Will Congress Save the “Sistine Chapel of the New Deal”?

A new Democratic bill moves in the right direction—but it doesn’t go far enough.

In March, I reported on a tour conducted by the General Services Administration, the executive branch’s real estate arm, of the remarkable New Deal murals and sculptures in Washington’s Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, which the Trump administration had designated for “accelerated disposition.” These art works include, among other things, frescoes by Ben Shahn that the artist once called “the best work I’ve done,” as well as gorgeous murals by Philip Guston and Seymour Fogel—all paid for by your grandparents and mine. The architectural historian Gray Brechin, founder of the nonprofit Living New Deal, describes the Cohen as “a kind of Sistine Chapel of the New Deal.”

As recently as last fall, the Trump administration was collecting bids to demolish the Cohen building and the art inside it, according to Mydelle Wright, a well-regarded former senior official who worked on preservation at the GSA. (The GSA responded with what Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, during the Watergate scandal, famously called a “non-denial denial.”) Since then, reason has emerged for cautious optimism that the Cohen can be saved, most recently new legislation introduced Monday by Democratic Representatives Dina Titus of Nevada and Lloyd Doggett of Texas.

I attended the March Cohen tour with several members of Congress, including Doggett, who, like Titus, is a member of the bipartisan Congressional Arts Caucus. (The Democratic co-chair of the Congressional Arts Caucus, Rep. Chellie Pingree, later offered an appropriations amendment to compel GSA to release publicly a study about refurbishing the Cohen that the Trump administration suppressed. The amendment failed in committee, but, in a hopeful sign, it picked up two Republican votes.) The Cohen tour was actually Doggett’s second, I was pleased to learn; he’s known about the Shahn murals inside the Cohen building for years. (The building is two blocks from the Capitol.) Doggett showed me some legislative language he had drafted requiring protection of all art works in the Cohen building, and when I asked whether he supported flat-out barring the Cohen sale, Doggett said........

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