WPA Art Inventory Project

There is little known about Leon V. Carroll. He specialized in painting floral still life.  He exhibited at shows and galleries in New York City and Connecticut. In 1937 he created three easel paintings for the WPA Federal Arts Project. Though his dates of birth and death are known, the places of these events are not.

 Sources: WPA Artist’s Work Card; AskART; “Here, There, Elsewhere,” New York Times, November 3, 1940.

Images available in Flickr

Works of Art Listed in CT Archives’ database from Leon Carroll:

Thomas Cavaliere created three easel works and one mural for the WPA Federal Arts Project. His mural American History was painted in fresco at the Ivy Street School in New Haven. His other works were allocated to the Scotland, Connecticut Board of Education and the Laurel Heights Sanatorium. His dates of birth and death are unknown.

Sources: WPA Artist’s Work Card; Social Security Death Index.

Images available in Flickr

Works of Art Listed in CT Archives’ database from Thomas Cavaliere:

Little is known about Frank Cirigliano except that he may have been a member of the Connecticut League of Art and that he lived in Hartford.  In 1941 he painted 6 easels for the WPA art project.

 Sources: WPA Artist’s Work Card; Photo Standalone 30, Hartford Courant, February 28, 1932.

Works of Art Listed in CT Archives’ database from Frank Cirigliano:

The only evidence that exists documenting John Collins’ participation in the Connecticut Federal Arts Project consists of two photographs showing him painting. We know nothing about his life.

James Conlon was born in Meriden, Connecticut in 1894. He studied at the Connecticut Art Students’ League, and one of his teachers was Charles Noel Flagg, one of the most influential Connecticut artists of his generation. Conlon also studied at the Art Students’ League of New York. During the First World War he served with the Army Air Corps, producing aerial maps in France. He won a prize for designing the “Connecticut Yankee” emblem, featuring “Father Hartford,” the insignia of the Connecticut Air Guard. He was a member of the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts and the Association of Connecticut Artists. Conlon helped found the Guilford Art League and was noted for his landscapes and portraits. He married the Connecticut artist Helen Saliske. He painted two portraits for the Federal Arts Project (FAP) in 1939. These were placed at Fairfield State Hospital and now reside at the Southbury Training School. Conlon also served as Assistant Director of Art for the FAP in Connecticut. In May 1936 he supervised artists who were painting portraits of four famous veterans of World War I. Conlon died in 1962 at the Veteran’s Home in West Haven.

Sources: WPA Artist’s Work Card; AskART; “James H.P. Conlon Dies; Was Noted Branford Artist,” New Haven Register, March 17,1962; “Patriotic Mural Has Family Group Theme,” Hartford Courant, March 8, 1942; Falk, Who Was Who In American Art (1985), p. 126.

Works of Art Listed in CT Archives’ database from James Conlon:

Little is known about Mariano Corda except that he lived in New Haven, Connecticut when he worked for the WPA from 1938-1939. Corda was known for his woodcarving. He shared a studio on Chapel Street in New Haven with Michele Martino. The two of them worked on the mahogany relief of John Charles McCarty, a deceased superintendent of schools. (See photographs for Michele Martino.) Corda’s dates of birth and death are unknown

Sources: WPA Artist’s Work Card; WPA Federal Arts Project Newsletter (ND).

Works of Art Listed in CT Archives’ database from Mariano Corda:

In 1882 Vito Covelli was born in southern Italy in the city of Bari. He attended public schools and night school studying electricity and electrical chemistry. He began his study of art under Ugenti in 1890. He came to the United States in 1903. In New York City in 1905, he studied art under Kenyon Cox. Covelli became a well known landscape painter, and his paintings were exhibited in New York City from 1910-1915. In 1913 he married the former opera star, Claire Felice de Guine, and in 1926 the couple moved to “heavily wooded land” on West Hill Road in Barkhamsted, Connecticut. There they lived simply, without electricity or an automobile. Vito painted while Claire composed music and wrote poetry. The Covellis called their place a “National Rural Art Museum,” and when visitors stopped by, the two would show them the hundreds of paintings in their home. In 1937 Covelli joined the WPA Federal Arts Project and painted for the art project until spring 1941. He completed 125 oil paintings of the nearby landscape. His art was allocated throughout the state to such institutions as public schools, state sanatoria, mental health hospitals, schools for the developmentally challenged, the Soldiers’ Home in Rocky Hill, and Fort Wright on Fishers Island in the Long Island Sound. In 1958 Vito Covelli died. He was predeceased by his wife in 1955. The family continues to live at his residence on West Hill Road and has retained many of Covelli’s paintings.

