{"id":101615,"date":"2026-02-11T11:15:54","date_gmt":"2026-02-11T18:15:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=101615"},"modified":"2026-02-17T06:23:33","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T13:23:33","slug":"printing-the-american-scene-for-the-middle-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/printing-the-american-scene-for-the-middle-class\/","title":{"rendered":"Printing the American Scene for the Middle Class"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Joseph Hirsch, \u201cThe Lunch Hour,\u201d c. 1942<\/p><\/div>\n

Showing in a student-curated exhibition at the Southern Utah Museum of Art, Mass Produced: The Advent of Affordable Art<\/em> brings together prints from the height of the Associated American Artists era\u2014black-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.<\/h4>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2014typically issued in runs of 125 to 250\u2014sold for about five dollars at the time (roughly $88\u2013$100 today), bringing works by famous American artists into the living rooms of everyday Americans to bridge the gap between artists and their audiences.<\/h4>\n

Lewenthal\u2019s objectives were not unlike Alphonse Mucha\u2019s 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<\/a>). In both cases, the artists and publishers harnessed technologies they were otherwise critical of\u2014technologies responsible, in many ways, for the erosion of handcraft\u2014using them instead as tools to preserve quality while expanding access. In this context, \u201cmass produced\u201d 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.<\/h4>\n

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\u2019s model feels like a far cooler alternative to today\u2019s big-box, d\u00e9cor-as-art economy. Lewenthal very intentionally chose artists focused on the \u201cAmerican Scene,\u201d 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.<\/h4>\n
\"\"<\/a>

W. R. Locke, “The Net Mender,” 1943<\/p><\/div>\n

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.<\/h4>\n

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\u2019 \u201cMissouri Wheat Farmers,\u201d recalls the photographs of Dorothea Lange at the time\u2014catching 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\u2019t seem to let up. We feel the exhaustion in Joseph Hirsch\u2019s \u201cThe Lunch Hour,\u201d the complete body release when konking out at lunch. Early mornings and hard hours. The young man\u2019s 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\u2019s “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.<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n