Social Realism as a movement in art and fiction emerged between the World Wars in response to the political and socio-economic turmoil of the period. To create in the 1930s, both in Europe and the United States, meant making an ideological choice.
The direction might be reactionary or revolutionary, it could be religious or materialist – the routes had in common a shift away from the experimentation of previous decades towards tradition, from individualism towards shared views.
Painters and authors turned to realism in order to make their work accessible to a wider public, portraying their subjects as victims of developments beyond their control. By calling attention to the miserable condition of working classes, they challenged the powers that were held responsible for the slump in conditions and standards.
Social consciousness in the arts originated in the dire consequences of the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent “rationalization” of the workplace. Artistic and economic history run parallel in this context and in some cases seem to overlap.
Migrant Family
Painter and printmaker Raphael Soyer (1899-1987) was born Raphael Zalman Schoar in Borisoglebsk, a Russian town on the left bank of the Vorona River.
His father was a Hebrew scholar; his mother worked as an embroiderer. In a family of six children (Raphael’s identical twin Moses was a painter as well) much emphasis was placed on intellectual and artistic pursuits.
Under pressure of relentless Tsarist pogroms, the exodus of Jews from the Russian Empire started in the 1880s and continued into the first decades of the twentieth century. In 1912, Raphael’s parents packed their bags and took their kids to America, changing their name in the process. They would eventually settle in Brooklyn.
Raphael had the good fortune of attending the free school of the Cooper Union. Between 1914 and 1917 he and his brother were educated at that great Manhattan institution.
Having decided upon a career in art, he continued his studies at the National Academy of Design and, intermittently between 1920 and 1926, at the Art Students League of New York (ASL).
His mentor at the League was French-born Guy Pène du Bois who encouraged him to explore his own style rather than adhere to “external” demands. His contacts with painters of New York’s Ashcan School proved inspirational. He shared their preference for gritty urban themes.
Du Bois advised him to show his work to Charles Daniel, owner of the Daniel Gallery at 2 West 47th Street. His first exhibition took place in 1929 and was well-received.
Selling a number of works emboldened him to dump his day job, rent a studio on the Lower East Side, and pursue painting as a career. In October that same year Wall Street’s Stock Market crashed.
Poverty & Depression
During the tumultuous years following Black Thursday, a great need emerged to provide millions of jobless people with meaningful employment. In esthetics, the theme of social engagement re-entered the debate. Many artists conceived creativity as an act of political participation.
Raphael became associated with painters of the Fourteenth Street grouping who worked from studios near Union Square. They depicted “rough” scenes from this district that was known as a hotbed of radicalism.
As economic decline began to impact people’s lives, Soyer portrayed local down-and-outs. Many of his works came to embody the Great Depression, but his approach differed from more politically motivated left-wing artists.
Soyer painted men and women in contemporary settings of subways and bars of the city’s East Side, parts of which had become dens of deprivation. His images of drifters and derelicts reveal a timeless vision of the human condition rather than the immediacy of social protest.
There was no attempt to propaganda or commentary in his work. He conveyed the plight of poverty without falling into the traps of melodrama. He remained what he set out to be as an artist: both a realist and a humanist.
Manhattan’s working-class girls were amongst his favorite subjects. The seamstress stands out as an iconic figure of whom he produced various images throughout his career (his mother being an embroiderer, he was used to pins and needles in his childhood home).
He depicted her as a slave of the trade, living in squalor and working against the clock. No finished products leave her hands; there is no pride in her labor. She is a piece worker; her life reduced to bits.
Soyer’s intuitive understanding of suffering may strike the viewer as highly personal and distinctive artistic quality. Yet, the painter’s seamstress is far from unique.
In art, tradition always intervenes – whatever the condition or locality of creation. The needlewoman has a long history, both in literature and in painting.
Division of Labor
Pins have always been around. Prehistoric people used thorns; in ancient Egypt, pins were crafted of bronze with decorative heads; in the Roman era, they were used to hold pieces of clothing together. Medieval Europeans produced pins from bone, ivory or gold. By then pin-making had become a bustling trade.
The textile industry and the associated production of pins and needles were important economic activities during the eighteenth century, both in England and France.
In 1755, an article on “Épingles” by Alexandre Deleyre included in Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie (vol. 5) sparked interest in the manufacturing process of pins. In 1761, Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau published a study on L’art de l’épinglier in which he broke down the production process into a sequence of seventeen separate stages.
In The Wealth of Nations (1776: first chapter) Adam Smith promoted the concept of division of labor by pointing at the work of pin-makers. He distinguished eighteen distinct steps in the manufacturing cycle.
Production numbers were bound to be low if the complete process was handled by a single person. Divide these operations between ten separate workers and the output would increase dramatically.
As Smith burned his papers before he died, it is difficult to trace his research sources. He followed French intellectual developments and would have been familiar with relevant texts on the subject.
Duhamel’s study on pin-making was acquired by the library of Glasgow University where Adam Smith held a professorship. The library also subscribed to the Journal des Sçavans which, in November 1761, published an extensive review of the book. These sources were within his immediate reach.
The phrase “division of labor” however, had not been employed previously. Smith suggested the term in order to communicate his ideas concerning specialization in manufacture.
He predicted that the process would raise standards of living and increase the wealth of the nation, provided that the monotony of work be compensated by educational diversification. This proviso was soon forgotten as the concept of “productivity” became the sole criterion of economic success.