Sources: WPA Artist’s Work Card; WPA Biography; AskART; Ernest N. Dickinson, “The Secret of Happiness is Richly Theirs,” Hartford Courant Magazine, October 19, 1952; Claire F. Covelli’s obituary,Hartford Courant, January 21, 1955; Obituaries: January 25, 1958,Hartford Courant, January 35, 1958, Waterbury American, January 25, 1958, Litchfield Enquirer, January 30, 1958, Torrington Register, January 25, 1958; “Barkhamsted,” Hartford Courant, January 26, 1958.

Images available in Flickr

Works of Art Listed in CT Archives’ database from Vito Covelli:

Arthur Sinclair Covey was born on June 13, 1877, in Leroy, Illinois. He studied at Southwestern College in Kansas and the Chicago Art Institute. In 1904 he studied in Munich, Germany. He went on to work as a staff artist for several publications then taught at the Chicago Art Institute and later at the London Art Institute. Upon returning from London, he married and had two children. In 1914 he assisted Robert Reid and Jules Guerin in the creation of a mural for the 1914-1915 Panama Pacific Exposition and received the Bronze Medal. His first wife died in 1917, and four years later he married the children’s book author and illustrator Lois Lenski. In 1929 they moved to a farm in Torrington, Connecticut. He served as President of the National Mural Painters Society from 1926-29. In 1936 Covey began work for the WPA Federal Arts Project. He painted the mural entitled Bridgeport Manufacturing in the Bridgeport Post Office. He also painted the mural depicting the life of John Brown in the Torrington Post Office. He went on to create murals for the 1939 World’s Fair and La Guardia Airport. In the 1950s he and his wife moved to Tarpon Springs, Florida where he died on February 5, 1960.

Sources: A Finding Aid to the Arthur Sinclair Covey Papers, 1882-1960in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Archives Finding Aid atwww.aaa.si.edu/collections/finding aids/covearth.htm; Obituary, New York Times, February 6^, 1960; AskART; Mantle Fielding’s Dictionary of American Painters (1987) pg. 182; Who Was Who in American Art(1985) pg.134.

Images available in Flickr

Works of Art Listed in CT Archives’ database from Arthur Covey:

Beatrice Cuming was born in Brooklyn, New York on March 25, 1903. She attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, going on to study under H.B. Snell for three summers at Boothbay Harbor, Maine. After graduation she taught art classes at the Girls’ Community High School for a year before deciding to go into free-lance commercial art. Using her earnings from free-lancing, Cuming moved to Paris in 1924. There she studied at the Colarossi, the Grande Chaumière and Moderne Academies, and at the Andrè Lhote Studio. After a year in Paris she travelled and painted in Italy, North Africa, England, and Brittany before returning to New York in 1926. In 1928 she studied at the Art Students League. In 1929 Cuming returned to Paris where she completed her studies. In the early 1930s she moved to Kairouan, Tunisia with her companion, author Dahris Butterworth Martin. In Tunisia, Cuming and Martin met an Arab who acquainted them with the local customs and taught Cuming Arabic. The exotic landscape and customs proved to be a great inspiration to both Cuming and Martin. In 1943 Dahris Martin published a book recounting their adventures in North Africa titled I Know Tunisia.

 Cuming returned to America in 1933 with a new appreciation for the American landscape. She later recalled, “I was overwhelmed by the wealth of material for an artist here, by my own keenness for it and the feeling of belonging and wanting to be nowhere but here.” In 1934 she boarded a train intending to move to Boston. When the train reached New London, Connecticut she was so struck by the beauty she saw around her that she disembarked the train and started a life in that town where she gravitated towards industrial subjects: steam trains, power plants, harbors, and factories.

