The economy was tanking. Unemployment was skyrocketing. People's savings were disappearing. And the newly elected president was pushing for an economic recovery program.

Sound familiar?

In this scenario, however, the year was 1933 and the president was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The arts were an early part of that program, dubbed the New Deal.

Roosevelt was inaugurated in March and by mid-December of 1933 his administration had initiated the Public Works of Art Project, the first federally funded national arts program and a validation of artist as a profession. The PWAP lasted only seven months, but its $1.3 million budget funded 3,750 artists across the country who produced 15,600 works of art for public buildings.

A bountiful and currently relevant exhibition, "1934: A New Deal for Artists," opened yesterday at The Frick Art Museum. Comprising 52 PWAP paintings, it is remarkable for its surprising range of subject matter. From an urban street festival to a smalltown night baseball game, a farmer plowing his field to a pulsing railroad yard, the artists represented a vibrant America with comeback potential.

While encouraged to portray the American scene, the artists' sometimes broad interpretation of what that entailed resulted in curiosities such as "Jungle," a 42-by-75-inch painting with fanciful deer and apes by Californian Paul Kirtland Mays. The Cheswick native had earned a living painting murals in Hollywood movie palaces until the stock market crash.

Stylistically the works are varied also, the most extreme example being "Machinery (Abstract #2)" by German-born Paul Kelpe. An abstract painter, Mr. Kelpe got around federal officials' insistence on representational art by creating a fantasy factory that's actually an exercise in color and design.

The exhibition was organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which has one of the largest collections of New Deal art in the world, to celebrate the PWAP's 75th anniversary in 2009.

If the collection includes wrenching images such as those produced by photographers of the subsequent Works Progress Administration (WPA), they are not included here. Labor is heroized. Farms are often neatly tucked in for the winter, as in the Pennsylvania scene by Titusville artist Arthur Cederquist. People stroll or skate in New York's Central Park.

In Saul Berman's "River Front," shipyard workers clear snow in the New York Navy Yard, the only kind of work left; still, the blue eagle sign indicating compliance with the National Recovery Administration labor guidelines is prominently displayed in a window.

The University of Pittsburgh's 42-story Cathedral of Learning and the Golden Gate Bridge are two grand projects that continued in the 1930s with the help of government grants, employing hundreds. Two paintings by Pitt alumnus Harry Scheuch depict a stylized overview of the construction that takes license with the location of surrounding buildings and, in tight frame, a group of Cathedral bricklayers. Ray Strong's Golden Gate, set in a majestic landscape, has impeccable detail and is given scale by the relatively tiny workmen.

If nobility and resiliency are dominant, there is also subtle discontent, even foreboding. Ivan Albright's farm wife, done in his inimitable style, bears the lines and swollen hands of years of difficult labor. The African Americans working the cotton fields of Earle Richardson's "Employment of Negroes in Agriculture" are graceful, but they still labor on someone else's land.

Ownership of land was also not possible for foreign-born Japanese Americans such as Kenjiro Nomura, which could account for the storm clouds and darkened building interiors of his "The Farm." During World War II, the artist would be moved to an internment camp. Fires burn in Ross Dickinson's spectacular "Valley Farms," a premonition of actual or symbolic destruction.

Among the 51 artists are a half dozen women, two African-Americans and 14 born out of the U.S., says Sarah Hall, Frick director of curatorial affairs. They are not household names, but most later enjoyed respectable careers as teachers or illustrators, she says. For many, their most famous images are the ones painted for the PWAP.

Although the time period represented is a little later than that usually addressed by the Frick, the exhibition offer arrived at the right moment in the fall of 2008, Ms. Hall says.

"Everyone was dazed with what had happened to our economy. It's absolutely timely. It's a great story about the spirit of artists and optimism in the American spirit. We thought the show had the potential to be popular, and to bring in a new audience."

In 1934, more than 500 PWAP works were exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Some traveled to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and elsewhere. Thirty-two were chosen by President Roosevelt to hang at the White House, seven of which are included in this exhibition and highlighted at the Frick by special labels for children.

These 52 paintings, reminders of a shared struggle and heritage, reverberate with particular poignancy today.

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