Museum Pieces, Homemade

In the early Machine Age days when most U.S. citizens were artists and craftsmen because they had to be, few of them thought much about art. They made quilts, candlesticks and rocking chairs beautiful out of respect for the crafts their parents had taught them plus an instinct for simple utility. This week 111 carefully detailed watercolors of their works went on view in Washington's National Gallery, labeled art with a capital A.

During the depression, some 1,000 WPA artists helped ferret the dusty, peeling masterpieces from Shaker barns, Manhattan antique shops, Southern California missions and New England historical societies, and sketched them according to rigid specifications.

Put together for the National Gallery as an enormous Index of American Design, which artists and manufacturers can study in one place instead of seeking out the scattered originals, it makes a file of about 22,000 pencil and watercolor copies of 17th, 18th and 19th Century homemade art. Some of the collection has been seen before (notably at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum); other parts will eventually be reproduced in a companion volume to the National Gallery's Masterpieces of Art.

WPA's painted record turned out to be cheaper than color photographs, and had some of the infinite variety and savor of the handmade stuff--alongside which most modern mass produced items looked blandly dull.

At $60 to $94 a month, artists spared no pains to reproduce the intricate, scaly silhouette of an Indian archer weather vane, the plump tarnished elegance of a cigar store squaw, or the streamlined rush of the rooster carved by a Vermont cabinetmaker for a horse-drawn carrousel at a St. Johnsbury fair.

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