Art for hard times
Crystal Bridges exhibit features works from the Great Depression. —
“When the sun came shining, and I was strolling, And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling, As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting: This land was made for you and me.”
– “This Land Is Your Land” by Woody Guthrie
BENTONVILLE — There is a show for history buffs and art lovers alike tucked away in the North Exhibition Gallery at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Named after a 1940 populist anthem by folk singer Woody Guthrie, “This Land: Picturing a Changing America in the 1930s and 1940s” includes a selection of paintings, prints and photographs that document a difficult and dangerous time in American history.
But this is no dry history lesson; looking back on the events of the era, the exhibition reads like something ripped from today’s headlines. There was a major financial collapse and the country experienced political unrest and dreadful natural disasters. The show is truly relevant in our region, explains Manuela Well-OffMan, exhibition curator, “where the Great Depression really had its most severe consequences.” In addition, the drought and floods back then echo recent natural disasters and “it all seems very timely.”
RURAL PAINTINGS AND PRINTS
The 1934 painting Ploughing It Under by Thomas Hart Benton is the signature work of the exhibition. Beneath a deep blue sky, a farmer marches along behind his mule, gouging narrow furrows in the earth. He must plow under his crop because of a controversial New Deal program. “It seems like an innocent rural scene but it’s really loaded, and has a political message,” Well-Off-Man says.
Benton’s The Departure of the Joads ( Grapes of Wrath Series) is a black-and-white lithograph originally made for promotions of the film version of John Steinbeck’s novel. A crescent moon hangs over the Joads as they pack a dilapidated truck for the long trek to California.
In the oil painting Return From Sunday School by Texarkana artist Thomas Hinton, a little man trudges down a dirt road toward his weather-beaten home. The scene feels “very lonely” notes the curator “and that really reminds of those great Edward Hopper paintings.” Polk County Landscape 2, a small watercolor by Hinton, hangs nearby.
Ominous clouds threaten hard-working farmers in Joe Jones’ Midwestern Harvest, a vibrant oil painting housed in a remarkable rustic frame. Marvin Dorwart Cone’s Stone City Landscape is reminiscent of a Grant Wood painting; an art critic at the time wrote of Cone’s paintings that “their lack of obvious trickery makes them much more enduring” than Wood’s highly stylized work. A shell-shocked black family stands in the aftermath of the Great 1937 Flood in Joseph Vorst’s After the Flood. The same flood is featured in Benton’s print, Investigation.
ARKANSAS MURAL STUDIES
“This Land” features studies for two Arkansas post office murals created during the New Deal. Cotton Pickers by Ethel Magafan “is really one of the best Arkansas post office murals,” says the curator, noting that the study and the mural “are masterfully rendered.“Vorst’s study was rejected because citizens felt it made the town of Paris appear backward. The study shows a farmer tilling the land in front of his shack, with oversize sunflowers in the foreground and mountains behind him. A small reproduction of the finished mural — a less colorful depiction of a more modern scene — is on the wall next to the study.
PHOTOGRAPHS
Tasked with gathering photographic evidence of the plight of rural America during the Depression, Roy Stryker of the Farm Security Administration hired skilled, artistic photographers like Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein and Ben Shahn. “This Land” includes many stellar black-and-white pictures by these photographers.
In the tightly cropped Migratory Cotton Picker, Eloy Arizona, Lange contrasts the highlights on the man’s lined forehead against darkly shaded eyes. Long fingers protrude from a rough, weathered hand that covers the bottom half of his face, with deep shadows behind. Inky black hair swirls out from his head against a charcoal gray sky.
Here also is Lange’s most famous and powerful image, commonly known as Migrant Mother. “I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet,” Lange recounted in 1960. “She told me her age, that she was 32. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed.” The woman’s dusty, stoic face is one of the classic images of Dust Bowl migration.
One man stands with hands clenched, his back turned on a small sea of men in front of a soup kitchen in White Angel Breadline, San Francisco. His face is taunt, partially hidden by a dirty, rumpled hat. On the fence sits a dented tin cup. Here again, Lange uses the individual as a symbol, this time for Depression-Era destitution. Also on view is Lange’s haunting 1936 photo, Child Living in Oklahoma City Shacktown and the melancholy Daughter of Migrant Tennessee Coal Miner.
