 Welcome everyone to our second lecture. I want to remind you at this time please turn off your cell phones. Channel 17 is here again and I don't know if you get the email that Glenn sends out the few days before our lecture but he did put on it when you could watch the last week's lecture if you want to and if you didn't get that information and want it please contact me and my name and Betsy Gardner and my email or telephone number is in the brochure. I have a little bit of unpleasant news to tell you. Beth Wood is the chair of our program committee. And her committee have put together this wonderful program and she's done it for us several years. Unfortunately, Beth broke her leg and she has been in the hospital and is going to be going to rehab and she will have some time recuperating. However, there's nothing wrong with her brain. She's a computer and I'm sure she'll be lining up for next semester very soon we hope but she doesn't want any company but if anyone wants to send her a card we'll pass on her address. And now in place of Beth we have Carol Hinkel our vice president who will introduce the speaker. I don't pretend to replace Beth but here we go. So today our speaker is Devin Coleman. I think some of you have heard him before and if you haven't you're in for a really wonderful treat. He is the state architectural historian for the Vermont division for historic preservation. And a little of Devin Coleman's background he graduated with a historic preservation major at UVM. He studied art history at Colby College. He lives in Burlington so all of that he's even a native now. So warmly I'd like to have you welcome Devin Coleman. All right. So do we need a sound check for the camera? Are we good? A little feedback? Is that better? A little better? Better? One, two, three? Okay, we'll try that. So well thank you for having me here. It's great to be with your group again and we'll be talking about art and architecture of the new deal. But before I start I wanted to note that you have your speaker next week, Glenn Andris, talking about the Justin Morrill homestead and then a field trip to the homestead in Stratford. You all have to go. It's a fantastic place. In early fall is the perfect time to visit and it's actually one of the state-owned historic sites that the Division for Historic Preservation, where I work, that we own and operate. So it's really worth the trip and there are some brochures on the back table with information about all of our state-owned historic sites and we hope you'll come out and visit those before they close for the season in mid-October. So we will be talking about art and architecture during the new deal and this is a period that's of interest to me personally because there is so much activity. There is so much energy and excitement about art and building even though it was the middle of the Great Depression and it was the government sponsorship of these programs that really brought that about and generated the basic training, if you will, for numerous artists and architects who then went on to very productive careers in the 1940s and 50s and 60s. So this is really a pivotal time in American culture artistically. And we'll start out with, you know, we call it the alphabet soup of government programs, the Civil Works Administration, the Emergency Relief Treasury Department, the WPA, the PWA, you know, the CCC goes on and on these acronyms and I won't burden you with learning all of them but basically this is to show that there were multiple overlapping federal programs all with different purposes but some similar goals in terms of providing meaningful employment for artists and architects and how they achieved that was carried out in different ways but there were three main purposes that really run through all these programs and the first is to provide meaningful employment and projects for artists and architects and the second is to provide public artwork for public buildings and the third is to bring art to the general public. This is a time in America when unless you lived in a major urban center your town probably did not have a fine art gallery unless you were really wealthy you didn't have original paintings in your house so very few Americans were actually exposed to original works of art it was more pictures and calendars, the mass production fine artwork that was sent out to farms and every farm had the same calendar with the same paintings in it but original artwork was really not that common in the everyday life of the average American so this was a way that the government thought instead of making people go to a museum to see fine art let's put the artwork where the people are already going like the post office, the courthouse, public spaces, libraries and that was really the genesis of this whole public arts project was to get the patron, the government and the artists, the painters and sculptors and the people all working together to provide a cultural experience that everyone could enjoy and this was certainly a time when there was a lot of change going on in the art world this is the early modernism was taking root post World War I, pre-World War II that 20s, 30s period is really pivotal and artists and architects trying to decide do we go back to how they did things before World War I back in the 19th century, the 18th century or is this our chance to start fresh start blank slate, new ideas, new thoughts and some went back to the old ways, others looked to the future people like Stuart Davis, fantastic painting, this is called Swing Landscape this is the jazz age, this is bright, colorful, abstract, in your face and this is not what most people wanted to see this was New York, this is Chicago, this is LA, this is not Des Moines, Iowa they didn't want to see this in the rural areas what they did want to see was scenes like this, baptism in Kansas, John Stuart Curry and this genre of art