1. Patricia Hills and Roberta K. Tarbell, The Figurative Tradition and the Whitney Museum of American Art: Paintings and Sculpture from the Permanent Collection (New York and Newark, Del.: Whitney Museum of American Art in association with University of Delaware Press, 1980), p. 71.

2. Susan Porter Benson, "The Cinderella of Occupations: Managing the Work of Department Store Saleswomen, 2900-1940," Business History Review 55 (Spring 2981); Benson, "The Clerking Sisterhood: Rationalization and the Work Culture of Saleswomen in American Department Stores, 1890-2960," Radical America 12 (March-April 1978), pp. 41-55; and Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986).

3. Benson, Counter Cultures , chapter 6, "'The Clerking Sisterhood': Saleswomen's Work Culture," pp. 227-271.

4. Critics throughout the 1930s placed Soyer squarely within the movement away from landscape toward a "commercial and industrial" subject matter that focused on "human beings affected by social conditions." Soyer's art, often referred to as "social commentary," was also praised for its frank realism and its often penetrating psychological observation. Far from suggesting that Soyer's art might be a propagandistic vehicle for social change, most critics praised the artist's craftsmanship, his subtle palette, and his direct, strong brush-work and marked him as one of the most promising painters of his generation. See, for example, "Social Commentaries Mark the Pennsylvania Academy's Annual," Art Digest 8 (February 15, 1934), quotations pp. 5-7; Lloyd Goodrich, ''In the New York Galleries," The Arts 15 (May 1929), p. 334; "Around the Galleries," Art News 30 (February 27, 1932), p. 10; "Exhibitions in New York," Art News 31 (February 18, 2933), p. 5; and "New Exhibitions of the Week: Human Studies by Raphael Soyer," Art News 37 (April 15, 1939), P. 14.

5. Interview with the artist, March 13, 1987. The relationship of horizontal and vertical hand gestures at the center of Shop Girls is loosely based on that of the gestures of Christ, Peter, and the disciple between them in Masaccio's Tribute Money (Fig. 6.7).

6. James Lane, "The Passing Shows," Art News 40 (April 1-15, 1941), p. 29.

7. Patricia Hills, with an essay by Raphael Soyer, Social Concern and Urban Realism: American Painting of the 1930 s (Boston: Boston University Art Gallery, 1983), p. 39. Davis spent most of his life in Arizona. During the 1930s, however, he was a student at the National Academy of Design and exhibited widely on the East Coast. He was also active in the WPA.

8. Hills, Social Concern and Urban Realism, p . 91. Born in Vienna, Vavak immigrated

to New York in 1904. He settled in Chicago and studied at the Art Institute. During the 1930s, he was in the WPA and was a member of the Chicago Artists' Union. His goal was to create a contemporary history painting.

9. Margaret Breuning, "Art in New York," Parnassus 10 (March 1938), p. 20 (review of Soyer's 1938 show at the Valentine Gallery); Helen Buchalter, "Carnegie International, 1939," Magazine of Art 32 (November 1939), p. 630; "New Exhibitions of the Week."

10. Soyer told me that Degas was always on his mind when he worked. His early interest in the French painter began when his twin brother, Moses, sent him a large volume of plates of Degas's work from France in 1926. As early as the 1930s, critics began to recognize the affinities between the Soyers and the French painter. Interview with the artist, December 27, 1982; Milton W. Brown, American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955; reprint, 1972), p. 185; and Harry Salpeter, "Raphael Soyer: East Side Degas," Esquire , May 1938.

11. Hills and Tarbell, The Figurative Tradition , p. 71. My discussion of the studio-picture tradition is taken from Brown, American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression , pp. 154-155. For the interpretation of Degas's bather images see Eunice Lipton, Looking into Degas: Uneasy Images of Women and Modern Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 165-186; and (for the monotypes), Hollis Clayson, " Avant-Garde and Pompier Images of the Nineteenth Century French Prostitution: The Matter of Modernism, Modernity, and Social Ideology," in Modernism and Modernity , ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, et al., Vancouver Conference Papers (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983), pp. 43-64. For a discussion of the female nude in early twentieth-century modernist painting see Carol Duncan, "Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth-Century Vanguard Painting," in Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany , ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), pp. 293-314.

