Henry Adams begins his fascinating essay in the catalogue that accompanies “Art for the People: WPA-Era Paintings from the Dijkstra Collection,” on view at the Crocker Art Museum through May 7, 2023, with the following: “When I was in graduate school, back in the late 1970s, the 1930s were a seemingly untouchable period of American art, often passed over with a shudder. The pervasive view was that most art of the 1930s was not really art at all, and that the government’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) art program was a massive mistake, one that had plastered the walls of America with banal, vapid, patriotic imagery.” Adams goes on to describe how historical attitudes toward American art have shifted—happily—and that the imagery of WPA-era American art is, as it always was, popular with museumgoers.
Having grown up at the same time in Milwaukee, then a bluecollar center of manufacturing, with an older brother who was both a brewery worker and a noted painter and gallerist, and. The war between realism and abstraction is a distraction from the real challenge, which Adams sums up nicely in this way: “Indeed, it’s always hard, even with art historians, to get people to take the time to look at paintings carefully.”
