Illustrated Catalogue; Official Art Exhibition, The Palace of Fine Arts, Balboa Park

The 1935 California Pacific International Exposition opened with great optimism, seen as an antidote to the difficulties of the Great Depression, as one of the first projects funded by the new Works Progress Administration (WPA). The San Diego World's Fair's Illustrated Catalogue in the Smithsonian Libraries collection shows a large Fine Arts Gallery dedicated to exhibiting art, displaying international works of the Old Masters, paintings and sculpture of European modernists, treasures of the Far East, significant American artists, and it even included a Children's Room with well-illustrated books by Walt Disney. The art committee "set itself the ticklish problem of presenting an exhibition of painting, sculpture, and crafts which should establish a contact with the layman who is a bit museum-shy, and at the same time offer refreshment to the connoisseur who is a bit museum-weary" according to the curator, Julia Gethmann Andrews, in an article on the Fair in the American Magazine of Art.