12. Brown, American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression , p. 154.

13. Interview with Isabel Bishop, December 16, 1982.

14. Frank Gettings, Raphael Soyer: Sixty-five Years of Printmaking (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982), p. 11; and interviews with Raphael Soyer, December 27, 1982, and March 13, 1987. Soyer rarely used professional models. In my last interview with him, he said he knew many of his models intimately, and they in turn would know him better than almost anyone else. Many of his last models had worked for him for ten to twenty years; some in their forties he had known since their early twenties. Soyer remarked that their late twentieth-century dilemmas—principally failed relationships with men reluctant to make commitments or to have the children many of the women were desperate for— were markedly different from those of the Depression era. One sensed in Soyer's commentary on his models long-standing relationships of mutual respect. It may have been the care Soyer took in these relationships beginning in the 1930s that prompted the New York Post reviewer Jerome Klein's comment that Soyer "reaches the greatest freedom under the most intimate conditions in the quiet of the studio where the distinction between model and person breaks down." Quoted in "Raphael Soyer, Realist, Captures That 'Haunted Look of the Unemployed,' "Art Digest 12 (March 15, 1938), p. 12.

15. Frances Fisher Dubuc, "Women Wanted by Department Stores," Saturday Evening Post , June 23, 1928, p. 134.

16. New York Times , May 9, 192 6 , sec. 2, p. 17.

17. As I've indicated elsewhere, polls in the 1920s showed that the white middle-class working woman preferred marriage over a career and usually dropped out of the work force with marriage or the birth of a child. Consequently, the proportion of working women

between twenty-five and forty-four years old rose from only 3.3 to 7.3 percent between 1900 and 1920. Furthermore, the occupational distribution of married women showed that of those who worked following marriage the largest group held low-level factory or domestic positions. By 1940 only 15 percent of all married women were employed, and only one-third of these women held professional, mercantile, or clerical positions. Lois Scharf, To Work and to Wed: Female Employment, Feminism, and the Great Depression , Contributions to Women's Studies no. 15 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), pp. 41, 16.

18. Alice Calvin, "The Shop Girl," Outlook 88 (February 15, 1908), pp. 383-384; Mary Rankin Cranston, "The Girl behind the Counter," World Today 10 (March 1906), pp. 270-274; Mary Alden Hopkins, "The Girls behind the Counter," Collier's , March 16, 1912; Mary Maule, "What Is a Shop Girl's Life?" World's Work 14 (September 1907); Anne O'Hagan, "The Shop-Girl and Her Wages,'' Munsey's Magazine 50 (November 1913), pp. 252-259; Mary Van Kleek, "Working Conditions in New York Department Stores," Survey , October 11, 1913, pp. 50-51. Van Kleek was writing as secretary of the Russell Sage Foundation's Committee on Women's Work. In New York and other major cities, there was a phenomenal growth in the number of department stores from the mid-nineteenth century until World War I. Older New York stores, like Arnold Constable, Lord & Taylor, and A. T. Stewart, had moved uptown and were joined by numerous others. Stores were clustered in districts between Sixth Avenue and Broadway and from just below Fourteenth Street to Forty-second Street. Within this small geographical area by 1910 between twenty and thirty thousand "girls and women" were employed in dry goods and department stores, as many as three thousand in some of the largest emporiums. John William Ferry, A History of the Department Store (New York: Macmillan, 1960), pp. 35-39; and Mary Maule, "What Is a Shop Girl's Life?" p. 9311.

19. Cranston, "The Girl behind the Counter," p. 270; Calvin, "The Shop Girl," p. 383; O'Hagan, "The Shop-Girl and Her Wages," pp. 253-254, 256; and Alice Kessler-Harris, Women Have Always Worked: A Historical Overview (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1981), p. 99. In 1900, less than 10 percent of the female working population held jobs in sales; about 33 percent were domestic servants; 25 percent worked in factories or mills; and about 10 percent worked in agriculture. Most of these jobs paid more than sales work, but sales work had a higher status because the environment was cleaner and, though minimal, opportunities for advancement were comparatively greater (p. 80).

