During the Great Depression, the New Deal, enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, kept many artists, painters, craftsmen, photographers, and set designers employed in the public eye. Artists like Gertrude Abercrombie, Jackson Pollock, Augusta Savage, Mark Rothko, and Lee Krasner were all supported and commissioned by the Federal Art Project, a New Deal initiative primarily run by Icelandic American curator and writer Holger Cahill.
Cahill had a particular fascination with American folk art and curated two of the earliest comprehensive surveys on the movement, American Primitives and American Folk Sculpture, in 1930 and 1931, respectively. Between 1935 and 1942, Cahill directed a vast visual archive of American decorative arts history, which was a lesser-known project of the Works Progress Administration, a federal program that aimed to create jobs for the unemployed during the Depression. Housed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Index of American Design comprises over 18,000 watercolor renderings that depict furniture, ceramics, textiles, and other popular and decorative arts from the early days of colonization through the nineteenth century.
The collection was later culled down to three thousand illustrations and published in two large volumes by Harrison House and Harry N. Abrams, titled Treasury of American Design and Antiques. The comprehensive compendium depicts brass and silver candlesticks; chests of drawers painted in a japanning technique; handspun woven coverlets with geometric and graphic depictions of baskets of flowers, houses, and lions; quilts; saddlebags; wooden toys and hobbyhorses; Windsor chairs; geographic-specific pottery and ironwork; clocks; lanterns; and the rocking chair—a design native to colonial America and attributed to Eliakim Smith, a cabinetmaker and meticulous record keeper, who documented his invention of attaching rockers to cottage chairs.
The objects depicted were sourced not only from large institutions but from private collections and working-class American homes. Each illustration took between two to ten weeks to complete, a method of documentation favored over photography for its ability to capture what Cahill called the “essential character” of each object.
A prominent undercurrent of many New Deal cultural programs was the construction of narratives about American history. The majority of commissioned artists looked directly at their surroundings, like photographer Dorothea Lange, who documented the Dust Bowl, and Berenice Abbott, who captured an evolving city with her Changing New York photographs. Other artists sought to represent intersections in the American past that could influence cultural consciousness, like the journey of Jewish immigrants depicted in Ben Shahn’s Jersey Homesteads mural or a dialogue between the past and the present represented through the juxtaposition of objects like a Fang reliquary sculpture and a modern microscope in painter Charles Alston’s murals Magic in Medicine and Modern Medicine in the Harlem Hospital.
Some of the most detailed illustrations included in the Index are of Native American basketry, beadwork, and women’s embroidery. The practice of handicrafts, traditional in Regency-era England, was brought to America by Europeans and became a part of domestic training for women. Before a young girl attended school, she was expected to be fluent in plain sewing and cross-stitch. In these samplers, we see simple iconography evolve over time through motifs and symbols that would be recognizable to even the youngest participants in society. There is a certain poetry in the naive needlework of the alphabets, fleurs-de-lis, flowers, and birds seen on the scraps of cloth that feels akin to a nation learning to craft its own story.
Modernism, the growing international design style at the time of the Depression, largely relies on a tension between past and present. Folk modalities are often pulled through time to offer contrast to the present. As industrialization continued to progress rapidly, the Index became a source of inspiration and a fruitful endowment to the lineage and influence of American design.
Monica Nelson is a New York–based writer and graphic designer and author of Edible Flowers: How, Why, and When We Eat Flowers and the forthcoming These Long Shadows: Women's House Museums in the American South.
