WPA / in praise of the Index of American Design

Three years ago, I completed a series of thirty posters for the purpose of drawing attention to an affiliate program of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) called the Index of American Design.

The WPA is well known by those who are acquainted with the Depression Era of US history. It is especially famous for hiring unemployed artists to create public murals for government buildings. Even when I was young, I knew about the WPA because one of the murals was in the post office lobby in my hometown.

Only years later did I learn about the Index of American Design, which was a companion agency that existed from 1935 to 1942. It too hired unemployed artists (some sources say 400, others say 1000) for the purpose of making 18,257 watercolor paintings (most or all of which survive), as a means of documenting hand-crafted folk art, functional wares, and decorative components from American history, beginning with the colonial age. Unlike the post office murals, no one remembers the names of the Index artists, who were more or less ignored (dismissed as craftsmen, not artists) who had previously been employed as commercial artists, designers and illustrators.

Looking closely at the Index works, I was soon persuaded that the work of those artists is surely as deserving as the WPA muralists. That led to producing the posters. I have never exhibited them in a gallery setting, but I have just now produced a twelve-minute video talk, called Index of American Design: Commemorating Arts and Crafts, by which I share my discoveries on YouTube at this online link.

Take a look. Hopefully, you will enjoy it, and will share the news of its release with artists, designers, historians and others.

Poster / Roy R. Behrens © 2022

how do you like your blue-eyed bird, mr. death?

Roy R. Behrens, © digital montage

Above One of my early digital montages (its title and date I can't recall). At the time I was interested in Arts and Crafts designer William Morris (that's Jane Morris leaning leftward), and Buffalo Bill (behind and above the target). One day we discovered that a bird (a starling) had been trapped in our wood stove, where it died and remained somewhat preserved. The feather colors were astonishing, and I decided I should place its body on a flat bed scanner, then use the result in a montage. Perhaps I also had in mind that wonderful e.e. cummings poem about the demise of Buffalo Bill: "How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mister Death."

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Wilhelm Reich, Passion of Youth: An Autobiography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988, p. 10—

Once I was playing by the fence and a peasant boy my age [whom he was forbidden to play with] was watching me from a few meters away. Suddenly he grabbed a stone, I presume as a joke, and threw it at me. It hit my forehead and I bled a little. He certainly had not intended to be mean. My mother washed my forehead and told my father [who was the boss of the other boy's father] what had happened. Father became enraged. He summoned the child and the child's father. After referring briefly to the incident, he gave the father a dreadful beating. The peasant endured it quietly, without defending himself. As he walked off with his child, I could see him beating him the whole way home. The boy screamed frightfully. I was very upset, but said nothing and crept away to hide. I was about eight years old.

Behrens, Dreams of Fields (2025)

Chap-Book Style Poster for Bicycle Club / 1895

Above Will H. Bradley, Bicycle Poster (1895).

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Billie Holiday—

They think they can make fuel from horse manure…Now, I don’t know if your car will be able to get 30 miles to the gallon, but it’s sure gonna put a stop to siphoning.

i believe in the imaginative life and love to talk

© Mary Snyder Behrens

Above Mary Snyder Behrens, Edo Wan (1988). Textile collage with machine stitching. 38h x 45w. Private collection.

•••

These are the concluding words in Sherwood Anderson’s foreward to his autobiography, as published in Ray Lewis White, ed., Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs: A Critical Edition, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969, p.29—

I am an imaginative man. I believe in the imaginative life, its importance and would like to write of that. My readers, therefore, those who go long with me, will have to be patient…

…I shall tell the tale as though you, the reader, were a personal friend. We are walking together, let’s say, on a country road. The road follows a stream and the day is pleasant. We are unhurried. We stop at times to sit on a rock beside the stream. We arise and walk again and I talk.

I keep talking, love to talk. I am telling you that this thing happened to me, that that thing happened.

Do you wish I would stop talking, let you talk? Why then, dear reader, go write your own book.

she spent half her life in a pink chenille robe

Above Image sequence from a talk I once presented on the history of chair design, called Sitting Down with Frank Lloyd Wright.

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Richard Critchfield, Those Days: An American Album. New York: Dell, 1986, pp. 376—

In one corner of the dining room, by the hot-air register, was a big old Morris chair, where Betty, when she still worked at the bakery, would sit and fall asleep, she was so tired. Billy used to say, "Betty's spent half her waking life in a pink chenille robe." The stairwell to the attic was always loaded with things left there by somebody intending to take them up later: books, clothes, tennis rackets, skates, Tinker Toys, little trucks that always seemed to have a wheel missing. Like the road to hell, the stairs were paved with good intentions. 

peach brandy / couldn't get drunk until sundown

Above Historic clay jug, as rendered in a painting by American illustrator Bisby Finley, for the Index of American Design (1939).

