Persona

Several bodies zoom through space, like un-clothed Superman figures navigating planets and other cosmic entities. Strangely, they make no eye contact with each other and appear to be on individual paths. Yearning and weariness washes across the face in the foreground, as it becomes apparent that their current trajectory is the vast dance floor across the Milky Way: cold and isolated. Harry Sternberg, the creator of The Dance (c. 1935-42) and an influential teacher in the FAP's Graphic Arts Division, repeatedly staged bodies that were unbound from gravity--whether as acrobats, aeronautical guides, or even spirits of musical instruments. At the same time, however, he was among the most brutal critics of capitalism extracting labor from human bodies--often set in factories or underground mines. We are meant to recognize that there is safety in numbers and survival lies in the hands of fellow community members. Dreams of independence--a self liberated in freedom--are isolating and so aboard Ronay's life-boat the brain storm may be one of the most difficult forces to overcome.

Developing a persona, the front-facing self that the world perceives, is a natural part of the human experience. This persona can serve as storm shutters, obscuring an outsider’s view behind the beholder’s window-eyes. While keeping the storm barricaded from the outside world, the internal turmoil will continue to brew inside. In 1930, Sigmund Freud argues that the human ego is buffeted between its own instinctive demands for autonomy and society's demand for cooperation. Wasn't the Great Depression enough to make everyone realize that survival depended upon solidarity? The Federal Art Project throws a lifeline to artists and they make "Art for the People," especially through public murals. Yet while tasked with an outward-facing, uplifting campaign to spark hope across America, artists simultaneously revealed glimpses of what life was like behind the creative persona: riding out the storm in an isolated boat with paint brushes and pencils instead of oars. Within a New Deal context, for example, the clown may function as a vehicle for the artist himself: publicly visible, socially useful, yet privately isolated. The work reveals the psychological cost of performing resilience during a national crisis. Augustus Peck’s clown is not a distraction from hardship, but rather an artistic display of it: masked and profoundly alone. Peck’s piece reminds people that everyone wears a mask.

Mabel Dwight evokes the feeling that sits in one’s stomach when things are Headed South (c. 1935): worry, loneliness, perhaps a space reserved for hope.

With his slumped shoulders and a downturned face, Raymond White Skofield’s The Hunter (1937) prefigures the artist’s own struggles. Smoking chimneys remind us there are others.

A man in Hugh Pearce Botts’ The Bargain (1935) attempts to sell a pair of pants, perhaps a remnant of some former self, as though his life depended upon it.

The subject in is Augustus Peck’s Blue Clown (c. 1935-42) is presented not as an entertainer, but as a solitary, introspective figure, drained of spectacle and saturated with melancholy.

Works Consulted

-- Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. Joan Riviere. 1930. Link

-- Monroe, Gerald M. “Art Front.” Archives of American Art Journal 13.3 (1973): 13–19. Link

-- Trollinger, Abigail. "Overcoming Isolation in the Great Depression." North Philly Notes 7 Oct. 2020. Link