After being eclipsed for generations by the swiftly moving currents which have continued to change art in America since the end of World War II, work by artists who were employed by the art projects of the WPA (works progress administration) is emerging once again to be viewed in a contemporary light. For instance, in recent years WPA murals painted by members of the American Abstract Artists group have been literally uncovered and rescued from layers of house-paint in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. With every rediscovery a valuable opportunity to learn something about the WPA art programs presents itself. Therefore, when a situation arises which makes it possible to pay long overdue attention to an accomplished, yet under-established WPA artist, that situation should be acted upon. Such is the case with the organization of these paintings, drawings and litographs by Arthur George Murphy. Murphy's work is a real and unique contribution to art of this country. Study of his work can only increase our understanding of the wide scope and substantial effect that the WPA art programs had on artists during the Great Depression.

In Murphy's own words, "The FAP (federal arts project) saved me and many an artist from serious malnutrition... as a 'single', my $90.00 a month meant that I could have one good meal a day and live in a room in San Francisco..." Beyond providing artists with money for food and shelter, the FAP required that they make art on a full time basis. Murphy was among the most prolific printmakers employed by the FAP. He completed 91 lithographs on the Northern California project between the years 1935 and 1940.

The high representation of prints by Murphy in such major Bay Area collections as the Achenbach Foundation, the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, the Oakland Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art attest to his status as favorite son of his adopted city, San Francisco. Murphy's achievements, however, are not limited to West Coast museums. His lithographs were collected by Carl Zigrosser, director of New York's Weyhe Gallery from 1919-1940. Later, as curator of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1940-1964_, Zigrosser accepted allocations from the WPA which included 20 prints from Murphy. The Newark Museum , repository of one of the most important WPA print collections in the country, houses some 37 prints by Murphy. Both the Metropoloitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Museum of American Art in Washington have examples of Murphy's WPA prints as well.

One of four children, Murphy was born on January 4, 1906 in Tiffin, Ohio, a small town 100 miles southwest of Cleveland. His mother was a Sunday painter, and by adolescence Murphy was determined to make his way in life as an artist. In Central Ohio during the early 1920's the options open to him were extremely limited, so at the age of thirteen he began supplementing his "one-room, backwoods schoolhouse" education with a correspondence course in illustration and cartooning. "It took years and years and much diligent effort to purge the wrong thinking and habits learned in this course", he would later write. He did learn enough , however, to support himself as a free-lance illustrator. In 1928 he took his savings and, "hopped an overnight Pullman on the New York Central to New York City", in order to study at the Art Students League. Murphy would attend a total of five art schools in as many different cities. This formal education was peppered with Guthrie-esque rail excursions throughout the American west and Mexico.

Murphy's early style began to develop after his arival on the West Coast in 1930. While studying at the California School of Fine Arts (now The San Francisco Art Institute) he came into contact with Diego Rivera, who was painting his mural, Construction (1931), for the school's gallery. Rivera enjoyed celebrity status in San Francisco following his 1930 retrospective at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor and during that same year in San Francisco, he executed his first commisioned murals in the United States. Rivera's art had a huge impact on American artists during the 1930's. Murphy was no exception; he began to execute mural studies in 1932, two years before the first WPA art program, the PWAP (public works of art project), would launch a national mural painting movement. In the vein of precisionist artists such as Charles Sheeler, Ralston Crawford, Louis Lozowick and Elsie Driggs, Murphy's streamlined, shallow spaced mural studies celebrate the modern American city's network of railroads, shipping lines, skyscrapers and factories. In 1934 Murphy was employed by the PWAP in Pasaden. Unfortunately, the only mural he is known to have fully realized, Negro Musicians, is now lost.

Murphy's introduction to lithography came at the Colorado Springs Art Center (formerly the Broadmoor Art Academy). Boardman Robinson, Murphy's one time instructor at the Art Students league, founded the Art Center's lithography workshop in 1932. In addition to being the hub of a developing artist colony in Colorado Springs, the Art Center soon became one of the best known workshops for lithography in the west. Although Murphy had been attending summer classes there since 1932, he did not make prints at the Art Center until 1934, after atrip to Mexico. Depicting the denizons of Mexican cantinas, Murphy's first prints are direct and roughly drawn. They are indepted to the lithographs of Orozco, Siqueros and other Mexicans including Pablo (Paul) O'Higgins, the California ex-patriot who lived and worked in Mexico.

