Warrick Fuller’s sculpture expresses of the unfinished work of emancipation.

Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Emancipation, 1913 (cast 1999), bronze, pink granite pedestal, 213.36 cm high (Harriet Tubman Square, Boston). Speakers: Dr. Renée Ater and Dr. Beth Harris

Motley paints the bustling nightlife of Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, once one of the foremost centers of Black cultural life.

Archibald John Motley Jr., Bronzeville at Night, 1949, oil on canvas, 76.2 x 101.6 cm (Art Bridges) © Estate of the artist. Speakers: Dr. Javier Rivero Ramos, Associate Curator, Art Bridges, and Dr. Steven Zucker, Smarthistory, at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

O’Keeffe achieves breathtaking complexity in her painting of simple colors and forms from nature.

Georgia O’Keeffe, A Piece of Wood II/From Knot of Wood, 1942, oil on canvas, 62.9 x 50.2 cm (Art Bridges) © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Speakers: Laura Vookles, Chair of Curatorial Department, Hudson River Museum, and Steven Zucker, Smarthistory

This shimmering, elaborately-decorated punch bowl was made to be admired rather than used.

Louis Comfort Tiffany, Punch Bowl with Three Ladles, 1900, glass, silver, gilding, copper, and wood, bowl 36.8 x 61 cm, ladle 6.4 x 8.9 x 25.4 cm (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond). Speakers: Celeste Fetta, Joan P. Brock Director of Education and Assistant Deputy Director for Education, Statewide and The Library, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Beth Harris, Smarthistory

Skillfully carved in wood, this decoy goose was made to attract an audience of birds.

Charles S. Schoenheider Sr., Standing Canada Goose, 1918, wood (Promised Gift of Thomas K. Figge to the Peoria Riverfront Museum). Speakers: Zac Zetterberg, Curator of the Center for American Decoys, Peoria Riverfront Museum and Steven Zucker, Smarthistory

The organic forms and radical abstraction of Krasner’s painting makes her canvas come alive.

Lee Krasner, Re-Echo, 1957, oil on canvas, 149.9 x 147.3 cm (Art Bridges) © Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Speakers: Wendy Earle, Curator, Akron Art Museum, and Steven Zucker

Pippin’s dreamlike painting pairs a vision of biblical paradise with vignettes that recall the violence of the World Wars.

Horace Pippin, Holy Mountain, I, 1944, oil on canvas, 77.5 x 91.4 cm (Art Bridges, Bentonville). Speakers: Wendy Earle, Curator, Akron Art Museum, and Steven Zucker

Through abstraction, Lewis conveys a fleeting moment of figures waiting at a New York City subway station.

Norman Lewis, Untitled (Subway Station), 1945, oil and sand on canvas, 61 x 91.4 cm (Art Bridges, Bentonville) © Estate of Norman Lewis, courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. Speakers: Dr. Jeffrey Katzin, Senior Curator, Akron Art Museum and Dr. Steven Zucker

World’s Fair, St. Louis 1904  (Library of Congress)

Wondrous new innovations for modern life

From 265 feet above the St. Louis Fair of 1904, ferris wheel riders looked down on “palaces” dedicated to electricity, transportation, and “varied industries” whose halls held wondrous new innovations for modern life including an electric streetcar, private automobiles, wireless telephones, X-ray machines, and infant incubators.

From the turn of the century and through two world wars, Americans witnessed technologies that advanced transportation, business, and health. Mass culture spread throughout the nation via movie theaters, radios, and department stores. From the view on the ferris wheel, the narrative of American progress glowed bright in the electric lights below. But on the ground, Americans experienced the inequalities of industrial development spawned by an era of mass consumption.

Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones, The Shoe Shop, c. 1911, oil on canvas, 99.1 x 79.4 cm (Art Institute of Chicago)

The fair was a centennial celebration of the Louisiana Purchase. When planning began in 1898, the U.S. was engaged in war with Spain in both the Caribbean and the Philippines. Often sensationalized in newspapers through “yellow journalism,” the Spanish-American War was a topic of debate that revealed differing ideologies of America’s place in the world.

The war ended the same year it began with American acquisition of Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and temporary control of Cuba. Although many disagreed with the politics of imperial expansion, when the fair opened in 1904 the Philippines pavilion was among the largest on site and included a small lake where model ships reenacted battles from the war.

A booklet advertising the Philippine Exposition at the St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904 (Smithsonian Institution)

Rights and reforms

The processes that enabled mass consumption also created great economic divisions. As industrial production increased, monopolies came to dominate American business. Workers, photographers, and “muckraking” journalists sought to expose the excesses of big business and the horrific conditions of factory labor. In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire killed 146 workers, many of them female or children, and most immigrants of Italian or Jewish descent. In response, 20,000 New York garment workers went on strike uniting across ethnic boundaries for the common goal of safety and economic opportunity. Other strikes followed around the country, spawning more organized unionization and activism for working conditions and fair pay.

The early twentieth-century saw more women entering the workforce in factories and offices, and as telephone operators or domestic servants. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who inspired the term “feminism,” saw changes as the “spirit of personal independence” and encouraged women to leave the home environment which was preventing them from full freedom and social engagement.

Several female leaders emerged expounding similar ideas including Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger. Some, such as Jane Addams, actively sought to help women improve their situations though housing, career training, education, and social services. After advocating for decades, women earned the right to vote in 1920.

Jacob Lawrence,  “During World War I there was a great migration north by southern African Americans,” from The Migration Series, 1940-41, 60 panels, tempera on hardboard (Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.)

Throughout the era, laws and intimidation tactics prevented African Americans from full participation in democratic society. Southern states enforced segregation of facilities arguing for a doctrine of “separate but equal” that the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed in its 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson. Even when similar schools and healthcare facilities were provided for the black population, they were not of the same standard as those offered to the white population. In 1900, no southern state offered a high school education to African Americans.

Thousands of black Americans made their way to the industrial cities of the North in the “Great Migration.” At the same time there was an explosion of literature, music, and art that has come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance or The New Negro movement. Artists and writers looked to black history—and specifically to the art of Africa—for inspiration, joining that to a modern African American identity (Romare Bearden, Aaron Douglas, and Jacob Lawrence, for example) .

Consumer society

Mass culture offered new forms of entertainment in vaudeville, radio, film, phonographs, dance halls, and amusement parks. Increased leisure time and transportation in the form of affordable automobiles like Ford’s Model T, which hit markets in 1908, made entertainment and tourism accessible for a wider variety of Americans. Mainstream culture flourished, but so did artistic expression beyond the center such as African Americans in the Harlem Renaissance and American Indians in a burgeoning Southwestern art and tourist market (see for example, Nampeyo).

Nampeyo (Hopi-Tewa), polychrome jar, c. 1930s, clay and pigment, 13 x 21 cm (National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution)

Mass culture and the growing entertainment industry spawned the Roaring Twenties—a time of carefree, youthful indulgence. When the Great Depression hit, that indulgence and optimism disappeared. Banks failed and people lost their savings, homes, farms, and businesses. Unemployment skyrocketed. Through its early years, federal aid came only for farmers and businesses; it did not reach those who needed it most.

In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised a “new deal” for workers, winning the presidency where he remained for four terms. The New Deal actively placed restrictions on big business; sent direct aid to small businesses, farmers, and cultural workers; and created new jobs building infrastructure like roads, libraries, schools, and dams. It even employed cultural workers like photographers and artists who depicted Depression life and created public works of art. Anthropologists collected oral histories and folk songs.

