If many of us feel as if we’re facing hard times in terms of the economy — the soaring cost of groceries and gasoline, unaffordable health care and housing — none of that compares to the Great Depression. I think now of my late father’s recollection of striving to earn $10 in one week at a wage of a dime an hour. He fell short after 96 hours on the job in a Denton pool-room tavern during the 1930s.
For 8.5 million Americans among the 25 percent who were jobless back then, the WPA — the Works Progress Administration, initiated by President Franklin Roosevelt and Congress — offered a chance to earn enough money to buy their next meal. Artists turned to the WPA’s Federal Art Project (FAP).
Each of nearly 50 prints in the Academy Art Museum’s current “Art for the People” exhibit of FAP-era images comes from the personal collection of Baltimore artist Scott Ponemone and his late husband, Michael Frommeyer. Several of the pieces are promised future gifts to the Academy Art Museum’s permanent collection.
Here are just a few of these prints that fed starving artists and brought the life experience of Americans during the Depression into black-and-white Realist observation and expression.
“Staten Island Shore” is part of a series of lithographs by Mabel Dwight, one of the most widely known printmakers of the 1920s and ’30s. Deaf at birth, Dwight didn’t produce her first print until she was 52. Nevertheless, she became a leading figure of the American Scene movement, which, in her case, focused on the everyday life of anonymous people she encountered in New York City. Working exclusively in lithography, her prints circulated in such popular magazines as Vanity Fair. In a realistic scene innocent of any sense of voyeurism, “Staten Island Shore” depicts a pair of skinny-dippers about to enjoy a spontaneous swim.
Leo Meissner, who grew up near Detroit, also became fascinated with life in New York City — particularly its gritty side. After returning from enlistment in the Great War, later known as World War I, Meissner, who took up wood engraving before the war, won a scholarship to the Art Students League of New York, where he was influenced by painters Robert Henri and George Luks. His 1942 “War Bulletins” engraving on wove paper draws you in, along with the crowd gathered around an unseen newsstand to read the latest headlines from the front of the latest “Great War,” World War II.
Isac Friedlander’s “Coney Island” is presented in three 1932 print forms — an etching on a copper plate mounted on wood, a gouache image on paper, and an etching and aquatint on paper. The trio of works traces his process as a print artist. First, he prepared a study in opaque watercolor, or gouache. Next, he etched the image in reverse on a copper plate, which he ran through a press onto paper to produce the final print. Voilà. A lesson in three steps for amateurs in printmaking. Friedlander returned occasionally to Coney Island for its Depression-era carnival distraction from grim reality.
Armin Landeck, a student of architecture at Columbia University, traveled in the early 1930s to Europe, where he learned the printmaking techniques of intaglio etching and drypoint. His architect’s eye for straight lines and sharp angles against a dramatic and unruly sky is best captured in his “Approaching Storm, Manhattan,” circa 1937. He later taught at a school for printmaking he co-founded before moving on to Atelier 17, a revolutionary promoter of printmaking as fine art, which observes the centennial of its founding next year.
Another architecture student, Fred Becker, abandoned his studies to join the Federal Art Project’s graphics division, where his “Home Cooking,” an official print of the project, stands as a prime example of the WPA’s mission to create Depression-era works portraying everyday life in street and domestic settings. To me, “Home Cooking” brings to mind the Broadway caricatures of the late Al Hirschfeld of The New York Times, best known for hiding the name of his daughter, Nina, in his fine-line drawings. Becker’s etching depicts a pianist on what looks to be a rip-roaring riff.
Emblematic of the overarching current event of this present time in our nation is Glenn Coleman’s 1928 “Election Night Bonfire,” part of the “Lithographs of New York” portfolio. He and two of his best buddies, Stuart Davis and Henry Glintenkamp, joined the staff of The Masses, founded by artist John Sloan. As its name suggests, the magazine was a leftist publication that the current president might call a “fake news commie rag.” Yes, it was socialist, as you would surmise from Coleman’s “Bonfire,” which looks more like a means of protest than of keeping warm. The times were ripe for protesting, as the 1929 Wall Street crash would soon land the nation in its severest Depression in history.
The Coleman lithograph is one among several in this exhibit that are promised future gifts to the Academy Art Museum by the Ponemone and Frommeyer Revocable Trust.
Art for the People: WPA-Era Prints
from the Ponemone-Frommeyer Collection
Through Jan. 10, 2027
Academy Art Museum
106 South St., Easton
academyartmuseum.org
