Art: Cut-Rate Culture

The clammy catacombs of a U.S. Government warehouse in Flushing, N.Y. sheltered, last year, bales and bales of old painters' canvas. One day, following an elaborate sheaf of official orders, a truck backed up to the warehouse, carted off the canvases to Manhattan. There were several thousand earnest easel paintings which WPA had somehow deemed "unallocatable." Dr. Win-the-War's Government had decided to liquidate the last traces of Dr. New Deal's great WPArt Project. *The bales of paintings jiggling on the truck were sold for junk.

Cried outraged Art Digest Editor Peyton Boswell Jr.: "The . . . Project's end is not...

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