Many WPA prints featured idealized images of people at work and engaged the accessible style and sociopolitical subject matter of social realism. Printmaking became the medium of choice among activist artists due in large part to its capacity for producing multiple impressions of the same image, enabling them to disseminate their political messages to a broader audience.

The public encountered these prints at WPA-organized exhibitions, and, as official government property, they were donated to or placed on long-term loan at various museums, libraries, and other public institutions across the United States after the close of the WPA in the early 1940s. Communal WPA workshops cropped up across the country, where workshop instructors introduced legions of artists to printmaking.

Tens of thousands of artists found work through the Federal Art Project (FAP) and related initiatives that operated under the aegis of the WPA. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Abner and Miriam Diamond, 1998 (1998.392.4) Machinery and Large Scale Industry 44, 1933. Right: Hugo Gellert (American, born Hungary, 1892–1985). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Abner and Miriam Diamond, 1998 (1998.392.5). Machinery and Large Scale Industry 46, 1933. Left: Hugo Gellert (American, born Hungary, 1892–1985). In another, a muscular fist breaks through a mass of mechanical parts, conquering the machine-enemy.

In one, a woman and a young boy are bound at the wrists to oversize cogs in a scene that conjures the Crucifixion, with the vulnerable sacrificed in the name of capitalism. Images that pitted industrial machines against people invoked Karl Marx’s theory of exploitation under capitalism, as in communist artist Hugo Gellert’s illustrations for a condensed 1934 edition of Das Kapital. After the onset of the economic downturn, however, wage workers were placed front and center. Some artists-particularly a loose group known as the Precisionists, working primarily before the stock market crash-treated industrial machinery and the plants that housed them as objects of fascination and wonder. Artists across the country centered the plight of the proletariat in their work and joined activist groups associated with the American Communist Party (CPUSA) that advocated for better protections for workers. This dire situation ignited a militant labor movement led by organizers with left-leaning politics who drew attention to low pay and harsh working conditions. Leftist Politics and LaborĪt the height of the Depression in 1933, nearly 13 million people-roughly 25 percent of the total workforce-were unemployed. While the exact number of people who encountered the art of the WPA is impossible to measure, it is unquestionable that millions of Americans consumed an array of complex and conflicting political messages between the output of the agency and the broader visual world around them. The Works Progress Administration (WPA)-a New Deal agency established in 1935 to bring jobs to the unemployed, including artists-aimed to make and distribute “art for the millions” in order to engineer a more cultured, educated, and refined citizenry. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Purchase, 1944 Roosevelt’s controversial New Deal solicited support for its relief programs, which were designed to revive the economy and several world’s fairs communicated values of technological innovation, American imperialism, and capitalism through the work of architects and designers.īen Shahn (American, born Lithuania, 1898–1969).

Widely circulated prints, posters, and magazine illustrations advocated for labor unions and communist and socialist causes propaganda for President Franklin D. While American visual culture has always been suffused with ideology, cultural production in the 1930s represents an exceptional range of political messaging. The decade was defined by the Great Depression, which resulted from the stock market crash of 1929-the worst crisis the nation had experienced since the Civil War. Though these circumstances might feel unprecedented, in many ways they mirror the conditions that characterized the 1930s. Since 2020 Americans have lived through extraordinary sociopolitical events: Black Lives Matter protests erupted across the country in response to the murder of George Floyd far-right activists stormed the Capitol, incited by Donald Trump’s false claim that the presidential election had been stolen from him labor organizers Chris Smalls and Derrick Palmer achieved the seemingly impossible task of establishing a union for warehouse workers at the corporate juggernaut Amazon and Joe Biden’s administration passed the largest federal climate legislation in the country’s history-all while COVID-19 upended millions of lives across the United States.

Financial strife definition