really comes to the forefront, regionalism works of art that are looking at a specific regional identity and usually in a very idealized, very fond look back to the not too distant past they're not going back hundreds of years, maybe one or two generations but they're also not looking at the present very few of these New Deal paintings are showing present conditions because it was the depression they didn't want to see pictures of what they were living they wanted to look back to the good old days and another John Stuart Curry painting, Our Good Earth the heroic individual farmer in control of his land and his kids in the farmhouse in the background it's that individual that is really emphasized as well as scenes like Thomas Hart Benton, Cradling Wheat I mean Benton is almost surreal in his flowing hillsides and fields of wheat the bodies of the people harvesting and this very romanticized look at the American countryside and Grant Wood another regionalist, not surreal these are the most perfectly planted rows of corn you will ever see Grant Wood was all about precision, geometry this is the ideal farmstead that's the farmhouse in his famous painting American Gothic in the background so looking at these idealized visions of America the good old days before the depression took place there's also a very strong influence in this period of illustrators like N.C. Wyeth doing these very dramatic, heroic and realistic nobody's mistaking this for Thomas Hart Benton this is realism, Captain John Paul Jones and these illustrations that so many people grew up looking at in picture books and of course if we're talking about murals in the 30s we have to talk about Diego Rivera, the great Mexican muralist and his work at Rockefeller Center which was, did not go over well it was ordered removed by the Rockefellers when he painted in a picture of Lenin and an unflattering portrait of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and they said that's enough, you're out they ripped out the mural so this was a big deal this was major news and something that the government sponsoring mural projects did not want any part of so you don't find much politics in New Deal murals they're pretty tame so the Diego Rivera episode was definitely he was very influential for the artists painting the murals in post offices and libraries but those artists knew better than to propose anything hinting of socialism or political so let's look at some of the buildings and first we'll start looking at murals in Vermont buildings, post offices the buildings themselves were all New Deal projects and some a combination of either plans coming out of Washington DC from a headquarters design office or local architects designing the buildings the buildings are typically colonial, revival, neoclassical buried, you know, the White River Junction post office sorry, Rutland post office just a very good, solid, proud building right in downtown Rutland and this building has a series of really beautiful murals in it and these are right in the lobby they're not hidden upstairs in a courtroom they're right there, you walk in the door and there are the murals and that was the intent, they wanted people to be face to face with this artwork and it really does, you know, it comes right down you can see the height in the door the murals are right there, you can reach out and touch them so these murals fall right into the category of the historical narrative and looking at the early history of Vermont we've got Ethan Allen, of course wouldn't be a Vermont mural without Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys on the left above is the Call to Unite where they rally the Green Mountain Boys and then on the right is the British that they are rallying against and this is another picture placed above the elevator I think they cut out part of it for that but this is the Green Mountain Boys gathering at the Breckenridge Farm in southern Vermont to scare off the sheriff from Albany who was coming to reclaim what they called the New York Grants Vermonters called the New Hampshire Grants these overlapping land claims and they were holding their ground and another one and see how these are all they're built into the architecture so these niches were designed by the architect specifically to hold works of art so these are not... let's see that might be as good as we get so these are not paintings that are an afterthought where they build the building and then they think oh you know they should put a painting on that wall and they commission it and hang it up these are part of the design of the building from the start so they're really integral to the building itself and this is an interesting one I think this shows the freeing of the first slave in Vermont in 1777 by Captain Ebenezer Allen and so this was a very... something that Vermonters were very proud of having the first constitution to outlaw slavery and they wanted to play up these important moments in Vermont history and finally Benedict Arnold commanding the first naval battle on Lake Champlain another heroic Vermont historic event in the Revolutionary War and if that looks familiar you know here's N.C. Wyeth and here's Stephen Bulaski the artist who did these so really showing the parallels between that illustration genre and these what the artists were doing in the New Deal the artist painter of all these murals Stephen Bulaski was from Bellows Falls so local painter and really did a remarkable job on this series and then did several other large murals throughout the state because of the success of these now in White River Junction another post office 1934 right downtown beautiful I think when a little Vermont town gets a building like this it puts them on the map there's nothing to be proud of not every town has a big grand post office like that White River Junction being a railroad hub warranted a really good building the