The Great Depression, which forced millions of Americans out of work, was no less devastating to artists, and their needs were addressed in the economic relief programs of the Roosevelt administration. During the New Deal era, the US Government administered four separate art projects and several other relief programs with art components. These programs benefited musicians and theatre professionals as well as visual artists. The depression era public art brought forth by the New Deal made the fine arts available to a vast audience. The government commissioned paintings and sculptures for post offices, state capitols, and federal buildings which became known as “The Art of the New Deal.”
Many artists who participated in these programs painted in a regionalist style. However, the younger artists involved in these public art projects, such as the Coloradan Frank Mechau, were not immune to the influence of modernist abstraction . The career of California painter Maynard Dixon was well under way when the Depression began, but he too created New Deal artwork when he turned to government commissions for support in the 1930s. Like Mechau, Dixon preferred western themes and developed a style of flattened and simplified forms well-suited to the scale of mural painting.
