{"id":1272914,"date":"2023-10-16T13:31:03","date_gmt":"2023-10-16T13:31:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2023\/10\/working-class-artists-new-deal-era-fdr-art-for-the-millions-metropolitan-exhibition\/"},"modified":"2023-10-16T13:38:26","modified_gmt":"2023-10-16T13:38:26","slug":"working-class-artists-thrived-in-the-new-deal-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/10\/16\/working-class-artists-thrived-in-the-new-deal-era\/","title":{"rendered":"Working-Class Artists Thrived in the New Deal Era"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

During the New Deal, mass left movements and government funding spawned a boomlet in working-class art. For once, art wasn\u2019t just the province of the rich.<\/h3>\n\n\n
\n \n
\n Ben Shahn, Years of Dust<\/cite> (Poster for the United States Resettlement Administration),\n1937. (Fotosearch \/ Getty Images)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

The last time New York City\u2019s Metropolitan Museum of Art was prominent in socialist conversation was probably in 2021 when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attended the Met Gala, a lavish annual display of wealth and fashion, wearing a white dress with the words \u201cTax the Rich\u201d emblazoned in red. Whatever you made of that intervention \u2014 protest? Act of complicity? \u2014 the Met deserves even more socialist attention now for an inspired show titled Art for the Millions: American Culture and Politics in the 1930s<\/a><\/em>. (You can look at the entire exhibition here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

The reasons that artists in the 1930s were so prolific, their work so political and so profoundly engaged with laborers and with left politics, are simple. There were mass left movements, including parties, influencing artists and the wider culture. As well, and as a result, President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR)\u2019s administration offered significant government support for artists, which made it possible for many working-class and leftist artists to pursue creative lives full time.<\/p>\n

The show at the Met is beautifully curated to emphasize the period\u2019s left politics and focus on workers. Most of the paintings are in realist style (though some of the same artists did more abstract work before or after this period). The painting most prominently advertised in the show, for example, is Miner Joe<\/i> (1942), by Elizabeth Olds, a stunning close-up of a miner with his helmet on. The exhibition also includes Ben Shahn\u2019s photos of black cotton pickers, as well as lesser-known works like Curtain Factory<\/i> (1936\u201339), by Riva Helfond, <\/i>which depicts women workers and includes an unmistakable visual reference to Picasso\u2019s Woman Ironing. <\/i>Next to it is Elizabeth Olds\u2019s Burlesque<\/i> (1936), an homage to dancers as workers.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Dorothea Lange, Migrants, family of Mexicans, on road with tire trouble. Looking for work in the peas. California<\/cite>, 1936. (Library of Congress)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Others show the conditions in which laborers lived, like Philip Guston\u2019s moody and ominous study for what later became a mural for the Queensbridge housing project. (It\u2019s good to see Guston here, after a 2020 retrospective on his work was disgracefully postponed<\/a> by three major world museums over concern that material depicting racism would be interpreted as racist). An extraordinarily delicate woodcut, View of Atlanta<\/i>\u00a0(1935), by Hale Woodruff, a black artist who studied with Diego Rivera and is better known as a muralist, shows a large woman ascending rickety stairs to a rickety house, with grace and in high heels.<\/p>\n

Some of the artists were members of the Communist Party or involved in left movements, and the exhibition does a good job of highlighting those relationships, presenting, for instance, Alice Neel\u2019s eponymous depiction of her fellow communist Kenneth Fearing, a poet, which shows a bloody skeleton intertwined with his heart. (As Neel once put it, \u201cHis heart bled for the grief of the world.\u201d) Other artists in the show with leftist commitments include Shahn and Olds. The exhibition features a clip from Charlie Chaplin\u2019s Modern<\/i> Times (1936), a comic and terrifying glimpse of the inhumanity of work under capitalism. (\u201cI am not a Communist,\u201d Chaplin said in 1942, \u201cbut I am proud to say I feel pretty pro-communist.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Art for the Millions<\/em> includes graphically elegant Communist propaganda from the period, too: covers from the New Masses<\/i> (both Yiddish and English versions), a party poster \u201cagainst hunger and war,\u201d and Hugo Gellert\u2019s haunting lithographs for the 1934 edition of The Communist Manifesto<\/i>.<\/p>\n

But as the label copy for the show notes, it wasn\u2019t only the politically identified artists and organizations who displayed a preoccupation with labor. The famous street photographer, Weegee, has a striking 1940 image of a protest over the murder of a union agent.<\/p>\n

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Cover of volume 8, no. 3 of New Masses<\/cite>, September 1932. (Marxists Internet Archive)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Art for the Millions<\/em> does an excellent job of highlighting the New Deal\u2019s role in funding this work. Many of the artists and works were underwritten by the Federal Art Project, which, as part of FDR\u2019s Works Progress Administration, supported some ten thousand artists during the Great Depression, virtually without restriction on content or subject matter, and is believed to be responsible for about two hundred thousand works of art. This robust government backing for visual art wasn\u2019t a technocratic whim: as art critic Ben Davis has noted, the Roosevelt administration\u2019s policy grew out of pressure from leftist artists and their organizations. While in some periods the independence and isolation of the artist has been valorized, in the 1930s, communities of artists supported one another, encouraged political work, and agitated to create resources for it.<\/p>\n

The show also highlights the work used to advertise public goods: a series of posters celebrating the United States\u2019 National Parks and the 1937 series of simple-yet-dramatic posters by Lester Beall promoting the Rural Electrification Administration, a government office that lent money to electricity cooperatives run by farming communities.<\/p>\n

The leftist labor politics of the present, while more visible and robust than at any time in years, seem disconnected from the production of art and culture. The reverse is also true, with the art world almost synonymous with the monied classes and working-class artists lacking in public support. While gestures at racial justice \u2014 or improved representation \u2014 are common in New York City\u2019s museums and galleries, they often feel superficial. This exhibition reminds us that it doesn\u2019t have to be that way.<\/p>\n

Art for the Millions<\/em> is tremendous, both politically uplifting and aesthetically awesome and will be up until December 10. If you\u2019re in, near, or passing through New York City, you shouldn\u2019t miss it.<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n\n\n

This post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The last time New York City\u2019s Metropolitan Museum of Art was prominent in socialist conversation was probably in 2021 when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attended the Met Gala, a lavish annual display of wealth and fashion, wearing a white dress with the words \u201cTax the Rich\u201d emblazoned in red. Whatever you made of that intervention \u2014 protest? [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1646,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272914"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1646"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1272914"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272914\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1272915,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272914\/revisions\/1272915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1272914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1272914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1272914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}