Mr. Stokes and the WPA

Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, architect, iconographer, president of New York City's Art Commission, member of the New York Public Library Board, is as long, as ascetic, as elegantly bearded as an El Greco cardinal. One day in 1934 his long face lengthened further when he came upon an artist in the Public Library earnestly measuring certain unfilled panels on the third floor. The artist told him that the Public Works Art Project would like to fill these spaces with some murals. Mr. Stokes said pessimistically that he would speak to the board.

Artists had been speaking to the board for 40 years. In the late 1890s, when John Carrere and Thomas Hastings designed the big building at the corner of 42nd St. and Fifth Ave. in Manhattan, they had ambitious plans for the upstairs panels. They thought of John Singer Sargent, whose gaudy Triumph of Religion in the Boston Public Library they admired. They thought of James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Whistler died in 1903. The library, privately endowed (only the building is public property), was too poor to pay Sargent's price, too proud to give the job to anyone but a really "distinguished painter."

The members of the board, Mr. Stokes found, did not believe that there were any distinguished painters working for the Government. But as PWAP was replaced by WPA, as the Art Project acquired more & more prestige,--he gradually began to bring the board round. Last year a young WPA muralist named Edward Laning finished an immense mural for the dining room of the Ellis Island immigrant station. Mr. Stokes contemplated its lusty, full-fleshed figures, its skillful gathering of groups, told the board that Edward Laning was the man.

A few members stuck at having a WPA artist fill a space meant for Whistler or Sargent. "If any member," said Mr. Stokes, "thinks that Edward Laning is a long-haired Bolshevik, he should get a look at him." Edward Laning is neat, solemn; at 32 he looks less like a Bolshevik than a college senior. The sketches he submitted for four panels on The History of Bookmaking (Mr. Stokes suggested the subject), impressed the board last week and finally succeeded in bringing it around completely.

The Library will put up only the few hundred dollars needed for materials. WPA will pay Edward Laning and his three assistants $23.86 a week. He will paint in oil on canvas. When the paintings are pasted up on the panels in about a year the Library will also repair the ceiling, the color of which ran when the roof leaked some 15 years ago.

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