Idaho’s Depression-Era Murals Get Poor Reviews

Zella Strickland, a courtroom artist for Idaho television stations, had to fight the urge to pull out her paintbrush every time she walked past the 26 Depression-era murals surrounding the main staircase at the old Ada County Courthouse.

“I would have loosened them up, and had them moving, breathing,” said Strickland. “I’d have put more life in them.”

Since their unveiling in June 1940, the murals -- products of the Works Progress Administration Artists Project, a federal program to employ jobless artists during the Great Depression -- have drawn similar fire.

Even before the images of settlers, workers, Indians and cavalrymen were finished, the first artist pulled out of the project.

When completed, they were hung in the wrong order. One woman is depicted with two right arms. A stagecoach isn’t connected to the horses supposedly pulling it. Two murals depicting the lynching of an American Indian were ordered concealed by a judge who found them offensive.

“It was like a doomed series from the beginning,” said Ilene S. Fort, curator of American art at Los Angeles County Museum of Art and an expert on WPA murals.

Sixty-five years after the murals were installed, historic preservationists, state officials and politicians are considering what to do with them now that the courthouse has been abandoned. Some art historians believe that, regardless of what happens, much work is needed to place them in their historical context and explain objectionable elements.

In 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt started the WPA, which eventually spent $11 billion and employed more than 8.5 million people on more than 1.4 million public works projects. The art project employed 5,000 artists who produced 250,000 works of art in courthouses, post offices and other public buildings.

Much of the art had “social realist” themes, some portraying idealized workers wrenching civilization from the American wilderness.

The artists “thought it should be comprehensible to the individual viewer,” said James G. Todd, professor emeritus of art and humanities at the University of Montana in Missoula who taught classes on WPA art.

Well-known artists including Jackson Pollock and Willem DeKooning participated in the federal program. Another was Ivan Bartlett, the final designer for the Ada County murals, but they were eventually painted by as many as two dozen lesser artists in studios in Los Angeles.

“Artistically, if they were my students, I’d give them a C,” said Arthur A. Hart, director emeritus of the Idaho State Historical Society.

It was supposed to have worked out differently.

Originally created by Fletcher Martin, a nationally known artist, the murals were to have included scenes from Idaho history, accompanied by legends explaining their significance.

According to period newspaper accounts, however, Martin withdrew from the project in part because he had more lucrative contracts to paint portraits of wealthy Boise residents.

Bartlett stepped in and redesigned the work, eventually switching to oil-on-canvas from what was likely meant to have been a petrachrome mosaic, in which colored aggregate and mortar form the image. The result falls flat, said Vince Michael, an associate professor of art history at the Art Institute of Chicago.

“They’re definitely the B-list,” said Michael, after reviewing photos. “That’s unusual. Generally, because you were dealing with the Depression era, the government could get high-quality stuff for a low price.”

Criticism started almost immediately.

“It seems to me in terribly bad taste to litter up wall spaces that were architecturally fine,” wrote Boise resident Fred F. Brown in a July 1940 letter to the Idaho Statesman.

Martin, on a trip to Boise that same month, called them “nothing to write home about.”

Six decades later, the controversy continues.

In two murals, an Indian wearing garb atypical for Idaho tribes is accosted by two white men, then lynched by two others. There’s no specific event in Idaho in which that happened, said Hart, who’s writing a local history that includes a mural chapter.

Gerald F. Schroeder, the Idaho Supreme Court’s chief justice, ordered Idaho and U.S. flags draped over the images.

“They appeared to be a lynching,” Schroeder said. “It was my view that would be offensive, and rightfully offensive, to some people.”

The building has been empty since 2002. It now is owned by the state, which had planned to use it for office space. But Idaho legislators this year failed to agree on whether to renovate it or demolish it, and a decision has been delayed at least another year.

Meanwhile, peeling and water-damaged murals hang in the gloom.

Tim Mason, who oversees state buildings, says preservationists have time to address their future.

Removing the canvas from the walls for display elsewhere -- they’re attached with a mixture of white lead paste, linseed oil, varnish and turpentine -- would be costly but not impossible.

Preservationists -- including Charles Hummel, son of one of the architects who designed the 1939 courthouse -- say they should stay put.

“The murals are an integral part of the building,” Hummel said. “They’re not as bad as one would think they are.”

Still, the WPA murals don’t win praise garnered by those elsewhere.

A 1941 painting in the Kellogg Post Office in northern Idaho by Fletcher Martin draws rave reviews. Called “Discovery,” it depicts a prospector and his mule striking it rich.

“People come from all over to see it,” said Postmaster Dominic DeMartino.

Historian Hart, who favors leaving the murals where they are and making them the centerpiece of a restored courthouse, laments the day that Martin withdrew from the Ada County project.

“If he’d done them, we’d really have something special,” Hart said.

“But the whole point is, they’ve got to be conserved. There’s no building in Idaho with even close to this number of murals, and certainly not with their historical significance.”