Joseph Hirsch, “The Lunch Hour,” c. 1942

Showing in a student-curated exhibition at the Southern Utah Museum of Art, Mass Produced: The Advent of Affordable Art brings together prints from the height of the Associated American Artists era—black-and-white lithographs that capture the lives of everyday Americans during and after the Great Depression. These works take a nostalgic look at rural and working-class life in places like the Midwest, while never losing sight of the grueling conditions farmers and laborers continued to endure years after the crisis had technically passed.

Founded in 1934 and operating until 2000, Associated American Artists was the brainchild of Reeves Lewenthal, who believed art should be accessible to the middle class and that fine art could be made affordably without sacrificing the artist’s compensation. Lewenthal commissioned about four artists per year from across the country to create designs sold through a mail-order subscription service. Limited-edition, signed prints—typically issued in runs of 125 to 250—sold for about five dollars at the time (roughly $88–$100 today), bringing works by famous American artists into the living rooms of everyday Americans to bridge the gap between artists and their audiences.

Lewenthal’s objectives were not unlike Alphonse Mucha’s Art Nouveau-flecked impetus to bring high art to the average person. Mucha used lithographs at the turn of the 20th-century to produce ornate posters en masse, reaching broader audiences (see our review on UVU’s Mucha exhibit here). In both cases, the artists and publishers harnessed technologies they were otherwise critical of—technologies responsible, in many ways, for the erosion of handcraft—using them instead as tools to preserve quality while expanding access. In this context, “mass produced” takes on a new meaning. Yes, industrialization makes things cheaper and more affordable, but here that mentality is applied without abandoning care, skill, or intention in the making.

Advertised in periodicals, distributed through mail-order subscriptions, sold in more than 50 department stores nationwide, and even circulating as a traveling exhibition program, Lewenthal’s model feels like a far cooler alternative to today’s big-box, décor-as-art economy. Lewenthal very intentionally chose artists focused on the “American Scene,” artists falling mostly within the American Regionalist and Social Realist circles who explored imagery of the heartland, the people there, capturing the lifestyles of the everyday person.

W. R. Locke, “The Net Mender,” 1943

The works by W. R. Locke offer some of the more lighthearted interpretations of American reality at the time. A Southerner with a deep fascination for plants, Locke renders the flora of rural Florida with extraordinary care. The scenes include trees so prehistoric they look as if they date from the time of pterodactyls, gazed at through the eyes of a lover. In “The Net Mender,” a farmer repairs his net beside a canoe tilting out of the water, while a massive tree dominates the scene like a wise elder presiding over the property. Locke captures a simple, slow, warm life.

Many of the other prints reflect more of the downtrodden times felt after the Great Depression and Dust Bowl had their ways with rural America. Joe Jones’ “Missouri Wheat Farmers,” recalls the photographs of Dorothea Lange at the time—catching the strain of farmers, the patina on their faces from the sun, the dirt, the expressions of weather, looking into the distance, persisting on with a heavy load to bear. Thomas Hart Benton, the legendary Missouri-born Regionalist, produced more than 90 prints for the AAA. One of them, “The Lonesome Road,” uses a folk style to show a Black rural farmer riding his carriage down the lonesome road, past a shack in the distance, his head tilted down, reeling from the hardship that doesn’t seem to let up. We feel the exhaustion in Joseph Hirsch’s “The Lunch Hour,” the complete body release when konking out at lunch. Early mornings and hard hours. The young man’s hands appear especially skeletal in the foreground, veiny and strong. Having seen someone passed out on a streetcar, Hirsch used his father as a model to capture the exhaustion of the working class and Black Americans at the time, creating an ambiguous character for us all to see ourselves in. David Stone Martin’s “Highland Logging” evokes the heroic murals of Diego Rivera, the machinery of glorious human ingenuity surrounded by the laborers. The settlers, scythes in hand, raising beams from logged ancient forests at the tempting allure of expansion, are presented with a reverence for laborers both agricultural and industrial.

While many of the works in Mass Produced confront hardship through the human figure—laborers, farmers, bodies marked by strain—Grant Wood, the Iowa artist best known for “American Gothic,” approaches the same emotional terrain from another angle in his unfinished Months of the Year series. “January,” c. 1937 captures the softness after a winter storm in the Midwest, without sugarcoating the ferocity of those northern powers. Deep snow covers the pastures in a fluffy blanket while tracks scurry past hay bales loaded with windblow drifts and a quietness rings loud. His “February” (1941), steals the show. There is a stylized way to the horses, a geometric influence  to the lines of the manes where the coats are nuanced enough to see the cubist nature in the anatomy of their design. The linearity of the mane catches the viewers and the elegance of the simple lines keeps them. The sky is gray and unbreaking for miles, for days (all too familiar a feeling to us Midwesterners, never knowing when winter will relent). The horses look from behind barbed wire in their pasture, with a sense of … curiosity? Foreboding?  The curatorial statement suggests we can see the horses as a foreshadowing of Wood’s oncoming, undiagnosed pancreatic cancer, which took him far too young, at the age of 50.

Taken together, the works in Mass Produced convey the eerie, downtrodden sense of the times. Yes, beauty is built in the freedom of the American expanse, yet the struggle of the people reads strongly. It is a feeling that resonates today: no matter the lengths we go to and the backbreaking work put in, capitalism is still yielding very little for the working class.

Grant Wood, “February, 1941,” lithograph on paper, image: 8 7⁄8 x 11 7⁄8 in.

Mass Produced: The Advent of Affordable Art, Southern Utah Museum of Art, Cedar City, through Mar. 7.

Genevieve Vahl

Genevieve Vahl is a writer, farmer and artist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her writing focuses on how art and community intersect, how to bring access to food and covering climate solutions around the Salt Lake Valley. She also writes poetry, binds artist books, makes paper and runs cyanotype prints from film.