The New Deal and Iowa State University: The Foundation of a Legacy

American Art Pottery Association Conference

April 26, 2018

by Dr. Lea Rosson DeLong

Iowa State University largely credits Christian Petersen with the foundation of its artistic legacy. Today, Iowa State University is recognized as having the largest public works of art on campus program in the United States.

Though it did begin at the earliest stages of the history of Iowa State in the late 19^th century, that legacy and its distinction was most firmly established by Christian Petersen. It is appropriate and accurate to give the glory to Petersen; his accomplishments were for many years and, to a great extent even today, the most visible manifestations of Iowa State University’s emphasis on campus aesthetics and the importance of art in a well-rounded public education.

We ought truly to recognize the other major factor in the establishment of that legacy: Franklin Roosevelt (1882 – 1945; presidency 1933-45) and his New Deal. Without the New Deal, it is nearly certain that Iowa State would not have the significant sculptures and other works of art from the Depression era that we do today. We do more certainly know that Christian Petersen and hundreds of artists like him would not have been able to exist as artists producing works of art during the Great Depression.

Petersen did, however, find the support of enlightened New Deal programs that valued artists and their importance in civilized society, even during an economic crisis such as the Depression.

That attitude led eventually to the creation of Petersen’s first major work of art at Iowa State, a work that has endured (as has much New Deal art) for the American public to the present day: the relief-sculpted mural in the courtyard of the Dairy Science Department: The History of Dairying.

Roosevelt’s New Deal contained a number of agencies that supported artists and installed public works of art in places where both rich and poor and everyone in between could encounter paintings, sculptures, prints, and other works of art. Recall that in the 1930s in America, art museums were to be found only in large urban centers, so that the access for average Americans to works of art was poor to non-existent. The New Deal changed much of that picture.

The first New Deal art agency was the PWAP (Public Works of Art Project). It was also the shortest-lived of the New Deal art agencies, but it showed what could be accomplished with government support for art. As with all of the programs of the New Deal, it was opposed by many in Congress and there was a constant fight for funding. It lasted from December of 1933 to June of 1934, but during that time, Wood’s When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow was begun, as was Petersen’s first major sculpture in Iowa. All of these works of art set the stage for the current bounty of public works of art at Iowa State.

Iowa State’s best known work of art on campus is a multi-level mural cycle in Parks Library, still just as accessible to the public as the day it was installed in the 1930s. Directed by Grant Wood and carried out by the artists he hired for the Iowa Public Works of Art Project, the murals of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow are the only murals of Wood that are still exactly as he designed and installed them.

The other PWAP product is Petersen’s sculpted mural, The History of Dairying, made up of six panels in low relief and a central sculpture and fountain in both low and high relief. It was his first work of art for Iowa State and the beginning of his artistic legacy here, and it would likely not have been possible without the New Deal.

Christian Petersen was born on his family’s farm in Denmark in 1885 at a time when the Danes were threatened by conscription into the Prussian military. Unwilling for their sons to experience that fate and uncomfortable with Prussia’s influence in Denmark, the Petersen family immigrated to America. At first they joined family in a Danish settlement in Illinois, but soon they decided to move to New Jersey, supposedly because the mother of the family preferred to live near the sea.

Young Christian went to the public schools of Newark, New Jersey and studied at a special public school for vocational training where he learned the trade of die-cutting. He soon began a successful career as a designer of medals and other honorific metal pieces for one of the premier manufacturers in the country, the Robbins Company, which is today perhaps best known for their medals commemorating American space flights.

The work was small-scale, delicate, and detailed, and Petersen excelled at it. However, he longed to be a fine arts sculptor and create sculptures on an entirely different scale. He took classes at the Rhode Island School of Design and also studied in New York, aspiring to a different career not as a craftsman but as a full-scale sculptor. From the late 1910s through the 1920s, Petersen gradually began to receive commissions for sculpted portraits and war memorials, and these and his studio pieces were accepted into art exhibitions and he began to find patronage as a sculptor. These changes took place at the same time that he was also continuing his career in die-cutting and metal designs.

At last, in the late 1920s, he decided that if he was ever going to achieve his goal as an artist, he would have to leave his life on the East coast behind and begin anew. Later on, he explained that he thought he would have his best chance for success in the Midwest, and so he moved to Chicago.

For several years, he had enjoyed the patronage of the Iowa Art, Memorial and Historical Department, and that relationship continued after his move to the Midwest. He set up a studio in Chicago, and he had reason to think that his life was on a new path and that his dreams could be realized.

At about that same time, however, the Great Depression began. Art fared no better than the rest of the shattered economy and, in fact, it suffered a good deal more. Patronage for artists, even well- established ones, dried up; exhibitions at museums and galleries were curtailed, and the market was drastically reduced. Recall that in the 1930s, most colleges and universities did not have large art and design departments, so that form of employment, so important for many artists today, did not exist as it does today.

