Bodies and Labor

By Margot E. Yale, Class of 2017

These prints emphasize how FAP artists depicted and distorted the laborer’s body to speak to the strength of the WPA and to identify their own positions in the program and in the working class. Distortion of the human form underscores the worker’s body as the fundamental building block for economic recovery. These artists valorized the body’s strength to canonize the laborer. The laborer in Dan Rice’s Subway Drilling radiates vitality, and perhaps even holiness, in the form of geometric rays. These prints, including Margaret Lowengrund’s Loading Bricks, define the idealized image of working-class masculinity. The working female body, on the other hand, is rarely represented in the work of the FAP.

In a later reflection on the WPA, Fred Becker expressed his intentions to celebrate the epic strength and mythic body of the African American steel-driving man John Henry in John Henry’s Death, one image of a serial work. In truth, Becker drew heavily on the racialized and patronizing imagery and storytelling of Roark Bradford’s 1931 novel John Henry. On the other hand, Becker’s African American contemporaries, including Aaron Douglas, employed the figure of John Henry to challenge the FAP and American society’s vision of the white male worker and to push back on the belittlement of the black working-class body. The Graphic Arts Division of New York never reflected the racial diversity of the city and never employed any African American artists.