The Young Artists: 1939

My mother was from the Washington area, and exactly the age to be one of these students, and for all I know she might have attended this school.

I'm an art teacher in a secondary school and the girl in the floral dress is a good example of why we don't do lino printing any more. One slip and she'll be slicing a finger off. I do recognise the expression on the young lady at the front.

Even back when I entered the first grade (which was shortly after time began) our classroom clock had the numerals 1-12 and it also sported a big hand and a small hand.

I was also noticing the shoes, as an indication of family income. New shoes are most interested in painting, probably because they can envision themselves as artists. Old shoes know full well that they won't have time for such tomfoolery when they grow up into a life of household or factory drudgery.

I'm impressed with the quality of their artwork, for the most part, but moreso with the leopard print vest the girl is wearing in the back. Now, that's a bold statement!

It seems very 1930s for these high school art students to be working on designs for murals, an art form that most American art teachers pretty much ignored after about 1950. The hundreds of WPA Mural Projects in public buildings all over the country did a lot to popularize this revival of Italian Renaissance fresco techniques, as had the publicity over the removal of Diego Rivera's politically charged mural at Rockefeller Center in 1933. The tall design of factory workers at the far right strikingly recalls the crowded figural compositions and forced perspective used by the influential Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Their well-publicized work in Mexico and the US in the early Thirties inspired the American WPA projects beginning in 1935, and art classes everywhere.

It's not even nine o'clock and we're already hard at work at our boards. If we're going to match the posters on the wall behind us, then please colorize this shot.

1224 reads and no comment: you can do better.

[It's 9:43 - Dave]

Back when schools still taught art, music and shop skills. You know, the stuff kids don't need.

I never knew Anacostia used to be a white school.

Blondie in the front row appears to be near death due to a combination of embarrassment for her shoes and the effects of terminal boredom.

The first thing I noticed is the wall clock. Those things haven't changed in 60 years. It looks exactly like the ones I remember from school in the '90s.