The Prints in the Exhibition

The major narratives and themes to be found in these prints of the thirties (with a few made earlier and later added for perspective) are here presented dramatically, in pairs set in opposition to each other. We move from considering the stage sets to the actors, to the unseen forces acting upon them. In the two most important areas of imagination and dreams in the 1930s, Urban Dramas balance Country Dreams; for the dramatic characters, Women in the World contrast Men in Industry, men and women who find themselves in an all-too-often hostile world, often pitted against each other. Since power relations are not symmetrical, neither are Couples and Lovers and Old Boys Clubs, two different kinds of camaraderie. Then, to round things off, we examine the body in health and illness, at ease and in distress, caught up in two of the biggest body-image conglomerates of the period, sports and medicine; Organizing Leisure and Institutionalizing Health. At the center of these, however, is the insurgent presence of an unacknowledged power, African Americans.

Please click on the individual image thumbnails below to view the full-size image and accompanying imformation.

Urban Dramas

By the 1930s, most Americans lived in cities, including the artists in this exhibition, most of whom resided in New York City. Cities had become the center of experience where the dramas of life were most vividly enacted, and none more powerfully than New York. The great sign of urban life, aside from skyscrapers, was the crowd. This was the subject most artists turned to, especially in the street where everything happened. These crowds were rarely orderly. They tended to be chaotic: artists did not stress community, but saw the city as alienating. In the city you could find love, loneliness, children playing, people begging, foreigners but no neighbors, single women and few families, modern technology and even a touch of nature. This was the variety of modern urban life.

Samuel Margolies Bridge to Babylon, 1949.	Douglas Gorsline Express Stop, 1948.
Fritz Eichenberg City Lights, 1933.	Kyra Markham Penny, Lady, 1936

Country Dreams

Even when most Americans lived in cities, they wanted to preserve the notion that they still respected the rural values which were the bedrock of American life: neighborliness, simplicity and independence. In reality, farmers had been in a deep economic slump since about 1920, compounded by the environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl in 1934 and the social tragedy of the Okies' immigration to California. Thinking about the countryside, printmakers wavered between sweet nostalgia and melodramatic realism, between the novels Gone With the Wind and The Grapes of Wrath, made into movies in 1939 and 1940.

Perhaps the strongest visual impressions of rural America were produced by photographers such as Marion Post Wolcott , who worked for the Farm Security Administration a New Deal program. Their work, concentrated on the poverty-stricken South, was seen widely in newspapers and books. Not everyone appreciated this imagery. When one museum director wanted artists to record "the dying scenes of the Old South, the Negro shanties, the wooden plows, the stills," the head of the Treasury section countered that instead the artists should "depict the grand new high power, mass production stills that are turning out good liquor for the new administration."

John de Martelly Looking at Sunshine, 1938.	Thomas Hart Benton Cradling Wheat, 1939.
Philip Evergood Sorrowing Farmers, 1938.	Stevan Dohanos State Fair, 1948.

Women in the World

In the 1920s the working woman became increasingly visible to the media, even though women had always worked outside the home. In the next decade she was subjected to enormous pressures to retreat back into domesticity. As one critic crudely claimed in 1939: "There are approximately 10,000,000 people out of work in the United States today; there are also 10,000,000 or more women, married and single, who are jobholders. Simply fire the women, who shouldn't be working anyway, and hire men. Presto! No unemployment. No relief rolls. No depression." Many organizations, including the federal government, adopted codes that encouraged or mandated the firing of married women.

While printmakers were seldom so oppressive, they still limited themselves to a repertoire of secretaries, waitresses, cleaning ladies, seamstresses, prostitutes and the like. At a time when women were now dramatically present in government and universities, not many business women, female doctors, professors and politicians appeared. Women had a very limited appearance outside the home.

Don Freeman Plights of Stardom, 1935.	Raphael Soyer Casting Office, 1945.
Kenneth Hayes Miller Department Store, 1930.	Peggy Bacon Close Quarters, 1932.

Men in Industry

Unemployment hit men in heavy industry and construction jobs disproportionately hard during the Depression. Between 1929 and 1933, construction dropped an incredible 78% and investment 98%. While other sectors of the economy struggled to survive, the building trades, machine parts, steel, mines, and most investments in industrial infrastructure dropped dead. Skilled laborers were cut loose from their jobs in horrifying numbers, As one victim said: "A man is not a man without work."

In sympathy, many an artist declared himself no longer "an ornament of the pink-tea, a playboy companion of the dilettante patron, a remote hero with a famous name. He becomes instead a workman among others." Translated into art, this reaction ranged from searing images of betrayal of the working man to sentimental heroicization.