The wars and the world

The U.S. initially sought not to be involved in World War I, though sympathy lay with the Allied Forces (The United Kingdom, France and Russia). In April 1917, however, Germany attacked American ships leading to the declaration of war. U.S. troops helped lead the Allies to victory in November 1918. President Woodrow Wilson imagined this was the “war that will end wars” (as H.G. Wells had written in 1914) and pushed the establishment of a League of Nations to keep peace, but in the end his own country favored isolation over involvement.

Isolationism remained strong during the start of World War II. Congress passed the neutrality act which banned the sale of war goods to fighting countries. In 1940, France surrendered to Germany and President Roosevelt sent supplies to England. The next year Japan bombed the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor and the U.S. declared war on Japan. After securing the European front at Normandy in 1944, the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan surrendered nine days later.

Illustration by Romare Bearden for “The Negro’s War,” Fortune (May 1942)

World War II increased opportunity for African Americans in the workplace with the signing of Executive Order 8802 preventing racial discrimination in federal hiring practices. Romare Bearden’s Factory Workers (1942) addressed such discrimination portraying workers being turned away from employment in the steel industry. Because the U.S. was at war with Japan, many people of Japanese descent living in the United States (like Ruth Asawa) were forced into internment camps, losing their homes, businesses, and freedoms.

Ruth Asawa, Untitled, c. 1958, iron wire, 219.7 × 81.3 × 81.3 cm (Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art)

During the war, women took the place of men in many fields of employment, including factory work to produce supplies needed both at home and overseas. In order to recruit women, the U.S. government printed posters of a strong female dressed in a blue jumpsuit and red bandanna saying, “We Can Do It.” Rosie the Riveter is still an icon of working women in America. Beneath the icon, however, women experienced much lower wages than men for the same positions and, when the soldiers came home, were expected to give up their jobs and resume more traditional roles.

The horrors of the Holocaust stunned people around the globe. America had refused to admit many of the Jews who sought to escape Nazi persecution though some who had secured employment were allowed entry including the scientist Albert Einstein. The United States was immeasurably strengthened by the many brilliant immigrants who fled Europe including composer Igor Stravinsky, author Thomas Mann, architect Walter Gropius, and artist George Grosz whose painting Remembering speaks the agony of have left friends and family behind in Nazi Germany.

George Grosz, Remembering, 1937, oil on canvas, 71.2 x 91.76 cm (Minneapolis Institute of Art, © Estate of George Grosz)

In Negro Aroused, the figure of a Black man rises. Carved in mahogany, he pushes himself upward elegantly, his hands placed one on top of the other before him. His figure is cut off right under the hips, at the base of the sculpture. The warm tones of the wood aid the illusion that he rises from the earth itself. His head is turned toward the heavens, his mouth set, his eyes wide and determined. Since its first public exhibition 1937, Negro Aroused has become an icon of the Jamaican nationalist movement and of Caribbean art history.

Edna Manley, Negro Aroused, 1935, mahogany wood, 63.5 cm high (National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston) © the artist’s estate

A Caribbean arrival

The sculptor Edna Manley, née Swithenbank, was born in England to a Jamaican mother and an English father. Raised in the countryside, it wasn’t until the end of the First World War that she started her artistic education in London after moving there as a young woman. While working at the Pensions Branch of the War Office in 1920 she honed her interest in sculpture at the Saint Martin’s School of Art and at the Royal Academy. [1] It was during this period that she reconnected with Norman Manley, her Jamaican cousin who had traveled to England to study law. This sparked a romance that would bring Edna to her mother’s homeland. The couple married and moved with their first child to Jamaica in 1922.

Encountering Jamaica, then a British colony developing its nationalist and anti-colonial movement, would prove formative for the artist. Manley observed a country she had until then known mostly through others’ memories and would focus her interest on the Black working class, which made up most of the island’s population.

Edna Manley, Beadseller, 1922, bronze (National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston) © the artist’s estate

She produced Beadseller in 1923, which represents a kneeling woman in bronze. The figure gathers her arms to her chest almost in prayer, a rosary-like string of beads clutched in her hands. There is no indication of her status as a bead seller beyond the title. Manley opted to focus on the pose and character of the market seller, capturing her hopes and desperation in her pose. The figure itself is also a study in the geometry of the body, as Manley focused on abstracting the anatomy, reducing the torso, arms, and legs to sharp lines and geometric shapes. This style seems tied to vorticism, a relatively short-lived English avant-garde movement that combined a Cubist approach to the fragmentation of body and space with an interest in industrial machinery and the modern city. Both Manley’s interest in the working and Black population of Jamaica and the stylization of the human figure would continue to be explored into the 1930s when she produced her most politically charged works, which include Negro Aroused.

Shaping Jamaica

Manley’s approach is informed by the growing economic and political tensions in 1920s Jamaica. The island, as with other British Caribbean possessions, was dealing with an economic crisis that would only deepen in the coming years. The boom experienced by the sugar industry during WWI had ended, affecting a considerable part of the population who could not compete with migrant workers arriving from Panama to purchase land. [2] The divide between classes widened and contributed to tensions that would ignite violent clashes in the next decade and reshape Jamaican politics with the formation of pro-workers political parties and influential labor unions.

Jamaica in the Caribbean (underlying map © Google)

The Pan-Africanism movement and anti-colonialist sentiments were also growing and promoting the reevaluation of Jamaica’s African ancestry and the calls for self-determination. Manley, a light-skinned English-Jamaican woman married to a mixed-race lawyer with a developing career in politics, did not remain indifferent. The privileged economic and social status provided by her husband’s work allowed her to continue her artistic production and to connect with different sectors of Jamaican society. Edna Manley involved herself in the development of a local art scene by teaching art and becoming editor of Jamaica’s first literary journal, Focus. [3] During the 1920s, she continued to travel to England to exhibit her work as she did not find spaces or an audience to do so in Jamaica, but by the early 1930s, she was strongly committed to the local art and culture sector.

Norman Manley’s political career and the development of the People’s National Party (PNP), which he founded in 1938, would also foster her interest in political change. The People’s National Party aligned itself with working-class struggles, promoting social democratic policies, universal suffrage, and the island’s independence from Great Britain. Edna Manley herself took part in promoting the PNP, its rallies, and community service. [4] It is in this charged political atmosphere that the artist felt the responsibility to develop a national aesthetic for a rising Jamaica.

Edna Manley, Negro Aroused, 1935, mahogany wood, 63.5 cm high (National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston) © the artist’s estate

Negro Aroused is a product of this context. The work was sculpted in local wood in 1935 and exhibited to the public in 1937 at Manley’s first individual show in Jamaica. The reception was immensely positive, as the work responded well to the cultural nationalism budding at the time, leading to the purchase of the work by the Institute of Jamaica by public subscription. [5] The piece only measures 63.5 cm in height yet it encapsulates a strength and hope that clearly resonated with the artist and the nationalist movement. It has since also been regarded as an icon of the independence movement in its highlighting of the Black population as encompassing Jamaica’s nationhood.

The nude male figure lifts himself, his body seemingly sprouting from the wooden base (which is part of the sculpture). His arms and hands are disproportionately large for his torso. They are posed in front of his body, framing him and the space between them, in a manner graceful and dancelike. Their thickness emphasizes their shape and power. The lines of his arms lead our gaze to his upturned head, his neck stretched, and his face is set in profile when viewed from the front. The wood is dark and polished, with the careful use of texture to provide depth and interest. The skin is defined by small and very shallow grooves, while deeper and larger ones represent the figure’s short hair. Thin and precise incisions in the wood define his features.

