Photograph by Margaret Bourke-White that appeared in
Life magazine above the headline “The Flood Leaves its Victims on the Bread Line,” February 15, 1937. Photo: Getty Images.
Disasters and Social Reproduction: Crisis Response Between the State and Community, by Peer Illner. London: Pluto Press, 2020. 208 pages.
Mutual Aid:
Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the Next), by Dean Spade. New York and London: Verso, 2020. 128 pages.
IN ONE OF photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White’s most iconic Depression-era images, a seamless, whitewashed vision of the good life is undercut by a segregated breadline. Tightly composed, the picture almost stages a return of the repressed, as material casualties of “the American Way” buttress but also contravene the billboard’s sanguine promise. Bourke-White’s irony is acerbic, condensed, and at the same time capacious; as art historian John Tagg points out, the absurdity of the background graphic’s “cynical corporat
Swann to offer curated sale focused on the artists of the WPA
Reginald Marsh, The Waterfront, New York, oil on canvas, 1943. Estimate $10,000 to $15,000.
NEW YORK, NY
.- On Thursday, February 4 Swann Galleries will offer the auction: The Artists of the WPA. The multi-departmental sale will feature paintings, prints, photographs, posters, books and related ephemera by artists whose careers were sustained by the Works Progress Administration. In the aftermath of the Great Depression, president Franklin D. Roosevelts New Deal and its related agencies represented an unprecedented investment in art and artists, setting the scene for the twentieth centurys art movements, and establishing the careers of diverse creatives, including women, Black artists, photographers, and muralists.
The Salvation Army in Paris continued to offer its services in November and December, including rent assistance, a bread line and soup kitchen and a mental health crisis hotline.