paintings by S. Douglas Crockwell and another Vermont and upstate New York artist 1937 and there he is from Ohio studied in St. Louis lived in Glens Falls, New York and did several other murals a lot of these artists would do multiple projects once they kind of got their foot in the door and were a known entity then they could get other commissions and there's this somewhat kind of derisive attitude that other artists who were not doing these projects took and they said well you know he's just painting for the section and that the section of fine arts was the federal program sponsoring these post office murals and artists pretty quickly figured out what the section of fine arts wanted to see. Rural scenes nice landscapes and so if you were painting the section you kind of you were playing to what you knew they wanted to fund so if you push the boundaries too much you were not going to get commissioned it was that simple so Crockwell and here's a picture of him actually painting this commission mural and what's great is that his family has all the letters and materials and correspondence between him and the federal government to do this commission so it's a really neat glimpse into the history of how these projects came to be the mural itself is one of it's really dark can't see it very well it's one of the more unusual murals and that it's very free form most of the murals would fill the wall panel the edge to edge top to bottom would all be painted Crockwell took a much more abstract where that white portion in the middle is a flowing river that kind of comes out breaks over the pediment to the door and then goes up around the edges so an unusual composition for this mural and some details he's highlighting the stone industry so that's walls of granite or marble and a stone cutter on the left and what I love is that he was actually really he wanted to portray this accurately and so he's showing this man with a mallet hammering using a plug and feather system with the diagram on the lower right where a drill a hole would be drilled into the stone and then two feathers put in and then a wedge shaped plug hammered in and you do a line of those and you break off the stone so they're not just you know he's someone who really knows how stone is quarried so these artists knew what they were painting and the people living in this town seeing this they also knew how stone was quarried so they would call him on it if he got it wrong and the other side of the mural maple sugaring of course it's Vermont countless murals of maple sugaring in St. Albans right downtown the main main strip in St. Albans federal post office and custom house two large murals haying and sugaring off by Philip von Salza and I think what's really neat about these murals is that von Salza was let's see he was I think born in Sweden immigrated to the U.S. fought for the U.S. in World War I and then was hired by the U.S. government in the 30s to paint scenes of rural Vermont New England life and I think for an immigrant that would have been pretty special for his adopted country to hire him as an artist to paint scenes of that country that he's fought for so the murals are and this is your typical format you know big rectangular murals spilling the wall spaces you've got the farmers haying the fields loading up the wagons you know horse drawn wagons this is the 1930s we had cars and trucks but they didn't want to see those they wanted wagons and horses the barn in the back plowing the field with a horse they had tractors that little barn dance the housewife on the porch just this idyllic scene of rural Vermont life and the other so these are on either end of the lobby in the post office so they face each other and it's maple sugaring and you know very playful the kids rolling on the ground playing with the dog and snowballs and the boy and the girl talking on the wood pile and you know there's a lot of activity a lot of the smoke or steam billowing up from the evaporators and so there's a lot of action these aren't just static renderings but certainly especially in St. Albans you have to show maple sugaring now Northfield which is we've been looking at larger urban centers if you will Northfield also got its own much smaller scale post office still colonial revival but not the monumental two-story buildings we see in Rutland and White River and St. Albans so the buildings would correspond to the scale of the community Charles Doherty was the artist for the murals in this building and there's Charles and actually his father was actually a very prominent muralist as well so it was in his family to do these projects and this might be my favorite one it's skiing and you can see the various skiers and you know they're going knock-kneed and they're falling down and just but they're having fun and this was painted I believe in the put a date on that in the mid-30s and this is when the ski industry in Vermont is still in its infancy the CCC, Civilian Conservation Corps another New Deal program at this very time is cutting the first run of Mount Mansfield nose dive they're cutting the first downhill ski trails on Mansfield so skiing is just becoming popular so I think it's interesting that this is much more of a current event scene but it's a fun event this was a chance people could forget their woes of the depression and go out and have fun on the ski hills and in addition to this large mural there are three other medallions for lack of a better word placed on the walls above the mailboxes and maple sugaring again and this one you know that's like the Jolly Green giant just again this heroic farmer figure runs through all of these paintings just the that individual the master of the land kind of the corner copia of crops and goodness and the last one being Northfield a stone carver he's working on a monument Northfield had a long history of quarrying and this one interestingly does