WPA Prints, “New Masses” Magazine, and the Radical Spirit of the 1930s

Currently on view in the Van Winkle Law Firm Gallery, Iron & Ink: Prints from America’s Machine Age features work created under one of the most ambitious government art initiatives in United States history: the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP). Over the course of its eight years in operation (1935-1943), the Federal Art Project provided essential economic relief and public access to art during the Great Depression by employing over 10,000 artists to create murals, paintings, sculptures, and prints. The program was especially significant for recognizing artists as workers deserving the same protections as other laborers.

Public art projects funded by the WPA included murals for municipal buildings, like post offices and courthouses, which had to pass strict approval processes to ensure that the work was uplifting and patriotic. Artists tended to paint grand scenes of American history, labor, and community life. Fine art prints, like those seen in Iron & Ink, were made in smaller studios across the country and did not have to contend with the same institutional oversight and public scrutiny. Artists were freer to address the often grim and grueling conditions of modern life in the Depression era.

Beyond their government-sponsored projects, many artists found an outlet for bolder political work in the pages of New Masses (1926–1948), a radical leftist magazine closely associated with the American Communist Party. In the direct lineage of earlier socialist magazines like The Masses (1911–1917) and The Liberator (1918–1924), New Masses published essays, fiction, poetry, and visual art. Attracting some of the most influential voices and talent of the time—including Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Diego Rivera, and Dorothy Day—New Masses became a forum for debates about how art and culture could support workers, challenge capitalism, and confront racism and fascism.

Although not all contributors to New Masses were communists, the economic collapse of the Great Depression pushed many writers, artists, and intellectuals further to the political left in response to the era’s widespread poverty and inequality. Eight of the artists featured in Iron & Ink contributed artwork to the magazine—Mabel Dwight, Helen West Heller, Jacob Kainen, Reginald Marsh, Elizabeth Olds, John Sloan, and Harry Sternberg. Sloan also served on the magazine’s executive board during its inaugural year in 1926. The involvement of these artists with both the WPA and New Masses highlights the ways that they used printmaking as a tool to both document and defy their times.