Laboring for Art

by

Lauren Roberts

 

Perhaps that is why At Work: The Art of California Labor (Heyday Books; $35) edited by Mark Dean Johnson, has affected me so strongly. A powerful and beautiful visual examination of California labor history, this book is a collaborative effort by San Francisco State University, the California Historical Society, the California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO and Heyday Books. It is filled with fantastic images from more than 100 artists who recorded with pen, paint, woodcuts, lithographs, cameras and other artistic tools the tumultuous history of labor in California in the 20th century.

This superbly designed coffee table-sized trade paperback celebrates the strength of those who fought for workers’ rights, and evokes the pain of the of the struggles and triumphs intended to bring dignity and decency to workers often not accorded much of either.

The history of labor in my native state is long, tumultuous and complicated. The art that honors it in this book travels from the rise of organized labor in the 1930s through World War II into the peak era of the California Labor School and the farm workers’ movement lead by Cesar Chavez in the 1960s to the weak and disadvantaged labor force of today’s service and information economies. Illuminating essays accompanying each chapter discuss in a direct, absorbing way a wide variety of topics associated with the labor movement: the romantic spirit of California culture vs. the contentious labor relations in the state; the rising influence of unions amid the Great Depression; the relationship of labor and art and its suppression during the McCarthy era; the re-emergence of organizing issues with the farm workers’ movement; and labor art’s role in our global economy.

“Survival,” as editor Mark Dean Johnson writes, “with its constant companion work, is among the most basic of human concerns. The word ‘work’ alone evokes primordial anxieties about sustenance and shelter. Beyond that are issues of personal success, our tendency to define ourselves by our occupations, the fulfillment and frustration that inform our days, the social life built around people we meet on the job. Work, for individuals and for society as a whole, carries great symbolic weight, akin in gravity to love and loss, life and death. Recognizing this, the artist in the volume evidence a humanistic interest in everyday experience and a determination to create art in accessible forms.”

The history of California’s visual art about labor began not here, not even in America but in nineteenth century Europe with painters like Honoré Daumier, Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet who focused their efforts on peasants and menial labor. At the turn of the twentieth century, some New York photographers were recording labor atrocities in the workplace and the look of poverty.

One of the largest influences on California labor art was Mexico. Many artists traveled between the state and Mexico; in addition, Mexican art and artists who work often promoted the cause of the working class received interest from California patrons and important exhibitions were often held. Diego Rivera was an important influence at this time, and many of the artists whose work is part of this movement and this book met and a few worked with him.

When they began working in the 1930s, the artists’ experiences were already deeply entwined in the issue of labor. As Johnson notes, “. . . California artists seem in retrospect to have been particularly passionate about the relationship of the individual to labor struggle . . . humanist themes were advanced in different way . . . During World War II, the depiction of work often reflected a nationalist agenda. After the war, manual work was sometimes seen as an antidote to the rapacious consumerism embraced by white collar society. During the civil rights movement, solidarity with nonwhite workers came to the political and artistic forefront . . . In the conflicted, contemporary, postmodern epoch . . . it is hard to trace the idealism of the civil rights era in . . . a young, uniformed Asian American, show[ing] signs of feeling trapped by a minimum-wage, stultifying job at the front counter of our contemporary service economy.”

Why should anyone be interested in this history (especially if not from California) and such art? Perhaps Gray Brechin best answers that when he says, “It is art’s mission to wake us to our common predicament and peril, and to our responsibilities toward one another and our home.” At Work achieves that. In this one volume the vast array of images over seven decades—paintings, sculpture, murals, woodblocks, photographs, drawings, posters, comics—come together to express a common theme, the connection of art and labor. Art from those whose names are familiar—photographers Dorothea Lange and Sebastião Salgado, painter Diego Rivera—mix with those whose names are obscure but whose work is no less powerful. One of the earliest and most dramatic images, Lucienne Bloch’s startling 1935 woodcut, Land of Plenty, shows a silhouetted immigrant family in tattered clothes walking past a fenced-off cornfield where numerous stalks and dominant power lines (a new-at-that-time feature of the American landscape) emphasize the both the abundance of this country and the immigrant’s financial and emotional disconnect from it.

Other images include Rivera’s understated but compelling The Tortilla Maker, showing a Mexican mother and daughter working in their home; Maynard Dixon’s Free Speech, a disturbing image of a union organizer addressing a group of men while policemen watch darkly from behind; Grace Clements’ Winter 1932 which combines actual newspaper headlines with ghostly images of unemployed marchers; Dorothea Lange’s images of the unemployed not only in her famous Migrant Mother but of shipyard workers; Ester Hernández’s The Virgin of the Streets; and Anton Refregier’s Maritime and General Strike.

