The Shapes of Things to Come

On September 30, 1937, Bessie Grabkowitz paid $6.65 for her first week’s rent in her new apartment in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg and told the New York Times that she appreciated its sunny interior, as well as the fact that there was “an extra room for the children.” Such an everyday event wouldn’t usually be fodder for the paper of record, but Grabkowitz was the first paying tenant of the newly opened Williamsburg Houses, a landmark affordable housing development spearheaded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Public Works Administration. The PWA had been founded in 1933, and the Houses were among over 34,000 public infrastructure projects built under its auspices, alongside dams, hospitals, and airports.

The Houses were among the first of their kind to be built in New York, and they were surprisingly pedigreed: they were built in the International Style—the clean, modernist look pioneered by, among others, the Bauhaus school and Le Corbusier—and designed by architects William Lescaze and Richmond H. Shreve. (The latter’s firm had also led the construction of the Empire State Building, completed just six years before.) The Houses consisted of four blocks of 20 four-story buildings, all of which were angled against the city grid. The development offered 1,622 spacious apartments, pedestrian pathways, courtyards, and basement community spaces. They were also home to some of the first abstract public murals in the United States.

Burgoyne Diller, head of the Mural Division of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), was tasked with decorating the development’s community rooms. The vast majority of murals commissioned on behalf of the WPA were representational, and many depicted industrious men and women at work in a variety of jobs. Diller, an abstract painter, had something else in mind for the Williamsburg Houses.

“The decision to place abstract murals in these rooms was made because these areas were intended to provide a place of relaxation and entertainment for the tenants,” Diller explained in an essay published in 1973. This was his tactful explanation; the reality is that he was not a fan of the Houses’ design. Speaking with an oral historian in 1964, Diller recalled that he thought “people moving into this housing project might need that touch of color and decoration around, something to add a little life and gaiety to these rather bleak buildings.”

A colleague told the Times in 1988 that Diller felt that, “at the end of eight hours spent among moving belts, machines and factory stacks, the painted images of more machines and factory stacks would be of no comfort” to the tenants.

Diller commissioned 12 artists to paint on the walls of the housing project’s recreation rooms in the late 1930s, including murals by four men—Ilya Bolotowsky, Balcomb Greene, Paul Kelpe, and Albert Swinden—who were all were members of the cooperative exhibition group American Abstract Artists. Each colorful, nonobjective mural was very different in composition, and yet they were all distinctly of a set.

The paintings enriched the lives of the Williamsburg Houses residents while also serving as their first exposure to abstract art, which would’ve still been unfamiliar to many low-income Americans at the time. (In the mid-1930s, future Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock was still painting figurative scenes of cotton pickers for the Federal Art Project; Pablo Picasso, already widely celebrated in Europe, wouldn’t have his first MoMA retrospective until the end of the decade.) But the murals Diller had commissioned—like many works produced by WPA artists—would eventually fall into neglect. They were painted over several times. Two were coated in rubber cement to be used as self-adhesive notice boards. It wasn’t until 1987, after years of fundraising, that the canvas-backed murals were removed from the walls of the Houses so that they could be painstakingly restored. Although the Houses still stand today, the restored murals are now on long-term loan to the Brooklyn Museum from the New York City Housing Authority.

“These are extremely important artworks, quite courageous and extraordinary,” said art historian Francis V. O’Conner, in the same 1988 New York Times story about the murals’ restoration. “They were painted in the most radical style you could get at the time.”