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Few Americans are aware of the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, two blocks from the U.S. Capitol on Independence Avenue. Fewer still know of the masterpieces housed inside. The building, opened in 1940, features grand New Deal-era murals by Ben Shahn, Philip Guston, Seymour Fogel and other esteemed 20th-century artists—all of which could be lost forever.
Since 1954, the building has been the home of the Voice of America, which was targeted by Elon Musk’s DOGE and President Donald Trump for cancellation. The building now stands empty and is up for sale. As Washington Monthly contributing editor Timothy Noah reports in a two-part series for The New Republic, the building’s buyer is unlikely to preserve the building’s New Deal art, despite its significance.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available on Spotify, YouTube, and iTunes.
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Anne Kim: Tim, tell us more about this art and what is going on.
Timothy Noah: The art is in a building called the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, built by Franklin Roosevelt during the New Deal. It was built to house the Social Security Administration, then called the Social Security Board.
It actually never ended up housing the Social Security Board, but since that was the intention, it was loaded up with all sorts of very inspirational art about the mission of Social Security. The signature piece of art in there is a series of frescoes by Ben Shahn, whose star has faded a little bit, but he was a great artist who was highly celebrated in the last century, and he produced what he himself described as some of the best work of his career.
There’s also art by Philip Guston, who is another well-known painter from that period. The National Gallery of Art had a big exhibition a couple of years ago. Meanwhile, hardly anybody knew that hiding behind a blue curtain, two blocks to the south, was this really lovely Guston mural that he painted for the then-Social Security building. There are also notable artworks by others. One preservationist I spoke to, the founder of a group called The Living New Deal, calls the Cohen building the “Sistine Chapel of New Deal art.”
But the building is for sale. Trump is determined to sell it by the end of 2025, and there is no evidence that any effort is being made to preserve the building or to preserve the artworks therein. And the staff at the General Services Administration, who ordinarily would be in charge of making sure these things get attended to, were all laid off by DOGE last winter. A few of them have trickled back, but it’s not clear they have the capability or will be allowed the capability by the White House. I think the GSA itself has voters’ best interests and the public’s best interests at heart here, but I don’t know that they will be allowed to do their job, as is so often the case under Donald Trump.
Garrett Epps: There’s background here that I am familiar with because of my generation. I grew up hearing my parents talking about the WPA and the WPA Artists Project. I knew older writers who worked for it. But tell our listeners a little bit about the background that this whole school of public art comes out of.
Timothy Noah: These particular artworks were not produced by the WPA, but there were several different programs in the federal government at the time to sponsor public art. The WPA art program did sort of produce all sorts of fantastic art, a lot of it in Washington, but also all across the country.
A lot of great writers were supported by the WPA. There were number of guides that were produced to the states that were written by subsequently famous writers like John Cheever and others. There was theater. Orson Welles had a theater project that was supported by the WPA. He put on an all-black production of Macbeth that was supported by the WPA.
So yes, there was an ethos of “artists have to work too” and everybody was out of work. Artists were suffering along with everybody else, and so there was a push to support artists. The murals in the Cohen building arose from a related ethos, which was that our public buildings ought to have beautiful art that celebrated working people as all of these murals do.
It’s all tracked very carefully by a wonderful organization, a nonprofit based in Berkeley called The Living New Deal. They actually crowdsource. There’s so much of this stuff that they had the ingenious idea of having people all over the country identify New Deal art—particularly in post offices. They have on their website a map of where these projects are all over the country, and they are attempting to preserve them wherever possible.
Anne Kim: Can you tell us a little bit more about the artist, Ben Shahn? You said his star has dimmed a little bit, but it was very bright at one point, and he has a really fascinating story.
Timothy Noah: He was out of the school of Social Realism, which acquired currency in the teens and ‘20s and ‘30s and ‘40s. In the 50s, it was eclipsed, especially in New York, by abstract expressionism.
I think we’re starting to see a Shahn revival. There’s a wonderful retrospective in New York at the Jewish Museum that’s on until October 26th of Shahn’s work. He started out doing a lot of paintings about Sacco and Venzetti, who were two anarchists found guilty of having committed a murder that they almost certainly did not commit.
It became a huge cause celebre among progressives around the country, and Shahn did some really wonderful paintings, very angry paintings. And he persisted in this kind of Social Realist style through the ‘30s.
He did a lot of work for the federal government. The Farm Security Administration had its own photography project, and he did a lot of photographs for them. He also did a lot of poster art. He was a painter, but he was also a graphic artist, and he spilled over from the academy into doing popular works. He was big lefty, but in the ‘50s, we had a very different corporate culture, and he was commissioned to do a lot of work for corporations, all presenting this political or humanist message to the public. He did graphic art for labor unions. He did some work for the Office of War Information during World War II. But his star did start to fade a bit, so you don’t hear as much about him from about the ‘70s going forward.