20. Benson, "The Cinderella of Occupations," p. 6, and Counter Cultures , p. 132. One indignant writer observed in 1913 that although social workers had estimated nine dollars per week as the lowest reasonable wage on which a working girl could be self-sufficient, ten thousand New York shopgirls received less than eight dollars. Van Kleek, "Working Conditions," p. 50. The belief that the shopgirl was prey to the "social evil" was the primary motive for some of the writers who investigated her job and life. Many feared that a young girl receiving low wages would succumb to advances by unscrupulous male superiors and store patrons who might, with money or goods, make her life easier. Even when a federal report showed that 75 percent of female crimes were committed by women in domestic and personal service and only z percent by saleswomen, the belief that a shopgirl was likely to compromise her virtue persisted. According to one author, both the staff and customers of one of the better New York stores believed "many of its saleswomen were subsidized by private illicit relations." O'Hagan, "The Shop-Girl," p. 256.

21. Helen Stuart Campbell, "Among the Shop-Girls," in Victorian Women: A Documentary Account of Women's Lives in Nineteenth-Century England, France, and the United States , ed. Erna Olaf Hellerstein, Leslie Parker Hume, and Karen M. Offen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1981), p. 374.

22. Helen Stuart Campbell, "Among the Shop-Girls," p. 374.

23. Benson, Counter Cultures , p. 178. "At the suggestion of a minimum wage for women and children, employers variously invoked the Constitution, grieved over the inefficient, whom they would be forced to dismiss to utter poverty in the event of any governmental interference with wages, and recited their ancient creed that woman works for 'pin-money.'" O'Hagan, "The Shop-Girl," p. 252. O'Hagan also observed (p. 253) that employers always tried to hire women who lived at home with male wage earners so as not to threaten their belief that she worked for spending money.

24. Mrs. John Van Vorst, " Grisettes and Midinettes," Lipincott's Magazine 80 (July 1907), quotations from pp. 101, 103.

25. Van Vorst, " Grisettes and Midinettes, " pp. 104, 107.

26. Many of the observations here are based on an extended discussion with Soyer about his relationship to his models, March 13, 1987.

27. Frances Donovan, The Saleslady (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929; reprint New York: Arno Press, 1974). In the introduction, Donovan's fellow sociologist David Park observed, "the little shopgirl whose fortunes have been touchingly described by O'Henry, has been very largely superseded; the saleslady is likely to be a mature woman. Many of them are married or widowed, and in any case they hold their jobs by their competence rather than by their charm" (p. ix).

28. Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties , First Perennial Library edition (New York: Harper and Row, 1931; reprint, 1964), p. 80.

29. Changes in labor laws, thanks in part to lobbying efforts by organizations like the Consumers' League of New York, altered some of the worst conditions. In 1913, for example, a law was passed prohibiting women from working more than 54 hours per week, children between fourteen and sixteen from working over 48 hours (previous limits had been 60 and 54 hours). Mary Dewhurst Blankenhorn, "Behind the Counter," Outlook , 144 (December 22, 1926), p. 531. Frances Donovan, The Saleslady , p. 83. Donovan, a sociologist who worked in the dress department of a New York store as a participant-observer, suggested that commissions for a good saleswoman could average ten to fifteen dollars per week. Blankenhorn, "Behind the Counter," p. 532, pointed out that the hiring of a nurse and provision for mutual-aid societies, uncommon in the prewar period, were by the 1920 s established practice. See also Dubuc, "Women Wanted by Department Stores," pp. 130. 134.

30. Donovan was quoting from an article in Woman's Wear , dated August 21, 1926, called "A Shop Girl by Any Other Name." The Saleslady , pp. 160-161.

31. "Where the Schools Fail," Dry Goods Economist 67 (May 10, 1913), p. 27, as quoted in Benson, "The Cinderella of Occupations," p. 12. There were also strong prescriptions on race: black women were almost never saleswomen but served as elevator operators or backstage personnel. Benson, Counter Cultures , p. 209.

32. Benson, "The Cinderella of Occupations," pp. 13-14, and Counter Cultures , pp. 142-146; Paul Brown, "Shopgirls: 1930 Model," Commonweal 12 (October 8, 1930), p. 577; and Donovan, The Saleslady , p. 83.

