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)’s administration offered significant government support for artists, which made it possible for many working-class and leftist artists to pursue creative lives full time.
The show at the Met is beautifully curated to emphasize the period’s 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 (1942), by Elizabeth Olds, a stunning close-up of a miner with his helmet on. The exhibition also includes Ben Shahn’s photos of black cotton pickers, as well as lesser-known works like Curtain Factory (1936–39), by Riva Helfond, which depicts women workers and includes an unmistakable visual reference to Picasso’s Woman Ironing. Next to it is Elizabeth Olds’s Burlesque (1936), an homage to dancers as workers.
Others show the conditions in which laborers lived, like Philip Guston’s moody and ominous study for what later became a mural for the Queensbridge housing project. (It’s good to see Guston here, after a 2020 retrospective on his work was disgracefully postponed by three major world museums over concern that material depicting racism would be interpreted as racist). An extraordinarily delicate woodcut, View of Atlanta (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.
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’s eponymous depiction of her fellow communist Kenneth Fearing, a poet, which shows a bloody skeleton intertwined with his heart. (As Neel once put it, “His heart bled for the grief of the world.”) Other artists in the show with leftist commitments include Shahn and Olds. The exhibition features a clip from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), a comic and terrifying glimpse of the inhumanity of work under capitalism. (“I am not a Communist,” Chaplin said in 1942, “but I am proud to say I feel pretty pro-communist.”)