Though much of the work produced for the FAP falls into the American Scene movement, an umbrella category for Regionalism and Social Realism, artists also grappled with the conventions of European modernism. Just over twenty years prior, the Armory Show had introduced America to European avant-garde styles.

George Constant and Minetta Good reverted to more traditional still-lifes, whereas William Hicks’s The Letter evokes cubist forms. Some artists attempted to reconcile radical politics with modernist principles, including Fred Becker, who employed hints of surrealism in his political satire print Yacht Race. Becker was the only WPA artist represented in Museum of Modern Art director Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936). Stuart Davis suggested that abstraction was more progressive than Social Realism because it could avoid propagandizing. However, abstraction remained a minor stylistic choice among FAP works. As president of the Artists Union, Davis advocated for greater inclusion in the FAP, encouraging the WPA to do away with the institutionalized hierarchy of artistic skill level that determined payment. 

Margot E. Yale, Class of 2017
Joseph F. McCrindle Intern

See all the works from the Museum's holdings of prints from the New York Graphics Art Division here. 

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