But as I say, I think he’s coming back. He was the first artist ever asked to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard. And those lectures were just republished by Harvard University Press with a lovely introduction by Adam Gopnik, who said we really are due for a revival.
Garrett Epps: He was kind of the Zelig of American art there for a period of time, as you note this very seminal photography work that he was involved with. He ended up working with Diego Rivera when Rivera came to New York to work on the Rockefeller building. He was everywhere.
Timothy Noah: That’s a wild story in itself. Nelson Rockefeller, young heir to the Rockefeller fortune and a huge art enthusiast, worshiped Diego Rivera and hired him to do a mural for the lobby of the Rockefeller Center. I think it was 30 Rock.
Shahn was working on the project with Rivera and he puts a portrait of Lenin in there. And Nelson Rockefeller says, no, you can’t have Lenin in there. And he says, I’m not taking it out. So they destroyed this beautiful work of art. We could have had a beautiful Diego Rivera in the Rockefeller Center, but they destroyed it.
He was very left. He was anti-communist, but in the ‘40s, he was very much against both Harry Truman and Dewey, and he did a famous poster of the two of them where Truman is playing the piano and Dewey is sort of leaning against it like a chanteuse. The idea is that they’re both sort of singing the same song, so you should instead vote for Henry Wallace, which in fact was not a very good idea. But it’s a beautiful piece of art nonetheless.
Later he got very concerned about the threat of nuclear war, and he did a great deal of work on that. He was also Jewish and got a little bit into Jewish mysticism in some of his later works. He just had this very distinctive style—these thick lines and very powerful stuff.
Anne Kim: Well, let’s start to take a look at some of his art, then. Tim, can you explain what we’re looking at and their significance?
Timothy Noah: I’m describing to you some art I have not seen myself. This all started out with me just trying as a civilian to get in to see the art because I found out about it at this Ben Shahn exhibit in New York and I couldn’t get in. And then I found out the building is for sale.
And I should say that the law to sell the building was passed at the end of the Biden administration. It was an amendment snuck into a water resources bill by Senator Joni Ernst. Now, why a senator from Kansas wanted to sell off a particular federal building—I’m sure there’s a story there, and probably not a very savory one. But it happened the actual sale was arranged and passed by Congress in January. And at the same time, the GSA was preparing a very elaborate, ambitious, wonderful plan to refurbish the building.
I have not seen the murals, but as I understand it, there is a whole corridor. It’s huge. One side of the hallway depicts life without Social Security. And that’s where you see a guy with crutches and people suffering.
And then the other side of the hallway is people thriving with Social Security through labor.
It’s very didactic, it is very 1930s, but it’s also very beautiful. The colors are just so vibrant and it speaks to what I think what all three of us would agree was a truly glorious moment in American politics where the federal government, in the person especially of Franklin Roosevelt, really revered the common man. That’s opposed to the sort of posturing you see these days from MAGA types about the common man, portrayed as just someone who is perpetually angry at everything coming out of Washington and ungenerous. This is the opposite. This is a very generous view of humanity. It also bespeaks a humanism that is also sort of weirdly out of fashion today, but I think that’s coming back.
Anne Kim: And there are other artists there too. You mentioned in your piece a couple of friezes by other artists.
Timothy Noah: Yes, there were some friezes on the exterior of the building that are all kind of allegorical. You see the husband going off to work with his lunch pail and plucking fruit, sort of harvesting the fruits of his labors.
It’s very moving art. And I think a couple of them were done by a woman artist at a time when there were not a lot of women artists receiving public commissions like that.
The building is loaded with distinctive art. It’s also got some interesting historical aspects that are worth preserving. I was talking to somebody at VOA—the Voice of America—which is headquartered there. Perhaps I should say was headquartered there because Trump has now fired everybody who works for VOA.
In any case, somebody had worked at VOA said there are an unbelievable number of bathrooms. And she said because it was built when the civil service was still racially segregated. So you see two men’s rooms side by side and two ladies’ rooms side by side and the same with water fountains.
And you know, there is some value in preserving that architecture, so you can remember this happened less than a century ago. They didn’t desegregate the civil service until 1948. That’s meaningful history.
But in any case, the building is on a fast track to be sold. It’s a terrible time to be selling any large office building in Washington, DC. We’re still in the midst of a post-COVID slump in demand for commercial real estate. In that neighborhood, which is Southwest, you’ve got a vacancy rate of about 15 percent, and anything above 10 percent is bad.