33. In The Saleslady , Frances Donovan expressed surprise at the difficulty of her training class. The teacher

scores us, calls our attention to errors, has us make out more checks, tells us in detail how to handle "C.O.D.s," when it is necessary to have the section-manager sign slips, when to send the money to the cashier in a gray carrier, when in a red or a blue one,

which form to put into the carrier, which with the merchandise, which to keep and how. She explains the intricacies . . . detail after detail until we are exhausted and dizzy. (p. 21)

Helen Rich Norton, Department-Store Education: An Account of the Training Methods Developed at the Boston School of Salesmanship, under the Direction of Lucinda Wyman Prince , Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education Bulletin, 1917, no. 9 (Washington, D.C.), p. 12, as quoted in Benson, "The Cinderella of Occupations," p. 15.

34. Benson, "The Cinderella of Occupations," p. 9.

35. Donovan, The Saleslady , introduction by David Park, p. ix; and Dubuc, "Women Wanted by Department Stores," p. 130. The manager of the book department in one store said that the store preferred college women, "although we will train high-school graduates if their home background is good" (p. 133).

36. Among these schools were the Prince School of Store Service Education (a graduate school of Simmons College in Boston); the Research Bureau for Retail Training, the University of Pittsburgh; and the School of Retailing at New York University. Helen Law, "A New Job for the College Girl," Review of Reviews 81 (June 1930), pp. 74-75.

37. Benson, Counter Cultures , p. 160.

38. Law, "A New Job," p. 74. Three years earlier, Reyburn, a key figure in training store managers, in a speech before the Store Managers' Division, National Dry Goods Association, spoke about the greater effects the middle- to upper-class store environment would have on the lower-class girl.

Constant contact with the woman who is in charge of her department will have an influence on her. Daily contact with other girls who have been subjected to influences in business will have an influence on her. Daily observations of customers in the building will influence her, and slowly she will change because of these influences. She will lower the tone of her voice, grow quiet in her manner, exhibit better taste in the selection of her clothes, become more considerate of others.

Quoted in Benson, "The Cinderella of Occupations," p. 13.

39. Donovan, The Saleslady , p. 9.

40. "We go our separate ways. . .. During the business week we are like a family with the close bond of a common interest. We know each other's outside life only through what we tell each other. We are not interested in the husbands, children, friends, except as they affect the attitudes of the girls in the store. Later I was to learn that there were outside contacts, carefully safeguarded, not at all general." Donovan, The Saleslady , p. 41.

41. "There are two girls who hold themselves aloof. They do not chatter but they take pains to tell us that they belong to the Training Squad, which is composed of college graduates who are given an intensive training in department-store procedure for a period of two years. One of the girls says, 'And when we get through, we are going to be store superintendents.' "Donovan, The Saleslady , p. 20.

42. John Wanamaker, as quoted in Benson, Counter Cultures , p. 155. Donovan recorded a conversation she had with Alice, a store model hired for her looks who was an unsuccessful saleswoman because she had left school early and used poor grammar when she spoke. Alice assured Donovan that she (Donovan) would get ahead because of her education ( The Saleslady , pp. 66-67 ). Helen Law, in "A New Job," p. 74, observed the passage of what she called the chewing-gum era among shopgirls in department stores, and Paul Brown, in "Shopgirls: 1930 Model," p. 576, noted how the O'Henry shopgirl became the

modern salesgirl with the elimination of the" 'dese, dem and dose' school of pronunciation."

43. Dubuc, "Women Wanted for Department Stores," p. 134; and Benson, Counter Cultures , pp. 153-159.

44. Scharf, To Work and to Wed , p. 37.

45. At the turn of the century, saleswomen (shopgirls) were required to wear black so they would not detract from the store displays. Cranston, "The Girl behind the Counter," p. 270. A writer in the 1920s suggested that the practice continued, to avoid the "danger of display of poor taste and lack of background on the part of employees." "Employees' Dress Regulations," Bulletin of the National Retail Dry Goods Association 10 (October 19 28), p. 457, as quoted in Benson, "The Cinderella of Occupations,'' p. 20. Donovan suggests that dark dresses remained appropriate and observed that salesladies changed into lighter-colored dresses to go out for lunch or to leave at the end of the day. Donovan, The Saleslady , p. 101. Miller's saleswomen conform to the practice by wearing monochromatic dresses with simple collars.

46. Richard R. Brettell and Suzanne Folds McCullagh, Degas in the Art Institute of Chicago (New York: Art Institute of Chicago and Abrams, 1984), p. 131. For a further discussion of Degas's milliners see Lipton, Looking into Degas , pp. 161-164.

