Abstract
In recent years, more and more visual records have become digitally accessible, and electronic teaching tools like presentation software and online syllabi have made sharing visual materials with students easier. At the same time, the study of visual culture has vastly enriched scholarship in such fields as history and American studies. Historians and interdisciplinary scholars realize that the critical investigation of visual materials can offer fresh perspectives on central events and periods in U.S. history. Few scholars would dispute that the New Deal years formed a crucial moment in American political, cultural, and social development.
The monographs addressed in this review exemplify the value of investigating the graphic arts—in particular, the federally sponsored graphic arts—in order to broaden our understanding of the New Deal period. While divergent in their choice of subject matter, both Julia Foulkes’s To the City and Laura Hapke’s Labor’s Canvas attest to the remarkable transformations that took place during the Depression and World War II: in the relationship between industrial capitalism and democratic governance; in the social and civic meanings of waged work and labor activism; in the intersectional construction of class, race, gender, and national identities; in the relationship of rural to urban life; and in the role of the arts in promoting “cultural democracy.”
While both works address the visual culture of the New Deal, Foulkes’s and Hapke’s approaches could not be more different. Foulkes examines the voluminous photographic record of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and the Office of War Information (OWI), looking for evidence of artists’ concern not just with the decline of rural America but with rural Americans’ migration to and influence on the urban American landscape. While other studies of FSA photographs have tended to emphasize artists’ depiction of rural American crisis, Foulkes persuasively shows that New Deal photographers also documented the changing urban American landscape. Her book thematizes FSA/OWI photographers’ depiction of urban America, focusing in particular on how photographs of urban American life reveal a distinct transition away from the enthusiastic, stylized urbanism of earlier decades to a more settled, realistic portrayal of the United States as an urban nation. Foulkes’s project also turns the corner from the late thirties and the work of the FSA to the war period and the continuation of government-sponsored photodocumentary under the OWI. To the City thus reframes the work of the FSA not only to emphasize its focus on the city, but also to stress continuity between the depression and wartime periods.
Hapke, in contrast, focuses not on FSA/OWI photography but on the paintings, prints, and drawings produced by artists employed by the New Deal’s Federal Art Project. A much more exhaustive study than To the City, Hapke’s work contains eight, lengthy chapters (to Foulkes’s brief five) and carefully considers such elements as artists’ institutional affiliations and relationships to labor radicalism and New Deal politics, as well as the artworks themselves. Her work offers nuanced and persuasive insights into themes of class, gender, and racial representation in New Deal art as well as a careful, visual analysis of the labor movement in the 1930s. Her racial analysis encompasses the changing contours of whiteness in the nation and in the labor movement, as those contours are reflected in the work of white and black artists affiliated with the FAP. Her analysis of the labor movement’s tumultuous relationship to broader transformations in American national identity and in the nature of industrial work is original and engaging. She convincingly suggests that FAP artists produced a unique record of labor’s struggles with ethnic, racial, and gender diversity, as well as with the relationship of skilled, semiskilled, and unskilled work. Whereas Foulkes’s short study focuses directly on representations of urban life and is thus of inherent interest to readers of this journal, Hapke’s work is most explicitly about changes in working-class politics and culture, which often played out against an urban backdrop, as those changes are reflected in the work of FAP artists.
Foulkes writes very clearly. The modest scope of her study enhances the clarity of her analysis and makes To the City potentially a fine text for undergraduate courses in U.S. urban history. Foulkes divides her analysis of New Deal urban photography into five thematic chapters: “Intersection,” “Traffic,” “High Life and Low Life,” “The City in the Country,” and “Citizens.” She argues for the specificity of the New Deal period as a time when, as FSA/OWI photographs suggest, Americans really began to think of the urban landscape not as new and exciting, but as the predominant mode of American life. Considerable dynamism can be found in New Deal urban photography, as Foulkes’s chapter titles suggest. FSA photographers, many of whom continued their work under the wartime auspices of the OWI, represented American urban life as a rich and complex landscape where different groups and experiences met. All of Foulkes’s chapters emphasize the dialectical nature of urban experience as represented in New Deal photography: the intersection not only of city streets, but of rural migrants and urban denizens, rich and poor, male and female, and black and white. She also stresses the environmental particularities of mid-twentieth-century American cities: their buildings, transit systems, commercialized entertainments, and human dimensions.
Unlike Hapke, Foulkes does not discuss her artists’ political investments or creative intent, nor does she provide much visual context for New Deal urban photographs. While Foulkes examines the impact of urbanization on rural life in a chapter titled “The City in the Country,” she might also have included some additional examples of FSA rural photography as a complement to the urban images she emphasizes. However, since most readers will be familiar with works like Dorothea Lange’s series on migrant workers and Ben Shahn’s images of Southern cotton pickers, Foulkes’s focus on urban scenes is a valuable corrective to the predominance of rural themes in other FSA scholarship. More troubling, perhaps, is Foulkes’s failure to engage the work of earlier urban photographers like Alfred Stieglitz, Jacob Riis, and Lewis Hine. While she mentions all three in the text, her arguments about the specificity of Depression-era and wartime photographs of urban life would be stronger if she showed how the work of the FSA/OWI photographers broke with established conventions for documenting urban space. Foulkes might also have addressed FSA/OWI photographers’ engagement with other visual media, such as federally sponsored murals and prints and commercially produced advertising and film images. Foulkes’s inattention to broader discursive contexts is just one way in which her analysis lacks cultural and historical depth.
