Art for the Millions: American Culture and Politics in the 1930s is a must-see exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that explores how artists reflected the social and political changes of the time in their work. We are pleased to share with you a selection of prints by exhibited artists Hugo Gellert and Louis Lozowick, whose estates the gallery represents. Included in this selection are works by James Allen and Norman Lewis, also on view at the Met, and contemporaries Peggy Bacon and Eli Jacobi. From etching and drypoint to lithography and silkscreen, these works demonstrate the remarkable breadth of technique printmakers used to explore the urbanization, socio-political discourse, and industrialism of the time.

Capturing the Rise of the Modern City

Louis Lozowick (b. 1892, Kyiv Oblast, Ukraine – d. 1973, South Orange, NJ) was a precisionist artist initially inspired by the striking scale and  geometries of skyscrapers, cable-stayed bridges, and other contemporary feats of engineering. But as the Depression and labor struggles deepened in the 1930s, Lozowick’s focus shifted away from the geometries and grandeur of these architectural marvels toward the workers behind them. Depicting two workers dismantling the Sixth Avenue “el” during the construction of the subway, Guts of Manhattan (1939) demonstrates this shift in Lozowick’s œuvre.

As Lozowick became increasingly concerned with the labor behind America’s rising cities, artist Eli Jacobi (b. 1898, Kharkov, Ukraine – d. 1984, New York, NY) focused on everyday urban life. In 1935, under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal agency that funded the arts, Jacobi began documenting life on the Bowery, an impoverished New York City neighborhood infamous for its extreme poverty and dereliction. In The Busy Bee (1940) (above), the artist depicts neighborhood locals dining at The Busy Bee, a bustling former eatery on the Lower East Side. 

Creating Art for the Masses

Artists-activists such as Hugo Gellert (b. 1892, Budapest, Hungary – d. 1985, Freehold Township, NJ) illustrated and disseminated the core tenets of rising socio-political ideologies such as Communism and Anti-Fascism. Gellert’s portfolio of 19 handmade silkscreens, Century of the Common Man (1943), illustrates a fiery 1943 speech delivered by Vice President Henry Wallace, in which he called for an egalitarian future, free of Fascism — a century of the common man. Pictured above, Learning to Think and Work Together, one of the 19 original silkscreens, is among the first American works of art to represent people of different races collaborating and standing together as equals.

Centering the Worker

A staunch advocate of workers’ rights, Gellert expanded on the increasingly worker-focused images of the time with Karl Marx Capital in Pictures, a portfolio of 60 lithographs that use the medium to provide an understanding of the fundamentals of Marxism. With a striking graphic sensibility and an avant-garde, futuristic style, Machinery and Large-Scale Industry 48 pictures a robot raising a worker’s arms. The print explores the fraught relationship between the factory, worker, and machine.