What is most compelling about this books is that reader is not only provided access to a body of diverse work as a singular unit, as both art and history, but given the opportunity to realize that however varied the media and the scenes depicted, that California’s glory lies not in its famous postcard presentation of ripe oranges against snowcapped mountains but in its laborers—tortilla makers at home, immigrant farmworkers, lathe workers, retail salesclerks, fast food counterpersons, steelworkers, teachers—who made possible the glory that was this state.

Today perhaps, that glory is tarnished. Crime and greed sometimes seem to dominate the California’s image more than its hardworking citizens—people like my father, a proud member of a union, a man who put his family before his dreams, a man who helped build this state. But with At Work we have an important tribute to those citizens for whom five days a week are labor days.

The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath (Heyday; $7.95), another compelling book about labor, is actually a collection of John Steinbeck’s 1936 articles for the San Francisco News.  A short (62-page) trade paperback, The Harvest Gypsies is a gripping look at the reality that Steinbeck found in California’s migrant labor camps in the 1930s and eventually transformed into the story of Ma and Pa Joad.

Steinbeck came to these articles shortly after his book on a farm workers’ strike, In Dubious Battle, was published. He had established himself as knowledgeable about and interested in farm labor matters, so when an editor at the News approached him to write a series on the dust bowl migration which was then in full force in central California, he readily agreed. In the summer of 1936, Steinbeck began touring the rural agricultural areas in the company of Tom Collins, manager of a migrant camp for the Resettlement Administration. Collins not only became Steinbeck’s guide but his model for Jim Rawley, manager of Wheatpatch Camp in The Grapes of Wrath. Collins desperately cared about the families in his camp, and Steinbeck promised him that he would “be very careful to do some good and no harm” in the writing of these articles.

Though the novel is unquestionably poignant, there is a brilliant, excruciating rawness in the people and policies he writes about in these articles. How many readers of The Grapes of Wrath know, for example, that Steinbeck was deeply involved in policy calling for, among other things, a vast expansion of the federal camp program. He also advocated for policies which ran counter to the strongly held beliefs of the entrenched agricultural interests:

“Since the greatest number of the white American migrants are former farm owners, renters or laborers, it follows that their training and ambition  have never been removed from agriculture. It is suggested that lands be leased; or where it is possible, that state and Federal lands be set aside as subsistence farms for migrants. These can be leased or sold on long time payments to families of migrant workers . . . The expense of such projects should be borne by the Federal Government, by state and country governments . . . The cost of such ventures would not be much greater than the amount which is now spent for tear gas, machine guns and ammunition, and deputy sheriffs.”

But it is when Steinbeck is writing exactly what he sees that you find yourself teetering emotionally between the real and the fictional. These may be Ma and Pa Joad to fans of the novel, but they are also real people, agonizingly alive, barely surviving in the squatter’s camps:

“Here, in the faces of the husband and his wife, you begin to see an expression you will notice on every face; not worry, but absolute terror of the starvation that crowds against the borders of the camp. This man has tried to make a toilet by digging a hole in the ground near his paper house and surrounding it with an old piece of burlap. But he will only do things like that this year. He is a newcomer and his spirit and decency and his sense of his own dignity have not been quite wiped out. Next year he will be like his next door neighbor.”

Steinbeck’s evocative words travel back and forth between individual descriptions of a family’s meager income and pitiable diet (beans, baking-powder biscuits, jam, coffee when the family is making money; beans and fried dough during lay-offs), the efforts of the federal government’s Resettlement Administration, the people who worked with the migrants, the policies of the large farms that exploited the migrants’ desperation and the history of imported labor. If you’ve read The Grapes of Wrath, this book will add another dimension to your understanding of the novel. If you haven’t, do so but read this book first as the superb prelude that it is.

If you are introducing a young reader to Steinbeck, The Harvest Gypsies along with The Grapes of Wrath would make an excellent gift. And for any art lover, California history fan or seeker of unique volumes, At Work would be a superb addition. They are both outstanding and have my highest recommendation.


Almost since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to anyone who will listen. That “talent” eventually took her out of magazine writing and into book reviewing in 2000 for an online review site where she cut her teeth (as well as a few authors). Stints as book editor for her local newspaper and contributing editor to Booklist and Bookmarks magazines has reinforced her belief that she has interesting things to say about books. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats, 850 bookmarks and approximately 1,000 books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She is a member of the National Books Critics Circle (NBCC) and Book Publicists of Southern California. You can reach her at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it