Half-round Table c. 1940

Georgine E. Mason produced this watercolor and graphite rendering of a half-round table, a now-lost piece of American furniture. Mason was a member of the Index of American Design, a visual archive of American decorative and folk arts. The Index was part of the WPA, the Works Progress Administration, which was itself a key institution of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. It was established in 1935 in an attempt to get America back to work after the Great Depression. The Index hired artists to make drawings and paintings of objects like this one. As such, we can look at this image in two ways: as an aesthetic object in itself, and also as a documentary record of an object which is no longer accessible to us. By preserving images of vernacular objects, the Index of American Design advanced a particular vision of national identity, one rooted in handicraft and pre-industrial aesthetics. Understanding that political and economic context helps us to fully appreciate the image before us.