Carved grooves demarcate the skin and hair (detail), Edna Manley, Negro Aroused, 1935, mahogany wood, 63.5 cm high (National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston) © the artist’s estate

The rounded forms of the body mark a difference from Manley’s interest in the sharp geometry that characterizes Beadseller. In Negro Aroused, the lines are curved, and the tubular quality of the arms adds mass when contrasted with the flatness of the torso. This approach to the human body is not dissimilar to the style found in much of British modernist sculpture, like that produced in the 1920s and 1930s by Alan L. Durst, work she likely knew from her trips to England during that same period. Manley’s work focuses on more than technical experimentation and the study of anatomy through a modernist lens. She was consciously designing an image in response to the political and cultural climate in Jamaica, as she explained: “[I] was trying to create a national vision … trying to put something into being that was bigger than myself and almost other than myself. It [took] me weeks to stop being the Negro Aroused.”[6]

Edna Manley, Negro Aroused (bronze cast), 1982, 78 cm high (The David Boxer/Oynx Foundation Collection National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston) © the artist’s estate

Manley’s commitment to Jamaican culture and politics would remain steadfast in the coming years. She organized art classes in the Institute of Jamaica in the 1940s which would be the seed for the Jamaica School of Art and Crafts. [7] The school was officially founded in 1950 and is now known as the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts. She would continue to support her husband’s career; Normal Manley would become Chief Minister in 1955 until 1959 and served as Premier from 1959 to 1962. Their son Michael Manley would also follow his footsteps, becoming Prime Minister of Jamaica for the first time in 1972.

Edna Manley, Negro Aroused, Kingston, Jamaica, bronze, 1991 (photo: Kevin Fraser, CC BY-NC 2.0) © the artist’s estate

Edna Manley’s own work would turn more personal and retrospective from the late 1940s onward, exploring emotional themes like grief and the role of women in society. The popular legacy of Negro Aroused as an icon of Black empowerment in an independent Jamaica would also continue, culminating in the commission of a monumental version in bronze to adorn a public space. The bronze version was finished posthumously in 1991 and has since presided over the Caribbean Sea in the Kingston waterfront.

Hassam’s Impressionist painting provides a visual form of optimism on the very brink of America’s entry into the First World War.

Childe Hassam, Allies Day, May 1917, 1917, oil on canvas, 92.7 x 76.8 cm (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Speakers: Dr. Bryan Zygmont and Dr. Steven Zucker

Painted during WWII, Tamayo’s howling dog leaves the viewer with a deep sense of dread.

Rufino Tamayo, Perro aullando a la luna (Dog Howling at the Moon), 1942, oil on canvas, 112.4 x 85.7 cm (Art Bridges, Bentonville) © estate of the artist. Speakers: Dr. Javier Rivero Ramos, Assistant Curator, Art Bridges Foundation, and Dr. Beth Harris

Lie portrays man’s dominance over nature in his painting of the construction of the Panama Canal.

Jonas Lie, The Conquerors (Culebra Cut, Panama Canal), 1913, oil on canvas, 152.4 x 127 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Speakers: Dr. Kate Clarke Lemay, Historian, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution and Dr. Steven Zucker

Following the Cuban War of Independence, Menocal seeks to create a distinct Cuban iconography.

Armando García Menocal, Campesino y soldado español (Peasant and Spanish soldier), 1902, oil on canvas, 43.2 x 64.8 cm (Collection of Emilio and Sylvia M. Ortiz) on display in the exhibition, 1898: Visual Culture and U.S. Imperialism in the Caribbean and the Pacific at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Speakers: Dr. Taína Caragol, Curator of Painting and Sculpture and Latino Art and History, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution and Dr. Beth Harris

Historical styles dominated 19th-century architecture in the United States. American architecture, like the country itself, was young and wanted to connect to European historical styles that brought sophistication and cultural status to the new edifices of the United States. American vernacular architecture was made of wood—and to many, American architecture was anything but cosmopolitan. Among the most popular styles was the Classical revival which reinterpreted the forms of Greek and Roman architecture. The adaptation of Egyptian architecture, especially obelisks, as funerary markers and memorials was also widespread. Americans were used to seeing banks and financial buildings modeled on the ancient Parthenon, libraries that recalled the Pantheon, or an obelisk celebrating the legacy of a president, like George Washington.

There was also a limited revival of the architecture of the ancient Near East, which many scholars today call ancient Western Asia. In late 19th-century and early 20th-century New York City, the use of historical styles was often about finding a way to stand out from the crowd, to distinguish one’s building, business, or restaurant. These styles were exotic and different. The reception—the reinterpretation and adaptation—of ancient Assyria and ancient Western Asia enjoyed a brief moment of popularity in New York City, as we can see in four such buildings.

In the early 20th century, newly minted millionaires flocked to expensive, late-night establishments known as Lobster Palaces, where lobster and champagne were served after the theater. These restaurants competed with each other for deep-pocketed clients by creating over-the-top interiors. 

Postcard of Main Dining Room, Café de l’Opéra (photo: author)

One of these Lobster Palaces known as Café de l’Opéra (at Broadway and Forty-Second Street) was remodeled in 1909. Its new décor reinterpreted and combined designs, art, and architecture from Assyria, Babylon, and Achaemenid Persian in one large mash-up of motifs from ancient Western Asia. According to The Architects’ and Builders’ Magazine, “Khorsbad (sic) or Perseopolis (sic) or an ancient Persian Tomb” inspired the main dining room which had three stories of seating around a central court with a fountain, whose central feature was a Mesopotamian ziggurat topped with an illuminated orb, tucked inside a pavilion supported by black marble columns. The capitals of these columns, rather than being decorated with Assyrian motifs, were actually replicas of the Achaemenid Persian bull capitals from the audience hall (apadana) of the palace of Darius I at Susa. 

Postcard of the Grand Staircase, Café de l’Opéra (photo: author)

Painted lions, a central motif in the palaces of ancient Iraq and Iran, adorned the balcony landing. The monumental staircase was carpeted and flanked by pairs of gilded lions and colossal lamassu that rose to the balconies and upper floors, which The New York Times reported “was modeled after the famous staircase in the Temple of Persepolis.” A reproduction of the 1891 painting The Fall of Babylon by the French painter Georges Rochegrosse covered the lofty side wall of the main dining room. There was little interest in archaeological accuracy—rather the appeal of these exotic motifs was that they were historical and melodramatic. These design choices were also full of implied debauchery, which was very appropriate considering that Lobster Palaces were often establishments where men took their mistresses while their wives were tucked up at home on Long Island or the Upper East Side of Manhattan. 

These interiors played directly into many of the American and European stereotypical views of the Middle East or Western Asia as exotic, sensual, and sexualized. They embodied the inaccurate but powerful Oriental fantasies that Americans and Europeans created in their art and literature starting in the 19th century. While these motifs were highly original, the service at Café de l’Opéra was subpar (the food often arrived cold) and the dress was too formal. It soon went out of business despite its unique décor.

