The Texas Post Office Murals: Art for the People.

The Texas Post Office Murals: Art for the People. By Philip Parisi. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004. Pp. xii, 181. $50.00, ISBN 1-58544-231-3.)

If every state had a guide to its New Deal post-office and courthouse murals as well conceived and executed as this one, there would be no further bad-mouthing of the art produced under government patronage during the 1930s. Here is a thorough survey of the wall painting commissioned in the state of Texas by the U.S. Treasury Department's Section of Fine Arts between 1934 and 1943. It provides historical and interpretative information, along with superb color photographs by Wyatt McSpadden of almost all of the 106 murals in sixty-nine post-office and federal buildings. There is a fine introduction explaining their provenance, a catalog giving the essential data about each one (including current condition), a section of color details of the more important walls, a map and list of their locations across Texas, a breakdown of their subjects, a solid bibliography--and best of all, an invaluable section of biographical notes on the muralists.

These muralists are not exactly famous in American art history, although a few ought to be. But the evidence here indicates that almost all were worthy of their commissions and that they produced some spectacular images. This is especially true of Tom Lea, whose Stampede (Odessa) and Comanches (Seymour) are among the more spectacular walls, surprisingly so given the conservative tendencies of the Section of Fine Arts. Similarly, Frank Mechau's Ranchers of the Panhandle Fighting Prairie Fire with Skinned Deer (Brownfield) is certainly the most dramatic and is indicative of the rough physical conditions that prevailed among the overly romanticized cowboys.

The most impressive muralist here is Howard Cook, whose great frieze entitled San Antonio's Importance in Texas History is one of the masterpieces of American mural art. Also impressive are his murals The Sea: Port Activities and Harbor Fisheries and The Land: Agriculture, Mineral Resources, and Ranching, located in the Corpus Christi post office. Cook's San Antonio murals are well described in the book, except that a photograph or diagram showing the relationship of the many triangular elements is needed to give visual context. Cook was strongly influenced by the frescoes of Diego Rivera, as his sculptural modeling and crowded but deft compositions indicate. These were among the few murals done in true fresco under New Deal auspices. The Corpus Christi murals, painted in oil on canvas, are also impressive for their utilization of a modern montage spatial organization that pushes the limits of the Treasury Department section's tolerance for abstraction. Here is an artist who ought to be better known.

Reading this book, one wonders what the WPA Federal Art Project was doing in Texas from 1935 to 1943. It sponsored murals with local institutions such as schools, hospitals, and airports. But they are not as amply recorded as are the wall murals and tend to be ignored. And what about the many murals created for the Texas Centennial Exposition in 1936 that still exist in Dallas's Fair Park? Philip Parisi, an independent scholar, should be congratulated for creating such a complete and revealing record of Section of Fine Arts murals in Texas, but he has more work to do if the complete story of murals in Texas during the 1930s is to be revealed.

New York, New York

FRANCIS V. O'CONNOR