Lloyd Ney's

Abstract

Lloyd Raymond "Bill" Ney's mural New London Facets was commissioned for the New London, Ohio post office through the Treasury Department-run New Deal program, the Section of Fine Arts (the Section), and is the only mural that program officials considered abstract. An examination of the mural today reveals that the label of "abstract" may be a bit extreme; objects in the piece have been abstracted but the mural as a whole is not at all strictly non-representational. This discrepancy and the ensuing controversy over Ney's mural reveal much about the sensitivity of Section officials to abstraction and to subjects outside genre or allegorical scenes typical of Section commissions. Correspondence between Ney and Section officials indicate a fear in the Section that the public would reject and fail to understand or relate to anything outside of the representational norm, a belief against which Ney adamantly and successfully argued. As a result, the Section made its lone exception in the case of Ney and New London Facets. While Ney did not achieve national renown as an artist within his lifetime, his work is still exhibited and auctioned relatively regularly in his hometown of New Hope, Pennsylvania. With the exception of Karal Ann Marling's description of the New London Facets incident in her book Wall to Wall America: A Cultural History of Post-Office Murals in the Great Depression, there is nothing significant published on Ney or his mural. With this thesis I hope to raise awareness of Ney as an artist, provide readers with a complete understanding of the New London Facets commission and approval, and explore the relationship between abstraction and the New Deal art programs.