 In 1934 Cuming joined the Public Works of Art Project. When the program dissolved, she was transferred to the WPA Federal Arts Project. Under the WPA she completed 150 easel works. They were allocated to the Norwich State Hospital, Hamden High School, Connecticut State College, Undercliff Sanatorium, Middlesex County Temporary Home, Fairfield State Hospital, Internal Revenue Office, New Britain High School, Lincoln School, Norwalk High School, Cedarcrest Sanatorium, Middlesex County Temporary Home, Long Lane Farm, Rocky Hill Soldiers’ Home, Mystic Oral School, Laurel Heights Sanatorium, Southbury Training School, Monroe Center School, and Fort Wright in Fishers Island, NY. Many of Cuming’s works for the project were etchings depicting the New London area. She created many of her prints at a print studio set up by the WPA in New York City. She assisted Aldis B. Browne in the execution of a mural for the U.S. Coast Guard Academy.

 To earn money in New London, Cuming offered art classes to children and adults at her New London studio. She served as the caretaker for her studio and residence, and therefore did not have to pay rent. She also taught art in New London public schools from 1936 until 1940. In 1937 she took control of the Young People’s Art Program at the Lyman Allyn Museum. In 1943 she was commissioned to paint the construction of a submarine at the Groton submarine plant. She was also hired to paint watercolors of the Standard Oil Company in New Jersey.

 In 1942 Cuming travelled extensively in the Southwest United States. She spent a summer in La Jitas, Texas where she was the Director of the Summer Colony at Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas. She was surrounded by wilderness in her quiet cabin, and this environment inspired a number of paintings of nature’s beauty. She spent her next summer in a secluded, rented house in New Mexico. An interesting footnote to this time in her life is that she was investigated by the FBI because they suspected she was spying on the Los Alamos nuclear bomb facility. There is no record that their suspicions were true.

 In 1958 Cumming designed her own home in New London. It featured a personal studio on the top floor, a first floor living area, and a basement studio for teaching classes. Towards the end of her life she could not afford to live in the house alone, so she moved into her upstairs studio and rented the downstairs living quarters. Cumming resided in the house until her death in March 1974.

 Sources: Beatrice Cuming 1903-1974: Exhibition Catalogue (1989); AskART; WPA Biography; “Cuming, Beatrice,” Jim Collins and Glen Opitz, editors,Women Artists in America (Apollo, 1980); Social Security Death Index;Fielding’s Dictionary of American Painters (1986), p. 193; Who Was Who In American Art (1985), p. 142; “Cecile Tyl research material on Beatrice Cuming [ca. 1913-1990], Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, athttp://siris-archives.si.edu/ipac20/ipac.jsp?uri=full=3100001~!212485~!0; “Artists’ Colony Opens Gallery At Noank,” Hartford Courant, August 26, 1947; Edward Alden Jewell, “National Gallery Gives Loan Show,” New York Times, May 16, 1941; Edward Alden Jewell, “Art Shows Offer Marine Subjects,” New York Times, February 3, 1942; “Among One-Man Shows,” New York Times, February 8, 1942; Edward Alden Jewell, “The American Artist And The War,”New York Times, February 8, 1942; Edward Alden Jewell, “National Gallery Birthday,” New York Times, May 17, 1946; Edward Alden Jewell, “Art on the Summer Circuit,” New York Times, August 24, 1947;  Howard Devree, “Pioneer Modernist,” New York Times, April 27, 1952; William Zimer, “New London’s Quirky Individualist Left a Records of the City’s Geometry,” New York Times, March 4, 1990.

Images available in Flickr

Works of Art Listed in CT Archives’ database from Beatrice Cuming:

John Steuart Curry and James Henry Daugherty were two artists in the Connecticut Federal Arts Project who were nationally and internationally celebrated. Curry was one of the three top regionalist artists in the country, Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton being the two others. He was born on November 14, 1897, near Dunavant, Kansas. He took his first art lessons at the age of 12. He went on to attend three years of art school, starting at the Kansas City Art Institute and transferring to the Art Institute of Chicago and then to Geneva College in Pennsylvania. He was soon working as a commercial artist, creating illustrations for the publications Country Gentleman, Boy’s Life, and the Saturday Evening Post. He married Clara Derrick in 1923 and the following year bought a studio in Westport, Connecticut.

