One Step Forward, Three Steps Back

The Depression era introduced both unprecedented and reoccurring anxieties that deeply affected average Americans. The question of how to respond aesthetically to major issues of economy, social instability, and an unsure future led artists to follow a canon of popular art that pointed to the idealized solidarity of an American people bonded by an imagined national community. Government-sponsored artists distilled ideals of national identity and unity in their depictions of working men and women, ignoring regional tensions and differences that had once divided the nation into disparate entities

Ambivalence · National identity · New Deal · Solidarity · Art Education and Development · Art History and Market Analysis · Art, Politics, and Modernism