Federal art and national culture

This book examines the role of the visual arts in the United States during the 1930s. Analysing the Federal Art Project, a New Deal agency that organised workers in programmes designed to put the unemployed back to work, it draws on theories of the state, cultural production, and ideology as they pertain to Roosevelt's social agenda. It also considers visual art of the Depression years in the context of a broader American culture, at a time when radical politics of the left and right were rampant. It engages, moreover, with debates over modernism and modernity in culture and the visual arts.