Art for the Millions: American Culture and Politics in the 1930s explores art of the 1930s through the lens of the economic, social, and political turmoil of the Great Depression. The extensively illustrated publication and the exhibition it accompanies feature works from the era’s best-known creators, such as Thomas Hart Benton, Charles White, and Georgia O’Keeffe, while also highlighting lesser-known contributors like Elizabeth Olds and Louis Lozowick. Spanning diverse media and techniques—from painting and sculpture to photography, textiles, prints, posters, and postcards—this engaging volume presents a timely look at art in the United States made by and for its people.
I spoke with Max Fraser, a professor at the University of Miami and a scholar of American labor and culture, who contributed one of the catalogue’s essays, “‘We Artists Must Act’: Left-Wing Artists and the Great Depression.” We discussed the political and economic upheaval of the 1930s, the intertwining of art and radical politics, and parallels between the 1930s and today.
Art for the Millions: American Culture and Politics in the 1930s is available at The Met Store and MetPublications.
Molly Morrow:
Art for the Millions describes a major shift in the audience for art in United States during the 1930s. Your essay in the catalogue addresses artists’ response to the Great Depression that was, in part, the source of this shift. Can you talk about what it means for American art from the 1930s to be art for the millions, as well as art by the millions and about the millions?
Max Fraser:
When I think of “art for the millions,” what immediately comes to mind is the increasing ubiquity of art as a popular commodity. The 1920s and 1930s marked the emergence of modern consumer capitalism in the United States—thanks to major developments of the time like the spectacular growth of radio and movies, the invention of the mass production assembly line, the new availability of consumer credit, and the advent of the department store. It was during these years that popular art, too, became a consumer good.
But in the 1930s, after the Crash and during the dark years of the Depression, there was also a growing interest in this idea that art could be not just accessible to millions of consumers, but that it could also be made by and about the masses—and in particular, the laboring classes. Art became recognized as a consumer object like a washing machine or a Chevrolet. With that new designation, art could be viewed as a product of labor, and the artist a worker like other laborers in American society. Laborers bore the worst of the suffering during the economic downturn and many artists identified with the struggles of the worker. This represented a real shift from the more traditional subject position of the modern artist (as a detached observer of contemporary society—the classical flaneur) and marked something new and distinctive about American art in the 1930s.
Elizabeth Olds (American, 1896–1991). Miner Joe, 1942. Screenprint, 183/4 × 123/4 in. (47.6 × 32.4 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum Accession, transferred from the Lending Library Collection (64.500.1)
Congruently, technological advancements in printmaking, as well as the emergence of a new infrastructure of federal support for the arts, made it possible for many more working artists, and working-class artists, to find a market. Taken all together, these developments reshaped the way artists during the 1930s thought about work and workers as the subject of their art. Far more often than before, artists chose to depict the masses of workers whose lives had been upended first by the rise of mass production and then by the mass unemployment crisis that was the Great Depression. Artists depicted workers in ways that were humane and sympathetic. Elizabeth Olds’s Miner Joe is a classic example of this tendency in the art of the period. Underneath the weight of his miner's cap, which marks Miner Joe as a worker, we see the furrowed brow and recognizably fatigued and concerned expression on his face.
Morrow:
Because of public and government support for the arts from organizations like the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s, women and people of color had greater social mobility and more opportunities to pursue careers in art. What role did the Artists’ Union—which is a major focus of your essay—play in this progress?
Fraser:
I think the Artists’ Union is a perfect example of the way artists’ response to the economic crisis of the Depression took not only aesthetic but also explicitly political forms. The Artists’ Union was an organization of working artists, centered largely in New York City during the 1930s. During the early years of the Great Depression, after the art market had completely flatlined, the first iterations of what would become the Artists’ Union began organizing to demand work relief and support from the state. These artists brought with them a real commitment to left-wing politics, broadly defined. In fact, many had pre-existing connections to political formations on the left—groups like the John Reed Clubs and the Unemployed Councils, both of which were organizational initiatives of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA).
