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ers (Minnesota); John Pappas' Apple Orchard (Michigan); Edgar Yaegger's Still Life (Michigan); and works by John McCrady, Esther Williams, Morris Gordon, Joe Clancy, Raelael Rios and Harry Donald Jones.

The critics had innumerable individual enthusiasms in addition to the paintings in the above list, Jerome Klein, Post critic, found in Earl Field's Study Hour (Washington), "one of the most remarkable portraits of an 


ERA OF WHITEWASHING?

IN A scathing criticism of the mural work with which the Government is decorating the nation's post offices, Sadakichi Hartmann, critic, author and lecturer predicts an "era of whitewashing" to follow the present "outburst of official art." Hartmann, giving full rein to his feeling in a letter to the editor of the New York Herald Tribune, said in part:

"Artists on the rule do not read much, now they become suddenly studious, burnt the midnight lamp and pored over histories of our postal service and quaint dissertations about overland mail, pony express, old post bags and the postal power of Congress. 'Ten Years Among the Mail Bags' assumed the importance of a novel and became a classic for lunette and panel muralists. 

"Young artists became inspired depicting Colonial post offices, Confederate post roads and curious means of transportation. Let me be Virgil while you are Dante and I will lead you to strange, weird places: to Freehold, N.J., or Ravenna, Ohio; to Stockton, Calif., or Wichita, Kans.; you will see pictorial effusions in color, large and small, such as do not exist anywhere else in the world. There is no descriptive power that can do them justice.

"In my travels I have been in Genoa, Italy, and seen the atrocious mortuary sculpture in the cemetery there. Well, it is something like that. Only with the difference that there all esthetic sins and errors are concentrated in one spot, while with us it is scattered all over our vast and patient states. Under some other administration a whitewashing brigade will be steadily employed. It does not matter, the rituals both ways, putting on indiscriminately and taking off discriminately are all points of evolution.

"We Americans never had much mural feeling. Even our best frescoists, under the leadership of gentle Blashfield, some twenty years ago, solved no problem, just painted a large easel painting and stuck it on ceiling or wall. 

"At that time artists were well paid for that kind of work. Some of it was as bad as what we are doing in this era of starvation wages. I happened to be in a town when four ten-thousand murals went up in the City Hall. Even soda-water fountain clerks and shop girls laughed and considered it a curious waste. A photographer said to me: What do they mean by putting up those big postage stamps? The criticism was on par, but the average art critic would not have the temerity to say so.

"Farley, appreciating Roosevelt's interests

Transcription Notes:
2/11 3:20pm PT Mona S. it sure would be nice if whoever re-opened this 30 mins ago would say why. I fixed it last night, made notes and sent it for review. Now it's in Review again. Am I just re-reviewing my own stuff? This happens ALL the time. It's weird. Reopened for Editing 2024-02-10 23:28:07 MS removed paragraph indents and commentary about cutoff page. This guy would not appreciate the vast murals of today's society!! ---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-06 15:08:08 ---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-08 15:37:00 ---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-11 17:52:14 ---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-14 14:26:14