Word: wpa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Arkansas Negro Boys' Industrial School, ten miles southeast of Little Rock, had 69 inmates, aged 14 to 17, living in a rickety 1936 WPA building. Most were sentenced to work on the reform farm for petty offenses such as stealing hubcaps, a few were allowed to stay simply because of broken homes and nowhere else to go. Each night at seven o'clock, they were locked inside their old dormitory by one of three key-carrying Negro officials. Thus they were confined one night last week, when fire broke out; the building was enveloped in flames before anybody...
...Association of Manufacturers, included some members of the Administration's own family. Arthur Burns, Saulnier's predecessor, called for "massive Government intervention" in the economy through both tax cuts and public works. The auto industry asked repeal of the 10% excise tax on autos. Others suggested huge WPA-style public-works programs, greatly increased Government spending. Such plans would have meant not only the loss of billions in tax revenues, but the addition of billions more to rising Government costs...
Nearly all the leading U.S. abstract expressionists painted realistically before they turned to abstraction. Nine of them got through the 1930s painting government murals. "The most important thing for all of us was the WPA," says Willem de Kooning, recognized leader of the movement since the death of 44-year-old Jackson Pollock in an auto accident in 1956. The WPA was important in more than one way. It enabled the larval abstractionists to live by painting, established them as professionals and helped to produce the reaction that turned them to, abstraction in the 1940s...
...instinctive agreement on a set of negatives. The painters turned against regional painting ("The Iowa farms painted by Grant Wood seemed to us like dream fantasy images'"), against the rigid structure of cubism, the cliché-ridden images of surrealism-and against the Government-commissioned mural painting of WPA. Above all they were revolting against the awesome dominance of Paris painting and the long shadow of Pablo Picasso. They were searching for something new, not as a school, but as individuals following nearby paths in the same wood. Some are still searching. "It's not that...
...early years were difficult and lonely. Trained as a child in Japan in brush and sumi, he came to the U.S. with his family at 15 and settled in Rock Springs, Wyo., where he got a job on the Union Pacific and learned western technique from a visiting WPA art instructor. Two months after Pearl Harbor he was fired, ordered to quit his company house within 24 hours. He burned all the possessions he could not pack into his jalopy and trailer, took to the road with his wife and two sons, wandered for a year before...