curtailed both their purchases and exhibition schedules. Many artists
sought financial support from the federal government, which estab-
lished numerous programs to provide relief, assist recovery, and pro-
mote reform. Among the programs supporting artists were the Trea-
sury Relief Art Project, founded in 1934 to commission art for federal
buildings, and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), founded
in 1935 to relieve widespread unemployment. Under the WPA, varied
activities of the Federal Art Project paid artists, writers, and theater
people a regular wage in exchange for work in their professions. An-
other important program was the Resettlement Administration
(RA), better known by its later name, the Farm Security Administra-
tion. The RA oversaw emergency aid programs for farm families
caught in the Depression.
DOROTHEA LANGEThe RA hired American photographer
Dorothea Lange(1895–1965) in 1936 and dispatched her to pho-
tograph the rural poor attempting to survive the desperate con-
ditions wrought by the Great Depression. At the end of an assign-
ment to document the lives of migratory pea pickers in California,
Lange stopped at a camp in Nipomo and found the migrant workers
there starving because the crops had frozen in the fields. Among the
pictures Lange made on this occasion was Migrant Mother, Nipomo
Va l l e y (FIG. 35-62), in which she captured the mixture of strength
and worry in the raised hand and careworn face of a young mother,
who holds a baby on her lap. Two older children cling to theirmother trustingly while shunning the camera. Lange described how
she got the picture:[I] saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if
drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my pres-
ence or my camera to her, but I remember she asked me no ques-
tions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the
same direction....There she sat in that lean-to tent with her chil-
dren huddled around her, and she seemed to know that my pictures
might help her, and so she helped me.^51Within days after Lange’s photograph appeared in a San Fran-
cisco newspaper, people rushed food to Nipomo to feed the hungry
workers.Painting
The political, social, and economic developments of the 1930s and
1940s also had a profound effect on American painters.BEN SHAHN Born in Lithuania,Ben Shahn(1898–1969) came
to the United States in 1906 and trained as a lithographer before
broadening the media in which he worked to include easel painting,
photography, and murals. He focused on the lives of ordinary people
and the injustices often done to them by the structure of an imper-
sonal, bureaucratic society. In the early 1930s, he completed a cycle
of 23 paintings and prints inspired by the trial and execution of the
two Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Ac-
cused of killing two men in a holdup in 1920 in South Braintree,
Massachusetts, the Italians were convicted in a trial that many peo-
ple thought resulted in a grave miscarriage of justice. Shahn felt he
had found in this story a subject the equal of any in Western art his-
tory: “Suddenly I realized... I was living through another crucifix-
ion.”^52 Basing many of the works in this cycle on newspaper pho-
tographs of the events, Shahn devised a style that adapted his
knowledge of Synthetic Cubism and his training in commercial art
to an emotionally expressive use of flat, intense color in figural com-
positions filled with sharp, dry, angular forms. He called the major
work in the series The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (FIG. I-5), draw-
ing a parallel to Christ’s Passion. This tall, narrow painting con-
denses the narrative in terms of both time and space. The two exe-
cuted men lie in coffins at the bottom of the composition. Presiding
over them are the three members of the commission chaired by Har-
vard University president A. Laurence Lowell, who declared the orig-
inal trial fair and cleared the way for the executions to take place. A
framed portrait of Judge Webster Thayer, who handed down the ini-
tial sentence, hangs on the wall of a simplified government building.
The gray pallor of the dead men, the stylized mask-faces of the
mock-pious mourning commissioners, and the sanctimonious, dis-
tant judge all contribute to the mood of anguished commentary that
makes this image one of Shahn’s most powerful works.EDWARD HOPPERTrained as a commercial artist,Edward
Hopper(1882–1967) studied painting and printmaking in New
York and then in Paris. When he returned to the United States, he
concentrated on scenes of contemporary American city and country
life. His paintings depict buildings, streets, and landscapes that are
curiously muted, still, and filled with empty spaces, evoking the na-
tional mind-set during the Depression era. Hopper did not paint
historically specific scenes. He took as his subject the more general-
ized theme of the overwhelming loneliness and echoing isolation of
modern life in the United States. In his paintings, motion is stoppedAmerica, 1930 to 1945 95535-62Dorothea Lange,Migrant Mother, Nipomo Valley,1935.
Gelatin silver print, 1 1 9 . Oakland Museum of California, Oakland
(gift of Paul S. Taylor).
While documenting the lives of migratory farm workers during the
Depression, Lange made this unforgettable photograph of a mother in
which she captured the woman’s strength and worry.1 in.35-62ABOURKE-
WHITE, Fort
Peck Dam,
1936.