Birmingham in UK & USA
Pin-making went through the various steps of wire redrawing, straightening, cutting, sharpening the point, attaching the head and polishing. As a consequence, automation also happened in stages. Mass production started in 1828 once the first pin-making machine had been patented.
In a parallel process, the introduction of power-driven mechanical frames had sparked off protests amongst skilled workers. Taking their name from the legendary rebel Ned Ludd in 1811/2, “Luddites” began wrecking machines until the British Army intervened at the behest of factory owners. Dozens of protesters were executed or exiled to Australia.
Until the 1830s, the American market was supplied with mass produced pins from Birmingham in the West Midlands, England. A century later that situation was reversed.
Born at Jamestown in March 1792, Samuel Slocum had been engaged in construction work in various parts of Rhode Island. Around 1830 he took his family to London, later moving to Newport on the Isle of Wight where he became involved in the manufacture of pins.
In 1835, Slocum patented a machine for making pins with solid flat heads. Unable to find financial backing for his project, he returned to the United States.
Having settled in Poughkeepsie, he founded the manufacturing company Slocum & Jillson. Business flourished. In September 1841, he also designed a “machine for sticking pins into paper” which is often described as the first stapler.
Physician John Ireland Howe was working as a medic at the New York Almshouse where inmates produced pins by a laborious manual process. In June 1832 he exhibited a prize-winning machine at the American Institute Fair in the City of New York.
Soon after he established the Howe Manufacturing Company. Having moved the firm to the Birmingham, Connecticut, it became America’s largest pin manufacturer, incorporating Slocum & Jilllson in the meantime.
Birmingham in Connecticut out-produced British Birmingham. The American success story resulted in the demise of the English pin industry. By 1939 there were only a handful manufacturers left in the United Kingdom.
Art & Fiction
In Britain and France, cheap production methods led to the collapse of the cottage industry. It harmed dressmakers and milliners in particular. For these workers, mainly young women with little income or family support, there were few alternatives.
Lack of opportunities left them vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. They were reduced to “slopwork,” producing parts of garments that would subsequently be turned into dresses that were sold at considerable profit in fashion shops.
The overworked seamstress became the focus of considerable philanthropic attention. In London, the “Association for the Aid and Benefit of Dressmakers and Milliners” was the first charitable institution founded in March 1843, followed by “The Distressed Needlewomen’s Society” in 1847. She also entered art and literature.
Thomas Hood’s “The Song of the Shirt” was published in 1843 in the Christmas issue of the magazine Punch.
The poet highlighted the inhumane conditions under which needlewomen struggled to get by: “With fingers weary and worn, / With eyelids heavy and red. / A woman sat, in unwomanly rags, / Plying her needle and thread – / Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!”
The poem struck a chord amongst its readers.
Less than six months later – using a motto taken from Hood’s song – Richard Redgrave exhibited “The Sempstress” at the Royal Academy’s annual summer show.
In a review in The Times of London on May 8, 1844, its art critic argued that by exposing the miserable life of the needlewoman, the painting’s subject was “peculiarly of our time.”
By the time that George W. M. Reynold published his novel The Seamstress, or The White Slave of England (1853), the fate of the exploited dressmaker had entered the collective consciousness of the Victorian populace (with spoonfuls of sugary sentimentality).
In French academic art, needlework and femininity were fused. Time and again, the seamstress was portrayed as a young woman working from home, her hands occupied with needlework, her head bowed in silent concentration.
Paintings by Millet, Renoir or Pissarro evoke similar images of modesty and domesticity. The seamstress was a paragon of virtue. Needlework as a profession was appreciated as a respectable career.
Mechanization deprived skilled artisans of their jobs and pride. In textile centers such as Rouen, the gentle seamstress of old was turned into a low class “slopworker,” often with questionable morals.
As (rampant) prostitution was a far more profitable trade, it took moral strength to resist the temptation. In painting and fiction, the figure of the prostitute hovered behind the poverty-stricken seamstress. In stories by Guy de Maupassant and others, she represented two halves of the same whole.
Specialization and division of labor became central topics of social criticism. Pin-making functioned as a metaphor for the dehumanizing effect of modern manufacture.
Pins no longer implied progress as imagined by Adam Smith, but represented the worker’s degradation. “He who passes his life in making pin’s heads will never have a head worth anything more,” Francis Palgrave wrote in 1840.
Authors and artists focused their creative attention on the young woman who professionally handled pins and needles. With the emergence of social realism, the needlewoman appeared as the archetypal victim who had been robbed of her livelihood in process of mass production.
Raphael Soyer’s seamstress-images were hard-hitting portrayals of New York City’s Great Crash. At the same time, these depictions were a continuation of and a variation on Franco-British themes that had emerged in painting during earlier periods of economic upheaval.
Read more about women’s history in New York State.
Illustrations, from above: Richard Redgrave’s “The Sempstress,” 1846 (Tate Gallery, London); Raphael Soyer’s “Seamstress,” 1972; G.F. Watts’ “Song of the Shirt,” ca. 1847 (Watts Gallery Trust, Surrey); Roman pins made of metal; Anna Elizabeth Blunden’s “The Seamstress,” 1854 (Yale Center for British Art); illustration from 1893 edition of Thomas Hood’s “Song of the Shirt” published on behalf of the New Home Sewing Company, Massachusetts; and Frank Holl’s “Seamstresses,” 1875 (Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter).