When Franklin Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, he instituted his New Deal to save the economy and, in some cases, the very lives of many Americans. Unusual in our society, he also valued the contribution of artists, and he realized that their means of livelihood was no more prosperous than the other segments of the economy. Even more unusual, he and his New Dealers recognized that supporting artists could help not only the individual artists, but could contribute a public service. They understood that Americans’ confidence in their way of life–not just the economy–was at a low level. The United States had never had so severe a financial crisis, though numerous “panics” had assaulted our economy during our history. They wanted artists to help rebuild American confidence and morale.

The New Dealers asked artists to depict for Americans their own history and heritage, the strength of their land, their traditions, their neighbors, and themselves. Most communities didn’t have public art, so one of the first things the New Deal did was to commission artists to paint pictures and make sculptures for public places like post offices, schools, libraries, and the like. They believed that art was not an extravagance or an “add-on” or “enrichment,” but was vital and essential in a healthy society.

Roosevelt took office in March of 1933, and by December of that year, Congress authorized the establishment of the PWAP, the first agency to support American art, with each state having its own section. In Iowa, the director of the Project was our most famous artist, Grant Wood. Petersen’s friends in Iowa recommended him to Wood as a very needy artist who was also highly talented and who deserved to be given a place on the new Public Works of Art Project.

When Wood wrote to Petersen, who was still living precariously in Illinois, Petersen was overjoyed to be offered a position on the Project. He wrote to Wood immediately that he and his wife would have to “raise a loan” to pay for gasoline, but that they would be in Iowa City within a few days and, he assured Wood, he was “rarin’ to go!”

Wood’s PWAP operated primarily at the University of Iowa, and he asked most of the artists he hired to come live at the University where they would form a sort of “collective” to carry out their various works of art. The locale of their “studio” was a former swimming pool, so that their workplace became known as the “swimming pool studio.”

The first and most important commission came very quickly from President Raymond Hughes of what was then called Iowa State College in Ames; he wanted some murals for the library at Iowa State, and Wood took on the challenge. He developed some designs which he then had the PWAP artists at the University of Iowa studio carry out. President Hughes was also interested in having sculpture at Iowa State; in fact, he was rather more interested in sculpture than in painting for his college and for that, he had already identified Petersen as the favored artist. When Petersen was hired for the Iowa Public Works of Art Project, Hughes quickly set up a second PWAP commission, and that was for the sculpted mural for the Dairy Industry building at Iowa State. Hughes initially asked Petersen for a single sculpture that would feature a fountain of some sort.

For this Dairy project, Petersen did what he would do many times in his career, especially at Iowa State. He would take a fairly small-scale assignment and develop it into a more complex and more demanding work of art. Petersen expanded Hughes’ original idea to create an entire installation that went well beyond a single sculpture. He actually re-designed the entire area and created a more complex experience for the viewer. He used a walkway to expand the central fountain into a long, narrative demonstration of the history of Dairying. Using that walkway, he filled in the arches partly with relief sculptures which, altogether, made up an entire wall that constituted one section of a sort of “outdoor room”. Today, visitors can see not only the fountain and the six narrative panels, but can also enjoy an entire creative environment that is quiet but full of visual intrigue.

After designing the compositions on paper, as photographs from the swimming pool studio show, Petersen fabricated those designs in plaster, hoping to cast them in bronze.

About the time Petersen was ready to transition to the actual fabrication of his panels, however, the PWAP lost its Congressional funding. Fortunately, President Hughes of Iowa State was determined that the projects, both the painted mural directed by Wood and the sculpted mural by Petersen, were going to be completed. Working with the University of Iowa and with other federal sources of the New Deal, the work continued, though in strained circumstances.

In order for Petersen to complete his sculpture, Hughes took an unprecedented and consequential action. He hired Petersen to move to Ames and work at Iowa State as the nation’s first permanent artist-in-residence. Eventually, Petersen did join the faculty, but he began this new phase of his career as an artist-in-residence in 1934. At first, Hughes sometimes had to pay Petersen from his own private money, but so committed was he to having art on the campus at Iowa State that he was willing to do so. Petersen was brought to Ames purely as an artist, to produce works of art for the campus. I often refer to Petersen as a New Deal success story because he (and Iowa State) accomplished one of the goals of the New Deal arts agency: to integrate art and artists into the lives of ordinary Americans. When Petersen joined the staff at Iowa State, he not only acquired a job, he represented the belief that art was important in American society and, specifically, at Iowa State University.

In order to carry out this commission, Petersen began by learning about his subject matter, a practice he continued for all the other major sculptures he produced for Iowa State. For his sculpted mural at the Iowa State University Dairy Science Department, he contrasted the old methods of dairy production with the new methods and equipment that the progressive agricultural scientists at Iowa State had developed or were implementing in their production of dairy products. There were three panels showing old practices, and three panels showing some of the up-to-date processes being taught to the students at Iowa State.