Martin Lewis Arc Welders, 1937.	Louis Lozowick Loading Girders, 1930.
Irwin Hoffman The Stoker, 1935.	Thomas Hart Benton Strike (Mine Strike), 1933.

Couples and Lovers

Love and the lack of it surely rule popular culture, from songs in the radio to movies, but attitudes toward love change all the time. In the course of the 1930s, whatever certainties about courtship and marriage the previous decade had left standing (and there were few) seemed lost. Public rhetoric pressed for the return of the nuclear family (a common theme in times of economic distress, as we know today); private lives were rather different. Much of this is captured by printmakers, who after all could afford to take a more jaundiced view than their political leaders.

Douglas Gorsline Invitation to the Lindy Hop, 1942.	Clement Haupers Shore Leave, 1935.
John Sloan Sunbathers on the Roof, 1941.	Paul Cadmus Two Boys on the Beach #1, 1938.

Old Boys Clubs

The rhetoric surrounding the Great Depression, its causes and cures, almost entirely concerned men; women were merely the passive appendages. Unemployment, for example, never concerned women, since they should have been home in the first place. The social discord of the period, then, may be seen most openly in these all-male groups.

One of the leading regionalist artists of the 1930s, Grant Wood honored the social life of his hometown, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, at the same time he gently satirized it, in Shriner's Quartet. Other artists took the power of men's clubs more seriously, as in Lawrence Beall Smith's malevolent  Business Men's Lunch. Most of the nation felt betrayed by the groups in power when the Depression began -- these groups were all male: women were excluded from the game and (despite Eleanor Roosevelt seldom shown as publicly powerful. At the same time male organizations were essential, leading to a great deal of ambivalence.

Grant Wood Shriner's Quartet, 1939.	Lawrence Beall-Smith Business Lunch, 1939.
Russell Limbach Reviewing Stand, 1934.	Reginald Marsh Bread Line -- No One Has Starved, 1932.

Organizing Leisure

Sports and games had been popular subjects for American printmakers for a long time, but most showed the games of children: adults worked. The 1930s brought a new emphasis on professional team sports, which acted out the idea of community for society at large. This is the period in which we became a nation of spectators -- or at least listeners, since it was radio broadcasts that fueled this development.

Professional baseball was already the national pastime; it was not until the end of the 1930s that football began to reach its present popularity. Instead, college football -- a brutal, often fatal game -- attracted enormous crowds. But the audiences for all sorts of other sports began to grow rapidly, from boxing to bowling.

Joseph Golinkin Set 'Em Up, 1935.

Cecil C. Bell East River Swimming, 1937.

Robert Riggs Little Brown Brother (Entering the Ring), 1932.

Institutionalizing Health

Today medicine is one of the most important institutions defining the way we understand and use our bodies. The 1930s represents a turning point in this history. Extreme malnutrition and other health hazards outpaced the efforts of private charity (as had the problem of unemployment) and the federal government began to step in, against furious opposition from the American Medial Association. Unions, insurance companies and healthcare businesses joined the fight.

The debate pitted "public health' against "disease," ideas of nutrition, hygiene and exercise against the illnesses that doctors had traditionally treated. Female nurses, health officials, and government beaurocrats were arrayed against doctors, in a battle that still rages over who should control our bodies -- and pay the costs of healing them. These prints subtly reflect these issues.

Robert Riggs Accident Ward, 1940.

African Americans

Black music--from work songs to spirituals, jazz and the blues--had achieved popular currency in the 1920s, but it swept the country in the 1930s. With it other aspects of African-American life and culture began finally to be noticed by the white mainstream. While even radical artists still tended to use African Americans as "a kind of proletarian prop, a symbol, vague and ab-stract," as the painter Aaron Douglas declared in 1936, others started to represent African Americans as people subject to the same range of emotions and situations as any other, in the city and the country, in love and out of it, in jobs and out of work, healthy and ill.

This attention may be found mainly in prints. As Douglas said: "In the Metropolitan Museum of Art there is a room devoted to modern American masters. Not one Negro face is represented." In prints, whether subtly racist or stereotyped or not, here for the first time in the arts the wide range of black life in America began to find its mirror. This is one of the most important developments of 1930s graphics.

Meyer Wolfe Red Eye's Hall, 1934.	John Steuart Curry The Fugitive, 1935.
John Barre Turnbull The Klan (or The Cross Burning), 1940.	Prentiss Taylor Scottsboro, Ltd., 1932.
Isac Friedlander Revival, 1933.	Joseph Hirsch The Kiss, 1948.

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