The Works Progress Administration was an anomaly in American cultural history. It was formed in 1935 by President Franklin Roosevelt with the intent of providing jobs for people who had been left unemployed by the Great Depression. But it didn’t just give work to skilled laborers and industrial workers. It also created paid jobs for writers and artists.
Perhaps because there was so much collaboration—or because the artists wanted to keep their patron, the WPA, happy—most of the prints remained representational and accessible, as Lincoln puts it, “very focused on the present and engagement with the human experience.” Some were political, like Ernest Fiene’s portrait of a ragged black boy at the foot of the Lincoln statue in New York’s Union Square. Some, like Edward Arthur Wilson’s Untitled (Sanding the Propeller), extol the nobility of the worker, while others, like Eleanor Coen’s Untitled (Couple With Baby), in which a strong-looking woman stands in the foreground glaring contemptuously back at her husband, show the toll the Depression had taken on everyone.
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