Social realism was an art movement, associated with the era of the Great Depression in the US (roughly the 1930s), that depicted the everyday realities of life. Social realism was critical of the social, economic, and racial conditions that made life challenging for the working classes and poor. Social realism in the US took the form of painting, photography, literature, printing and drawing, sculpture, and more. Many of the artists were employed as part of the Depression-era programs of the New Deal, namely the Farm Security Administration and the Works Progress Administration. The resources in this set highlight the artists, art forms, and the subject matter that were central to the social realist movement.
Photograph of Young Driver in Mine, 1908, by Lewis Hine.
Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery to Reconstruction, 1934, by Aaron Douglas.
The jacket from a 1937 book—You Have Seen Their Faces—which highlights the work of American documentary photographer Margaret Bourke-White.
Racial inequality, as depicted in this 1935 photograph by Ben Shahn, was a topic of interest to the social realists.
Many of Thomas Hart Benton’s paintings and prints, including this lithograph White Calf from 1945, told the stories of rural Americans.
Excerpt from the novel A Sign for Cain, 1935, by Grace Lumpkin.
Relief of miners working, 1937-1938, by David Swing.
An excerpt from the catalog to a 1939 exhibition of works from the Federal Art Project at the de Young Museum.
An excerpt from an interview with Dorothea Lange, 1964, as part of the New Deal and the Arts Oral History Project.
A 1936 photograph by Dorothea Lange, Migrants. California.
Walker Evans titled this 1937 photo Negroes in the lineup for food at mealtime in the camp for flood refugees, Forrest City, Arkansas.
A Metropolitan Life exhibit, 1939 World’s Fair, captioned “Life insurance funds make possible the security for those whose work is done.”
John Brown, a lithograph by John Steuart Curry from 1939, depicts Brown’s growing agitation and the “storm” it provoked.
A 1937 mural of a textile worker from the thirteen-part fresco by Ben Shahn and Bernarda Bryson Shahn for a post office in Bronx, NY.
Arthur Rothstein, a Farm Security Administration photographer, captured this social realist bas-relief by Lenore Thomas Straus in 1937.
