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Basil Hawkins
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Basil Hawkins (1903-1980)
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Basil Gilmore Hawkins (1903–1980) was an American artist who served under the Works Progress Administration of the 1930s and 40s. As a WPA artist under President Franklin D. Roosevelt Hawkins belonged to a generation tasked with documenting and interpreting everyday American life during the Great Depression and uplifting the American spirit through art. His work is held in major institutional collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the University of Michigan, and the Library of Congress. During his time he was considered one of Michigan’s leading artists.
Born in 1903, Hawkins came of age during a period of rapid transformation in American art. The early decades of the twentieth century saw artists increasingly reject academic European traditions in favor of subjects rooted in modern American life—urban growth, industry, labor, architecture, and the rhythms of everyday experience. Like many artists of his generation, Hawkins developed within a professional environment in which commercial illustration, printmaking, and public art often overlapped. Lithography in particular emerged as one of the defining artistic media of the Depression era, valued for both its expressive qualities and its accessibility to broad audiences.
Hawkins trained at the Flint Institute of Arts under Jaroslav Brozik. The Institute now holds a significant body of his work. During the 1930s, Hawkins completed WPA-era murals for the Flint Public Library, Hurley Hospital, and Flint Public Schools.
During the 1930s and early 1940s Hawkins was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the sweeping federal arts initiative established under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. The WPA Federal Art Project employed thousands of artists, muralists, printmakers, designers, and educators at a moment when economic collapse threatened the livelihoods of creative professionals across the country. More than a relief program, the WPA transformed the role of artists in American society by supporting public murals, community art centers, educational programs, and affordable printmaking initiatives intended to bring art into everyday civic life.
Hawkins’ work under the WPA centered on mural painting and printmaking. Lithography, woodcuts and etchings became some of the most important artistic mediums of the New Deal period because they allowed artists to produce images that were both technically sophisticated and relatively inexpensive to circulate. WPA print workshops encouraged artists to depict scenes of American identity, industrial expansion, and the rural experience. The Lost Art Collection also includes 1930s-50s watercolors, grease pencil drawings and sketches.
Hawkins printmaking works demonstrate a strong command of tonal contrast and compositional structure, qualities associated with Depression-era American printmaking. Like many WPA artists, Hawkins balanced realism with stylization, sometimes simplifying forms into bold graphic arrangements that emphasized mood, rhythm, and architectural clarity. His imagery reflects the broader visual language of American Scene painting and Social Realism.
Even when working in smaller formats, Hawkins’ compositions retained a sense of monumentality and public address associated with mural design and New Deal visual culture. Two pieces in particular, “The Artist” (a self portrait) and “Roszika” (a portrait of his wife, Rose) exist at an intersection between American social realism and European modernist portraiture. One can sense affinities with the psychological directness of George Bellows (1882-1925) and the working-class intimacy of Reginald Marsh (1898-1954).
In 1942, Hawkins and his wife Rose relocated to Arizona, where he continued his artistic and commercial practice. In the early 1950s his work evolved toward abstracted landscapes and abstract surrealism, influenced by Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) and Frantisek Kupka (1871–1957). The compositions in these pieces are built around intersecting diagonals, hovering geometric fragments, and rhythmic marks that pulse across the page.The images vibrate like music: crescendos of blue, percussive black hatchings, lyrical arabesques, and staccato zigzags. Many of the titles incorporate references to jazz. At other times, a connection to the Southwest landscape is clearly evident. True to his mid century era, there are also stylistic connections to lyrical abstraction, biomorphic Surrealism, and early Abstract Expressionism.
Although much of Hawkins’s biography remains comparatively obscure today, his work survives as part of the rich artistic legacy generated by the WPA era and the expansion of American printmaking in the twentieth century. Artists such as Hawkins helped establish lithography as one of the defining visual languages of Depression-era America, bridging the worlds of public art, graphic design, and fine art at a moment when artists were called upon to help document and interpret the American experience.
We would like to acknowledge and thank Larry Bongort and his husband Doug Shoemaker for bringing the Basil Hawkins story and collection to Lost Art Salon. Larry is the nephew of Basil Hawkins.
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