After returning from his trip abroad, Johnson came home to a suffering nation—the United States was experiencing one of the bleakest years of the Great Depression as the economy continued to spiral downward. In response Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed the New Deal, a series of programs that sought recovery and reform from the Great Depression by creating jobs and aiding the unemployed with a living wage. The first was the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), funded by the Civil Works Administration via the US Treasury Department. It was under a second, more aggressive series of federal programs (sometimes called the Second Deal) that the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was created. The WPA was designed to aid struggling writers, musicians, theatre directors, and artists in earning a living; for the latter, the Federal Art Project (FAP) (1935–1943) was established. The FAP became the largest of the New Deal art programs and focused on all areas of the visual arts—including design, the fine arts, and art education. Thousands of artists were commissioned by the government to create public works that recorded the hopes and realities of a shaken nation, which resulted in prints disseminated throughout the country and in popular magazines, hundreds of murals installed in various government buildings, and the creation of numerous community centers.
Johnson worked with watercolors and oils, but is most known for the mural paintings he created during the New Deal. He won several commissions to paint murals at post offices and other public buildings—at Cook County Hospital, Chicago; in Melrose Park, East Aurora, and Tuscola, Illinois; in Dickson, Tennessee; and in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He became a supervisor for the Elgin Division of the Federal Art Project (FAP) and was a part of a group that traveled to Alaska to document its wildlife. Later in life Johnson shifted his artistic focus to photography and took up residence in Mexico City.
In Mural Painting, Johnson incorporated various images that symbolize different aspects of the nation—notions of family with the mother and child, a symbol of sustenance and nourishment through the sheaf of wheat, a man holding a hammer as a reference to hard work, a representation of the idea of industry versus the common man with the inclusion of smokestacks, and a symbol of art with the classical nude placed on a pedestal. Perhaps the artist included these symbols for aspiration, even in the midst of all that was going on in the nation at the time.
Author: Kathryn Koca Polite, assistant curator, 2017.