include the bed of a pickup truck and a power pole so the artist this is more of a present debut and he's not afraid to show those modern conveniences but they're kind of pushed off in the background and in Woodstock another nice little smaller scale post office artist was Bernadine Custer one of the few female artists that did work on these post office murals 1940 and Bernadine Custer is someone I'd love to study more her papers are at the UVM Special Collections Department and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago lived in Landgrove and I think the Landgrove Historical Society owns her property now and is working on going through its collections so you know a female artist at this time that certainly be interesting to trace her evolution and work on these projects and what's great is that we have the preparatory sketches for her murals and so this is one of those sketches it's maybe eleven by seventeen roughly but she's sketched out a basic format for the mural and all of these had to be reviewed and vetted by the powers that be both at the state level and at the federal level so there is a lot of back and forth in terms of okay what are you going to paint what's your subject matter who are these people just making sure it was all on the up and up and then once it was approved then the artist would actually execute the work and this is the finished mural and as you can kind of see it features four prominent men right in the center each with a building lined up right behind them interestingly none of those buildings are in Woodstock a little artistic license but as you move across the painting on the left and I think we can see it better here it's working chronologically so the early frontier days the settlers coming with their oxen and horses drawing their wagons and clearing the forest and then the stagecoach and you see the man in the middle chopping down the tree to build the pioneer log cabin and then as we move into the middle we see these four gentlemen and they are all people who had an important role in Woodstock history so this is a very site specific mural these people wouldn't be shown in a post office in Burlington they're very linked to the Woodstock history we've got first Hosea Baloo a universalist preacher who lived in Woodstock and wrote a very important work The Treatise on Atonement in 1805 when he was living there and Jacob Collimer lawyer politician postmaster general for president Taylor lived in Woodstock for about 30 years and John Cotton Dana a renowned library and museum director born in Woodstock and the Dana family is generations in Woodstock and in fact the Woodstock Historical Society occupies the Dana house in Woodstock so highlighting three of the big names in town and what I think is really kind of sweet is that the fourth person is the unnamed farmer he's just a stand in for the working man and he's holding a side he's ready to go out in the fields all the other guys are up with their fancy shirts and collars and he's ready to go to work and on the right side curiously we have a man heading off to play golf accompanied by a woman heading off to go skiing I don't know where they did that in Woodstock but this is showing that transition into the present day Woodstock modeling itself as a recreational community a resort a play area and downhill skiing was very popular golf was very popular these leisure pursuits and in the background is a couple of horses and there's right between the two men you see a man at a gas pump and a car and apparently that was pretty risque the elites in Woodstock did not want a dirty gas pump in their painting but it stayed there's a lot of correspondence back and forth in those files about what kind of image are we presenting if we have a dirty gas pump in automobile so very interesting social interaction and island pond anyone been to island pond it's way up there beautiful spot a surprising place for a major post office and a mural you would think a more urban area would get it and it turns out they never built it so they had grand plans Barst Miller who was a painter was selected through a nationwide competition sponsored by Life Magazine called the 48 States Competition and there's this great quote in the editors of the magazine and reviewing all the entries and this is printed right in the magazine apparently rural Americans are artistic stay-at-homes with a preference for paintings that reproduce experiences in scenes and parts of history with which they are familiar significantly the much publicized main street atmosphere of small towns does not seem to mean so much to the people who actually live in them and that's true none of these murals show what we consider today the classic downtown the rural village there's another comment I read that in looking at the New Deal murals and post offices you couldn't blame someone for thinking that America hadn't gone through the industrial revolution yet because they're all farmers in fields with horses and men chopping down trees by hand there's no modern technology no airplanes no big factories they really wanted to look back a few generations and that's what Barst Miller proposed for the island pond post office and this was his proposal sketch for Life Magazine and it shows two men working a portable sawmill of sorts to cut up lumber and in the background is the lake a railroad roundhouse and the train station on the far right and the description of the painting talks about how Barst Miller has previously favored allegorical figures but now he's looking at a more outright reflection of American life so no no Greek gods no kind of out there allegorical scenes straight and narrow the working man and if we look at a detail of the picture you can see on the left the railroad station and on the right the actual railroad station that's still there today no question it's the same building and this becomes interesting