Art – Hidden in Plain Sight (II): East Tennessee

In my March 26^th blog posting I’d promised that I’d follow-up with another post about the ‘art hidden in plain sight’ in post offices across the USA.  Under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal’s Work Progress Administration and more importantly, the Section of Painting and Sculpture within the Procurement Division of the Department of the Treasury, the government sponsored a plethora of art projects to help artists and their families survive the Great Depression. 

The Federal Art Project employed most of its artists from relief rolls.  Artists received a basic wage of $23.50 per week and worked under a deadline for the completion of their projects.  1,371 post office murals were created but with 3 different but related Federal art programs, the system employed more than 5,000 artists at its peak and probably about 10,000 over the existence of these programs. 

More than 2,566 murals, 100,000 easel paintings, 17,700 sculptures, 300,000 fine prints and about 22,000 plates for the Index of American Design were completed.  An innumerable number of posters and craft objects were also created… In addition to post offices, federal buildings and courthouses across the country were the beneficiaries of this governmentally sponsored employment/beautification effort.  The cost of all of these programs was about $35,000,000.  Using the value of the dollar in 1940 as a base, in 2021 the program would cost $657,535,000.

In this post, I’m going to focus on WPA/FAP murals and objects d’art still found in East Tennessee… Due to their size, in order to see the details of these murals, you will need to click on the photos to expand them.

I’ll start with this mural in the La Follette Tennessee Post Office.  It was painted by Dahlov Zorach Ipcar. (1917 – 2017) The work titled “In the Shores of the Lake” and it was completed in 1939.  Dahlov was an American painter, illustrator and author.  She was raised in New York City’s Greenwich Village and grew up surrounded by bohemian influences. 

When she was 19, Dahlov married Adolph Ipcar, her math tutor who was 14 years her senior.  At the age of 21 she had her first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.  She was the first woman to have a solo exhibit, and at that time, the youngest artist to be featured in a solo exhibition at the museum.

Shortly thereafter, the couple decided to move to a farm near Georgetown Maine where they became subsistence farmers: growing their own food, raising animals and their 2 sons and selling eggs and milk for extra money.  She continued painting for both pleasure and income.  She also wrote 4 fantasy novels and wrote and/or illustrated many children’s books.  The couple must have gotten along well… Adolph died in 2003 at the age of 98.  Dahlov herself died in February of 2017 a bit before her 100^th birthday.

Dahlov completed 10 large-scale mural projects for public buildings.  In addition to this one in La Follette Tennessee, she also painted one for the post office in Yukon Oklahoma.  Her works are part of the permanent collections for the Metropolitan, Whitney and Brooklyn Art Museums in New York City.

This mural is titled “Farm and Factory” and it was completed by Horace Talmage Day in June of 1941.  It was installed in the Clinton Tennessee Post Office and in 1989 it was transferred to the new post office where it is currently on public display. 

Horace Day (1909 – 1984) was a painter who specialized in the “American Scene”.  He gained early recognition for his portraits and landscapes, particularly of the Carolina low country.   Day was actually born in Xiamen (then Amoy) China.  His parents were American missionaries with the American Reformed Mission…

Early in his career, Day’s talents were recognized and rewarded via awards of summer fellowships by the Tiffany Foundation.  In 1931, his work was included in an international exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago.   In response to a growing interest in mural painting, Day joined the Beaux Arts Mural Group in New York City.  In 1940 he applied to the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture for a commission to complete a mural for a US Post Office.  That commission resulted in the mural shown above…

This mural is titled “The Partnership of Man and Nature” and it’s on display in the Crossville Tennessee post office.  It was completed in 1939 by Marion Greenwood (1909 – 1970), an American social realist who became popular in the 1920’s in both the USA and Mexico.  She is best known for her murals but she also did easel paintings, printmaking and frescoes.   

Greenwood traveled widely with trips to Mexico, Hong Kong, Burma and India.  Her first visit to Taxco Mexico was a turning point in her career.  Between 1933 and 1936, Greenwood and her sister painted 5 different murals for the Mexican government.  She was the first woman to receive a mural commission from a foreign government. 

Upon her return to the USA, Greenwood painted a mural for a housing project in Camden New Jersey and then was hired to teach fresco painting at Columbia University.  Shortly afterwards she received the commission to paint the mural for the Crossville post office.  At the start of World War II, she was one of only two women appointed as an artist war-correspondent with the United States Army Art Program. 

In 1954, Greenwood received a commission to complete the following mural that is of local interest here in East Tennessee.

This extra large 6-by-20 foot oil-on-linen mural was completed for the University Center student center auditorium at the University of Tennessee.  It is titled “The History of Tennessee” and it’s nicknamed “The Singing Mural”.  It took a year to complete while Greenwood taught courses at the university.