 Curry soon grew tired of commercial illustration and decided to return to school for further training in the fine arts. In 1926 he raised funds and moved to Paris to attend the Russian Academy Art School. After a year of study in Paris, he returned to the United States where he studied at the Art Students League in New York City. He returned to Westport in 1928. That same year his painting, Baptism in Kansas, was exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. to considerable acclaim. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney bought the work for her museum and paid him a stipend of 50 dollars a week for two years.

 In 1932 his wife died, and he relocated from his secluded Westport studio to a studio in New York City. In the city he taught at the Cooper Union and the Art Students League. Around this same time Curry toured New England painting studies of the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus. His reputation continued to grow, and he was soon considered one of the leaders in the art movement called “regionalism.” His artwork was bought and exhibited by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum, University of Nebraska, and the St. Louis Museum.

 In 1934 Curry wed Kathleen Shepard, and the couple returned to Westport. He was commissioned to create a double mural, Comedy and Tragedy, for Westport High School. Time Magazine described the whimsical mural as follows:

 “In Comedy (and Tragedy) Artist Curry has included himself and his wife, has gaily jumbled Charlie Chaplin on roller skates, Mickey Mouse, Mutt, Jeff, Shakespeare’s Bottom, Will Rogers, Popeye the Sailor. In Tragedy Uncle Tom prays by the bedside of Little Eva, Hamlet sulks, Lady Macbeth sleepwalks, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Eugene O’Neill scowl, Aerialist Lillian Leitzel drops from her circus partner’s arms to death.”

 Curry was also selected to paint murals for the Department of Justice and the Department of Interior buildings in Washington, D.C. He began work for the WPA Federal Arts Project in January of 1936 painting two murals for the new Norwalk High School in Connecticut: Ancient Industries of Norwalk andHat Industry. He expressed his admiration of the WPA saying, “the present administration’s program of sponsoring painting, sculpture, music, and drama is of tremendous importance to the American art of the present and of the future.”

At the end of 1936 he left the project to become the Artist in Residence at the College of Agriculture in the University of Wisconsin, a job he would hold until the end of his life. He was paid $4,000 a year and given a studio on campus. His painting Wisconsin Landscape, which he painted while at the University of Wisconsin, won the first prize at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Artists for Victory” exhibition in 1942.

 In 1943 Curry was commissioned to paint ten murals for the Capitol Building in Topeka, Kansas. Though this commission may have been the basis of his greatest work, it resulted in a sharp disagreement with many in Kansas. The subject matter of his mural, The Tragic Prelude, was extremely dark and brooding. At the center of the mural stands John Brown, the controversial abolitionist. To either side of him stand Union and Confederate troops, some living and some dead. Behind him a prairie fire rages as a tornado tears through the sky. Curry was extremely proud of this mural, going so far as to say, “In the panel of John Brown, I have accomplished the greatest painting I have yet done.” However, the Kansas Legislative Committee overseeing the execution of the murals disagreed finding Curry’s dark depiction of Kansas’ past unacceptable. There was also a strong public outcry against the paintings. The Kansas Council of Women felt that the people in the mural looked more like “freaks than true law-abiding people of Kansas.” The Kansas Livestock Association was similarly displeased: the hide of the bull in the mural was far too red, and the pig’s tail curled the wrong way. The Kansas Legislature passed a resolution that prevented Curry from finishing the mural. As a result, he refused to sign the sections of the mural he had completed.

Curry was deeply affected by the negative reactions towards his Kansas murals. For the final years of his life he rarely painted, instead focusing on book illustrations and lithographs. On August 29, 1946, he died of a heart attack in Madison, Wisconsin. His wife was convinced that the controversy surrounding his John Brown mural had killed him. In 1992 the State of Kansas bought all of the original drawings related to the mural and offered an official apology for their treatment of Curry. Curry’s art continues to be popular among museums and individual collectors.