The ziggurat, the stepped pyramid of ancient Western Asia, was a natural inspiration for New York’s skyscrapers. In his 1929 book The Metropolis of Tomorrow, the delineator and architectural illustrator Hugh Ferris noted the ziggurat (which he identified as Assyrian) embodied the New York zoning law of 1916. This law required that buildings have setbacks to allow light and air to circulate and reach the ground level. As a result, skyscrapers built in a step-pyramid style were incredibly popular. Ferris’s confusion suggests that archaeological accuracy and knowledge was not as important as in other receptions of ancient Assyrian art and architecture. That said, modern ziggurats dotted New York City’s skyline.

130 West 30th Street (1927–28)

Setbacks and ziggurat shape at 130 West 30th Street, New York (photo: author)

Between 1927 and 1928, Cass Gilbert was hired to design a loft building at 130 West 30th Street. While commercial lofts were designed with utility in mind, their exterior aesthetics could help distinguish them from other buildings. Hiring Cass Gilbert, who had designed the famous Woolworth Building and countless other masterpieces, was another way for the developer to attract tenants in the competitive landscape of Manhattan’s garment district. One Hundred Thirty West 30th Street had architectural setbacks, as required by the 1916 zoning law, which gave the building a ziggurat-like appearance. Glazed terracotta friezes with mythical Neo-Hittite griffins and Syro-Hittite sphinxes decorated the building’s six setbacks. Lamashtu, a fearsome demon in ancient Mesopotamia, stood guard at some of the corners. These polychrome tiles and the setbacks differentiated the top of this building from its surroundings.

Main Entrance, 130 West 30th Street, New York (photo: author)

Over both the front and service entrances was the same terracotta relief of a hunting scene, with two male figures in a chariot shooting arrows at deer. The source for this relief is not those from the North-West palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud, but rather, they are based on Neo-Hittite reliefs. The Louvre has a nearly identical scene from the kingdom of Milid (Malatya) in southeastern Anatolia and northern Syria dating from 1200 B.C.E. The ziggurat setbacks and Neo-Hittite sphinxes and griffins were unique in New York’s architectural landscape. The abstract aesthetic of the two-toned terracotta tiles and the building’s clean lines reflect the aesthetics of Art Deco, the artistic style that was emerging in the 1920s. Western Asian, Egyptian, and Minoan styles were already influencing Art Deco motifs and designs. The building feels undeniably more modern than skyscrapers that used historical styles.

Fred French Building (1927)

Ancient Assyrian art was used to decorate two other prominent New York City buildings: the Fred French Building and the Pythian Temple. Again, Assyrian motifs were intended to distinguish these buildings rather than to be archaeologically accurate. Between 1925 and 1927, the property developer Fred French erected his headquarters at 45th Street and Fifth Avenue. The diverse artistic traditions of ancient Western Asia inspired the Fred French building’s interesting top and setbacks, as well as bright polychrome terracottas and the decoration of the two lobbies and street-level façades.

Fred French’s in-house architect, H. Douglas Ives, worked with the firm Sloan & Robertson on the skyscraper. They adapted “Assyrian or Chaldean forms of ornament” for the flat surfaces of the building. For his design, Ives referenced the polychrome Tower of the Seven Planets, another name for the Tower of Babel, and observed that setbacks would permit planted terraces, like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Ives called the style “Mesopotamian,” although this seems to have been a catch-all for the use of architectural and artistic forms from ancient West Asia.

Faience reliefs and setbacks, Fred F. French Building, New York (photo: Tony Hisgett, CC-BY-2.0)

Colored tiles, which always had an important place in the architecture of ancient Western Asia, figured prominently here. On the north and south façades of the building’s top, there are identical polychrome faience reliefs that center on rising suns, which symbolize progress, flanked by winged griffins, symbolizing watchfulness and integrity. Separated from the sun and griffins by two Corinthian columns are two golden beehives, each surrounded by five bees, which have symbolized thrift and industry since antiquity. The reliefs, with their glossy and polychrome finish, helped the Fred French building to stand out in New York’s Midtown skyline during the day. At night, the building’s crown was illuminated, adding to its prominence in the cityscape. The head of Mercury, the Roman god of commerce, appears on the building’s eastern and western sides.

The 5th Avenue Entrance, Fred F. French Building, New York (photo: Chris Sampson, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The building’s two lobbies and decorated façades are unique. The Fifth Avenue entrance featured lamassus and Pegasus (here mixing ancient Western Asian and Greek forms), as well as victory-like figures in the spandrels, that framed the door. The gilt-bronze doors are decorated with winged griffins, while Assyrian palmettes, lotus flowers, lions, chevron bands, merlons, winged bulls, and volutes adorned the Fifth Avenue lobby. Scaled-down double bull capitals inspired by the palace of Darius the Great in Susa were also included, as was a polychrome ceiling. The lobby and main entrance on 45th Street were similarly decorated.

The Pythian Temple (1927)

Designed by Thomas W. Lamb, the Pythian Temple (at 135 West 70th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues) is one of New York’s most original buildings and combines the artistic and architectural traditions of ancient Assyria, Babylon, and Egypt. Completed in 1927, the Pythian temple served as a lodge for the Knights of Pythias, a fraternal organization.

The main entrance is embellished with a golden inscription set against a black tile background and framed by two crowned asps, each with an ankh and two Egyptian-style vultures. Above the inscription there are polychrome terracotta tiles, evocative of Babylonian brickwork, and Egyptianizing plant motifs, where open and closed lotus leaves alternate. At the top, there was the inverted triangular, multi-color symbol of the Pythian Knights, flanked by two muscular griffins.

Entrance of the Pythian Temple, 135 West 70th Street, New York (photo: author)

Four massive columns flank the main entrance on each side. The capitals are composed of two bearded, male heads with headdresses that derive from male figures in ancient Assyrian sculptural reliefs. At the east and west ends of the building, there are pairs of lamassus. The building was converted into condominium apartments in 1982, the middle section of the building was completely remodeled and most of the details were removed. The upper third is divided into three levels with setbacks and draws heavily on Egyptian architectural and sculptural traditions. It includes four seated, polychrome statues of pharaohs based on the statues from the famous site of Abu Simbel, which Ramesses II erected in the mid-13th century B.C.E.

Architecture inspired by ancient Assyria and ancient Western Asia did not become wide-spread in New York or the United States. Rather in the first three decades of the 20th century, architects and patrons used exotic Assyrianizing and Neo-Hittite motifs and architecture strategically to help their skyscraper, restaurant, lodge, and a loft to stand out in New York’s competitive urban landscape.

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo California, 1936, printed later, gelatin silver print, 35.24 x 27.78 cm (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, PG.1997.2). Speakers: Eve Schillo, Assistant Curator, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Steven Zucker

Florence Owens’s grandson, Roger Sprague, identified the subjects, from left to right, as: “Katherine Owens age 4, Florence Owens (later known as Thompson) age 32, Ruby Owens age 5. Baby on mother’s lap is Norma age 1 year.” [1] Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother / Destitute Pea Pickers in California, Mother of Seven Children. Age Thirty-Two. Nipomo, California, 1936, digital reproduction from retouched negative (Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

I didn’t want to stop, and didn’t. I didn’t want to remember that I had seen it, so I drove on and ignored the summons. … Having well convinced myself for twenty miles that I could continue on, I did the opposite. Almost without realizing what I was doing, I made a U-turn on the empty highway. [3]

She eventually did turn around, and toward the camp of 2,500 out-of-work migratory agriculture workers. At that moment, Lange noticed what she  described as a “hungry and desperate mother” surrounded by her children and crowded under a makeshift tent. She took seven photographs—only five were deemed by Lange to be good enough to send to Washington, D.C., after she retouched the negative to make a thumb at the right edge of the picture plane of the Migrant Mother less apparent to viewers. [4]