The mural, which is comprised of 4 thematic sections, was designed to depict the folk traditions and music of Tennessee.  It was unveiled in 1955.  In 1970, it was vandalized, hidden and debated due to images that have been perceived as racial stereo-typing.  Note the smiling adult black man farming cotton.  It is unclear from the mural if he is being depicted as a slave, a sharecropper or a farmer…

In 1972, the university decided to cover the mural with paneling and it remained hidden for 34 years.  Student groups asked for it to be uncovered for a special showing in 2014.  Afterward, UT covered it with Plexiglas and curtains…making it available to classes and other groups for educational purposes.  Currently this controversial, colorful and historic mural is on loan from the university and is on exhibit at the Knoxville Museum of Art.

This next mural, titled “View from Johnson’s Bluff”, is on exhibit in the former US Post Office in Dayton Tennessee.  The building is now the Dayton Water and Electric Building.  This oil on canvas was completed by Bertram Hartman in 1939. (1882 – 1960)

Hartman was an oil and watercolor painter who was born in Kansas.  He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich Germany.  In addition to paintings, he did batik textiles, book illustrations, stained glass, mosaics and designs for rugs.

Between 1935 and 1937, Hartman completed 8 mural panels for the WPA.  To research his design for the Dayton Post Office mural, he traveled to the town, which is the site of the infamous Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1925.  Hartman surveyed the mountains and river around Dayton prior to starting his mural.  The “View from Johnson’s Bluff” shows the distant Smoky Mountains with farms and fields in the middle ground and people at leisure in the foreground. 

Hartman’s artwork is on display at the Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site in Ganado Arizona as well as at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas and the Brooklyn Museum in New York City.

This is an exception to my statement that these WPA works of art are all in East Tennessee... Minna Wright Citron (1896 – 1991) was a painter and printmaker.  In the late 1930s she became involved with WPA Federal Art Project, completing a number of mural commissions between 1938 and 1942.  This mural, titled “Horse Swapping” is on display in the Manchester Tennessee Post Office.  This town is in east central Tennessee.  The mural depicts Manchester in a quieter, less mechanized time when driving to town in a horse drawn wagon was the norm. (Sorry about the fan blade in the upper right corner of the mural)

Citron sometimes focused satirically on women’s roles and she criticized men for the subordination of women while holding women accountable for their own complicity in a sexist society.  Citron continued to work well into her nineties.  Her work is in the collection of the Georgia Museum of Art.  

Citron completed one other mural in East Tennessee but it is so large that I couldn’t find a clean complete photo of it on-line.  Her 1940 mural, “TVA Power”, is about 48 feet long…four times the size of most other area murals.  This huge mural includes several scenes showing the era’s agriculture and growing industrialization.  In the 1970s the 4 panels that make up Citron’s giant mural were moved from Newport Tennessee’s old post office to the museum in the Newport Community Center.

To glimpse sections of Citron’s giant mural, you can go to Former Newport Tennessee Post Office — Post Office Fans.

Unlike most murals, this one in the Jefferson City Tennessee US Post Office, entitled “Great Smokies and Tennessee Farms” doesn’t feature any people… Usually the murals include a person or character as part of the subject matter.  This one is all about the landscape and farming.

The artist was Charles Child. (1902 – 1983) Child was best known for portrait paintings, nude figures, landscape painting, fabric design and book illustrations.  He was also a writer.  He attended Harvard University where he became the art editor for the Harvard Lampoon.  Subsequently he spent 5 years traveling across Asia and Europe, studying art and sharpening his artistic techniques.  He finished this mural in 1941.

This mural is not too far from where we live…but it also is one of the least interesting one, at least for me.  “Electrification” is the mural in the Lenoir City Tennessee post office.  It was completed by David Stone Martin in 1940.  This mural is tempura on cardboard and it shows the transformation of the rural south due to the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Rural Electrification Administration’s efforts during the Great Depression.  The construction of nearby Fort Loudon Dam on the Tennessee River was another step forward in the TVA’s progress.  During the early 1930s, 90% of Tennessee farms had no electricity.

Martin (1913 – 1992) was best known for his illustrations on jazz record albums.  He produced more than 400 album covers for musicians such as Buddy Rich, Stan Getz, Count Basie, Oscar Peterson, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.  Martin also did illustrations for many of the popular magazines of the 1950s and 1960s including “Seventeen” and “The Saturday Evening Post”.  He was married to muralist Thelma Martin…who painted the mural shown below…

I couldn’t find any information about Thelma Martin…other than the fact that she was David Stone Martin’s wife…and she painted the mural shown above.  The “Wild Boar Hunt” was completed in 1942 for display in the Sweetwater Tennessee post office lobby area.  Unlike most of the post office murals in the USA, but like the one in Dayton Tennessee, this mural drapes around the postmaster’s office door.