because in the same competition Paul Sample another Vermont artist artist in residence at Dartmouth for decades lived in Norwich Vermont he submitted an entry for the westerly Rhode Island post office there's the train station in the background and the people in westerly were not fooled they did not want this painting and in fact the post office in westerly Rhode Island was not built either so island pond in westerly both lost out and I'll toss in one more this was another proposal for island pond that shows how a lot of these submittals were presented for consideration the artist would be given the dimensions of the wall space and noting where the bulletin boards had to go, where the door went what the casing was and then they could lay out their design and present that for review and this one by an Italian painter Pappino Mangravite and it shows maple sugaring so the murals today I was really happy to find that they're all intact none of them have been removed painted over, damaged and I think a lot of that's due in a large part because they're mostly up high on the walls so they're out of the reach of little fingers and getting run into with mail carts and things like that but they're also largely overlooked and that they've been there so long that they don't see them anymore I was in the Northfield Post Office taking pictures of it's like an 18 foot by 9 foot mural like you can't not see it and a woman was like what are you doing? taking pictures of that painting up there I've never seen that look up so they're out there kind of hiding in plain sight so when you're out and about look around and look up a few other examples that I found through this research in Bellows Falls Middle School another series of murals by Steven Belaske who did the Rutland Post Office murals did these huge murals up on the walls in what was then the high school, it's now the middle school showing this is the first Protestant sermon in Vermont so another historical allegorical theme and on the opposite wall is a scene of Native Americans spearing salmon at the Great Falls in Bellows Falls and so these were these were also WPA projects so not Treasury Department in the Post Office, these were WPA fine arts projects but in a public school so that the kids could have access to original works of art and these are still in place in great condition, they're up in a double height stairwell so nobody can get to them if you've driven through Middlebury you might have seen this little monument it's kind of on its own little island where all the roads converge and you're worrying about being in the correcto lane to make your turn it's a really sweet little relief carving the Emma Hart-Willard Memorial and this was put in place to honor Emma Willard who was an early advocate for women's education in Middlebury and there's not a whole lot of public sculpture that came out of the New Deal there's a lot of paintings but public sculpture, not so much so this is a really great example and it's it's very low relief and very finely executed TA the designers were Marion Guild another female and for decades she was not credited with this work the credit went to Pierre Zwick who was the head of the fine arts program for Vermont and then eventually it came out that she was really the designer of this memorial and it was carved by TA Campbell so we've looked at the murals and some of the buildings, the post office mainly but let's look at some of the New Deal building programs mainly the Civilian Conservation Corps the CCC the Public Works Administration the PWA and the Resettlement Administration I won't say too much about resettlement other than they were known for their planned communities the Green Towns Greendale, Wisconsin Green Hills, Ohio Greenbelt, Maryland these were meant to be prototypical communities in which people could live in harmony together in a fully planned out modern development in Vermont some of the CCC projects that we have are really remarkable the CCC was hugely influential in the Vermont making Vermont what it is today in terms of our state parks our ski industry state forests public infrastructure it all goes back to the CCC they laid the groundwork for all of those developments and one of my favorite buildings that came out of the CCC is the Ski Lodge at the base of Nosedive that's the ski trail going straight up Mount Mansfield and this was designed in 1941 by architect David Freed and he is one of if not the only one of just a handful of modernist architects working for the CCC that actually got his designs built your typical CCC building is big heavy round log kind of Adirondack style and Freed was able to incorporate some round log construction but also this very modern shed roof full height space with a wall of windows it's really unlike anything else that the CCC built anywhere nationally another example of Freed's work the Crystal Lake Bath House in Barton Vermont again we don't know how these got approved because they're so unlike anything else that DC was approving and one researcher thinks that they probably figured it's just Vermont just do it but there's no mistaking that this is a modern building and compared to buildings like this the Hubbard Cabin at the Middlebury Snow Bowl this is your typical CCC you know pretty small scale rustic big logs the forest building but these two projects by David Freed are really quite notable within the national context of CCC construction and he's working with stone and brick and wood things that the average the CCC was employing young men 17 to 28 years old or so they weren't skilled they would just give them a shovel to dig a ditch and lay a foundation so these buildings had to be really straight forward they had to be bored and batten but the way they were put together the forms are very modern and so it's really interesting to see that happening in rural Vermont the Public Works Administration was