Farmer and Sons Walking in the Face of a Dust Storm was taken in 1936 by Rothstein in Cimarron County, Okla., as dust and wind swirled all around. A man and his sons are caught in the whirlwind, scrambling for shelter in a weathered, half-buried shack. This photo became an iconic image of the American farmer’s struggle to survive in the Dust Bowl.
Evans’ portraits of Alabama sharecropper Floyd Burroughs and his wife, Allie Mae, were published in the book Now Let Us Praise Famous Men. The enigmatic, tight-lipped Allie Mae has been described as “the Mona Lisa of the Depression,” and is another classic of the era.
In Man and Movie Poster a grim, earnest black man stands in profile before a pair of larger-than-life white faces that grin broadly at him from a creased movie poster. Evans often incorporated graphic elements like posters and signs in his work, and his affinity for hard-edged design can be seen in four straightahead shots of rural Southern churches.
Evans never shows the faces of the flood survivors he photographed standing in a Forrest City bread line, but his artful images of them are deeply moving nevertheless.
Shahn was a noted American painter who put down his brush for a time and traveled the country shooting photographs. In the photo Cotton Pickers, Pulaski County, two weary black children pose in front of a cotton field at the end of the work day. An unsteady, unshaven man stands in front of a shabby clapboard house in One of Few Remaining Inhabitants of Zinc, Arkansas, his dog is curled in a ball on the porch behind him. Other images from Arkansas in 1935 include Sharecropper on Sunday, Little Rock, Arkansas and Blind Street Musician, West Memphis, Arkansas.
Other great images taken in the state include Lee’s pictures from Lake Dick and the Forrest City area and the 1937 photograph A Family Flooded Out Built Themselves This Ark, Marianna, Arkansas by Edwin Locke.
URBAN PRINTMAKING
“We have this really stunning collection of American prints of the 1930s to 1950,” says curator Well-Off-Man. Among the prints are striking images of urban anxiety such as Abe Ajay’s gloomy Company Town, with its dark factory, smoky skies and bare trees, and Unemployed, a 1938 print by Chet LaMore. Mark Freeman’s Manhattan Construction from 1936 and Irving Lehman’s Tool Grinder, a 1932 woodcut, are dynamic works verging on the abstract, and the aerial acrobatics of the workers who built New York’s skyscrapers are the subject of James Allen’s skillful etching The Connectors.
A COLLABORATIVE EFFORT
The idea for the show came from discussions between Well-Off-Man and University of Arkansas at Fayetteville history professor Jeannie Whayne. Several of the university’s faculty played a role in developing the exhibition. In addition, Crystal Bridges collaborated with the Fayetteville Roots Festival on an audio tour for the show called “The Music Experience of This Land.”
Bryan Hembree, director of the Fayetteville Roots Festival, and Well-Off-Man will lead a discussion of the project, Art Talk: Music Heals the Great Depression, in the North Exhibition Gallery, lower level at 1 p.m. Oct. 24. The discussion is free and no registration is required.
A TALE OF HOPE
“This Land’’ paints a vivid picture of the American landscape during the Dust Bowl and the Depression. This picture is filled with rural men and women, the land they lived on and the farms and fields they worked, with vistas of urban America included as well.
We see working Arkansans, vagabonds and victims, making the best of dire circumstances. We see flood survivors in Forrest City, a farmer working his land in Paris and a blind musician playing for a crowd on a West Memphis street corner. We see deep floodwaters, rundown Ozark shacks and porches on the Delta piled high with cotton.
We also see scenes from across the country, scenes that feature rural Southern churches and Midwestern wheat harvests. We see the Oklahoma farmers battling dust storms and the “Okies” who fled the whirlwind for California. There are images here of men standing in front of San Francisco soup kitchens and men working construction high atop Manhattan skyscrapers.
They are all here, fighting for survival. In the end, the show is about these people, and their homes and this land. It’s a tale of hope and struggle, just like the one the old Dust Bowl balladeer, Woody Guthrie, once told in a song.
“This land is your land, This land is my land From California to the New York island; From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters This land was made for you and me.”