As part of the ideological Williamsburg Housing Project initiated by the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s, seventeen murals were proposed for its artistic program in what was envisioned to be one of the largest collections of abstract public art in the United States. The group of artists to create these murals, selected by Buygoyne Diller (head of the WAP Federal Art Project’s Mural Division) and chief architect William Lescaze, were carefully chosen through common threads they shared in ideals, interests, experiences and engagement with certain organizations and networks (such as the Art Students League, many under the tutelage of Jan Matulka and Hans Hofmann).

George McNeil, Williamsburg, Mural. ca. 1938, Medium unknown, approx. 72 × 216 in. (182.9 × 548.6 cm). Current location unknown (Presumed Lost)

George McNeil was among one of the artists asked to participate in the mural project, alongside other painters such as Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, Harry Bowden, Balcomb Greene, Byron Browne and Ilya Bolotowsky. However, due to financial and political reasons, the project was never realized. Eight murals were ultimately painted, but only five were installed and McNeil’s studies for the mural – “most reflecting a loose, biomorphic aesthetic” – was never installed and eventually lost.

During an interview later in his life with the Archives of American Art, McNeil described his methods and process when painting the lost mural, an experience he remembered due to the sheer size of the project (which is recorded to have been approximately six by eighteen feet in size):

“I did this thing for the Williamsburg Housing Project on the WPA when I was on the Mural Project. It was never used. The canvas disappeared. But I tried to work the thing out logically. I made hundreds and hundreds of sketches and prior things. And I worked in a Neo-plastic manner. But then finally I had to make what amounted to a big easel painting, you know. I don’t know how big the painting was but it was maybe ten feet by twenty feet.”

Shown here, studies for the now-lost mural, which suggests his distinct approach to painting – as he described in the 1930s as “a dialogue, not a conflict, between art freedom and control, between an intuitive, painterly evocation of images, and the thoughtful ordering of pictorial elements into abstract form.”

McComas, Jennifer, et al. Swing Landscape: Stuart Davis and the Modernist Mural. Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art, 2020.

Researched by Yuri Chong

From the Archive: McNeil in Exhibition Book by Jennifer McComas: "Swing Landscape" 2020