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It's Been Called the 'Sistine Chapel of the New Deal.' Don't Destroy It.
Critic’s Notebook
It’s Been Called the ‘Sistine Chapel of the New Deal.’ Don’t Destroy It.
The rare murals in the Cohen Federal Building celebrate vital American values of dignity and community. Now they could meet the same fate as the White House’s East Wing.
Philip Guston’s mural, “Reconstruction and the Wellbeing of the Family,” 1943, is an image reminiscent of a “Last Supper,” with a family around a table. Its home, the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, is slated to be sold. via U.S. General Services Administration
By Holland Cotter
Holland Cotter, our chief art critic, reported from Washington
Feb. 5, 2026
The November news photographs were startling: Jurassic-looking demolition cranes had just ripped up the East Wing of the White House.
Why did this happen? Because the current occupant of what has been sometimes referred to as “The People’s House” wanted to add a $400 million ballroom to the premises. And the site of the East Wing is where it will fit.
On Sunday, the administration announced that another cultural landmark, the John F. Kennedy Center, would close on July 4 for two years of “reconstruction,” to be remade into a “new and spectacular Entertainment Complex.”
These actions have raised alarms in cultural quarters in this city and across the country, where they are seen as a threat to the survival of a wide range of federally owned artistic and architectural treasures, including many dating from the progressive New Deal era.
The New Deal-era Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building — previously the Social Security Administration Building — is on the “accelerated dispositions” list. It holds important New Deal-era murals. Heather Diehl/Getty Images
One of these New Deal gems is a miraculously well-preserved set of murals produced, in the early 1940s, by two of America’s greatest political artists, Philip Guston and Ben Shahn, in a building relatively few tourists have seen or visited, and until recently may not have been aware of.
{snip}
It’s Been Called the ‘Sistine Chapel of the New Deal.’ Don’t Destroy It.
The rare murals in the Cohen Federal Building celebrate vital American values of dignity and community. Now they could meet the same fate as the White House’s East Wing.
Philip Guston’s mural, “Reconstruction and the Wellbeing of the Family,” 1943, is an image reminiscent of a “Last Supper,” with a family around a table. Its home, the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, is slated to be sold. via U.S. General Services Administration
By Holland Cotter
Holland Cotter, our chief art critic, reported from Washington
Feb. 5, 2026
The November news photographs were startling: Jurassic-looking demolition cranes had just ripped up the East Wing of the White House.
Why did this happen? Because the current occupant of what has been sometimes referred to as “The People’s House” wanted to add a $400 million ballroom to the premises. And the site of the East Wing is where it will fit.
On Sunday, the administration announced that another cultural landmark, the John F. Kennedy Center, would close on July 4 for two years of “reconstruction,” to be remade into a “new and spectacular Entertainment Complex.”
These actions have raised alarms in cultural quarters in this city and across the country, where they are seen as a threat to the survival of a wide range of federally owned artistic and architectural treasures, including many dating from the progressive New Deal era.
The New Deal-era Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building — previously the Social Security Administration Building — is on the “accelerated dispositions” list. It holds important New Deal-era murals. Heather Diehl/Getty Images
One of these New Deal gems is a miraculously well-preserved set of murals produced, in the early 1940s, by two of America’s greatest political artists, Philip Guston and Ben Shahn, in a building relatively few tourists have seen or visited, and until recently may not have been aware of.
{snip}