In April 1942, Edward B. Rowan, the assistant chief for fine arts at President Franklin Roosevelt’s Public Buildings Administration, wrote the painter Ben Shahn about some frescoes Shahn was creating for a new federal office building in Washington, D.C. “On Friday I found it convenient to go to the Social Security Building and see your murals,” Rowan wrote: In addition to the Shahn frescoes, the Cohen building contains distinguished New Deal murals by Philip Guston and (I neglected to mention