By including Black artists and images of Black workers, “Art for the Millions” challenges other dominant narratives of the Depression, the New Deal, and the art of this period. One such representation appears in a painting by Ben Shahn, an artist who created some of the era’s most arresting imagery.
Though he was happy to describe his work as propaganda, Shahn’s paintings were rarely straightforward. In the painting on view at the Met, the artist depicts a ruddy-complexioned man with his gaze lifted to the horizon. In the distance, scaffolding rises, reflected in the lenses of his welding goggles. Next to him, another welder, who is Black, looks into the middle distance with a furrowed brow. Shahn created this painting in 1943 while working in the graphics division of the CIO’s political action committee—established that year as the first PAC in American history. Reproduced as a poster, the work circulated among union members with the caption “For full employment after the war REGISTER—VOTE.” On its face, this painting presents a vision of racial solidarity within and beyond the workforce, suggesting the power that American workers could wield at the ballot box regardless of their background. Yet there is something more ambiguous at work: Its Black subject occupies an uneasy space in the composition, to the left of the white worker, squeezed into the corner and strangely cropped. I can’t help but feel that he is an afterthought, although compellingly rendered and despite the artist’s own anti-racist bona fides: Shahn was a member of the Committee for the Negro in the Arts, a diverse organization dedicated to the fight against discrimination in theater, the visual arts, music, and beyond.
The Black figure’s marginalization captures a deeper tension of the era: the exclusion of Black Americans from the post–World War II promise. Although Franklin Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union address would propose a Second Bill of Rights guaranteeing Americans the right to “a decent home” and “a useful and remunerative job,” state and local authorities enforced segregationist measures that denied Black Americans these advantages. Likewise, returning Black GIs found it difficult to enroll in colleges and gain meaningful employment. Meanwhile, discriminatory federal housing policy and redlining kept Black families from purchasing homes in new suburban developments. However unintentionally, Shahn’s painting recalls this history and reminds us of the unevenness with which the era’s supposedly universal assistance programs were applied.