47. Lorine Pruette, ed., Women Workers through the Depression: A Study of White Collar Employment Made by the American Woman's Association (New York: Macmillan, 1934), pp. 20, 66-74; and Scharf, To Work and to Wed , p. 120.

48. Although the WPA brought some relief, three-fourths of the women on WPA rolls were former factory workers or domestics, who found creative art or sewing projects more easily than sales or clerical workers could have done. This occurred even though the proportion of white-collar women was higher and they were generally out of work longer. Scharf, To Work and to Wed , pp. 121-122; and Meridel Le Sueur, "Women on the Bread-lines," New Masses 7 (January 1932), pp. 5-7.

49. The only image that alludes to women's unemployment is Isabel Bishop's painting Waiting (1935-37). It shows a plainly dressed mother leaning back with her child resting in her lap. Although the Depression era viewer might have interpreted this woman, very different from Bishop's other females, as one waiting for work, Bishop said that she was trying to portray the dependence that exists between mother and child.

50. Grace Hutchins, Women Who Work (New York: International Publishers, 1934), pp. 83-84. Since the turn of the century, stools had been placed behind counters so that women could rest their feet when not waiting on customers. Managers believed, however, that seated workers undermined a store's reputation for prompt and energetic service, and girls caught using the stools received reprimands for laziness. The unwritten rule that stools were never to be used persisted and a shopgirl, particularly in the Depression, would endure aching feet rather than risk losing her job or the chance for a much-needed raise or promotion. O'Hagan, "The Shop-Girl," p. 253.

51. Lauren Gilfillan, "Weary Feet," Forum and Century 90 (October 1933), p. 202.

52. The NRA was established to enforce the wage and hour regulations resulting from the 1933 NIRA (National Industrial Recovery Act), designed to pump new life into the economy. The act resulted from long discussions among businessmen, labor leaders, and government officials and also involved a massive public-relations program to stimulate consumer support (and purchasing). Businesses conforming to NRA practices could display the NRA sticker—a blue eagle with the slogan We Do Our Part emblazoned beneath. Klein's annex proudly displays it in a 1936 Berenice Abbott photograph (Fig. 3.5).

53. New York Times , September 5, 1933, p. 5; and "S. Klein: 'On the Square' Store Plays Santa to Its Employees," Newsweek , December 29, 1934, pp. 28-30.

54. "S. Klein Loses Wage Plea," New York Times , November 30, 1933, p. 10; and "S. Klein: 'On the Square,'" p. 29.

55. Stella Ormsby, "The Other Side of the Profile," New Republic 72 (August 17, 1932), p. 21. Although wages had improved by the time Soyer painted Shop Girls in 1936, the piece approximates the working conditions at Klein's.

56. Stella Ormsby, "The Other Side of the Profile," p. 21. Ormsby's letter was submitted to Klein by the New Republic editorial staff, who invited him to reply for simultaneous publication. After waiting three weeks, they published the letter, promising to print his reply. Apparently one was never forthcoming.

57. "NRA Violation Laid to Klein's Store," New York Times , December 18, 1934, p. 14; and New York Times , February 3, 1935, p. 12.

58. On February 10 an audience at the Civic Repertory Theater on Fourteenth Street was left waiting when five actors in the radical play Sailors of Cattero were arrested for picketing Ohrbach's. On February 7 a warrant had been issued for the arrest of the author Nathaneal West, also for picketing. For details on the strike, see New York Times , January 3, 1935, p. 8; January 4, 1935, p. 14; January 6, 1935, p. 28; January 11, 1935, p. 27; February 7, 1935, p. 40; February 10, 1935, p. 17; February 12, 1935, p. 6; February 13, 1935, p. 22; February 17, 1935, p. 17; February 21, 1935, p. 6; February 24, 1935, p. 23; February 27, 1935, p. 10; March 3, 1935, p. 30; March 9, 1935, p. 8.

59. The signs in Marsh's painting read, Locked Out for Joining Union, Don't Buy at Ohrbachs, and Young Men and Young Women Jailed for Picketing, Don't Buy at Ohrbachs.

