Sweat Shop

Boris Gorelick's lithograph presents a harrowing montage of haggard faces, sewing machines, and hard-working seamstresses to convey the oppressive conditions in a sweatshop, where exploited employees work overly long hours making articles of clothing for pitifully low pay. At the lower right, two gaunt workers with thin arms are hunched over the cloth they are toiling to sew; they work under the harsh glare of lamplight that indicates the late-night hour. At left, a statuesque mannequin dominates the scene like a soulless overseer.

Compressing fragments of several scenes of sweat shop life into a single composition, Sweat Shop distorts and manipulates elements of its subject in a manner that reflects major currents in mid-twentieth-century art. These range from the flattening, fragmenting, and interlocking of objects associated with cubism to the use of strange juxtapositions of mundane things for dreamlike effect typically associated with surrealism. At the center, for example, large mask-like faces are contrasted with the reductive form of a small, sewing machine on a tipped-up table top, and another mask-like face animates the mannequin. The background is a composite of parts of walls, windows, and a blank door, with the grid of elevated train tracks near the upper center. Gorelick used these modernist pictorial techniques to emphasize the hardships the working poor endured during the economic privations of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Gorelick was one of many artists advocating social change in America during the period. He was employed by the Works Progress Administration Federal Arts Project, a government relief program; under the sponsorship of the WPA he painted murals and made lithographs, of which this may be one, for display in libraries, schools, and other public institutions. Like Raphael Soyer's The Mission (TF 1996.66), Sweat Shop highlights a setting associated with society's most impoverished class. Since the late nineteenth century, the dangerous, overcrowded garment factories of New York City had been infamous for their exploitation of workers--often, like the artist himself, recent immigrants. Whereas Edward Hopper's stylistically more conventional etching East Side Interior (TF 1994.22) only hints at the confining toil of the garment worker, Gorelick uses fantasy and distortion to dramatize the virtual slavery of sweatshop laborers.

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.]

The Left Front: Radical Art in "the Red Decade," 1929-1940,  Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art, Evanston, Illinois (organizer) Venues: Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art, Evanston, Illinois, January 17–May 22, 2014; Gray Art Gallery, New York University, New York, New York, January 13–April 4, 2015. [exh. cat.]

Atelier 17: Modern Printmaking in the Americas (Atelier 17: Gravura moderna nas Américas,  Museu De Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC-USP) and Terra Foundation for American Art (organizer).  Venue: Museu De Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC-USP), March 23–June 2, 2019. [exh. cat.]

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

   

Contacting Pablo Picasso: The Influence of Picasso on American Printmakers; Prints from the Collection of Reba and Dave Williams. (exh. cat., R. & D. Williams). New York: R. & D. Williams, 1995.

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. 10, 23, 28 (checklist); fig. 2, p. 10 (black & white). [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. 10, 23, 28 (checklist); fig. 2, p. 10 (black & white). [specific reference to Terra print]