Can the “Sistine Chapel of the New Deal” Be Saved From Trump?

A History of December 8 by Suzanna Monyak of Bloomberg reported that, according to a former official at the General Services Administration Official, the agency in charge of federal real estate, Trump is already bypassing legal procedures required by the GSA and soliciting bids for demolish the Cohen, as well as three other federal buildings in Washington—the housing and urban development headquarters designed by Marcel Breuer; the building housing the Office of the Fiscal Service of the Department of the Treasurybuilt in 1919; And GSA’s own regional office buildingwhich, like the Cohen, is a New Deal-era building housing social-realist murals, in this case by Howard Weston (although they are oil fired and removable) Once the four buildings are demolished, the land will be sold to developers. The price probably won’t be high because these buildings are all in the southwest quadrant of Washington, where the vacancy rate is higher than 15 percent. (Anything north of 10 percent is bad.)

The threat to Cohen is most urgent because “The Meaning of Social Security” is probably the most significant work of public art from the New Deal in Washington. Last week I finally got to see it up close. Its colors remain astonishingly vibrant eight decades later. (Everyone, I’m told, has this reaction.) It’s no wonder that once finished, Shahn called it “the best work I have done.” I also saw Philip Guston’s lovely mural, “Reconstruction and family well-being“, in Cohen’s auditorium – a triptych whose panels ingeniously open and slide to make way for a cinema screen – as well as two beautiful murals by Seymour Fogel, “Personal safety” And “Wealth of the nation“, who stood guard at what was once the Cohen entrance on Independence Avenue. (Today, you enter from the other side, on C Street.)

In the event of demolition, removing the Guston would be child’s play; eliminating Fogels is more difficult; and removing the Shahn is extremely difficult and costly, perhaps even impossible. Painfully aware of this, the GSA recently spoke with Olin Conservation, Inc., a private contractor that has done preservation work on the Shahn frescoes for decades, about preparing “feasibility studies for the potential removal of certain artworks,” David Olin, the company’s lead conservator, told me. A key question is whether any of the walls on which Shahn’s frescoes are painted are load-bearing. (To my untrained eye, one of them might.) The GSA press office told me it wasn’t yet able to answer that question, and Olin told me it didn’t know either.