Paw Paw: The Mural
Carlos Lopez’s Bounty shows scenes of labor, leisure, and agricultural production in Paw Paw, Michigan. The work’s graphic style marks a departure from Lopez’s previous mural work for the Section. In the center of the mural, the artist’s fruits, vegetables, and grains are set against bold geometric outlines in black and white and painted wooden boards abstracted into fields of deep red, black, and golden yellow. Lopez’s wheat in particular, carefully painted as a row of rigid, angular shapes each composed of repeating lines and ovals, is painted in a notably different style than the brushy, gestural foliage of Lopez’s Plymouth Trail completed two years prior. The workers, musicians, and dancers occupying the left and right sides of Bounty have angular facial features, thick legs and arms, and broad, rounded hands, reflecting a style of figurative painting inspired by Mexican muralism and shared with New Deal artwork depicting industrial and rural labor across the country at the time.
Lopez’s correspondence with Rowan as he worked for over a year to finish the mural shows the time, care, and attention Lopez devoted to parts of the process of creating Bounty that he had neglected in the past (see Process). Lopez’s extensive work to create a cartoon that was a “very complete” full-scale drawing of the work rather than a sketchy outline, as he had made for Plymouth two years prior, provides context for some of the differences in the completed frescos. In 1942, as Lopez prepared to paint a fourth mural for the Section in Birmingham, Michigan, he reflected on this change in his practice, writing “since the time you thought I worked too fast, my ways have changed a great deal. I used to paint six pictures per week but now I paint six weeks on one picture.”
In addition to a style that resonates with other New Deal artworks and with work by the Mexican muralists, the themes of labor and leisure that Lopez explored in Bounty speak to Diego Rivera’s work, in particular, and to New Deal programming. To the left of the fruits, vegetables, and grains grown in Paw Paw that dominate the center of his composition, Lopez painted rows of crops and four workers tending them. On the work’s right side, Paw Paw residents are shown playing music and dancing with a small cutout to their upper left with small figures ice skating. The division of the scene into labor depicted on the mural’s left side and leisure on its right is reminiscent of Rivera’s Court of Labor and Court of Fiestas in his 1920s murals for the Secretary of Education building in Mexico City. While it is not known if Lopez was familiar with these murals by Rivera, his correspondence with the Section about his mural in Plymouth, Michigan reveals his familiarity with Rivera’s Detroit Industry murals. Likewise, his strata of the earth painted on the lower panels of Bounty echo Rivera’s strata of the earth in the upper panels of his Detroit murals.
Lopez’s labor and leisure pairing can also be understood in the context of the early twentieth century recreation movement in the United States. Amidst the concern to create new opportunities to engage the American labor force in the economy through New Deal projects, the economic depression and rapid industrialization also spawned concern that Americans engage in intellectually and physically stimulating recreational activities. This urge stemmed from the notion that working class people, in particular, were in need of aid to both fill their unused leisure time if unemployed and to counter the increasingly mind numbing quality of industrial work. The efforts to create positions for the surplus labor force and to create organized activities to fill surplus leisure time came together in the Recreation Projects of the Works Progress Administration and in visual culture like Lopez’s mural that attended to the duality of work and recreation.
While typical of the style and themes of New Deal artworks, Bounty displays a keen attention to land, its minerals, plants, animals, and labor and to the specificities of Plymouth, its place and its people. A love for this mural and a devotion to depicting the human, plant, and animal life of Paw Paw within it come through in Lopez’s writing to Rowan about the finished work:
“I believe that most people in Paw Paw are satisfied with the mural, and I think it is the best work I ever did. Every part is carefully painted in detail and the color is rich and strong. Every face is the likeness of some person in town including the two small figures watching the dancers in the upper right hand corner. The white haired man is the Postmaster, the dark haired one, myself. I wish to call your attention to such small details as the mouse running under the celery plants and the diamonds below the coal in the strata of the earth in the lower panel.”
Sources
- “Paw Paw.” Box 51, Case Files Concerning Embellishments of Public Buildings, 1934-1943, Entry 133, Records of the Public Buildings Service, Record Group 121, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland.
- “Birmingham.” Box 49, Case Files Concerning Embellishments of Public Buildings, 1934-1943, Entry 133, Records of the Public Buildings Service, Record Group 121, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland.