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Stark Young, The Pavilion: Of People and Times Remembered, of Stories and Places. NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951, p. 77—

Micajah McGhee had many acres in peaches for making brandy. His constitution was such, the history says solemnly, that drink as he might he was unable to be drunk till sundown, once a day; but as the infirmities of age crept on him he was able to be drunk twice a day. The Methodist exhortations converted him to some of sort of reform by which he agreed to limit himself to a daily quart of brandy. In a fortnight he returned to say that he could not endure it, and his advisors said, very well, they would pray for him and he should what he could; the matter was between him and God.

teaching dogs olde tricks all the way to the bank

Poster © Roy R. Behrens (2022)

Roy R. Behrens, poster from a series that pays tribute to the Index of American Design (1935-1942). The original watercolor painting is in public domain at the National Gallery of Art.  

when the evening is spread out against the sky

Poster © Roy R. Behrens (2022) with William H. Edwards image

Roy R. Behrens, poster from a series that pays tribute to the Index of American Design (1935-1942). The original watercolor painting is in public domain at the National Gallery of Art.  

Shaker wisdom of restraint and understatement

Poster © Roy R. Behrens (2022) with Alois E. Urich image

Roy R. Behrens, poster from a series that pays tribute to the Index of American Design (1935-1942). The original watercolor painting is in public domain at the National Gallery of Art.  

Sancho Panza says Don Quixote off his rocker

Poster © Roy R. Behrens (2022) with John Davis image

Roy R. Behrens, poster from a series that pays tribute to the Index of American Design (1935-1942). The original watercolor painting is in public domain at the National Gallery of Art. 

feline gargoyle with fabulous embellishments

Poster © Roy R. Behrens (2022), with John Davis image

Roy R. Behrens, poster from a series that pays tribute to the Index of American Design (1935-1942). The original watercolor painting is in public domain at the National Gallery of Art.  

disarranged bandbox of a mad hatter's top hat

Poster design © Roy R. Behrens (2022), with Gilbert Sackerman image

Roy R. Behrens, poster from a series that pays tribute to the Index of American Design (1935-1942). The original watercolor painting is in public domain at the National Gallery of Art. 

set off for India but arrive in America somehow

Poster © Roy R, Behrens, with Ingrid Selmer Larsen image

Roy R. Behrens, poster from a series that pays tribute to the Index of American Design (1935-1942). The original watercolor painting is in public domain at the National Gallery of Art.

remarkable from the Index of American Design

Poster © Roy R. Behrens (2022) from Betty Fuerst image

Roy R. Behrens, poster from a series that pays tribute to the Index of American Design (1935-1942). The original watercolor painting is in public domain at the National Gallery of Art.

astonishing from the Index of American Design

Poster © Roy R. Behrens (2022), artist unknown

Roy R. Behrens, poster from a series that pays tribute to the Index of American Design (1935-1942). The original watercolor painting is in public domain at the National Gallery of Art.

a favorite from the Index of American Design

Poster © Roy R. Behrens (2022) with Mina Lowry image

Roy R. Behrens, poster from a series that pays tribute to the Index of American Design (1935-1942). The original watercolor painting is in public domain at the National Gallery of Art.
 

selection from the index of american design

Poster © Roy R. Behrens (2022) with Mina Lowry image

Roy R. Behrens, poster from a series that pays tribute to the Index of American Design (1935-1942). The original watercolor painting is in public domain at the National Gallery of Art.
 

exquisite image / the index of american design

Poster design © Roy R. Behrens (2022)

Roy R. Behrens, poster from a series that pays tribute to the Index of American Design (1935-1942). This particular painting, by Daniel Marshack, documents a woman's gymnasium outfit. The original watercolor painting is in public domain at the National Gallery of Art.

hurly burly Morris with few detachable phrases

Review of Linda Parry, William Morris

Above Opening page of our published review of Linda Parry's biography of Arts and Crafts legend William Morris, as published in PRINT magazine (January / February 1997). Morris is featured briefly in the autobiography of one of his admirers, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. In the passage quoted below, Yeats refers to Morris as having a "burly body." In reference to that, British satirist / caricaturist Max Beerhohm once wrote that Morris was "a wonderful all-round man, but the act of walking round him always tired me."

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William Butler Yeats, The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats: Consisting of reveries over childhood and youth, the trembling of the veil, and dramatic personae. New York: Macmillan, 1953, p. 89—

He had few detachable phrases, and I can remember little of his speech, which many thought the best of all good talk, except that it matched his burly body and seemed within definite boundaries inexhaustible in fact and expression. He alone of all the men I have known seemed guided by some beast-like instinct and never ate strange meat. “Balzac! Balzac!” he said to me once, “Oh, that was the man the French Bourgeoisie read so much a few years ago.” I can remember him at supper praising wine: “Why do people say it is prosaic to be inspired by wine? Has it not been made by the sunlight and the sap?” and his dispraising houses decorated by himself: “Do you suppose I like that kind of house? I would like a house like a big barn, where one ate in one corner, cooked in another corner, slept in the third corner, and in the fourth received one's friends”; and his complaining of Ruskin's objection to the underground railway [the Tube, the London subway]: “If you must have a railway the best thing you can do with it is to put it in a tube with a cork at each end." I remember, too, that when I asked what led up to his movement, he replied: "Oh, [John] Ruskin and [Thomas] Carlyle, but somebody should have been beside Carlyle and punched his head every five minutes.”

Roycroft / Elbert Hubbard and Alice Hubbard

online version

Having taught courses in the history of design for many years, I have of course long known about the Roycroft Workshops in East Aurora NY, as well as their proprietors, Elbert Hubbard, and his second wife, Alice Moore Hubbard. But until recently, I hadn't realized the extent of their connections to people and events in Iowa. This new essay from The Iowa Source discloses the various details.