Social Realism, trend in American art originating in about 1930 and referring in its narrow sense to paintings treating themes of social protest in a naturalistic or quasi-expressionist manner. In a broader sense, the term is sometimes taken to include the more general renderings of American life usually categorized as American Scene painting and Regionalism, which may or may not manifest socially critical comment.
The origins of Social Realism lie in the Ashcan School painters, who in the first decades of the 20th century depicted the commonplace, gritty, and unglamorous realities of city life. John Sloan, Robert Henri, George Bellows, and George Luks were prominent members of this diverse group who painted scenes from everyday life. Later, Reginald Marsh, though not a member of the Ashcan School, continued this tradition, taking lower Manhattan and the Bowery as his themes.
The advent of the Great Depression in 1929 and the enactment of the New Deal’s programs beginning in 1933 stimulated a broad trend toward sociopolitical commentary in American painting. The vast expansion of job patronage by the federal government spilled over into the arts; with the support of the Works Progress (later Projects) Administration (WPA), the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), and the Treasury Department, many artists in the 1930s were commissioned to decorate public buildings with murals dealing with American subject matter. Many American artists during the 1930s were also influenced by the politically conscious and sometimes overtly propagandistic works of the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco. George Biddle’s “Sweatshop” (c. 1935), a study for a fresco in the Justice Department Building, Washington, D.C., is a notable example of such American public decorations, and one of the few to have survived intact.
In the Depression era American painters began to grapple more openly with such themes as joblessness and poverty, political corruption and injustice, labour-management conflict, and the excesses of American materialism. Works in this vein by Ben Shahn, Philip Evergood, William Gropper, Charles White, and Jack Levine, all of whom worked for the WPA, are notable for their overt and sometimes scathing pictorial criticisms of American society. Shahn’s painting The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1931–32; Whitney Museum of American Art) is a bitter comment on the outcome of the famous case in which two Italian anarchists were condemned to death in a politically motivated trial. A good example of William Gropper’s powerfully simplified caricatures of American public life is The Senate (1935; Museum of Modern Art, New York City). Jack Levine evolved a more sophisticated expressionist technique for portraying what he viewed as the degradation of certain aspects of the national scene, a technique exemplified in The Feast of Pure Reason (1937; Museum of Modern Art).
Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry, Edward Hopper, and other Regionalist painters all dealt with everyday life in their works, but in a romanticized way that was basically incompatible with explicit social protest or criticism.