Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1900–1960 | Art & Artists

Apr 28, 2017–June 2, 2019

The Strength of Collective Man

The Strength of Collective Man

During the first half of the twentieth century, the United States continued its transition from an agrarian to an industrial society, experienced an unprecedented economic downturn, and recovered as the nation entered World War II. American artists responded to this seismic moment in the history of labor with works that portray the sites of production, scenes of working, and the individuals who constituted the workforce. John Steuart Curry’s The Stockman (1929) presents the keeper of livestock as heroically as it does the animals that are his products and domain. Charles Sheeler’s pristine 1932 depiction of the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge Plant in Dearborn, Michigan, celebrates American industry even if it obscures the labor of the American worker. Isaac Soyer’s Employment Agency, painted in 1937 as the United States was attempting to pull itself out of the Great Depression, shows the tedious and frequently dispiriting work of trying to find a job. In his second inaugural address, given in the same year that Soyer’s painting was made, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said: “In our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up or else all go down as one people.” By making labor a central theme of artistic production, American artists also were asserting themselves as fellow workers at a time of collective national effort.