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Exhibition Sections: Art of
the People - The Radical Impulse -
City Life
Capital and Labor - The American Scene
- Ben Goldstein
CAPITAL AND
LABOR
The division between capital
and labor widened considerably after the Civil War as fledgling trade
unions sought to assert the claims of their members against Gilded Age
industrialists taking advantage of lax government regulations on issues
of hours, health, safety, and compensation. Confrontations often turned
violent and the widely reported brutal suppression of strikes by National
Guard troops or private corporate armies raised public awareness and
impelled intellectuals, middle class reformers, and even bohemian artists
and writers to offer support to the labor movement. Until the outbreak
of World War I and the development of the internal combustion engine
gave new impetus to the American economy, doubts began to surface about
the viability of capitalism itself. With the onset of the Great Depression
those doubts returned.
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White
Collar Boys, 1936.
Elizabeth Olds, 1896-1991.
Lithograph.
LC-USZC4-6566
© Estate of Elizabeth Olds. (41)
Elizabeth Olds' sense
of humor and study of satirical works by Honoré Daumier, William
Glackens, and William Gropper are evident in this portrayal of
scurrying businessmen, or "white collar boys." Olds first trained
at the Minneapolis School of Art, and the Art Students League
under Ashcan School artist George Luks. In 1932, while working
for the Omaha Public Works of Art Project, she learned the process
of lithography, from grinding the stones to cranking the printing
press.
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Miner
Joe, 1940.
Elizabeth Olds, 1896-1991.
Screenprint.
LC-USZC4-6599
© Estate of Elizabeth Olds. (42)
Miner Joe exemplifies
Elizabeth Olds' mastery of screenprinting a commercial process
which she helped develop as a fine art medium beginning in 1938.
Joining the New York City WPA Federal Art Project in 1935, Olds
later expressed the artistic aims of her generation in writing:
"American artists have lately chosen to portray our own life.
We find our subject on the streets, in the factory, the machines
and workers of industry and on the farm. We aim to picture truly
the life about us as the people we are in reference to the forces
that make us. We choose all sides of life, searching for the vital
and significant."
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Morgan,
Mellon, and Rockefeller, ca. 1922.
Robert Minor, 1884-1952.
Crayon and ink.
LC-USZC4-5709; LC-USZ62-119275 (37)
In this small, savage
sketch, editorial cartoonist "Fighting Bob" Minor caricatured
the capitalist magnates who ran New York, if not the nation, portraying
J. P. Morgan (left), Andrew Mellon (center) and John D. Rockefeller
(right) as avaricious men. Minor began his career as a cartoonist
in 1904 and soon went to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where he
was exposed to the radical ideas that shaped his future. When,
like many leftist cartoonists, he challenged America's intervention
in World War I, he lost his position in the mainstream press.
Minor gave up cartooning altogether in 1926 to become a Communist
Party activist.
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Builders,
1935-1936.
Harry Sternberg, born 1904.
Lithograph. Stamped: Federal Art Project WPA NYC.
LC-USZC4-6719 (55)
Harry Sternberg, who
was born and grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, influenced
generations of American realist artists and pioneered the artistic
development of commercial print processes such as screenprinting
and offset lithography through his activities with the American
Artists' Congress and the WPA Graphics Division as well as by
teaching graphic arts at the Art Students League from 1933 to
1968. He worked for the Federal Art Project in 1935-36.
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Defense
Workers, 1942-1943.
Moses Soyer, 1899-1974.
Lithograph.
LC-USZC4-6597
© Estate of Moses Soyer/Licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y. (52)
Moses Soyer, twin brother
of Raphael, enrolled in the WPA Federal Art Project as a painter
in 1935. Best known for his work in this medium, he explored many
genres from portraits to landscapes as a social realist. His lithograph
Defense Workers, also called War Workers, sensitively
depicts the tired dignity of laborers involved in the war effort.
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The
Working Day, no. 37, ca. 1933.
Hugo Gellert, 1892-1985.
Lithograph. Published in Karl Marx in Pictures (Paris:
E. Desjobert, 1933).
LC-USZC4-6586
© the Estate of Hugo Gellert. (19)
Hugo Gellert considered
his politics inseparable from his art, arguing that "Being an
artist and being a communist are one and the same. One is as important
as the other." The Working Day, which features a white
miner standing back to back with a black industrial worker, is
part of the portfolio Karl Marx in Pictures that Gellert
published in France in 1933 with text from Marx's Das Kapital,
which reads in part, "Labor with a white skin cannot emancipate
itself where labor with a black skin is branded."
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Full
Production and Full Employment under Our Democratic System of
Private Enterprise, ca. 1944.
Michael Lenson, 1903-1971.
Crayon and ink.
LC-USZC4-6568
© Barry Lenson and David Lenson. (31)
An anomaly among images
in the Goldstein Collection in extolling the benefits of capitalism,
Lenson's title is a quotation from Franklin Delano Roosevelt's
campaign speech at a union dinner in Washington, D.C., on September
23, 1944. Born in Russia, Lenson enrolled in the National Academy
of Design in New York in 1920. In 1928 he won the prestigious
Chaloner Prize, supporting four years of art study at the Slade
School of the University of London and at the Académie des Beaux-Arts
in Paris. He returned to the United States in 1933, joining the
New Jersey WPA Federal Art Project as a muralist.