In the mural men and hounds hunt tusked boars and timbers of a mill can be faintly seen in the background.  Look closely and you can see a boar carcass hanging from the mill’s rafters. 

Sadly, this mural is quite dark, its egg tempera paint dimmed by the passage of time as well as accumulated grime.  The story is that one of the postmasters had inquired about cleaning the work, but was told that restorers didn’t want to touch it because of the type of paint used.  I suspect that with today’s techniques, it could be successfully cleaned and restored.

Not all of the works of art that were created through the WPA/Federal Art Projects were murals.  There also were a number of sculptures and bas reliefs created.  This 7 foot by 3 foot terra cotta relief in Rockwood Tennessee is entitled “Wild Life” and it was completed in 1939 by Christian Heinrich.  As you can see, it’s mounted above the postmaster’s office door.  This relief depicting a family of deer weighs about 300 pounds.  It is the only ceramic post office decoration in the state.

William Ernst Ehrich (1897 – 1960) was a sculptor, ceramicist, public monument artist, educator and a WPA supervisor.  Ehrich and his wife immigrated to the USA from Konigsberg, East Prussia in 1929, relocating to Buffalo New York where there was a strong and growing community of German emigres.  His decorative works were almost immediately in demand and he created items for the Buffalo Zoo, the City Hall and many other locales.  Later, Ehrich moved to Rochester New York to teach sculpture at the Memorial Art Gallery and at the University of Rochester until his death in 1960.

There is one other sculpture on exhibit here in East Tennessee.  “The Mail Carrier” is found in the main United States Post Office in Chattanooga.  This silver plated bronze bust was completed in 1938 by Leopold Scholz.  This statue portrays a postman dressed in the 1930s uniform…with a look of determination on his face…as the mail will be delivered no matter what happens.

Scholz (1877 – 1946) emigrated to the USA from Austria in 1916.  He had previously attended the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.  In 1921, he married a sculptor and Tennessean by birth, Belle Kinney.  They’d met in New York City’s Greenwich Village. 

Much of his best known work was completed when working with Belle.  Among other works, Scholz and his better half completed all of the pediment sculptures on Nashville Tennessee’s Pantheon.  More importantly, Belle Kinney and Scholz created 2 sculptures that are on display in the United States Capitol Building.  A bronze statue of Andrew Jackson was finished in 1928 and is on display in the building’s rotunda.  The other statue is of John Sevier and it is displayed in the National Statuary Hall.

As you have probably surmised, the mural shown above is not displayed in a post office but it was completed in 1937 under the auspices of the Federal Art Program.  The “Allegory of Chattanooga” is prominently displayed in the grand courtroom above the judge’s bench and chair in the Joel W. Solomon Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse in Chattanooga.  Note: This was the courthouse where Jimmy Hoffa’s tax fraud trial was held in 1964.

This ceremonial courtroom is something special in itself.  Located on the 3^rd floor, the courtroom’s lobby has marble walls and a terrazzo floor with an inlaid seal of justice.  The courtroom itself is paneled in oak enhanced by decorative aluminum grilles.  The judge’s bench is truly a handsome piece of cabinetry….and above it is the mural itself.

The mural was painted by Hilton Leech (1906 – 1969).  Leech, described as a muralist, taught painting at the Ringling School of Art in Florida from 1931 to 1936 and then again from 1939 until 1945.  After World War II he opened the Amagansett Art School in Sarasota.  The Hilton Leech House and Amagansett Art School are now both listed in the United States National Register of Historic Places.

I thought that I’d end this exploration of East Tennessee Murals with my favorite!  Wendell Jones (1899 – 1956) completed “Farmer Family”, an oil on canvas mural, in 1940.  This mural is definitely busy…with a lot going on!  It depicts local industries such as farming and transportation.  The #10 locomotive of the East Tennessee and Western North Carolina Railroad is shown rolling through the mountains as cattle are being delivered by truck.  Note the baby in the cab of the truck being admired by the folks standing around it.  The artist, Wendell Jones, is actually in the painting, sitting behind the cattle.  Just look at all the different people portrayed in this eye-catching mural…

The mural was originally displayed in Johnson City’s post office but it has been moved to the testing center in the Charles C. Sherrod Library on the campus of Eastern Tennessee University.  It is accessible to the public…

Wendell Jones was a fixture in the mid-twentieth century Woodstock arts scene.  He painted 4 murals for the New Deal’s Section of Fine Arts.  Jones was known for his genre, figure, landscape and mural paintings.  His works are found in many private collections as well as in the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth University, the de Young Museum in San Francisco and at the Smithsonian.

Just click on any of the photos to enlarge them…

Thanks for stopping by for a visit!

Stay Safe and Take Care, Big Daddy Dave