60. Department stores continued their practice of seeking out mature women and in the 1930s hired and rehired working wives more than any other white-collar employer. Scharf, To Work and to Wed , p. 103. Whether or not Miller intended his matronly saleswomen to represent married women, the paintings corroborate the social fact. Although he believed in women's traditional roles, moreover, Miller was sympathetic to their doing other work as children grew older. Kenneth Hayes Miller Papers, Roll 583, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.

61. Scharf, To Work and to Wed , chapter 2, "Marriage and Careers: Feminism in the 1920s," pp. 21-38. Against historians who argue that feminism died in the 1920s (see William H. Chafe, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920-1970 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1972], and William L. O'Neill, "The End of Feminism," in Twentieth-Century America: Recent Interpretations , ed. Barton J. Bernstein and Allen J. Matusow, zd edition [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972], pp. 186-196), Scharf exposes this feminist "voice" that advocated the right of married women to work, one which, though never as strong as that advocating suffrage, should nonetheless be considered in evaluating the feminist movement and its relation to working women. The arguments of this small group of feminists, however, never altered the dominant image of the womanly homemaker or the womanly worker.

62. I would like to thank Peter Boswell for his thoughtful contribution to this analysis.

63. New York State Assemblyman Arthur Schwartz, for example, claimed in 1931 that the employment of married women was "reprehensible," and he admonished both federal and local governments to "cooperate and remove these undeserving parasites." George Gallup, after seeing the results of a 1936 poll on whether to permit married women to work, stated that he had never seen respondents "so solidly united in opposition as on any subject imaginable including sin and hay fever." Scharf, To Work and to Wed , pp. 47, 50.

The most telling example of strong public opposition to working wives appeared in the controversy over Section 213 of the 1932 Economy Act, which stated that whenever personnel reductions had to be made in government jobs, married persons (meaning married

women) must be discharged if their spouses were also government employees. Since this discriminatory clause applied only to a narrow group of government employees, President Hoover initially opposed it for the economic hardship it would cause as it made only an inconsequential contribution to economic recovery. With the growing sentiment against working wives, however, the section received widespread public attention and enjoyed strong public support. Women's groups who found the act economically and socially repugnant campaigned for its repeal. Yet Congress, recognizing a "politically advantageous symbol," debated for two years before repealing it, in July 1937. Scharf, To Work and to Wed , pp. 46-47, 50.

Scharf assumes some public familiarity with Section 213, to judge from her citation of newspaper references to it. Artists might have noticed the controversy. The journalist Adela Rogers St. John published case-study articles in the Washington Herald on the hardships of women who lost jobs because of the federal legislation. The novelist Rupert Hughes wrote a six-part serial in the winter of 19 36 for the New York Herald Tribune entitled "Section 213-a Story behind the Headlines." A year before, in the same paper, the humorist Franklin Pierce Adams published the following ditty:

Oh for a play by Bernard Shaw

On the Federal Marital Status Law

Finally, an official history of the civil service, written in the early 1940s, noted that Section 213 was "the best known of the [Economy Act's] provisions." Scharf, To Work and to Wed , p. 51.

64. Scharf, To Work and to Wed , pp. 100-102.

65. For descriptions of the humanity, honesty, and sincerity of Soyer's women see "Around the Galleries," Art News 30 (February 27, 1932), p. 10; Robert Coates, "Latter Day Impressionist," New Yorker (March 13, 1948), pp. 61-62; and Carl Zigrosser, Tbe Artist in America: Twenty-four Close-ups of Contemporary Printmakers (New York: Knopf, 1942), pp. 60-61.

66. The critic Emily Genauer was quoted on Soyer's drab women in the anonymous review "Raphael Soyer Paints Twenty-three Artists and Some Hungering Shop Girls," Art Digest 15 (April 1, 1941), p. 17. A reviewer of Soyer's 1929 show at the Daniel Gallery spoke of the grotesque stupidity of his model Susan in "Raphael Soyer: Daniel Galleries," Art News 27 (April 27, 1929), p. 10. Reviewing the same show, Walter Gutman spoke of Soyer's "unconscious way of deforming which makes his subjects ludicrous" ("Raphael Soyer,'' Creative Art 6 [April 1930], pp. 258-260); "Reviews and Previews," Art News 48 (April 1948), p. 51.

67. For the classic discussion of this phenomenon in the Western European tradition of oil painting, of which Soyer was a part, see John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1972), pp. 45-64.

