Painted figures haunt an empty building. A boy leaning on a pair of crutches. A father and son wandering a barren railroad track. A nuclear family at a picnic table. These poignant scenes were painted by two of the foremost American artists of the twentieth century, Ben Shahn and Philip Guston. No one is around to see them. They are on the walls of the Wilbur J. Cohen Building in Washington, DC, one of forty-five federal properties currently earmarked for sale. The staff who worked in the building have been mostly fired, furloughed, or relocated. Only the murals remain—and perhaps not for long.

The Cohen Building has been called the “Sistine Chapel of the New Deal” for its ambitious mural cycles. Shahn and Guston, as well as Seymour Fogel and Ethel and Jenne Magafan, gave indelible form to New Deal tenets: the dignity of labor, the benefit of public works, and the need for a social safety net. A detail of Fogel’s Wealth of the Nation, painted for the lobby, is on the cover of my survey of New Deal art: it crystallizes the period belief in the mutual power of mind and muscle to secure a prosperous future. If the Cohen building is sold, these masterpieces of public art will be in peril. As Timothy Noah has reported, a private developer is unlikely to bear the cost of renovating and maintaining the building, much less the murals. It would be cheaper to tear the whole thing down.

Is it frivolous to worry about art when the world is on fire? The Franklin D. Roosevelt administration didn’t think so. In the midst of the Great Depression, the worst economic calamity in the country’s history, FDR’s New Deal invested in culture as essential to a more “abundant life” for US citizens.

The government paid struggling artists like Shahn, Guston, Jacob Lawrence, Alice Neel, and Jackson Pollock to create artworks for post offices, schools, hospitals, and airports across the country, in big cities and rural hamlets. New Deal art extolled American livelihoods and landscapes in an accessible style, reassuring anxious viewers about the state of the nation and the economy. “In encouraging the creation and enjoyment of beautiful things,” FDR said in a 1939 address, “we are furthering democracy itself.”

The Cohen murals were among the New Deal's highest-profile works. Commissioned by the Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts, the agency that oversaw art for federal buildings (such as your local post office, which may house a New Deal mural), the murals celebrate the Social Security Act of 1935. The landmark law established retirement benefits and unemployment insurance at a time when most Americans worked until they dropped and risked........

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