Plus, Trump is trying to sell four buildings in Southwest all at the same time. This one and a Marcel Breuer building built for HUD and a couple of others. And they want to do it in 2025. Russell Vought is pushing hard on this.
It doesn’t make sense, not only because of the art treasures, although that’s the main reason to be concerned, but it’s also situated in an absolutely ideal spot that any federal agency would kill for. It’s across Independence Avenue from the National Museum of the American Indian, and it’s two blocks west of the Capitol.
That is prime real estate at a time when you’ve got a lot of agencies being pushed out to the suburbs because supposedly there’s no place to put them in Washington, and that’s just not true.
But as I say, my main concern is the art. I talked to one person who was one of the people who was fired at GSA and he said, there’s no way a private buyer is going to keep that building. It’s too expensive to renovate. It hasn’t been renovated since 1940. It would cost really more than the private sector can cough up to really preserve that building.
So what does that mean? That means whoever wants to buy it is going to want to buy it and to tear it down and build whatever on the Mall. I imagine that there will be some restrictions on what you can build. It’s not on the Mall itself, but it’s across the street from the Mall and that whole area is protected by the National Capital Commission to some extent. But will the art be saved? I wouldn’t count on it. They don’t have the staff to deal with that.
The Shahn murals are also really big, and they’re on the ground floor. So that is a difficult engineering task. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it would have to be done very expensively. And we have an inkling of what Donald Trump’s views of art preservation are from the famous Bonwit Teller story. When Trump was building Trump Tower in 1980, Bonwit Teller had its flagship store on Fifth Avenue, and it was being torn down to make way for Trump Tower. And the Metropolitan said, “Hey, Donald, do think you could save these lovely bas-reliefs that are on there, these art deco bas-reliefs on the building? We’d like to have them.” And he said, “Sure.”
Then the day came when it was time to deal with this, and he said, screw it. He just demolished them because it was too much trouble. That’s the attitude. It’s a familiar attitude. You’re not surprised to hear this story. He is indifferent. He doesn’t keep his promises.
And as I say in my piece, these were bas-reliefs of lovely naked women. How do you think he’s going to feel about frescoes of sweaty laboring masses? I think he’s not going to want to concern himself with that.
Garrett Epps: Could we sneak in and coat it with gold really quickly?
Anne Kim: I had the same thought. He’s gilding the White House—can we gild these frescoes?
Timothy Noah: Good plan! There are lovely brass railings in front of them to protect them. But yeah, a little gilt in there would be good.
Look, there’s a lot going on right now. There’s a lot for people to be concerned about, but nobody else has written about this except me, and I’m really trying to kind of get the word out to the rest of the press and also to preservationists, because I think unless some preservationist organization sues GSA demanding that they follow what relatively meager protections there are involved with regard to this art, then we’re not going to see any effort made to preserve it.
There are some court decisions, including one this year, that said New Deal art belongs to the public. It actually gets more protection than other public art, which is a little strange. Art that was built by the CETA program in the ‘70s doesn’t get as much protection. But the New Deal art, for some reason, does. But we also know how Trump deals with court decisions.
Anne Kim: I can’t help but think that there’s some symbolism here with these historic murals about Social Security being demolished by this administration as well. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” is in fact doing that in real life. By 2034, we’re going to be staring down some pretty significant cuts in Social Security. Life imitates art, or vice versa.
Timothy Noah: Absolutely. And if I may go on a Washington Monthly-esque road, part of the story is just the screwy way the federal government handles its buildings, where almost every federal agency does not own its own building. The Pentagon does, the Defense Department does, but most of them don’t. They pay rent to GSA.
So as a consequence, you have to have a big budget in order to maintain decent maintenance. It’s like in the private rental market, right? You get a cheap apartment, it’s going to be maintained in a lousy way. You get an expensive apartment, and at least theoretically, it’s going to be maintained better. Since the ‘50s, the Cohen building has been inhabited by the Voice of America, which has a tiny budget. And as consequence, the GSA has not spent a lot of money maintaining it.
Anne Kim: Do you have any advice for ordinary citizens? Is there anything that we can do out here to try to save this art?
Timothy Noah: Contact your Congressman. D.C. preservation groups are going to have to be energized here and are going to have to take the Trump administration to court. Seems like everything Trump does requires a lawsuit. But this is another one and there’s a time consideration because they are trying to do this by the end of the year.
They’ve already emptied out the building, which is the first step towards putting it on the market. We could see a sale quite soon. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places, but once a private owner owns something on the National Register, he can demolish it. He has to give up certain tax breaks he would otherwise get, but if he gives those up, he’s free to do whatever he wants with that building. It’s really up to the GSA to impose restrictions now, and best of all would be to cancel the sale. That’s going to be harder because the law has already passed affecting it, but it was a bad decision.