Dorothea Lange, four other frames from the Migrant Mother shoot, 1936 (Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.: upper left; upper right; lower left; lower right)

In an account written in 1960, Lange describes her interaction with the central figure of the photograph (originally titled Destitute Pea Pickers in California. Mother of Seven Children. Age Thirty-Two. Nipomo, California), a newly widowed, Cherokee woman, Florence Owens, who shortly would become known as “Migrant Mother”:

I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. The pea crop at Nipomo had frozen and there was no work for anybody. But I did not approach the tents and shelters of other stranded pea-pickers. It was not necessary; I knew I had recorded the essence of my assignment. [5]

The making of an iconic photograph

The essence of Lange’s assignment—and the mission of all Resettlement Administration/Farm Security Administration photographers’ work—was to capture iconic, memorable images of agricultural workers that roused support for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal relief programs. Migrant Mother—which reveals an anxious mother holding a baby as two of her other children bury their heads on her shoulders—draws on the familiar trope of the Madonna and Child in Christian art as it evokes sympathy and, ideally, a spirit of humanitarian generosity toward its subjects.

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, digital file of black-and-white film copy negative of unretouched file print showing thumb holding a tent pole in the lower right corner (Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

Lange’s supervisor, Roy Stryker, believed this image encapsulated the goals of RA/FSA most succinctly:

When Dorothea took that picture, that was the ultimate. She never surpassed it. To me, it was the picture of Farm Security. The others were marvelous but that was special. [6]

As an icon, the photograph Migrant Mother is larger than one woman’s story. Instead, the pictured mother stands for the plight of suffering, poverty, and uncertainty among rural laborers during the Great Depression. Migrant Mother immediately was (and still is) circulated by the U.S. government, free of charge, to the press and the public. [7]

This was among the first publications of photographs from Lange’s Migrant Mother series, which were taken in late February or early March of 1936. The San Francisco News, March 10, 1936

Beyond iconicity: misrepresenting Migrant Mother’s story

Migrant Mother provided such a persuasive, straightforward, and iconic image of a destitute, worried mother concerned about providing for her children that a sympathetic public and government sent a total of $200,000 in aid and free medical care to the pea-picker’s camp three days later. [8] Sadly, by that time, Owens and her children already had moved on to find other work. She never got to take advantage of the “help” Lange promised the photograph would bring.

Despite caption information provided by Lange, Owens’s family did have a car, which her soon-to-be future husband (Jim Hill) had taken to buy parts and repair. [9] That car had all of its tires, and Hill would return in it to retrieve Owens and her 6 (not 7) children, so they could leave the 2,500-person pea-picker’s camp, which would shortly be raided by locals who arrested and beat its remaining inhabitants. [10]

As historian Milton Meltzer noted, Lange’s caption-writing and note-taking habits were lax, and tracking the details of her subjects and their circumstances frequently took a backseat to photographing. [11] Lange acknowledged these allegations of misrepresenting Owens, and claimed that the image did more good than harm.

Living in the shadow of the photograph’s iconicity

Although Owens and her children were not abandoned to starve to death, and would survive the Great Depression, she resented being associated with the Migrant Mother photograph for the rest of her life, her daughter attests: “She was a very strong woman. She was a leader. I think that’s one of the reasons she resented the photo — because it didn’t show her in that light.” [12] Rather, the iconic image transcended Owens’s actual story and became a part of a U.S. macro-narrative of suffering and motherly fortitude during the Great Depression.

Owens—a woman of color—felt forever stereotyped as the destitute, suffering mother, trapped in poverty by the repeated reproductions of her image that appeared in newspapers, magazines, art exhibitions, on the pages of our history books, and on postage stamps, t-shirts, parodic magazine illustrations, and trinkets. In 1958, after Migrant Mother was included in exhibitions and published widely for two decades, Owens wrote a letter to one publication, U.S. Camera, and insisted on being consulted about future plans to publish the image. She asked for all copies of that issue of U.S. Camera to be recalled. [13] Because neither Lange nor any of the publications made money from the photograph, they did not offer Owens compensation. Instead, Lange apologized and offered sympathy to the woman whose individual story and likeness were co-opted to fulfill a political program’s narrative.

Revolutionary soldiers (detail), Diego Rivera, “Distribution of Arms,” Court of the Fiestas, third floor, mural in the Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City (photo: Megan Flattley, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

What is the intersection of art and politics? When and how does art serve as propaganda or as a political force for change? For Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, all art was propaganda. In his autobiography he wrote,

Every strong artist has been a propagandist. I want to be a propagandist and I want to be nothing else. I want to be a propagandist of Communism and I want to be it in all that I can think, in all that I can speak, in all that I can write, and in all that I can paint. I want to use my art as a weapon.[1]

This idea of art as a weapon was prominent in the 1920s and 1930s when there was an international discourse on how art could best serve a political cause. Rivera was painting at a time when artists were exploring the artistic possibilities of how their work could further the political project of postrevolutionary Mexico and, for Rivera and other Communist artists, the political project of international socialism. As a Communist, Rivera saw his murals as playing an important role in the class struggle, writing,

In order to be good art . . . it must be revolutionary art, art of the proletariat.[2]

Today it might be difficult to imagine an artist being commissioned by the government to paint mural scenes that advocate for an international workers’ revolution on the walls of a state building, but that is exactly what Diego Rivera did at the Ministry of Public Education (Secretaría de Educación Pública, or SEP) in Mexico City.

An aerial view of the Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City (underlying map © Google)

Rivera was not just any artist, however, and by 1928 he had attained an international artistic reputation that afforded him protection from censorship that other artists might have faced and this enabled him to be more explicitly political in his mural work. Executed over the course of five years, the mural cycle at the SEP offers the chance to study the evolution of Rivera’s politics and style in response to changing political conditions and an influential trip to the Soviet Union in 1927.

Diagram of the 3rd floor mural program for the Court of Fiestas, Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City (underlying map © Google)

The SEP cycle

Rivera was commissioned to paint 117 panels at the SEP building that covered two courtyards and three levels. The courtyards were divided thematically into a “Court of Labor” and a “Court of Fiestas.” The initial phase of the mural cycle (the first and second floors painted in 1923–24) represents the traditions and culture of the Mexican people, as well as the central role of agrarian reform (redistribution of agricultural land) in the Mexican Revolution. Rivera depicted the role of the arts in advancing the revolutionary struggle in the stairwell and third floor “Court of Labor” murals. 

Diego Rivera, Court of the Fiestas, third floor, mural in the Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City (photo: Megan Flattley, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

In the third floor “Court of Fiestas,” Rivera looked increasingly to the future and the proletarian revolution that would further the project of the agrarian revolution. In the third floor “Court of Fiestas,” Rivera painted a “Corrido of Agrarian Revolution” that depicted the results of the 1910–20 Mexican Revolution, before painting the “Corrido of the Proletarian Revolution” after his trip to the Soviet Union in 1927, where he rendered a socialist revolution that was international and industrial.

Diego Rivera, beginning of the “Corrido of the Agrarian Revolution,” Court of the Fiestas, third floor, mural in the Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City (photo: Megan Flattley, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The Court of Fiestas

Corridos are a Mexican narrative ballads that were popular during the Revolution. In Rivera’s murals, the lyrics to the corrido are represented upon a painted red banner that unites the various panels as well as the two distinct corrido cycles. The cycles are further linked through the illusionistic archways that Rivera painted to frame each scene. Throughout the cycle, Rivera renders figures and forms partially outside the frame, which further brings the revolutionary subject matter into the space of the viewer.  