 Sources: WPA Allocation Card; AskART; Laurence E. Schmeckebier, John Stuart Curry’s Pageant of America (New York, 1943); “U.S. Scene,” Time Magazine, December 24, 1934; Percy Boswell, Jr., Modern American Painting (New York, 1940), pp. 116-117; www.metmuseum.org ; News Hour with Jim Lehrer: August 13, 1998; Modern American Painting (1940); David Detmer, “Curry, John Steuart,” American National Biography (1999), pp.878-879; Dorothy and John Tarrant, A Community of Artists; Wilton-Westport, 1900-1985, pp. 83-86; “Painter Most Remembered for Image of John Brown,” The Topeka Capital-Journal: February 16, 2003; “Curry, Noted Artist, Dies In Wisconsin,” Hartford Courant, August 30, 1946; “The Permanent Collection [John Steuart Curry],” Sioux City Art Center “Collective Images: The Sketchbooks of John Steuart Curry,” exhibition at the Worcester [MA] Art Museum in 2002; “Curry, John Steuart,” list of manuscripts of the John Steuart and Curry Family Papers at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution;  The following are found in the New York Times and were selected for their assessment of Curry’s work and/or career:  “Exhibition At Silvermine [Norwalk, CT],” September 15, 1929; Edward Alden Jewell, “Our Modern Museums,” February 16, 1930; “Kansas Has Found Her Homer,” December 7, 1930; Edward Alden Jewell, “Events in the [Art] Colonies,” June 28, 1931; “Story of Kansas Countryside,” October 13, 1930; Elisabeth Luther Cary, “Restoring the Balance,” December 13, 1931; Edward Alden Jewell, “Art,” October 20, 1933; “Mrs. Kathleen Shepherd Wed,” June 8, 1934; Edward Alden Jewell, “Curry Presents Kansas Pictures,” January 23, 1935; “To Show Lynching Art,” February 13, 1935; “Curry’s ‘Tornado’ Sold To Museum,” June 5, 1935; Elisabeth Luther Cary, “Two Artists’ Drawings,” September 22, 1935; “Lectures,” January 26, 1939; Edward Alden Jewell, “Mural Art,” August 30, 1936; “Curry Is Named ‘Artist In Residence’; Wisconsin Acts to Aid ‘Rural Culture,’” September 20, 1936; “Mural For Justice Department,” Photo stand-alone, 2, March 22, 1937; “Realm of Art:  Murals and Architectural Sculpture,” May 9, 1937; “Curry’s Sketches of Murals for Kansas Are Photographed for Exhibition Here,” November 27, 1937; Edward Alden Jewell, “John S. Curry Art Is Put On Display,” January 17, 1938; “Regional Displays for;  Art Open Today,” October 12, 1938; “30 Art Exhibitions Here This Week,” January 10, 1938; Edward Alden Jewell, “Murals: A Survey of Recent Washington Work,” December 21, 1941; “Record Art Show Has $52,000 Prizes,” December 8, 1942; “Elected By Academy,” April 30, 1943; “John S. Curry Dies; Mural Painter, 48,” August 30, 1946; “John Steuart Curry,” August 31, 1946; “500 at Curry Burial Service,” September 2, 1946; Hal Borland, “Curry’s America: Strong, Bold, Lush,” March 23, 1947; “Galleries Show Cezanne, Curry,” March 24, 1947; Edward Alden Jewell, “John Curry’s Art Shown At Gallery,” March 25, 1947; Edward Alden Jewell, “Cezanne Tops List,” March 30, 1947; John Canaday, “Art:  Precisionist View,” January 26, 1961; Hilton Kramer, “Revising the Art History of the Nineteen-Thirties,” October 20, 1968; “Grace Glueck. “Art and Alphabet Soup,” February 9, 1969; John Canaday, “John Steuart Curry:  Burial in Kansas,” November 1, 1969; John Canaday, “Hold On There Just a Minutes: Won’t You? I Didn’t Say-,” November 29, 1970; James R. Mellow, “The American Scene,” December 1, 1974; Hilton Kramer, “Art: Revisionism Mines Historical Lode,” July 13, 1977; Peter Schjeldahl, “The Morris Museum Mounts A Solid Exhibition of ‘Realism,’ ” April 20, 1980; Hilton Kramer, “Art:  Show at Whitney Stars the Human Figure,” June 7, 1980; William Zimmer, “Don’t Expect Happy Clowns In This Show of Circus Art,” November 25, 2001.

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Works of Art Listed in CT Archives’ database from John Curry: