New Hope Artist Lloyd Ney's Abstract Mural is Centerpiece of New Hope Museum Building

	Lloyd R. Ney (1893-1965), Study for New London Facets (detail), 1940, Ink, gouache, and oil on gessoed plywood, Museum purchase and partial gift in honor of Dr. Marvin and Muriel Sultz, Elkins Park, PA

A study for a large, abstract mural created in 1940 by New Hope artist Lloyd Raymond Ney (1893-1965) occupies a place of prominence in the entryway to the Michener Art Museum's New Hope location. Ney's four-panel, 5'7" x 13'9" Study for New London Facets was created for a post office in New London, Ohio, as part of the United States Treasury Department's Section of Painting and Sculpture, which employed hundreds of artists and craftspeople during the 1930s and 40s. The work was acquired by the Museum in 2002 as a purchase and partial gift in honor of Dr. Marvin and Muriel Sultz of Elkins Park, Pa., and was chosen to serve as a centerpiece to the Museum building.

A graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Lloyd Ney settled in New Hope in 1925, "for the same reason artists go anywhere—beauty of the countryside, cheap living and a sympathetic atmosphere," as he explained. His regular exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum from 1941-1956 earned him national recognition as a leading non-objective artist.

When Ney submitted his preliminary sketch for the post office mural to the Section of Painting and Sculpture in December of 1939, he envisioned an abstract mural that would be a composite picture of the town's history, "depicting many ideas of scenes in one setting similar to the photo montages shown in every moving picture house." His compositional challenge was to organize different scenes of the town's history in such a way as to allow each scene to flow into the neighboring space to produce a work with no single center of focus.

The town's rich and colorful history began when British soldiers burned the city of New London, Connecticut in 1776 and a federal land grant promoted the migration of settlers to New London, Ohio. The mural is filled with figures representing the burning of New London; the settlers' migration west in covered wagons; an eccentric who would visit New London yearly, shouting "How far is it to Belle Fontaine?"; the dome of the Capitol symbolizing Ohio's contribution of two presidents to the United States; slaves escaping through New London; Civil War veterans; the town's first train; baseball players in gaudy uniforms; a farmer carrying apples to the schoolhouse to avoid students raiding his orchard; and the first hippopotamus seen in America. Ney's design would attempt to express "the spirit, content and activity" of New London life, in his words.

Federal officials initially rejected Ney's sketch for the mural. Deputy Secretary of the Section Edward Rowan wrote to Ney detailing his concerns with the use of a palette "so extremely vivid," and insisting that "the combination of the objective and the abstract would find very few supporters in the town." In response to personal appeals from the artist, however, members of the local community—including the president of the local power company, the mortician, the movie-theatre manager, the superintendent of schools, the postmaster, and the president of a local uniform company—reviewed and ultimately championed his design as a brilliant depiction of the town's history of triumph over adversity.

Federal officials reversed their opposition, and the mural was installed in the New London Post Office, where it remains to this day. Of the approximately 1,100 murals created as part of the project, Ney's was the only abstract work to be commissioned. It is an unqualified success when evaluated from Lloyd Ney's own standard that great art should express "the spirit of the times in which it is painted."

To house the large mural, which was created with charcoal, graphite and tempera on gessoed laminated wood panel, exhibit designer Charles B. Froom has designed a shallow, shadow-box case "designed and executed to mitigate any sudden changes in environment that may occur." Froom has worked with Museum staff, architects, and members of the construction team over the past several months to create a case that would effectively display a mural designed to be flat against the curved surface of the Museum wall.

The panels will float a few inches behind the glass, and as Froom explains "the work of art will be installed in special aluminum channels to hold the four panels in place." The case itself is seven feet high and fourteen feet long and hangs twelve feet above floor level in the Museum entryway.

Froom was also the designer of a special case for the Doylestown Museum's Putman Smith Gallery, where Daniel Garber's mural A Wooded Watershed is displayed.