Foulkes also fails to differentiate between the Depression-era photographs of urban life and those produced under the OWI. While her periodization, which spans the period 1935 to 1944, is potentially interesting, she stresses continuities over contrasts, suggesting that the FSA and OWI frameworks enabled and constrained photographers in similar ways, when this seems unlikely. Particularly in examining the photographs of African Americans that Foulkes includes in her study, the shift is quite dramatic: from Depression-era scenes in which African American slum dwellers appear overwhelmed by their bleak surroundings, to wartime portraits of African American individuals purposefully working or contemplatively engaging in leisure or community activities. More attention to the differing institutional imperatives of FSA and OWI sponsorship, as those imperatives are reflected in the photographs themselves, would thus have been enriching.
In contextualizing the photographs, Foulkes draws on the written record of the New Deal administration, and particularly on the American Guides. Such officially sponsored narrative depictions of urban life complement Foulkes’s photographs nicely, and she weaves them into her analysis well. She also draws to a lesser extent on the work of sociologists like Robert Staughton Lynd and Louis Wirth. More engagement with the work of Chicago-school urban sociologists would further enhance her analysis, however, since such sociologists played a crucial role in defining the new urban contexts of American democracy, both during the Depression and war periods.
While Foulkes’s purpose is to elucidate urban themes in FSA/OWI photography and her analysis is organized accordingly, she could do more to discuss the artists themselves. In particular, it would have been helpful if Foulkes had discussed the racial background of photographers who frequently depicted African American subjects. For example, African American photographer Gordon Parks’s depictions of black urbanites differ from those of Euro-American photographers John Vachon and Russell Lee. While FSA/OWI photographs carry meanings far beyond those intended by any given artist, brief biographical contexts might help illuminate such representational differences.
Overall, To the City is a clearly written, brief, and engaging study that shows the value of photographs in understanding the place of the urban landscape in U.S. national politics and culture in the New Deal years. The photographs themselves are thought-provoking. One might have wished for more of them, but the ones Foulkes includes certainly reinforce her claim that America was not only looking toward its rural past but finding strength in its ever-changing urban present, in meeting the crises of the Depression and World War II. Scholars and teachers who wish to supplement Foulkes’s study need only go as far as the Library of Congress online collection Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives, which includes images of all 175,317 negatives produced under both agencies, as well as contextual information about the collection. 1
Like To the City, Hapke’s Labor’s Canvas also focuses on federally sponsored graphic arts in the New Deal era, but that is where the similarity ends. Whereas Foulkes is interested in how FSA/OWI photographs ramify American urban experience in the period 1935–1944, Hapke is interested in how paintings, prints, and drawings of the Federal Art Project (FAP; 1935–1943) illuminate working-class experience and the labor movement during the 1930s. Her analysis is implicitly more than explicitly about urban America, in the sense that much of working-class experience in the Depression took place in urban contexts. Whereas Foulkes foregrounds the photographs she studies and not the artists who produced them, Hapke offers a much deeper contextual analysis for the images she studies, including artists’ backgrounds and political affiliations, institutional constraints, and concurrent developments in the organized labor movement. This results in a denser, but also richer, interpretation.
Labor’s Canvas is a thoroughly researched study of artistic representations of the American working class in the 1930s. Rather than addressing how FAP artists contributed to the creation of middlebrow culture, as Victoria Grieve does in her recent monograph, Hapke focuses on the relationship between FAP artists and labor radicalism. 2 This brings her work into closer alignment with Helen Langa’s impressive Radical Art: Printmaking and the Left in 1930s New York. 3 Yet while Langa focuses exclusively on printmaking in New York, Hapke’s study extends to other regions and includes a range of graphic arts. Instead of looking at the FAP on its own, Hapke connects the work of FAP artists to the art of radical publications like the New Masses and Art Front. She examines the relationship of FAP artists to Communist Party cultural politics of the Third Period and Popular Front. And she pays particular attention to some FAP artists who have fallen into obscurity, like Hugo Gellert and Charles White, because of their radical politics.
One problem that arises from Hapke’s emphasis on intersections between the FAP and labor radicalism is a lack of structural coherence. Hapke could provide more background about the FAP itself—its chronology, its relationship to broader New Deal policies and practices, its variety (sculpture and the Index of American Design are neglected in favor of drawings, easel paintings, and prints). While Hapke’s title suggests a broad, national sweep to her study, she focuses primarily on New York City, and particularly the work of the Fourteenth Street School. Also, she does not address the FAP’s important function in providing art classes and community art classes to children and adults. Sometimes, her choice of early-Depression artworks for analysis is confusing, since the FAP did not technically begin operation until 1935. Her inclusion of earlier works by artists who would later join the FAP thus requires better contextualization.
