Roberta Lehrman Introduction The People Work, Associated American Artists, 20 West 57th Street, NY, NY, 10019 June 6-29, 1990
"During the period of the Great Depression, President Roosevelt's New Deal instituted various programs to help unemployed artists. One of the first of these was the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) which began in December 1933 and ended in June 1934. As Christine Nelson Ruby wrote in her introduction to the catalogue, The Federal Art Project: American Prints From the 1930s, "The PWAP as an agency combined the goals of providing quality art for public buildings with relief for unemployed artists, which was in keeping with Edward Bruce's (the director of the program) greater interest-providing excellent art for a mass audience, rather than simply providing relief for starving artists. The remaining New Deal art programs followed the successful precedents of the PWAP." After the PWAP, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was created in 1935 and it encompassed the Federal Art Project (FAP), an eight part program for artists. The Graphic Art Division, one of the parts of this program, produced 200,000 prints (11,000 different images) during those years.These prints were intended for distribution to government buildings such as schools, libraries and hospitals. Much of the imagery created was influenced by the artists' acute concern over the economy and the plight of the worker in America.
"As its title suggests, the subject of this exhibition is imagery of labor. The material, mostly prints with a scattering if watercolors and drawings, focusses primarily on American artists working in the era of the Federal Art Project in the 19340s and 1940s. Social and economic consciousness was at a height during this time. The Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Depression resulted in wide-spread unemployment. The unemployed worker waiting for food in a bread line became a common sight, and it was a popular subject for socially conscious artists such as Ivor Rose (#71) and Reginald Marsh (#57). Another result of the Depression was increased unrest between labor and management. Artists of the period depicted this conflict in countless images, and this exhibition contains two excellent examples: Harry Gottlieb's silkscreen (#35) and Lynd Ward's wood engraving (#87) of strikers on the picket line.
"Though the Social Realist movement produced many works that were both politically and socially charged, artists of the period did not entirely lose their sense of the prosaic. Thus we have included in this exhibition many works depicting the average men and women of the time in the simple pursuit of trying to earn a living, whether it was men shining shoes (Leo Meissner, #59) and pressing clothing (Will Barnet, #8) or women on the assembly line (Johan Gross-Bettelheim, #37). The function of Social Realism was to encourage social change by both depicting the inequities inherent in society as well as celebrating the workers whose own primary concerns were providing for their families in the best way they could. This work truly captures the spirit of the Social Realism of the 1930s and 1940s.
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