Corrido of the Agrarian Revolution

The “Corrido of the Agrarian Revolution” begins with a woman (modeled after the singer and activist Concha Michel) singing the corrido to a group of people in the countryside. Ribboned lyrics emerge from her mouth before continuing along the top of the remaining walls. This cycle depicts scenes that reflect the successes of the Mexican Revolution.

Diego Rivera, Literacy (left) and The Eras (right), “Corrido of the Agrarian Revolution,” Court of the Fiestas, third floor, mural in the Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City (photos: Megan Flattley, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Scenes such as Literacy, where revolutionary soldiers are shown reading and a teacher is distributing books, represent the centrality of education in the postrevolutionary project (and reflects on the function of the building where the mural was created) by depicting the campaigns to spread education throughout the nation. 

Rivera depicts farmers, or campesinos, as foundational for the success of post-revolutionary Mexico in panels such as The Eras, where farmers are shown transporting large bundles of wheat. The way that the curves of their laboring backs echo the curved bundles indicates the harmony of the worker with the land. The corrido lyric above this scene reads: “Just as the soldiers have served for the war they give fruit to the nation and work the land,” indicating the unity of the efforts of soldiers and campesinos, a theme that is repeated throughout the cycle.

Diego Rivera, The Capitalist Dinner (left) and Wall Street Banquet (right), “Corrido of the Agrarian Revolution,” Court of the Fiestas, third floor, mural in the Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City (photos: Megan Flattley, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Diego Rivera, Our Daily Bread, “Corrido of the Agrarian Revolution,” Court of the Fiestas, third floor, mural in the Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City (photo: Megan Flattley, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Diego Rivera, We Want to Work, “Corrido of the Agrarian Revolution,” Court of the Fiestas, third floor, mural in the Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City (photo: Megan Flattley, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

This harmony is not present in the scenes in which Rivera caricatures capitalism. In The Capitalist Dinner, figures with grotesque faces sit before a meal of gold coins, with a hungry child crying in the foreground. Behind the capitalists, happy farmers carry a bounty of food, sharpening the contrast between the health of those who value the land and its products and those who exploit it for profit.

Rivera expands on this comparison between capitalism and socialism (or if not yet full socialism, an economic system that values the land and those who work it) in Wall Street Dinner, where he represents rich New Yorkers, such as the magnates John D. Rockefeller, Pierpont Morgan, and Henry Ford feasting on the ticker tape of the stock market. This scene compositionally mirrors Our Daily Bread, which depicts a man (modeled after the socialist governor Felipe Carillo Puerto) wearing the red star of Communism breaking bread before a collective meal. Behind him, the figure of the Tehuana, women from the region of Tehuantepec who became icons of Mexican culture, balances an abundance of fruit upon her head. In these panels, Rivera makes the point that, though the Mexican farmer’s existence is simple, his is true wealth because it comes from a harmony with the land. [3] This is further made explicit in We Want to Work, where Rivera has painted the phrase, “all the wealth in the world comes from the field” in the mouth of a land surveyor.

The “Corrido of the Agrarian Revolution” centers farm workers and scenes of the Mexican countryside, but it also integrates new technology in panels such as The Tractor. The embrace of technology and modernization greatly informs Rivera’s depiction of the international socialist cause in the other corrido, the “Corrido of the Proletarian Revolution.” 

Diego Rivera, Distribution of Arms, “Corrido of the Proletarian Revolution” Court of the Fiestas, third floor, mural in the Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City (photo: Megan Flattley, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Corrido of the Proletarian Revolution

The “Corrido of the Proletarian Revolution” begins with Distribution of Arms, a scene where a woman in red (modeled after the artist’s later wife Frida Kahlo) distributes rifles to revolutionary soldiers at the outbreak of the revolution. Again, the figures in the scene come out beyond the painted architectural border, entering the viewer’s space and incorporating them into the scene, inviting them to take up arms. Also prominent in the foreground are figures modeled after the photographer Tina Modotti and muralist Davíd Alfaro Siqueiros. This inclusion reflects the role that Rivera saw for the artist in distributing ammunition (both literal and metaphorical) to the Mexican people to construct the postrevolutionary society. [4] The lyrics on the ribbon show that this scene, however, is futuristic, reading “And so the proletarian revolution will be. . . .” Here, the Proletarian Revolution is depicted as the eventual successor to Mexico’s recent revolution, reflecting an evolution in Rivera’s politics from a focus on the agrarian revolution in Mexico to an international understanding of political revolution.

Diego Rivera, A Single Front, “Corrido of the Proletarian Revolution,” Court of the Fiestas, third floor, mural in the Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City (photo: Megan Flattley, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Trip to the USSR

The “Corrido of the Proletarian Revolution” was painted after Rivera’s trip to the Soviet Union in 1927, where he served as the representative of the Mexican Communist Party at the 10th anniversary celebration of the October Revolution. While there, Rivera became more involved in the intricacies of international socialist politics. For example, there was great debate at the time over Josef Stalin’s theory of “socialism in a single country,” in which the Soviet Union turned towards its own national development rather than attempting to initiate further socialist revolutions globally. Rivera, at the time, was aligned with the Trotskyist view that international revolution was necessary to challenge the global dominance of capitalism. Compared to the stairwell and third floor Court of Labor one can see the artist’s political evolution from an emphasis on the Mexican revolution to a view that centers the importance of an international socialist revolution.

After returning from the Soviet Union, Rivera included imagery of Slavic-looking workers and industrial labor, such as in A Single Front, in which a Soviet revolutionary oversees the handshake of a Mexican campesino and a revolutionary soldier. A Single Front can also be read as a response to these debates and divisions within the international Left, with Rivera calling for a united front in the revolutionary cause (formally echoed in the repeated forms of the raised bayonets) while at the same time repeating a theme that is prominent throughout the rest of the cycle (the solidarity between worker and soldier). 

Diego Rivera, The Cooperative (left) and The Protest (right), “Corrido of the Proletarian Revolution,” Court of the Fiestas, third floor, mural in the Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City (photos: Megan Flattley, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Gustav Klutsis, “Let’s Fulfill the Plan of Great Works,” 1930, lithograph, 118.4 x 83.8 cm (MoMA)

Through his inclusion of industrial factory scenes, Rivera depicted a vision of modernization. He also rendered the socialization of the means of production in The Cooperative, where he imagines a factory owned and controlled by workers.

Another factory can be seen in The Protest, where against a backdrop of a red hammer and sickle flag, an anonymous mass of workers are rendered with their hands raised in solidarity, a motif that would be prominent internationally among artists of the Left, for example, in the photomontages of Gustav Klutsis.  

Diego Rivera, the end of “Corrido of the Proletarian Revolution,” Court of the Fiestas, third floor, mural in the Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City (photo: Megan Flattley, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Artists on the Left

In the “Corrido of the Proletarian Revolution,” Rivera engaged with an international conversation on how art can change the world. While in Moscow, Rivera participated in artist debates over the appropriate form of a revolutionary art, and even signed the manifesto of the artist group October, which included Soviet artists such as Alexander Rodchenko, Sergei Eisenstein, and Alexander Deineka. At a time when many in the Soviet Union were decrying avant-garde artistic forms such as abstraction and montage as “bourgeois” and calling for a realist artistic style, October aimed to incorporate such avant-garde artistic developments into their work created for the masses. Rivera agreed that artists must adapt “the most advanced technical achievements of bourgeois art . . . to the needs of the proletarian revolution.” [5]

An international conversation

Rivera’s mural cycle on the third floor of the SEP referring to the corridos is a critical work that reflects the international conversation of the time surrounding the role and style of revolutionary art. In the stairwell and “Court of Labor” murals, Rivera depicted the decisive position of the revolutionary artist in the collective struggle for a better world. When compared to the corrido cycles in the “Court of Fiestas,” we can see how Rivera’s own view of what that better world looked like was evolving. 

