Cut-Rate Culture

The clammy catacombs of a U.S. Government warehouse in Flushing, N.Y. sheltered, last year, bales and bales of old painters' canvas. One day, following an elaborate sheaf of official orders, a truck backed up to the warehouse, carted off the canvases to Manhattan. There were several thousand earnest easel paintings which WPA had somehow deemed "unallocatable." Dr. Win-the-War's Government had decided to liquidate the last traces of Dr. New Deal's great WPArt Project. *The bales of paintings jiggling on the truck were sold for junk.

Cried outraged Art Digest Editor Peyton Boswell Jr.: "The . . . Project's end is not an indictment of the WPA . . . but of us as a nation who deny dignity to the individual artist. ... It would be hard to convince me that some of the good [art] was not included among the thousands of canvases . . . sold for scrap by the ton."

Last week word went around Manhattan that some of the mildewed bundles of art had been rescued, could be seen in the back room of a dingy Canal Street bric-a-brac shop run by one Henry C. Roberts. Art dealers snapped up hundreds of pictures at $3 to $5 apiece. They planned to clean, mount, frame and resell them.

This was smart business. Most of the paintings were flower pieces, rural landscapes, near abstractions, street-scenes-with-elevated. A few were by the clenched-fist school. Some were competent and some were remarkably bad. But, good or bad, the wartime boom had long since included a heavy demand for cut-rate culture on the wall (TIME, Sept. 6).

* Roosevelt abolished the WPArt Project in December, 1942 in the face of rising war employment after it had spent around $35,000,000.

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