68. Alfred Kazin, Starting Out in the Tbirties (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), as quoted in Dore Ashton, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning (New York: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 54.

69. According to Frances Donovan, a store's management typically chose the prettiest saleswomen as models ( The Saleslady , p. 66).

70. "Exhibitions in New York," Art News 31 (February 18, 1933), p. 5.

71. Reviews, in the order quoted, are "Raphael Soyer Paints Twenty-three Artists," p. 17; "New York Criticism," Art Digest 9 (March 1, 1935), p. 18; Soyer quoted from Gettings, Raphael Soyer , p. 30; "Social Commentaries Mark the Pennsylvania Academy's Annual,"

Art Digest 8 (February 15, 1934), pp. 5-7; and Laurie Eglington, "Exhibitions in New York," Art News 33 (February 23, 1935), p. 10.

72. Interview with the artist, December 27, 1982.

73. Hills, Social Concern and Urban Realism , p.27.

74. Moses Soyer, "Three Brothers," Magazine of Art 32 (April 1939), p. 207. In Self-Revealment: A Memoir (New York: Maecenas Press, 1969), Raphael Soyer also recalled feeling lonely and disenchanted with France, in part because he knew no French and had few friends there, in part because Parisian museums had not yet been renovated (p. 22). My discussion of Soyer's relation to the aesthetic policies and politics of the Popular Front is indebted here and below to Céile Whiting, Antifascism in American Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

75. Soyer, Self-Revealment , p. 23. Soyer saw Grosz's works in Munich at an exhibit called Von neue Sachlichkeit zu kein Sachlichkeit (From new objectivism to non-objectivism).

76. Lloyd Goodrich, Raphael Soyer (New York: Abrams, 1972), p. 66; and statement of purpose from the Artists' Congress, as quoted in Hills, Social Concern and Urban Realism , p. 29.

77. Soyer did several paintings of dancers, often at rest in the studio rather than in performance. His brother Moses had married a dancer, and perhaps through him Raphael became interested in the theme. In mid-decade he painted dancers from the studios of Fé Alf and Jane Dudley, relatively unknown figures at that time who were interested in presenting revolutionary themes in dance. The determined pose of Fé Alf in Figure 6.24 suggests this purpose. John Martin, "Fé All Seen Here in Dance Recital," New York Times , February 25, 1935, p. 12; New York Times , April 21, 1935, sec. 9, p. 4; and Harry Salpeter, "Raphael Soyer: East Side Degas," p. 158.

78. Whiting, Antifascism in American Art , pp. 38-39, 165.

79. Pruette, Women Workers through the Depression , p. 155.

80. For a discussion of Art Front , its role in the Artists' Union and its changing editorial policy, see Gerald M. Monroe, "Art Front," Archives of American Art Journal 13 (1973), pp. 13-19.

81. The argument here is based on my understanding of the content of Art Front from Monroe; from selections from articles quoted in Hills, Social Concern and Urban Realism , pp. 16 - 17; and from Whiting, Antifascism in American Art , chapters 2, 5.

82. Harold Rosenberg, "The Wit of William Gropper," Art Front z (March 1936), pp. 7-8, as quoted in Hills, Social Concern and Urban Realism , p. 17.

83. Louis Lozowick, "Towards a Revolutionary Art," Art Front 2 (July-August 1936), pp. 12-13, as quoted in Hills, Social Concern and Urban Realism , p. 17. Lozowick's statement reads:

Nor does partisanship narrow the horizon of revolutionary art. Quite the contrary, the challenge of a new cause leads to the discovery of a new storehouse of experience and the exploration of a new world of actuality. Even a tentative summary will show the vast possibilities, ideologic and plastic; relations between the classes; relations within each class; a clear characterization in historic perspective, of the capitalist as employer, as philanthropist, as statesman, as art patron; the worker as victim, as striker, as hero, as comrade, as fighter for a better world; the unattached liberal, the unctuous priest, the labor racketeer; all the ills capitalist flesh is heir to—persons and events treated not as chance snapshot episodes but correlated among themselves shown in their dramatic antagonisms, made convincing by the living language of fact and made meaningful from the standpoint of a world philosophy. The very newness of the theme will forbid a conformity in technique.