Bernarda Bryson Shahn, A Mule and a Plow, Resettlement Administration, Small Loans Give Farmers a New Start poster, 1935. Lithograph. 42 × 28 3/4 in. (106.7 × 73 cm) Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. The exhibited impression is from the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (Gift of Jake Milgram Wien in honor of the 95th birthday of Bernarda Bryson Shahn), and the dimensions are 38 × 25 in. (96.5 × 63.5 cm).
In the ’20s and ’30s the CPUSA was the most avowedly anti-segregationist political organization in the United States outside of the Black-led Civil Rights movement. So, artists whose roots were in the Unemployed Councils and the Communist Party—people like the Artists’ Union first secretary, Bernarda Bryson (later Bernarda Bryson Shahn)—brought that commitment to anti-racism into their formative work in the Artists’ Union. Famously, the Artists’ Union would be instrumental in organizing several renowned exhibitions in New York City during the 1930s, which aimed to raise money and awareness for the ongoing movement to pass a national law outlawing lynching. And as the newly created public art initiatives in the WPA and the Federal Art Project began to take shape, the Artists’ Union pushed to ensure that they would be more inclusive in the type of art and artists to whom they provided jobs and other forms of public support. In all these ways, the Artists’ Union was quite different from anything that had existed before.
Morrow:
Much of the art from this book is, as you’ve described, intertwined with the politics of its time. As discussed in your essay from the catalogue, Mike Gold—author of “Towards Proletarian Art” and contemporary of many of the artists represented—would likely have argued that art and politics are one and the same. Was this rhetoric new, and how did it play out in the 1930s?
Fraser:
Art is always political, as all of us who think about art and history know to be true. But this widespread idea that artists are themselves political actors is something that distinguished art in this period from other moments in the American past and potentially even from any subsequent moment in twentieth-century American art, partly because of the backlash left-wing politics and art experienced during the ’40s and ’50s with McCarthyism.
Gold and others in his circles argued that left-wing artists and intellectuals should create a whole new cultural idiom, one that rejected the art of the museum and the academy and replaced it with a radically new aesthetic that took the worker, class conflict, industrial exploitation, and revolution as its primary subjects. The resulting images that we are perhaps most familiar with are almost caricatures of working men: the muscle-bound, proletarian superheroes, which we see in many of those covers from the New Masses or the Daily Worker.
Left: Hugo Gellert (American, born Hungary, 1892–1985). Daily Worker poster (ca. 1935). Lithograph. 381/8 × 251/4 in. (96.8 × 64.1 cm). Merrill C. Berman Collection, Rye, N.Y. Right: Cover by Hugo Gellert (American, born Hungary, 1892–1985). New Masses, July 1931. Photomechanical relief print, 111/2 × 83/4 in. (29.2 × 22.2 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Friends of Drawings and Prints Gifts, 2022 (2022.110)
Proletarianism as an artistic ideology was something new to this moment—a direct outgrowth of the unprecedented global economic crisis of the 1930s. This was a high-water point for the Communist Party and other left-wing organizations and movements, not only in the United States but internationally. For people like Gold, as for many other working-class radicals and revolutionaries who saw in that global crisis an opportunity to bring the revolution to pass, art and politics had never before been as intertwined with or as inseparable from each other as they were at this moment.
Morrow:
Earlier you mentioned the rise of technology and how it influenced both the subject and the production of art in the 1930s. There’s anxiety over the rise of new forms of technology present in many works in the catalogue and across the exhibition. We might be able to see a parallel to that today in concerns about artificial intelligence, which include its ability to replicate art. Is there a comparison to be made between these fascinations and fears, in the 1930s and today?
Fraser:
Absolutely. Several compelling prints included in this exhibition orbit around the uneasy relationship between people and machinery. After 1929, the machines that millions of American men and women had been working on ground to a halt and through their stagnation created an extraordinarily painful human crisis. The silencing of the machines was the driving economic engine of this whole social catastrophe.
