by TRACY BONFITTO, CURATOR OF ART
In 1937, WPA artist Elizabeth Olds (American, 1896–1991) persuaded “muckraking” investigative journalist Ida Tarbell to help her secure entrance to the Carnegie-Illinois steel mill. When Olds arrived with fellow artist Harry Gottlieb, skeptical mill workers required the artists to become union members in order to access the site. Olds, who was close with several labor organizers, and Gottlieb, a Communist Party member, complied. Olds later noted that the two artists “got just as hot and just as dirty” as the workers they observed. She created a series of penetrating artworks depicting the conditions, work, and people she encountered.
Let Americans put on their walls a reflection of life as vital as they are.
—Elizabeth Olds quoted in the Omaha World-Tribune, 1935
Olds exhibited her steel paintings, executed in watercolor using her quick sketching technique, at the American Contemporary Artists (ACA) Gallery in New York City. She later created a series of lithographs based on these studies. In these works, geometric forms of massive-scale tools and iron scrap dwarf human laborers. These human figures are rendered using closely cropped perspective and dramatic angles, in a visual signal of the back-breaking intensity of the work. In related prints, Olds experimented with creating individualized but anonymous portraits of workers. Her Miners (1937) and Miner Joe (1942) suggest the workers’ separate identities, as well as their collective efforts toward a common goal.
The Ransom Center is home to many of Olds’s coal and steel series watercolor sketches and related lithographs. The Center’s collection also includes hundreds of Olds’s other sketches, prints, paintings, collages, and children’s books, as well as significant archival materials that shed light on her life and artistic process.
A selection of more than 100 of these items is currently on display in the Center’s exhibition Public Works: Art by Elizabeth Olds. The exhibition explores Olds’s career from the 1920s to the 1960s—a period that saw her become the first woman awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the visual arts, a WPA printmaker and devoted advocate for the democratic possibilities of screenprinting, and a celebrated children’s book author-illustrator.
Olds’s coal and steel series, with their focus on the difficulty of the labor and the dignity of the workers, is typical of her larger practice during the 1930s and 1940s. Returning to the United States in 1929 from her Guggenheim-funded study in Europe, Olds was energized toward social action by the interwar struggles she had witnessed in Paris. Later recalling her return to an America sliding into the Great Depression—with its unemployment rate eventually as high as 25%—Olds noted her determination that her artworks should reflect the challenges and realities of contemporary life.
This determination found ready form in the early 1930s. Social realism as an artistic movement had taken hold, and artists such as Ben Shahn (American, b. Lithuania 1898–1969), José Clemente Orozco (Mexican, 1883–1949), and Thomas Hart Benton (American, 1889–1975) were depicting Depression-era life and visually arguing for change. In 1933, newly elected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the federally funded Works Progress Administration (WPA) to support creative labor, and artists increasingly identified with, as well as depicted, members of the working classes. And Olds, who had earlier sketched people and scenes from daily life in New York City with Ashcan School artist George Luks (American, 1867–1933), began experimenting with lithographic printmaking. It soon changed the course of her career.
Archival materials in the Ransom Center’s collection demonstrate that Olds relied on preliminary sketches, executed onsite in pencil and charcoal on paper, to create her paintings and prints. She also collected photographs by other artists. The subjects of these photographs—a textile worker, a man on crutches maneuvering through rubble in Manhattan, three young boys standing near a tenement building—were reimagined in Olds’s poignant portrayals of Depression-era life. She referred to these photographs in her works throughout her career.
Miss Olds’s lithographs are ‘as gentle as a blast furnace.’
—The Minneapolis Institute of Arts Newsletter, January 7, 1939
Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, Olds worked within a larger environment that was actively exploring, debating, and seeking to expand ways in which art could make impactful intersections with more Americans. In New York City, there were competitions for subway art installations, and the Museum of Modern Art organized displays of fine-art prints with popular appeal that were available for purchase at a modest price. Many commercial art galleries, including ACA Gallery, championed social-realist themes and activist-minded artists. The WPA supported public murals and distributed artworks to public institutions, approaching art as a public service rather than a commodity intended for an elite audience. Elizabeth Olds left the WPA program in 1939, having created the first silkscreen print to be published by the six-person WPA Graphic Arts Division Silk Screen Unit. In her portrayal of workers and everyday urban life, her works reverberate with those of many of her contemporaries. But while Olds shared a sensibility in common with many other artists of the 1930s and 1940s, her career is equally compelling for its areas of divergence. In post–World War II New York City the avant-garde shifted away from social realism and the overtly political engagement it encouraged, but Olds remained committed to fulfilling the role art could play in fostering democracy, accessibility, and education.
During the next phase of her career, this commitment led her to become a children’s book author-illustrator. She published six books between 1945 and 1963, approaching them as “picture textbooks” and carefully researching each theme. Olds had received an award in a MoMA-juried exhibition of prints for children for her screenprint Fire in 1940, and the image was the basis for her book The Big Fire, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1945. Copies of contemporary media reports in the archive note that the children MoMA surveyed wished artists to create “real” or naturalistic images. Olds took this feedback to heart in her books, four of which are illustrated with lithographs and two with woodcut prints. The carved woodblocks in the collection that are currently on display offer evidence of Olds’s skillful manipulation of the natural wood grain to achieve rich visual texture.
The whole wide world of America today is the subject matter [for] printmakers.
—Elizabeth Olds to students at Smith College, July 19, 1944
More broadly, Olds saw in printmaking the possibility of filling “an important need” for average Americans to own original works of art “not met,” as she put it, “since Currier and Ives.” To increase accessibility, she declined to limit her print editions and instead produced enough copies to meet public demand. She also championed screen-printing—a relatively inexpensive and adaptable technique—as a viable fine art, rather than commercial, medium. Her legacy, as displayed in the Ransom Center’s galleries, reiterates the value of art in everyday life.
Public Works: Art by Elizabeth Olds is on display through October 6 and explores the process and trajectory of Olds’s artistic practice. Olds’s careerlong commitment to experimentation and the value of making art accessible is readily visible in the exhibition. We invite you to explore the many forms her commitment took.
Dr. Tracy Bonfitto is the Ransom Center’s Curator of Art and curator of the exhibition Public Works: Art by Elizabeth Olds.
CREDITS
Elizabeth Olds (American, 1896–1991), Miners (WPA proof), 1937. Lithograph. Gift of Emmett L. and Mary B. Hudspeth. Emmett L. Hudspeth Art Collection of Elizabeth Olds, 2003.8.068. Image copyright Elizabeth Olds Estate.
Elizabeth Olds, Scrap Iron, 1936. Gift of Emmett L. and Mary B. Hudspeth. Emmet L. Hudspeth Art Collection of Elizabeth Olds, 2003.8.074. Image copyright Elizabeth Olds Estate.
Elizabeth Olds, Black Jack at the Transient Shelter, 1934. Lithograph. Benjamin O. Rees Art Collection of Elizabeth Olds, 2003.12.20. Image copyright Elizabeth Olds Estate.
Elizabeth Olds, [Two boys, New York City], ca. 1940. Oil on Masonite. Gift of Emmett L. and Mary B. Hudspeth. Emmet L. Hudspeth Art Collection of Elizabeth Olds, 2003.8.368. Image copyright Elizabeth Olds Estate.
Elizabeth Olds (American, 1896–1991), Three Alarm Fire, 1940. Screenprint. Gift of Emmett L. and Mary B. Hudspeth. Emmett L. Hudspeth Art Collection of Elizabeth Olds, 2003.8.648. Image copyright Elizabeth Olds Estate.
The Big Fire, written and illustrated by Elizabeth Olds (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1945).