While the panels Rivera painted at the SEP before his 1927 trip to the Soviet Union primarily depict Mexico—its industries, celebrations, and people—the corridos cycle in the Court of Fiestas on the third floor reflects Rivera’s new sense of class consciousness, or an awareness of one’s class status and one’s role in the class struggle, across national lines. Rather than exclusively heralding the achievements of the Mexican Revolution, Rivera, and other Communists, began to see it as an initial step towards the achievement of an international socialist revolution, one in which artists wanted to play a contributing role.

Ramón Frade, Our Daily Bread, 1905, oil on canvas (Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, San Juan)

Ramón Frade created an icon with his 1905 painting Our Daily Bread. The figure of an older man dominates the composition. He is frontal and monumental. Set in the center foreground, we look up at him as he rises high above the mountainous landscape in the background. The weathered lines of his face are rendered in great detail, as are the prominent veins of his hands and feet that speak of age and a life of labor in the mountains and valleys of Puerto Rico.

The painting and its origin

The scene is set in the countryside of Puerto Rico, in a geography reminiscent of the area of Cayey, where the artist lived most of his adult life. The jíbaro walks barefoot on a dirt path, dressed in tan pants and a thin, white shirt with a small rip below the right shoulder. He cradles in his arms a bunch of mafafo bananas (a type of plantain), fruits that have long been a staple of the Puerto Rican diet. The machete he used to cut down the bundle hangs from his waist from a rope and a straw hat covers his graying hair. The man’s gaze is directed toward the viewer; he is tired but dignified as the sun lights half of his face.

Path (detail), Ramón Frade, Our Daily Bread, 1905, oil on canvas (Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, San Juan)

Our eyes move left to follow the path that leads to the banana field (on the lower left corner, we see tall banana leaves) where the man harvested the fruit he carries. As the path continues to the right, it becomes fenced off behind a small wooden gate. The fence wires create a diagonal line that allows us to cross the landscape to the right side of the composition.

Bohío (detail), Ramón Frade, Our Daily Bread, 1905, oil on canvas (Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, San Juan)

The fencing is mirrored by the rising slope of a hill, crowned by a small, wooden bohío and a lone palm tree. The gentle incline of the mountains in the middle ground are painted in the varied shades of green and ocher of the dry season in spring. Mountains fade into the cloudy horizon, which is crowned by a bright blue sky.

Frade produced this painting as a show of skill when requesting financial aid from the government to study art in Italy. He sent it to the Chamber of Delegates in San Juan, where the almost five-foot-tall painting was exhibited and well-received by local politicians and journalists. Painter Francisco Oller was consulted on the artistic merit of the painting and with his endorsement the stipend was approved. [1] Unfortunately, the decision was reverted by Regis H. Post, the U.S. assigned Secretary of State. After numerous tries, his request was finally approved in 1907 by Governor Beekman Winthrop; Frade would spend four months in Italy. [2]

While Frade was already a professional artist, he had been interested in visiting Europe to augment his formal artistic training. He was born in Cayey, Puerto Rico, but was soon adopted by a well-off Spanish-Dominican family after the death of his biological father. He lived for most of his childhood in Spain before spending his youth in the Dominican Republic where the family settled in 1885. In the capital of Santo Domingo, he started his training first at the Municipal Drawing School with Felipe de los Santos, before studying painting with French artist Adolphe Laglande.

Frade would go on to work as an illustrator for different publications in the Dominican Republic before setting up a painting studio in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He traveled extensively around the Caribbean and Latin America. While still living in Hispaniola he periodically visited his biological family in Puerto Rico and saw the economic and political precariousness accelerated by the changes brought by the Spanish-American War, before moving back to his hometown around 1902.

The jíbaro as national symbol in the wake of U.S. occupation

Everything seen here—from the old farmer with his machete and pava to the mountains with the wooden bohío—speaks of Puerto Rican national identity. [3] The jíbaro became a national and cultural symbol of Puerto Rico in 19th-century literature and painting. Publications like Manuel Alonso’s El Gíbaro and artworks like Oller’s The Wake sought to represent local traditions and people in order to identify what was distinctly Puerto Rican. This process of recognition and representation occurred in Spanish Puerto Rico, as many considered the region and themselves in light of independence struggles in continental America as new republics like Colombia and Chile sprang up and severed ties with their once dominant European colonial administrations. Artists, writers, and intellectuals found in the rural population the character and ways of being that they believed set Puerto Ricans apart from the Spanish.

However, Frade painted this image in a different context. In 1898, the United States military invaded Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War. By the end of the year, the archipelago became a possession of the United States after the signing of the Treaty of Paris. This treaty marked the end of the conflict between Spain and the U.S., and along with Puerto Rico it brought other Spanish territories (like Guam and the Philippines) under U.S. control.

Puerto Rico was ruled by the U.S. military until 1900, when a civilian government was established with the Foraker Act. This legal act had immense repercussions on Puerto Rico’s future. The U.S. appointed governors and high-ranking officials, controlled importation/exportation guidelines, and severely limited the influence that Puerto Ricans had on their own political and economic situation. People living in the territory did not have the same rights as those in the U.S., political limitations that carry over into the present.

The U.S. occupation provoked a wide array of reactions that evolved as the new administration put their policies into play. A segment of the population welcomed the new relation with the U.S., moved by dissatisfaction with Spain, while others considered the possibility of a union with the U.S. that maintained Puerto Rico’s political autonomy. Others worked toward independence, rejecting the United States as another colonial regime.

Jíbaro (detail), Ramón Frade, Our Daily Bread, 1905, oil on canvas (Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, San Juan)

The first decades of U.S. administration were marked by uncertainty and economic hardship for most of the population. The U.S. administration promoted the agrarian economy, particularly the sugar industry. U.S. and foreign-owned corporations bought up land for sugarcane and, along with poor labor conditions, created an exploitative industry that benefited few Puerto Ricans. Most of the labor was carried out in valleys and flat terrain close to the coastline and well suited for sugar cane. This, combined with the decline of the coffee industry in the mountains, exacerbated the economic strain of the rural, interior population. The new administration also brought Americanization policies, including the imposition of English in schools, a policy that was deeply resented. The Americanization policies provoked significant local resistance and fueled national anti-U.S. sentiment.

Artists like Frade found in the representations of jíbaros a way to push back against the cultural and political situation. This extended to an interest in the local landscape and traditions, present both in the visual arts and literature as a trend referred to as jíbarismo. [4] Our Daily Bread carried an undeniable political weight.

An identity considered imperiled by foreign influence

Here the jíbaro is representative of the population of the mountainside, impoverished and forced to move either to urban centers or abroad. Bigger than the landscape itself, the figure is not limited to the region; he encapsulates an identity considered imperiled by foreign influence. The Spanish-speaking jíbaros with their music and traditions were the perfect subjects with which to visualize the colonial struggle.