Prior to this commission for Iowa State, Petersen’s sculptural style had been what we might call naturalistic or traditional. For this sculpture, however, we see that he adopted a more modern style that was more abstracted, flatter, and reflected the art deco style of the 1930s. It also was a style that was likely more to the taste of the director of the Iowa PWAP, Grant Wood. He may have felt, as well, that it would mesh more successfully with the style used in the paintings in the library murals.

His style here is simplified and schematic, with a strong geometric character. The natural contours of the cattle, for example, have been subjected to repeated, straight lines and angular forms. They reflect the “streamlined” and mechanistic character of Art Deco design. Forms are reduced to their geometric essentials, with little decorative elaboration. Petersen showed mastery over this new approach, and it was one that persisted in his work for the next decade. His compositions from this period possess rhythm and an almost musical balance. They are simpler and less detailed than his work in a naturalistic style. They also communicate their narrative in a less elaborate way.

The narrative begins at the outer edges of each side, with three cattle being milked. On the side representing traditional dairying methods, the cows are milked by hand; on the opposite side, the cows are hooked up to milking machines (notice that the contemporary cows have been de-horned).

In the middle of the six panels, Petersen created the central feature of his commission and the basis of the commission that President Hughes envisioned: a fountain and a pool that also included sculpture. Rather than maintain the low relief of the six narrative panels, he created a kind of trompe l’oeil effect that made it look as if the cows were actually drinking from the pool that formed from the fountain by making them fully three dimensional rather than low relief.

Shifting from Iowa City to Ames halfway through his project, Petersen had to solve the problem of the installation of his panels. Ideally, they would have been cast in bronze, but that was far too expensive. He then began to consider executing the panels in terra cotta, an earthen material of reddish clay. The problem, however, was that he couldn’t cast the panels at scale because the clay warped when it was placed into the kiln. Working with the head of Iowa State’s Department of Ceramic Engineering, Professor Paul Cox, Petersen re-engineered each of the panels into nine separate sections that were carefully and laboriously fired individually over several months. They were then assembled on the site of the Dairy Courtyard. This cooperation between the scientist/ceramicist/academician Paul Cox and the artist Petersen is another example of the kind of situation that the New Deal hoped to inspire. Their collaboration was necessary for Petersen’s work of art to come to realization.

After the installation of his major History of Dairying mural, Petersen noticed that the interior of the building had places for more relief sculptures. Acting on his own initiative, he designed two more sculptures for the interior of the Dairy building, ones that continued the low relief carving of the Dairy panels, but which were much larger and more imposing. The expansion of what had been originally proposed as single, self-contained sculpture to an entire environment was typical of Petersen’s ambitions.

Departments in the college beyond Dairy Industry noticed his work and soon other deans and professors were requesting works of art for their areas. The Veterinary Medicine College was the first to commission Petersen, asking him to design a large sculpted mural for them as well. For this one, as for his other works, Petersen had to learn a great deal about the science involved in the work and the educational programs for the veterinarians.

Here, his theme was showing how the study of animals and pursuit of their good health also benefited humans. The simpler and starker, sparer, and more modern style that he had developed while working on the Dairy sculptures was continued and may have reached an even higher level of mastery.

As part of the installation of the Veterinary Medicine sculpted mural, Petersen added a separate figure, also in terra cotta. The Gentle Doctor has become a symbol of the veterinary profession.

One of the goals of the New Deal art agencies was to integrate art into the daily lives of as many citizens as possible. They also wanted Americans, many of whom had never seen an actual work of art in the 1930s, to understand that artists were common people who did not wish to be seen as separate or an elite class. They were ordinary people – though ones with special talents – who were part of the fabric of the American experience and who did not hold themselves apart from it. In addition, most artists were horribly poor. Many young people wanted to be artists of some sort, but many were prevented from pursuing their dreams because of economic hardship and misunderstanding about their profession on the part of much of American society. This frustration was especially evident during the Depression.

Because of the New Deal, Petersen was able to be hired to create a major work of art. Once that initial opportunity had opened, the president of Iowa State had a basis for adding Petersen to the staff of the college. From then on, Petersen never lacked employment; he remained at Iowa State for the rest of his life, first as artist-in-residence and then as a faculty member. He created sculptural installations and individual works that can be seen all over campus today and which set the precedent for investing in artists and public works of art.

Because of the support of the New Deal, President Hughes and others at Iowa State were able to further their vision of an aesthetic campus where students could encounter thought-provoking and often beautiful works of art that were as important to their education and to their development as well-rounded citizens as any of their classes in engineering, agriculture, or home economics.

When Petersen came to Iowa State in 1934, he stopped being an artist who searched in poverty for every single commission, never knowing his future for sure. He became an artist of tremendous productivity, and he helped to define an entire campus environment, one for which Iowa State is now widely recognized. Therefore, as noted, I often have referred to him as a New Deal success; he accomplished exactly what the New Dealers and Roosevelt hoped would be accomplished when they began their unprecedented programs of government support for art. He not only fulfilled his artistic promise, but he enriched this community on many levels.