The Weary Body

These artists explored gestures of the casualty of the Great Depression in their prints: arched backs weighed by worry, hands with pronounced joints manipulated by labor, and forehead wrinkles etched by uncertainty. The body becomes deflated and imprinted with the disempowerment of both trade work and unemployment. Raphael Soyer’s Pugnacity depicts Soyer’s muse Walter Broe, an unemployed local from the Bowery, to highlight the raw emotive expression of the economically powerless. Dorothea Lange’s FSA photographs and William Gropper’s painting The Common Man capture this same corporal distortion bred by arduous work.