Collective Disconnect
A storm is a community problem, all-encompassing and too powerful for one person. That is what the Great Depression was for many: a tempest that they had to ride out. The burden of knowing that others were suffering, while suffering themselves, strained the compassion of Americans; it was a shared disconnection. In Maurice Sievan’s painting City Landscape (1935) we can see the estrangement many felt while going through those challenging times. An apparently struggling neighborhood goes about its business underneath a massive highway viaduct, a world apart. In the foreground is a street, impossibly wide, with a few people scattered on either side. The painting feels empty despite its urban setting; those individuals shown are blurry and indistinct from the world around them. Sievan’s depopulated landscape has commonalities with more familiar images from the 1930s, like bank runs. A crowd gathered together in terror, gazing around in a stupor or exchanging rumors, isn’t really a community. A decade later, Frank Capra’s film It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) restaged these bank runs in a way he wished that Americans had responded.
Visual artists felt the strain as much as anyone. Compared to a portfolio of stocks, the value of art collapsed even more during the 1930s, and its creators were desperate (Rush 376). The Federal Art Project supported that portion of the community who held up a mirror to itself, articulated unspoken fears, and gathered people around shared recognitions. Muralists enacted this in public spaces, with locals sometimes speaking to the artists about their techniques and subject matter, offering suggestions and criticism, and thus “turning the production of a mural into a community endeavor” (Mathews 323). Easel artists and lithographers explored smaller micro-terrains. Robert Moir’s expressionist print Tempest (1941) shows a man in his own world surrounded by others—perhaps on a subway or public bus—whose emotions engulf the space around him. Harold Faye’s Backyard (c. 1935) uses horizontal and vertical grids to emphasize the separation between two individuals, although it looks more restful and companionable. What came to be called pocket parks expanded throughout New York during the 1950s-60s: places where individuals could come together or rest from the burdens of community.