Bennington Mueum of Art: New Deal Art and Edward Koren

Crash to Creativity: The New Deal in Vermont (through Nov. 4, 2018)

Thinking about Extinction and other Droll Things: Recent Prints and Drawings from Edward Koren (though Sept. 9, 2018)

Bennington Museum of Art

Bennington, Vermont

Francis Colburn

Click Image for larger format

Back in the 1980s, when I was a high school teacher in Milton, Vermont, I oversaw an oral history project in which students solicited memories of the Great Depression. One comment remains vivid. A farmer from the Lamoille River Valley of north-central Vermont remarked, “What Depression? We were poor before the Depression, poor during it, and poor after it. It didn’t make much difference up to these parts.”

That old farmer exaggerated, but only by a little. Northern Vermont agriculture has always been easier to associate with an adjective such as hardscrabble rather than idyllic terms such as verdant or prosperous. A different story prevailed for Green Mountain State wage earners, and the Depression was also hard on intellectuals, artists, and writers. A current exhibit at the Bennington Museum of Art looks back at Vermont during the 1930s through the eyes of painters, graphic artists, and Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration photographers. We also hear from ordinary citizens who were interviewed by field researchers with the Federal Writers Project.

Ronald Slayon, Unemployed

If you are unfamiliar with programs such as the CCC, WPA, and FWP, all you need to know is that, once upon a time, we had a president named Franklin D. Roosevelt who actually believed it was wrong for people to be poor. During Roosevelt’s time in office (1933-45), his New Deal programs unfolded from the premise that only the federal government had the necessary resources to mediate a crisis the magnitude of the Great Depression (1929-41). Among the programs were those designed to put people back to work (WPA), give financial relief to farmers (Agricultural Adjustment Act), create work for unemployed young men (CCC), and harness the minds and talents of intellectuals to document what ordinary people experienced (FWP, WPA). The Bennington Museum’s exhibit centers on those who endured and documented the Depression.

Much of the exhibit focuses on the paintings of two former University of Vermont artists: Francis Colburn (1909-84) and Ronald Slayton (1910-92). Each was a New Deal liberal, a term often applied to those who also flirted with socialist ideals and even had some respect for communists. Conservatives back then also whipped up paranoia about Big Government, Reds, and radicals, but mostly an ethos of we’re-all-in-this-together relegated the self-serving power elites to the sidelines. 

Colburn, Quarry Workers

Several takeaways emerge from the paintings and photographs on display. First, there is the view noted by the above-mentioned farmer in the '80s. That is to say, though we see hard work during hard times, there is an underlying timelessness to the daily grind before us. Look into the eyes of the subjects; observe the nature of work lurking in the background. Often, only the implements or automobiles tell us that it’s the 1930s.

Marion Huse, Sunday

 

Second, New Deal art celebrated the Common Man (and Woman)—usually capitalized as I have done—in renderings sometimes known as proletarian art. Human scale is deliberately exaggerated in attempts to bestow dignity upon the subjects. The emphasis is on average Americans, a term that decidedly did not mean kowtowing to the romantic nonsense that all Americans were somehow members of the middle class. (Of all American myths, that of a middle-class society is the most perniciously false.) New Deal art doesn’t dwell on elites, a refreshing break in the history of Western art. 

Third, you’ll see—especially in Colburn and Slayton—artists experimenting with form, color, and style. If crisis has a virtue, it is that it challenges conventions of all sorts. This was also the case for graphics and woodcut artists. Again, the content is usually ordinary people, their work, and the upheavals in which they caught up, but you’ll see artists who reduce all of this to geometric outlines, a stripping away that universalizes experience.

If you live in the Greater Burlington area, you may have seen a 2010 retrospective of Colburn and Slayton, but it’s well worth a trip to southern Vermont to see them again in their New Deal context. Everyone else should definitely make a detour to Bennington if you find yourself anywhere near there before November.

Henry Schnakenberg, Winooski

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The museum also has an exhibit of Edward Koren sketches and prints, though only for another month. The 82-year-old Koren is best known for his children’s books and his social and political cartoons that appear in the New Yorker. Koren splits his time in Manhattan and in Brookfield, Vermont, and happened to be giving a talk the July day I was in the museum. It was nice to see Koren, but if you miss the current exhibit, it’s not a tragedy. Although Koren tackles a timely subject (climate change), and sounds a clarion warning that mammals including humans are threatened with extinction, this exhibit is a one-trick skeletal pony.

Too much of one thing?

Koren’s trademark shaggy critters are everywhere. They remain charming and whimsical, but the show lacks visual diversity. You’d need to be a real Koren junkie to devote more time than needed for a brief walk through the gallery. In essence, the drawings are repeated doodles that add up to variations on the theme of species extinction. You could pretty much lift any Koren cartoon from the New Yorker and replace the body with bones and you’d get the same effect. For me, Koren’s Seuss-like offbeat faces blunted the seriousness of his message. I remain a fan of Koren’s work, share his alarm over climate change, and parrot his warning. However, I also think that if ever the phrase less is more applies, it is here.

Rob Weir