With the inception of the WPA/FAP in late 1935, Murphy began to explore lithography more ambitiously. Centered in San Francisco, the printmaking division of Northern California Project was set up and headed by Ray Bertrand. Bertrand, a master lithographer loaned many of his own presses to the project and, as a result, the emphasis was on lithography. Additional preses and lithographic stones were sought from all over the state and commercial lithographers were hired to assist Bertrand in editioning the prints. Experienced printmakers as well as novices like Murphy took full advantage of the project. Joseph Danysh, regional director of the Northern California FAP, "saw the interest in printmaking develop to a degre that had never occured before." Murphy's first FAP lithographs document the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge. Iconic depictions of suspended bridges appear as a motif in some of the best known examples of Depression Era printmaking. However, the romantic monumentality of Murphy's Bridge Pylon (1936) rising out of the foggy bay, stands in contrast to the sculptural, hard-edged treatment of the structure's New York cousins by artists such as Louis Lozowich, Howard Cook and Jolan Gross Bettelheim. Similarly, Murphy's Steel Riggers-Bay Bridge series, like the pipe layer cycles of Rockwell Kent and James Allen, epitomize the optimistic portrayal of heroic working men, laboring to build America out of the Depression. Murphy's carefully arranged compositions, simplified and reduced to a sophisticated geometric harmony, have their roots in Rivera's frescos, and are among the finest examples of American Social Realism.

After the Bridge Builders series Murphy began to explore, "subjects of action," as he put it, such as ballet dancers, the rodeo, wild horses, and the circus. He spent hours observing his subjects in motion before rendering it from memory in a series of quick, graceful sketches. His approach to lithography developed much in the same way, as he began to draw in spontaneous gestures directly onto the stone with tusche and a sable brush. The fluid lines which calligraphically evolve from assertive, heavy thickness to tenious threadlike delicacy motion. These prints recall Toulouse-Lautrec's Cafe Concert lithographs as well as Japanese water ink paintings. With this in mind, it is not surprising that Murphy's stylized "AGM" signature, based on Asian chopmarks, also resembles Toulouse-Lautrec's "HTL" insignia.

Concurrent with his experiments in lithography, Murphy also explored watercolor under the auspices of the FAP. The medium's innate properties of immediacy no doubt honed his light touch and contributed to his lithographic technique. Imbued with a deep reverence for the landscape of the America West and Southwest, these masterful watercolors follow in the tradition of early 20th century California landscape painters such as Conrad Buff and Edgar Aldwin Payne. They also relate in spirit to the abstractions of Georgia O'Keeffe, as well as those of the Transcendentalist painters, Raymond Jonson and Emil Bisttram, who populated artist colonies of Taos and Sante Fe at the time when Murphy's "hobo period" took him all over New Mexico. Like these artists, Murphy gleaned inspiration from the rich pigments, intense light, and mystical qualities of the mountains and desert.

During his years on the FAP Murphy enjoyed a good measure of recognition for his prints, watercolors and drawings. Murphy exhibited at private galleries in San Francisco and New York, was included in annual exhibitions of drawings and prints at the San Francisco Museum of Art as well as the WPA/FAP sponsored Frontiers of American Art (1939) exhibit at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco. Additionally, a number of his lithographs travelled throughout the the country to community art centers and WPA extension galleries in group exhibitions organized by the National Exhibition Section of the WPA/FAP. The lithograph, Horses (1936), included in the 1936 New Horizons of American Art exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was singled out by Elisabeth McCausland as "attempt(ing) to push the frontiers of the medium one step further." In 1941, at the height of his reputation, Murphy was given a solo exhibition of forty one oil paintings, watercolors, and lithographs at the San Francisco Museum of Art. This show marked the culmination of his years on the WPA/FAP.

In January 1943, the same year that the WPA would officially be dissolved, Murphy was drafted into the army. He served in the South Pacific as a war artist, sending notebooks filled with ink drawings from the front lines to the historical section of the National Archives in Washington. The war had an enormous and indelible impact on him. Images of GIs being subjected to horrible realities of battle would continue to haunt Murphy's work throughout the rest of his life.

Shortly after the end of the war Murphy married Maxine Anne Appleby in Sydney, Australia. They returned to the United States and settled in the town of Guilford, Connecticut, in order to be near his family who had moved there from the Midwest. Although the FAP years were the most fruitful of Murphy's life as an artist, the post war period was by no means unproductive. In order to to provide an income for his growing family he divided his time between making art, working as a free lance commercial artist, and teaching. In Connecticut, without the unlimited access to printmaking equipment which the FAP provided, Murphy returned to oil painting, a medium which he briefly explored during his life on the road. He spent months at a time on a single painting building translucent layers in the glazing techniques developed by Renaissance masters.

In a reflection on his life as an artist Murphy wrote, "Independence of thought and action is the very backbone of the creatie artist and to reach this state is, in itself, an act of creativity and sacrifice seldom required by other pursuits." Murphy was a free spirit. As he roamed from Ohio to New York to San Francisco, from his studio in a gold miner's shack in the Sierra Madre foothills to his studio among the redwoods in the Sierra Nevadas, from Taxmo to Taos, from Monterey to Reno, Arthur Murphy was able to translate that spirit into the visual. His sensitive, sometimes lyrical, and often spiritual treatment of these subjects is distinctly his own. He is an artist whose work expands preconceived notions of American art of the Great Depression.

-from Mary Ryan Gallery 1993 Arthur Murphy Exhibition Catalog