The Index of American Design: picturing a national identity.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., will mark the sixtieth anniversary of its acquisition of the Index of American Design with the exhibition Drawing on America's Past: Folk Art, Modernism, and the Index of American Design, which is on view from November 27 until March 2,2003. It is the first major exhibition of the Index since 1984 and the first to be accompanied by a comprehensive, scholarly catalogue.

The Index is a vast pictorial archive of Americana produced between 1935 and 1942 by the Federal Art Project (FAP), which was in turn part of Federal Project Number One, sponsored by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). (1) The WPA provided temporary, emergency employment for some of the millions of unemployed Americans during the Great Depression, and Federal Project Number One was intended specifically to help members of the arts community.

More than eighteen thousand watercolor renderings in the Index of American Design document a wide range of indigenous artifacts, from weather vanes, toys, and quilts to cigar-store Indians, ceramics, and ships' carvings. (2) A data sheet accompanies each plate with basic information about the object represented. The nationwide project was intended to culminate in a series of illustrated portfolios organized by topics such as wood carving, metalwork, furniture, and Shaker crafts. (3) With the wide distribution of these portfolios the creators of the Index hoped to acquaint Americans with their folk, popular, and decorative arts--aspects of their cultural heritage that were relatively unknown at the time. Although the portfolios were never published, the Index became one of the most highly regarded of the WPA art projects during the 1930s, successfully capturing that decade's patriotic, egalitarian spirit in a well-publicized mission: to discover the country's true aesthetic language in the wonderfully robust a rt and craft traditions of its common man.

The National Gallery's commemorative exhibition will include eighty watercolors from the Index along with thirty-five of the original objects they illustrate, reuniting them for the first time since the Index project was in operation more than sixty years ago. Installing the renderings alongside the actual artifacts not only proves how accurately the pictures represent their subjects, but how they transform what they portray, illuminating the articles of everyday life with a preternatural clarity. Against blank white backgrounds, Index artists meticulously re-created items from our common cultural past, giving them a trompe l'oeil presence sometimes challenging our certainty that we can distinguish reality from illusion. The intensely focused renderings are comparable to some of the great documentary art of the 1930s, such as the WPA Farm Security Administration photographs of migrant workers and life on the margin.

Research for the exhibition catalogue involved a thorough investigation of the voluminous records of the Index in Washington, D.C.--at the National Archives and Records Administration, the Archives of American Art, and in the Gallery Archives of the National Gallery of Art--and it has resulted in a detailed examination of the origin, history, and day-to-day operations of the project. This research has also prompted a reappraisal, concluding that the Index was not merely an antiquarian project--as it is usually regarded today--but the creation by a group of modernists dedicated to promoting the development of a modern art based on the national idiom of design they had detected in American folk art. The Index was an ambitious and creative attempt to survey and document the aesthetic "usable past" that many critics had claimed the United States lacked, keeping it from reaching cultural maturity. (4) The founders of the Index were confident that their project would uncover in our folk art a patrimony that would e nable artists and designers to create a new and definitively American art that would synthesize the fine and applied arts and enrich the daily lives of all Americans. (5)

The collection of renderings for the Index now at the National Gallery still comprises the most comprehensive study of American folk, popular, and decorative arts ever amassed. In its quest to find a cultural identity in American folk art it was a quintessential expression of some of the ideals that motivated American artists between the two world wars. The publicity the Index gave during the 1930s to the idea that folk art was the progenitor of an exclusively American art tradition contributed not only to the popularity of folk art itself in the second half of the twentieth century, but also to our current perception that these works may provide a starting point from which to answer the question, "What is American in American art?"

The idea for the Index evolved during conversations between Romana Javitz (1903-1980) and Ruth Reeves (see Fig. 4) at the New York Public Library in New York City. (6) Javitz, who had studied art and was keenly interested in contemporary developments in American design, was director of the library's renowned picture collection. Artists and designers frequently consulted these vast files for information and inspiration in their work. Reeves was a textile designer who visited this picture collection from time to time seeking ideas. The two women became friends and often discussed the regrettable lack of American materials in the library's picture collection, and how this had deprived users of the opportunity to develop modern art and industrial products based on designs drawn from their own material culture. Both women were aware of efforts made by European countries to acquaint their citizens with their cultural patrimonies. They concluded that the United States government should sponsor the publication of the type of pictorial encyclopedia of national design that other countries had compiled, not as a source from which to copy old patterns but as a springboard for American modernism. (7)