind, after all – and if my suburban surroundings have my books, my music, my art – AND MY KITTY!!!! – then everything is fine.
Which brings me to a Barse Miller watercolor I like – “Reflections In A Suburban Window” from 1951.
People outside merely walking or sitting around a table, which I suppose we can assume is a picnic table of some sort. Inside, we have two casually dressed figures sitting around sofa & coffee table. Looks like Dad is reading while mom is feeding the baby. The blocks of light are literal retangles, suggesting patches of sun moving around from windows. Like I said earlier, Miller’s style is much like Rouault with thick black lines breaking up the colors, as well as the reflection of the window frame breaking up mom’s face & doubling up on the bottles sitting on the table showing some cubist aspects.
I like the regular everyday feel to it. It even has a SoCal touch in that Dad seems to be reading a stack of scripts or screenplays. I’d like to think they’re all B-movie crime films considering this was 1951. It’s the romantic in me.
Jim Berkin 
Leave a comment