Works by artists supported by the Depression-era Works Progress Administration (WPA) brought in $460,490 at a curated sale held at New York’s Swann Auction Galleries. Titled “The Artists of the WPA” and held on February 4, the auction featured paintings, prints, photographs, posters, sculptures, medallions, mural studies, and other ephemera, offering a glimpse into the many art initiatives the U.S. government backed in its effort to employ out-of-work artists and build a national culture around art from 1935 to 1943.
Many of the lots were created through the Federal Art Project (FAP), the most ambitious of the New Deal’s art-focused programs. Established in 1935 under the WPA, the initiative employed more than 10,000 artists of different skill levels and backgrounds nationwide, including those in underserved communities such as Harlem and Chicago’s South Side. Beyond public art and work across media, the FAP also supported arts education and research, community art centers, exhibition programming, and an illustrated archive of American decorative art.
The heavy presence of prints in the sale reflected the Federal Art Project’s strong endorsement of printmaking as an especially democratic medium. Its Graphic Arts Division hired printmakers around the country and opened a major workshop in New York City that produced about 75,000 prints while introducing many younger artists to the medium. Leading the offerings at Swann was Norman Lewis’s 1943 lithograph “Comrades,” which sold for $9,375, above its $7,000 high estimate, followed by Grant Wood’s “Tree Planting Group,” which brought $8,750.
The auction also included documentary photographs by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, and John Vachon, among the most recognized photographers employed by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to record the impact of drought and economic depression on rural and migrant laborers. Published in magazines such as LIFE, the images helped bring national attention to these communities’ hardships and the need for federal support. A set of 38 vintage photographs by Vachon, who began at the FSA as a messenger before joining its photography department, sold for $37,500, more than five times its high estimate.
Harold Porcher, Swann Modern & Post-War Art director and the specialist for the WPA sale, told Hyperallergic: “The WPA projects, and the New Deal at large, is not just our nation’s history but a road map to show us that we can work together and overcome hardships as a nation. We are strongest in unity. Few of the artists of the WPA generation are still with us. Let us not forget them and their neighbors, and how they helped to usher us into the prosperous post-war era.”
