Growth of Democracy in Illinois (Mural Study, Decatur, Illinois Post Office)

This is the surviving tempera-on-fiberboard mural study, at approximately 12 by 36 inches, for one of the three murals that Millman painted in 1937-38 for the lobby of the Decatur, Illinois Post Office under a commission from the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture. The Decatur cycle — Early Pioneers, Social Consciousness and Growth of Democracy in Illinois — was Millman's principal Treasury Section commission of the late 1930s and constituted his most fully realised statement of the Federal-period mural mode. The Growth of Democracy panel depicts an allegorical narrative of Illinois civic history, organised in the disciplined horizontal banding that Millman had absorbed from the Mexican muralist tradition and that he had developed through his collaboration with Mitchell Siporin on the contemporary St Louis Post Office cycle. The study is one of the great body of mural sketches that the General Services Administration transferred to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1974 (the accession 1974.28 group, of which Millman's contribution forms an important component) and that constitute the principal surviving record of Federal mural design during the New Deal years. The Decatur murals themselves remain in situ at the Decatur Post Office and were restored in the 1990s as part of the broader Federal effort to preserve the surviving public art of the 1930s.