Overall, Labor’s Canvas is less a rigorous institutional analysis of the FAP itself and more a study of FAP-affiliated artists who, in Hapke’s estimation, created particularly thought-provoking representations of American working-class life in the Great Depression. She makes a strong case for the value of using evidence drawn from visual culture to complicate our understanding of how diverse groups of workers fared in the era of the New Deal. A major theme of Hapke’s work is artists’ ambivalence both toward their working-class subjects and toward the industrial workplaces they depicted. Hapke locates that ambivalence in artists’ varied portrayals of laboring bodies, which were not always “damned machine Hercules” but sometimes weak as opposed to strong, female as opposed to male, downtrodden as opposed to triumphant. 4 Throughout the text, Hapke shows how subtle visual cues can complicate our understanding of labor ideology and working-class experience in the New Deal years.
Hapke begins by analyzing two iconographic precedents for FAP portrayals of the working class: Thomas Anshutz’s The Ironworkers’ Noontime (oil on canvas, 1880) and Joseph Stella’s Progressive-era drawings of Pennsylvania steelworkers. Hapke’s analysis of these iconographic precedents helps to frame her interrogation of how leftist artists affiliated with the FAP depicted the relationship between the industrial worker’s body and the machines he was compelled to tend. She also sets up her depiction of laboring bodies against the “male and pale” conventions of American Federation of Labor iconography and politics of white skilled workers.
Each chapter of Hapke’s work looks at a particular group of artists and how they represented a particular subset of the working-class population. Much to her credit, Hapke does not restrict her analysis to familiar artists like Reginald Marsh, Ben Shahn, and Isabel Bishop. She also includes the work of lesser-known artists like Alice Neel, Elizabeth Olds, John Wilson, and Dox Thrash. One of the most interesting and rewarding parts of Hapke’s analysis is her treatment of multiculturalism in the artistic community and in the kinds of artworks they produce. A relatively established, male artist like Reginald Marsh depicts his female subjects very differently than does Isabel Bishop or Kyra Markham. More background information on a number of topics, ranging from chronologies of the Communist Party and New Deal relief to the history and scope of artistic movements like the Fourteenth Street School, would have made Hapke’s analysis easier to follow.
Hapke’s analysis of African American subjects in FAP artwork is strong, particularly in comparison with Foulkes’s. In one chapter, Hapke discusses the work of four dissenting African American artists employed by the FAP. She relates their artwork to their personal biographical and political affiliations, their artistic influences and educations, and the particular iconographic precedents for their work. She contrasts white artists’ depictions of black workers to those of black artists. Combined with her nuanced and detailed discussion of the changing shades of whiteness in FAP art and in the labor movement it depicts, this discussion of African American artists reveals the abiding racial tensions and transformative possibilities of the Depression-era labor movement.
Labor’s Canvas could benefit from more plentiful images. Hapke includes only thirty-seven illustrations spread out over eight chapters and they are reproduced in black and white. Since many of her insights pertain to subtle contrasts of shade and hue in the representation of working-class multiculturalism, these subtleties are lost on readers. Frustratingly, some of the artworks Hapke discusses at length are not reproduced in the book at all (e.g., Reginald Marsh’s fascinating The End of the Fourteenth Street Line). One solution—likely a costly one—would have been to add more illustrations. But perhaps an equally effective option would have been to discuss fewer examples, each in greater detail.
While a general audience interested in learning about New Deal visual culture is advised to choose a different book, specialists who study twentieth-century art, U.S. labor radicalism, or proletarian culture will be able to fill in some of the more challenging blanks in Hapke’s analysis. (For example, when did the Communist Party USA transition from the Third Period to the Popular Front? To what extent did Party’s Third Period overlap with the tenure of the WPA? Who was Hugo Gellert? Or, what were the artistic origins of the Fourteenth Street School?)
Despite its limitations, Hapke’s study exemplifies a rigorously multicultural analysis, and her thematic approach to Depression-era public art is incisive and thought-provoking. Thematic tensions that Hapke identifies include those between white, artisanal labor and ethnically diverse industrial labor; between the face of the laborer and the body; between the individual worker and the crowd; between masculine and feminine; and between defiant and defeated bodies. Hapke also considers distinctive representations of different types of work: steelworkers and coalminers, textile workers, and laundry workers.
Together with Foulkes’s study of FSA/OWI urban photography, Labor’s Canvas enriches our understanding of the class, racial, and gender conflicts that animated Americans’ workaday lives and that generally played out against a changing urban backdrop during the New Deal years. Looking at visual culture affords compelling evidence of those conflicts, for the multi-accentuality of visual media prevents us from making reductive assumptions about the nature of work or urban experience. If Foulkes’s photographic study dispels the truism that Americans repudiated urbanism to dwell in a place of nostalgia for the nation’s rural and small-town past during the Great Depression, Hapke’s study shatters the notion that the FAP’s class-conscious artists produced fairly uniform images of the workers as imposing, white, faceless bodies during the same period. Of course, neither Foulkes nor Hapke is the first scholar to make such observations. However, each does contribute unique insights into the rich visual history of a dramatically transformative moment in America’s urban past.