really interested in public education this is the new school in Cabot which replaced a I don't think I wrote down the quote but there's a great description of just the the awful one room school house with broken windows and an out house off the back and the broken floor board they were really playing it up that we need a new school and this was a big investment in a little town like Cabot to have a brand new school in you know colonial revival style and the building I'm sure a lot of you are more familiar with the Southwick Memorial building at the UVM Redstone campus McKim, Mead and White nationally renowned architects but this was funded by the Public Works Administration so it wasn't just small scale locals doing these projects here's a nationally renowned architecture firm working with PWA money and other buildings such as Tracy Hall which is in Norwich right on the green they did a lot of civic town halls meeting places, community gathering places, libraries, public schools and so on and finally probably the single most beautiful sewage treatment plant in St. Albans I mean this is amazing they've built this beautiful little brick building to hold the machinery with a tower there's a flag pole with an American flag they've spelled out St. Albans sewage plant on the hillside probably with white rocks there are gravel pathways lined with shrubs I mean this was really special and for a town like St. I don't know the history of their sewage treatment system in St. Albans but you know this was probably a big step up and to have the federal government investing in employing local young men to build these projects was a big deal and I think that's really the key and why I find this so interesting is that it's a period when the government was willing to invest in its citizens put them to work doing meaningful jobs especially the artists there was a lot of talk about well you know why should we give money to artists to make paintings isn't that better than putting them to work in a factory let them do what they're good at pay them to create works of art that the public can enjoy and that's their skill set and others are really good at laying brick let the bricklayers do that let this mason's do other things the landscapers so all these trades come together and create what I think are some really special projects I have not been up to see if this is still there I somewhat doubt it so a few of the resources if you're interested in knowing more about these programs there are a couple great books the new deal is 75th anniversary celebration came out in 2008 long range public investment the forgotten legacy of the new deal by Bob Leninger is a fantastic book and he really makes the argument that we're ready for a new deal and that these buildings have lasted more than three quarters of a century now a lot of the infrastructure the sewers the sidewalks the roads that we use today come out of the new deal we're ready for a new program to put people to work and reinvest in public infrastructure and wall to wall america post office murals and the great depression looks specifically at the whole post office mural project and finally if you want to really dig into this the bennington museum right now has an exhibit called crash to creativity the new deal in vermont and it's up through November 4th and they're looking at fine arts architecture all sorts of there were quilting projects there were you name it the new deal it was in there somewhere and the bennington museum I haven't been down to see the exhibit yet but it's I'll be heading down there so certainly be sure to check that out if you want to know more and that's what I have thank you very much happy to answer any questions yeah we'll bring up the lights and we'll now do we need to use a microphone for the questions okay do you want to go and go and back over there or okay I know you said the building the murals were in good condition but people used to smoke in public buildings so I'm wondering if any of them were cleaned or do some of them need to be cleaned I know the murals in the bellows falls middle school have been cleaned and stabilized somewhat there's some flaking of paint the others I really haven't looked at them close enough to see how dirty they might be because they're up you need a scaffolding to get up and look but I'm sure they could use a little TLC to clean them up most of them were painted on canvas in the art of studio and then glued to the walls so they're not frescoes they're not like painted into the plaster and if that glue starts to release that could cause some problems but I would love to see some sort of comprehensive inventory and conditions assessment done that'd be really neat there was a gigantic set of murals in my hometown of 11,000 people in Illinois in the movie theater and always I thought it was a WPA project and when I went back there ten years ago there had been a remodeling project and those murals were gone gone gone and I couldn't find any record of what had happened to them and they were specifically local they had to do with young men who fought in the great war the growing of corn coal mining there was a factory there and there was a great painting of the factory so does anyone have a handle on these wonderful works that are gone? there's certainly an effort to try to catalog what's out there but what's been lost it's hard to say it can happen so one person with a bucket of paint and a roller it's gone in an afternoon it can happen so quickly I do know there are Steven Belaski, the Bellows Falls artist also did two murals at Fort Ethan Allen that are gone but I found them they're wrapped up in storage at Fort Ticonderoga they don't want them so if anybody wants them knows of a good place but they're out there and it just takes some sleuthing and asking questions and I do a lot of research on old newspapers because usually when these murals were