Labor’s Canvas: American Working-Class History and the WPA Art of the 1930s
Author: Laura Hapke
Date Of Publication: Jan 2008
Isbn13: 9781847184153
Isbn: 1-84718-415-4
At an unprecedented and probably unique American moment, laboring people were indivisible from the art of the 1930s. By far the most recognizable New Deal art employed an endless frieze of white or racially ambiguous machine proletarians, from solo drillers to identical assembly line toilers. Even today such paintings, particularly those with work themes, are almost instantly recognizable. Happening on a Depression-era picture, one can see from a distance the often simplified figures, the intense or bold colors, the frozen motion or flattened perspective, and the uniformity of laboring bodies within an often naive realism or naturalism of treatment. In a kind of Social Realist dance, the FAP’s imagined drillers, haulers, construction workers, welders, miners, and steel mill workers make up a rugged industrial army.

In an unusual synthesis of art and working-class history, Labor’s Canvas argues that however simplified this golden age of American worker art appears from a post-modern perspective, The New Deal’s Federal Art Project (FAP), under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), revealed important tensions. Artists saw themselves as cultural workers who had much in common with the blue-collar workforce. Yet they struggled to reconcile social protest and aesthetic distance. Their canvases, prints, and drawings registered attitudes toward laborers as bodies without minds often shared by the wider culture. In choosing a visual language to reconnect workers to the larger society, they tried to tell the worker from the work with varying success.

Drawing on a wealth of social documents and visual narratives, Labor’s Canvas engages in a bold revisionism. Hapke examines how FAP iconography both chronicles and reframes working-class history. She demonstrates how the New Deal’s artistically rendered workforce history reveals the cultural contradictions about laboring people evident even in the depths of the Great Depression, not the least in the imaginations of the FAP artists themselves.

Laura Hapke teaches at the New York City College of Technology, City University of New York. Dr. Hapke is the author of five previous books and numerous articles on the relation of American cultural production to laboring people. She is currently at work on an ideological history of the United States tenement.

"Laura Hapke offers us a marvelous view of under-appreciated and unappreciated labor art in an era when labor emerged at the center of the struggle for democracy in America. Hapke's deft eye, her meticulous research, her fine writing all work together to provide the reader an understanding of art history as well as social history. The illustrations in this book, carefully selected, will bring the reader additional joy and insight: it will be a book to look at, enjoy and appreciate for a long time."

—Paul Buhle, Senior Lecturer, Brown University, Editor, ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE AMERICAN LEFT, also INSURGENT IMAGES, THE AGITPROP MURALS OF MIKE ALEWITZ, and other volumes.

“This elaborately detailed yet analytical work does for American labor art in the twentieth century what Hapke’s previously published Labor’s Text did for imaginative literature of the working class: it contextualizes, distinguishes among approaches, and explores the contradictions and singularities among the artists as well as their sponsors and partisans. The productions of the Federal Arts Project are shown to be anything but monolithic; the relationship of the art to trade unionism and the rise of the CIO is studied in depth, as is the struggle for presence among women and racial and ethnic minorities.

Hapke’s study is not only encyclopedic but constantly engrossing. In her keeping, the collective body and the individual face of the worker under representation are equally well served.”

—John Crawford, publisher of West End Press (USA)

"In each of her half a dozen books, she [Hapke] engages a prismatic scholarly approach, cutting into a particular vein of history or culture and bringing its rich material to the surface. She resists theoretical fads and grounds her work in a Gramscian commitment to use her prowess as a scholar to tell the larger story of working class people in American history.

The structure of Labor's Canvas provides a valuable historical chronology and narrative...it is a dense book written by an exemplary scholar for other scholars. Her notes and bibliographic sources, true for all her books, are genuine contributions to scholarly research within the confines of the book and beyond."

---Janet Zandy (Professor of Language and Literature, Rochester Institute of Technology) in Working USA, October 2008

"This valuable book adds further weight to the arguments that the New Deal was a phenomenon much further than the left previously believed, and that the influence and scope of the Communist Party was greater than conventional literature suggests"

Gerald Mayer, Professor of History, CUNY in American Communist History Vol. 8, No. 1, 2009

"Labor's Canvas will be of great interest not only to scholars of American art and history, but also to artists who are committed to aligning their artistic practice with the struggles of organized labor at the beginning of the twenty-fist century."

Frances Pohl, Chair of Art and Art History, Pomona College in Journal of Working Class Studies Association, Dec. 2008

"In addition to its excellent introduction, Hapke's book consists of seven chapters on topics about the Federal Arts Project ranging from women, African Americans, to the depiction of masses of workers - listening to speakers, marching, or purposelessly milling about. Some chapters feature reproductions of aptly chosen representative works. While all of the essays couls stand alone as publishable essays, each enriches the others; and all succeed in responding to the stated thesis of the book.

Though primarily a work of art history, whichi significantly contributes to an important period in American art, Labor's Canvas also sheds a broader light. This valuable book adds further weight to the arguments that the New Deal was a phenomenon much further Left than previously believed and that the influence and scope of the Communist Party was greater than the conventional literature asserts."

Gerald Meyer in Political Affairs, 2010

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