New Deal Celestial Art (5/5): "The Comet" and "The Big Dipper"

Above: "The Comet," a linoleum artwork by Edward Hagedorn (1902-1982), created while he was in the WPA, ca. 1935-1943. Hagedorn was a lifelong San Francisco Bay Area resident. A colleague once said: "Ed was an outsider, a loner, a tall thin man who walked down the street looking like a question-mark; he had no use for success." And it's been noted that "after much early success the eccentric and idealistic Hagedorn, troubled by personal shyness, ceased to exhibit his work publicly in the late 1930s." Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Above: "The Big Dipper," another linoleum WPA artwork by Edward Hagedorn. In addition to artworks like "The Comet" and "The Big Dipper," many of Hagedorn's pieces depict war, and also large skeletal or menacing creatures crushing smaller people. Though Hagedorn may not have intended it, I find them to be fantastic representations of American plutocracy and American-style capitalism (i.e., financial bullying and brutality). It's been suggested that "The spirit went out of much of his work from about 1940, and although Hagedorn continued to make art throughout most of his life, it often devolved into trivializing depictions of the female nude." That might be an oversimplification; but even if just partly true, that's a shame, because he clearly had something to say in his early works. Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.