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 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 is 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 in lithography exclusively, 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 the 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 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 copper plate mounted on wood, a gouache image on paper, and an etching and aquatint on paper.
The trio of works trace his process as a print artist: First, he prepared a study in opaque watercolor (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. Voila. A lesson in three steps for amateurs to printmaking. Friedlander returned occasionally to Coney Island for its Depression-era carnival distraction from grim
