The People Work - Evening

The People Work - Evening is Benton Murdoch Spruance's compact view of a weekday evening rush hour. In a scene familiar to today's urban commuters, the sidewalks and streets are congested with traffic and people cram into crowded subways. Evening is the third of four lithograph prints comprising the series "The People Work," which also includes Morning (TF 1995.47.a), Noon (TF 1995.47.b), and Night (TF 1995.47.d). As in Morning, this composition  combines two separate aspects of the daily mass migration of workers heading home to capture in a single image what can in actuality only be witnessed or experienced separately: the above-ground scene of streets and vehicles and the subterranean world of the subway. In the top portion showing a darkening city illuminated by lights, a policeman directs traffic at a stop-light on the right as bustling pedestrians cross the street in front of a double-decker bus and automobiles. At the upper left, some pedestrians gather at the subway entrance to join the throng descending to the subway platform, seen in the bottom half of the picture. At the lower right, an overcrowded subway car, many of its riders absorbed in their newspapers, is shown in cross-section. On the Title Sheet that originally accompanied the series (TF 1995.47), Henri Marceau, then Assistant Director at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, wrote the following caption for this print: "Weary minds homeward bound, traffic with its toll—straphangers—the press."

This lithograph, like the others in Spruance's series, lucidly presents a complex ritual of urban life: the shared daily cycle of city-dwellers moving—by foot, bus, car, and subway—among a multitude of strangers. The accidental social juxtapositions that take place in urban public spaces became a compelling artistic theme for many American artists in the early decades of the twentieth century, as seen for example in Fritz Eichenberg's Subway (TF 1995.34) and John Sloan's Fifth Avenue 1909 (TF 1995.20). Spruance's series is notable, however, for his innovative cross-section compositions, which subtly associate the busy American city, with its multiple social and physical levels, to the bee hive or the ant colony.

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. 143, p. 111.

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. 108, 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. 53 (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. 53 (color). [specific reference to Terra print]