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Office
Girls, 1938.
Isabel Bishop, 1902-1988. Etching.
LC-USZC4-6963
© D.C. Moore Gallery, New York, N.Y. (8)
Working women, unemployed
men, and resting couples were among the people Isabel Bishop drew
from her studio overlooking Union Square in New York. Bishop later
recalled constantly peering out her window as she worked to ensure
the veracity of her images. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Bishop grew
up in Detroit but went to New York at the age of eighteen to enroll
in the School of Applied Design for Women. She also took classes
in the Art Students League and became associated with instructor
Kenneth Hayes Miller and fellow student Reginald Marsh in what
has been called the Fourteenth Street School.
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The
Lord Provides, 1934.
Jacob Burck, 1907-1982.
Lithograph. Published in The American Scene, no. 1 (New York:
Contemporary Print Group, 1934).
LC-USZC4-6717
© Conrad Burck and Joseph Burck. (9)
With its forceful crayon
strokes and an ironic edge, The Lord Provides reflects
Jacob Burck's training under master political cartoonist Boardman
Robinson. He absorbed Robinson's political radicalism, and his
Fourteenth Street studio became a meeting place for leftists.
Born in Poland, Burke emigrated with his family to the United
States at the age of seven. After attending the Cleveland School
of Art, he moved to New York, continuing his studies at the Art
Students League. In 1938 he began a forty-four year run as editorial
cartoonist for the Chicago Times, winning the Pulitzer
Prize in 1940.
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Going
to Work, 1941.
Harry Gottlieb, 1895-1992.
Screenprint.
LC-USZC4-6715
© Amy Gottlieb. (21)
In 1937, as president
of the Artists Union, Harry Gottlieb heard Anthony Velonis propose
to the WPA Federal Art Project that they establish a silkscreen
unit. Gottlieb became a founding member of the unit in 1938, along
with Louis Lozowick and Elizabeth Olds. Although silkscreen had
been used by commercial printers for decades, these artists exploited
its potential as a fine arts process. Going to Work conveys
the dignified poverty of two workers through such narrative detail
as ill-fitting clothing and shabby housing.
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San
Francisco '34 Waterfront Strike, between 1940 and 1948.
Anton Refregier, 1905-1979.
Screenprint.
LC-USZC4-6564
© Brigit Refregier. (46)
Under the auspices of
the Federal Art Project, Anton Refregier brought images of labor
strife to the public through murals created for post offices in
San Francisco and Plainfield, New Jersey. San Francisco '34
Waterfront Strike is a silkscreen version of the mural entitled
The Waterfront--1934 in the Rincon Post Office in San Francisco,
for which Refregier received a commission in 1940 and which he
completed in 1948 .
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Loading,
1931.
Clare Leighton, 1898-1989.
Wood engraving.
LC-USZC4-6602
© David Leighton. (30)
Clare Leighton helped
revive the art of wood engraving in England and America. Born
in Britain in 1898, she emigrated in 1939 to the United States.
Over the course of a long and prolific career, she wrote and illustrated
numerous books praising the virtues of the American countryside
and the people who worked the land. During the 1920s and 1930s,
as the world around her became increasingly technological, industrial,
and urban, Leighton portrayed rural working men and women with
strength and dignity. She reminded her viewers of the simpler
values of hard work, fresh air, camaraderie, and community.
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No
Work, 1935.
Blanche Grambs, born 1916.
Lithograph. Printed at the Art Students League by Will Barnet.
LC-USZC4-6574
© Blanche Mary Grambs. (22)
The defeated figure portrayed
in No Work exhibits the emphasis Blanche Grambs'
teacher Harry Sternberg placed on the depiction of the rawness
of life during the Depression. Born in Beijing, China, to American
parents, Grambs arrived in New York in 1934 with a full scholarship
to attend the Art Students League. In 1936 she joined the Federal
Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, earning enough
money to maintain her studio on Fourteenth Street, an area where
many radicals congregated.
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Koppers
Coke, 1932.
Victoria Hutson Huntley, 1900-1971.
Lithograph.
LC-USZC4-6578
© Matteo Ledinic. (26)
Victoria Hutson Huntley
won first prize at the Philadelphia Print Club's National Exhibition
in 1933 for Koppers Coke. Writing of the print two years
later, she said, "It is difficult for me to gage [sic] accurately
the exact time period necessary for me to complete a lithograph.
Sometimes I spend days on a relatively small area--putting tone
on tone in order to arrive at the richness of value and texture
which I find necessary. . . . I worked a week just on the sky
of Kopper's (sic) Coke and that included nights as well."
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Tuesday--Othelia,
1934.
Meyer Wolfe, 1897-1985.
Lithograph.
LC-USZC4-6593 (59)
Meyer Wolfe created his
first series of lithographs, entitled American Negro Life, in
1934 while employed by the Public Works of Art Project. In Tuesday--Othelia
he depicts a woman, possibly a laundress, in the weekly activity
of ironing clothing.
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HOME - Exhibition
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Credits
Exhibition Sections: Art of
the People - The Radical Impulse -
City Life
Capital and Labor - The American Scene
- Ben Goldstein
Library of Congress
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July 27, 2010
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