ABSTRACT
On December 8, 1933, US Treasury official Edward Bruce invited several of his New Deal associates, eight directors of art museums across the nation and special guest Eleanor Roosevelt to discuss economic plight of thousands of artists and to convince the group of the efficacy of his plan for a government-supported art project. The hastily formed and short-lived Public Works of Art Project, the first formal agency in the United States for government support of the visual arts, was based on the premise that artworks paid for by public dollars would remain in the public domain. The early months of the New Deal were charged with that kind of optimism and urgency bolstered by high-toned rhetoric as new bureaucracies sprang into existence. When viewing the New Deal murals today, the evaluation of the artwork is obscured by the evaluation of the government program. The historic legacy of the New Deal art programs is more complicated than warehousing of old paintings.
