Painting Conflict:The National Agenda of Mural Painting

Public art has often flourished as an expression of new governing ideologies and in societies struggling to survive trauma and conflict. In this paper I discuss the multiple uses of the 20th century public painting in the service of power, addressing the differences between mural production and the more explicitly commemorative activity of producing monuments and memorials. This paper focuses on the national agendas behind the production of murals through examples from New Deal American and post-war Finnish mural painting. In Finland, a vast number of memorial sculptures were produced throughout the 1950's to commemorate the losses of the past wars, whereas contemporary murals depicted an idealized present and suggested an optimistic future. In the United States, the New Deal murals focused on a state of prosperity, bypassing the Depression as a momentary phenomenon. Investigating the imagery of the murals and the processes of their production I discuss how the paintings were used in promoting and producing national ideologies.