The People Work - Noon

The People Work - Noon is Benton Murdoch Spruance's midday scene of a multitude of pedestrians hurrying along the street in various directions. Some stop to view a construction site, located below street level, where workers rest on their lunch break. This glimpse of a major construction project and its laborers, who are essential for creating a structure that will ultimately dwarf its inhabitants, hints at the city's dynamic potential for growth. Using a cross-section compositional format, the image juxtaposes two levels of concurrent activities that characterize ordinary American city life at noon, moving about on city streets and having lunch, and two strata of urban society, office workers and laborers. Such juxtapositions also characterize the three other images—Morning (TF 1995.47.a), Evening (TF 1995.47.c), and Night (TF 1995.47.d)—that, together with Noon, comprise Spruance's lithograph series "The People Work." On the series' Title Sheet (TF 1995.47), Henri Marceau, then Assistant Director at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, offered an evocative caption for this print: "Rush and black hands, a hasty sandwich, steaming, hissing shovels—construction."

Urban streets crowded with pedestrians, hemmed in by buildings, and overshadowed by elevated train tracks were a favorite subject for artists in the first decades of the twentieth century, as also demonstrated in Glenn Coleman's Bonfire (TF 1996.67) and Reginald Marsh's Tattoo-Shave-Haircut (TF 1995.18). In all four of Spruance's "The People Work" prints, rapid transit is a persistent presence. Here, the elevated train is visible in the distance, while below street level, openings offer glimpses of dimly lit subterranean tracks and the side of one train car (just to the left of the diagonal bracing in the picture's center), suggesting that the work at hand is an expansion of the subway itself. Indeed, at the time Spruance was making this print, his hometown of Philadelphia was extending its Broad Street Subway. With its emphasis on the typical noon-time bustle of city streets and construction sites, however, Spruance's The People Work-Noon portrays a generalized idea of the modern American city.

Visions of a Nation: Exploring Identity through American Art, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, August 10, 1996–January 12, 1997.

The People Work: American Perspectives, 1840–1940 (Le Travail à l'oeuvre: les artistes américains 1840–1940), Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venues: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, March 15–May 25, 2003; Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, June 8–August 17, 2003. [exh. cat.]

Expanded Galleries of American Art with Loans from the Terra Foundation for American Art Collection, [Gallery 163] The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, April 15–July 2005.

Terra Collection-in-Residence, Ashmolean Museum of Art & Archaeology, Oxford, United Kingdom, September 15, 2022–September 30, 2026.

 

Fine, Ruth E. and Robert F. Looney. The Prints of Benton Murdoch Spruance. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986. No. 142, p. 110.

Master Prints of Five Centuries: The Alan and Marianne Schwartz Collection. (exh. cat., The Detroit Institute of Arts). Detroit, Michigan: The Detroit Institute of Arts, 1990. No. 107, pp. 120–21.

Bourguignon, Katherine M. and Elizabeth Kennedy. The People Work: American Perspectives, 1840–1940. (exh. cat., Terra Museum of American Art). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 2003. Text pp. 22, 30 (checklist); ill. p. 52 (color). [specific reference to Terra print]

Bourguignon, Katherine M. and Elizabeth Kennedy. Le Travail à l'oeuvre: les artistes américains, 1840–1940. (exh. cat., Terra Museum of American Art). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 2003. Text pp. 22, 30 (checklist); ill. p. 52 (color). [specific reference to Terra print]