Ida York Abelman (American, 1910–2002). Man and Machine, ca. 1939. Lithograph, 111/2 × 16 in. (29.2 × 40.6 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of New York City W.P.A., 1943 (43.33.34)
The exhibition and catalogue introduced me to a print by Ida York Abelman that I was not familiar with and which does a powerful job of communicating these complex and often contradictory feelings. You see a machine compressing the face of a worker between its jaws. It's already horrifying to think of the decapitation insinuated in this image—and even more so when you realize that the machine is being manipulated by the worker’s own hand.
Or you might think of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, where the larger-than-life gears and complex machines devouring the laboring bodies tending them was expressed to more satirical but no less vivid effect. Both examples are emblematic of the ways that artists represented the experience of exploitation on and by machines.
A clip from Chaplin's Modern Times (1936). Modern Times © Roy Export S.A.S.
But, as the book and exhibition also document, many artists of the time had a real fascination with and appreciation for machinery, even left-wing artists. You can see this in Stuart Davis’s painting Men and Machine (1934), where two figures marvel at a schematic rendering of a building site. Like Davis, many left-wing artists of the period believed that the Machine Age had the potential to be truly emancipatory: a revolutionary period in which workers would finally become the masters of the machines not for the benefit of the owners of the means of production, but in service of creating a more universally abundant socialist world.
Stuart Davis (American, 1892–1964). Men and Machine, 1934. Oil on canvas, 32 × 40 in. (81.3 × 101.6 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Jay R. Braus, 1981 (1981.406)
I think the 1930s really does resonate with our own moment, particularly when it comes to anxieties surrounding automation displacing workers or artificial intelligence going rogue. We share a fascination with the possibility of machines liberating people from the drudgeries of labor in the workplace and the home—freeing humanity to engage in higher forms of creativity—but at the same time, we recognize that the more powerful technology becomes, the more it takes on a life of its own.
Morrow:
There are numerous parallels between the 1930s and today: labor organizing, the media’s comparison of the Biden administration’s infrastructure and climate policies to the New Deal, even the discussion in your essay of artists being hit particularly hard by the Great Depression, which we also saw during COVID-19. How can we better understand the 1930s using what we’re experiencing right now? And do you think there’s anything useful we can learn from the 1930s for our response today?
Fraser:
It’s a big question, and hopefully the question all visitors to the exhibition and readers of the catalogue will be compelled to reckon with. One thing that is important to keep in mind about the 1930s is the true scale of the social disruption and economic crisis. The economic dislocation wrought by the Depression had no equivalent before and has had no equivalent since. The millions of workers who were on strike, who were mounting anti-eviction campaigns and leading marches of the unemployed across the country, dwarfs anything we have seen in this moment.
Hugo Gellert (American, born Hungary, 1892–1985) The Communist Party poster, ca. 1935 Lithograph 393/4 × 27 in. (101 × 68.6 cm) Merrill C. Berman Collection, Rye, N.Y.
But everything you said at the outset is also true. We have seen a growing movement to organize new kinds of workers, younger workers, and new kinds of workplaces. The Biden administration has embarked on the beginnings of a new direction in the American political economy, with its break from the neoliberal order of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century that saw very little role for the state in interfering with private investment and the marketplace. Biden wants to steer private investment towards green jobs, green manufacturing, green energy, and wants to do so in a way that will create work for those groups of workers and parts of the country that have suffered the most from deindustrialization.
If there’s a lesson of the 1930s, it's that the more artists, workers, writers, scholars, and others organize to transform the economy, the more it will be possible to come as close to the revolution as it did during the Great Depression. The more we believe it’s possible to make change in this moment, to truly push for a more equitable economy and climatologically sustainable mode of energy production, the more such outcomes might be possible in the political present in which we find ourselves.
Marquee: Still from Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936). Modern Times © Roy Export S.A.S.
