Discouraged Workers

Artist Ben Norris (1910 - 2006)

Date1936

MediumOil on canvas

Dimensions24 x 30 in. (61 x 76.2 cm)
Framed (gold, wired, not glazed): 31 x 37 x 3 in. (78.7 x 94 x 7.6 cm)

ClassificationsPainting

Credit LineGift of the Hilbert Collection

Object number2017.030

DescriptionA Depression-era classic, this painting is chock-full of Art Deco elements -- the streamlined forms of the buildings, tanks and smokestacks, the bright searchlight that splits the composition in half. It's also a fine example of Social Realism, a genre that many California Scene painters worked within. Social Realist art commented on the social, economic and political conditions that prevailed between the wars and particularly during the Great Depression, often focusing on the working classes and the disenfranchised.

Here, Norris compresses a number of real buildings that existed on or near Aliso Street near the Los Angeles Gas Works and the Maier Brewing Company. Workers trudge with weary steps from building to building, either looking fruitlessly for jobs, or downcast because they've lost a job. (Historical aside: Maier Brewery created the famous "Brew 102" after WWII, the cheapest beer in L.A. and one of the most popular.)

Ben Norris graduated from Pomona College, won a fellowship at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, studied at the Sorbonne and traveled extensively through Europe before WWII. He painted primarily landscapes and still lifes, as well as some Social Realist works, during his early career, and his style later evolved into abstraction and semi-abstraction. From late 1936 through the '50s he lived in Hawaii and was a member of the art faculty at the University of Hawaii. He later retired to New York City and Philadelphia, where he continued to create art for another two decades.

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