installed there would be a photographer to take a picture of the artist and the mural and the mayor and so on so finding those references to figure out what used to be somewhere and then going there and if it's not there, okay, what happened to it so it's a lot of detective work as a young boy we call this saying it used to be there's more cows than people in Vermont I'm wondering why there wasn't no cows depicted in the artwork wow good question I don't know there's no pictures of dairying maybe the artist didn't know how to paint cows that's a very good question though I have a question I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts were any of the Carnegie libraries built during this period those were a little earlier were they? because it's a beautiful library for such a small town I'm sure they never had the money to build it themselves I think Carnegie's were more early 20th century 1930s there seems to have been no lack of funds for these projects why was there so much money available? the artist didn't make they were not making a lot of money because their fee had to include their supplies and materials it was basically a lump sum so there was there was money to a certain point but the artist it was just enough to keep them solvent they weren't getting rich off these projects by any means oh well the buildings are a different story there's a lot of money for buildings that was part of the infrastructure investment that the government realized they could sort of kill two birds with one stone these desperate need for new facilities in these communities across the country and a desperate need for employment in the Great Depression all these unemployed young men will put them to work building buildings yeah all part of the new deal yes would you repeat again the field trip which is connected with next week's program yes to the Justin Morrill homestead oh it's canceled well go on your own what was it oh you're going next spring okay it's to the Justin Morrill homestead in Stratford Vermont Stratford I was delighted in San Francisco to visit the Quate Tower which is a fantastic landmark but is full in its circumference of these beautiful new deal murals yes sir you were talking about Paul Sample he did know how to paint horses and cows and it reminds me of the wonderful mural which I've forgotten the year but it must be a little later than the new deal time when Paul painted the huge mural it was at National Life which has been moved to the Vermont History Museum Vermont Historical Society and it's down where you can see it at eye level so people ought to visit that as well right and that mural that Sarah is referring to was by Paul Sample who did some of these new deal murals he painted that in 1956 for the National Life Building and it's now at the Vermont History Center what I was led to say beyond that is that these can be moved and reinstalled in new buildings so it makes me think maybe those ones that are rolled up there ought to be some kind of an RFP put out for people who might be building a new a new municipal building as South Burlington will be soon etc. but other places in the state that might be more appropriate for those particular murals definitely and there are examples in other parts of the country where a post office has been torn down and they'll carefully remove the murals and then reinstall them either in the new post office or maybe in the town hall another suitable public space because these are publicly owned works of art so they're not to just be sold off it's against the law to put these up for auction for example they can't just sell them so they are we own them so enjoy them the artists that painted the murals did they then go on to become more popular because of their work did they gain they didn't earn a lot of money but did they prosper later as people saw their murals that's a good question I'm not sure if the murals themselves because they were in such a kind of specific style if people would see oh I love that rural farm scene people weren't hiring painters at that time I'd say it was more of helping them in the development of their careers and learning how to paint large scale and then moving on to bigger projects after the depression and World War II and so why did they accept the job because they needed the money yeah there's a way to were they young they didn't look young in the pictures I would say middle age kind of mid career probably yeah interesting I mean there's a whole series of murals that I just saw in Des Moines, Iowa that Grant Wood oversaw the whole the design and installation of them assistance Grant Wood was a major artistic figure at the time but even he was willing for a few bucks yeah I'm curious as to why the treasury was involved it doesn't sound like a treasury function to be paying artists at least not the treasury yeah the treasury department they were the funding behind all the any government building being built they were the funding source and so there is it was figured out that well if they're building the buildings they should pay for some artwork also yeah today all those buildings are overseen by the general services administration which also has a public art program any new federal building has a certain percentage of the building has to include public art any other questions this isn't a question but can you put back the slide of the man you said that was I think from Sweden it had a long Philip von Sultz let's see he did you went really quickly through and I wondered if there was anything more interesting there that I missed so he's the one who fought in World War I for the United States and then coming back became an artist gave up the military career and did murals in New Hampshire, Nebraska and North Carolina so you can see once once you did one then you're kind of in you were a known entity and you could get other commissions great thank you very much