Ramón Frade, La Planchadora, 1948, oil on masonite (Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, San Juan)

Frade continued to respond to this in his work with compositions that idealized rural life in the mountains based on his observations and photographs of the people of his town. Our Daily Bread is clearly inspired by costumbrismo and could almost be considered a genre painting, yet the monumentality conferred to the jíbaro transforms it into something else. Even the title, a phrase found in The Lord’s Prayer, links the image to a sense of religiosity. The jíbaro’s daily labor producing and harvesting for a rural population becomes a religious act.

Frade would return to this same composition on eight different occasions, translating it into watercolor and smaller oil paintings as late as 1950. [5] Something about the painting interested Frade throughout his career, perhaps the desire to capture an identity he considered threatened by the new political reality.

A conversation with Dr.  Virginia Heckert, Curator, Department of Photographs, Getty Museum, and Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank, Dean of Content and Strategy, Smarthistory, at Getty Center in front of Shigemi Uyeda, Reflections on the Oil Ditch, c. 1925. Gelatin silver print, 33.5 x 26.5 cm. Getty Museum, Los Angeles © Family of Shigemi Uyeda

Shigemi Uyeda captured the environment of Los Angeles and the growing popularity of oil production in the early 20th century. He created a composition of hardened oil with water drops to capture the perfect reflection of an oil derrick from the early morning sun.

Getty has joined forces with Smarthistory to bring you an in-depth look at select works within our collection, whether you’re looking to learn more at home or want to make art more accessible in your classroom. This video series illuminates art history concepts through fun, unscripted conversations between art historians, curators, archaeologists, and artists, committed to a fresh take on the history of visual arts.

Esther Bubley, Waiting for the bus at the Memphis terminal, September 1943, photograph (Library of Congress)

At the age of 22, American photographer Esther Bubley took a six-week unaccompanied Greyhound bus trip, starting in New York City and ending in Memphis, for the U.S. government’s Office of War Information (OWI). Her assignment: to document everyday moments during the country’s transition from economic depression to mobilizing for World War II, as wartime rationing of gasoline and rubber pushed the public to embrace mass transit in droves.

According to OWI documentary director Roy Stryker, Bubley and her photographer colleagues were asked to capture “pictures of men, women and children who appear as if they really believe in the USA. Get people with a little spirit.” [1] Bubley’s Bus Story series from 1943 faithfully included photographs of dutiful Americans patriotically making sacrifices—altering their modes of transportation to save gasoline and rubber for the war effort—without complaining or putting their individual needs first. Like images made by OWI peers including Jack Delano and John Vachon, Bubley’s photographs conveyed the public’s absolute faith in the ability of the United States to win the war.

In Waiting for the Bus at the Memphis Terminal from the Bus Story series, Bubley captures a large crowd of passengers waiting to board buses in Memphis—the last stop on her route. [2] Instead of forming orderly lines, people stand in a mob, remarkably unaware of Bubley’s camera, and they wait patiently. Women wear dresses, a few men are in suits and hats, and an off-duty soldier and child appear in the left edge of the frame. As the Library of Congress’s archive suggests: “They captured a range of expression—anxiety, exhaustion, boredom and enthusiasm—of people on the homefront whose lives were inextricably caught up in the national effort of willing a safe and speedy victory for ‘our boys.’” [3]

Contradicting the patriotic message

Despite the OWI’s heavy-handed instructions to capture patriotic moments of dutiful sacrifice for the war effort, Bubley includes references to Jim Crow racial-segregation laws in Waiting for the Bus at the Memphis Terminal. Although the passengers mostly appear to be white, the sign “White Waiting Room” reminds viewers that the Black passengers in the Jim Crow South were not able to legally access the same waiting room as the white bus-riders. Black people also had to ride in the back of the buses, in deference to white passengers. Jim Crow laws disenfranchised Black citizens to reverse the political and economic gains they made during the Reconstruction era, and to discourage interracial mingling. Like a few images by government documentary photographers Gordon Parks and fellow female photographers Dorothea Lange and Marion Post Wolcott, Bubley’s Waiting for the Bus at the Memphis Terminal captures the daily realities of systemic racism in the U.S. during the Great Depression and World War II.

Man entering segregated movie house, Marion Post Wolcott, Crescent Theatre (Belzoni, Mississippi), 1939, nitrate negative, 35 mm (Library of Congress)

In addition to being legally obliged to use separate waiting rooms at bus stations, and separate water fountains, Black people living in the segregationist South also had separate entrances to theatres, and were required to sit in balcony seats, apart from white audiences.

These photographs nudged the government to address the issue of legalized racial division and its incompatibility with the country’s ideology of equality. Because segregation was at odds with an optimistic ideology of rallying support for war-time domestic sacrifice, the FSA and OWI shied from circulating these images to the public unless references to racism and racial policy could be cropped out of view. [4] The OWI project grew out of the Resettlement Administration’s (RA) and Farm Security Administration’s (FSA’s) efforts to create one of the largest and most comprehensive documentary-photography projects in U.S. history covering the Great Depression. Like RA/FSA, the OWI project targeted a middle-class audience through photographs made available to the popular press and other government branches at no cost. These images still are available to the public today through the Library of Congress.

By focusing on the bus-riding working class, Bubley’s Waiting for the Bus at the Memphis Terminal also subversively points out that sacrifices were not universally made by all Americans. As Jacqueline Ellis noted, rationing hit the lower classes (who are the subjects of this photograph) harder, but it hardly altered the lives of the upper class:

She photographed women and their children, old people, and people of different races. Since they were all cramped together on the bus, she also depicted the circumstances of their economic disadvantage. [5]

In an interview, Bubley, the daughter of Russian and Lithuanian Jewish immigrants who settled in a small Wisconsin town and were in the lower-middle class, stated her preference for assignments that focused on working-class life and people. [6]

Rather than function as wholehearted war-time propaganda tools for the OWI, Bubley’s images such as Waiting for the Bus at the Memphis Terminal raise inequities of class and race in American society, issues that the government was not ready to address in the 1940s, because these inequalities undercut the rhetorical goal of the photographic project—prompting cohesive patriotic sacrifice for a common cause.

A milestone career

Shortly after the Bus Story series, Bubley became one of the first successful female freelance photojournalists at a time when few publications gave staff positions to women. Publications even more infrequently hired women without Ivy League degrees, or who lacked upper-class pedigrees and East Coast connections. [7] Nevertheless, bolstered by the success of Bus Story, Bubley’s work appeared in the photographic magazines Life, Look, and Ladies’ Home Journal, and was published in U.S. Camera and Modern Photography.

Esther Bubley, “Young Choir Singer. Brooklyn, N.Y.,” Life, cover image, 1951

Bubley’s freelance work for Life included upbeat, mass-audience-friendly photo essays on celebrities such as Albert Einstein, scenes from movie sets, and images of everyday people. The photograph of a young singer was from Bubley’s first job for Life magazine, for which she photographed a choir of children aged 2 to 5. Young Choir Singer. Brooklyn, N.Y. was awarded the coveted “cover” position of the Easter issue.

Bubley’s photographs also were selected for inclusion in several exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, including “In and Out of Focus” (1948), “The Family of Man” (1955), and “Diogenes with a Camera” (1956), all of which highlighted important contemporary photographers. Today, her photographs are celebrated as key contributions to the golden age of photojournalism in the U.S., and are included in collections at The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the Dallas Museum of Fine Art, the Carnegie Museum, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.