I.W.O Picnic

 

Harry Gottlieb

  1895 - 1992 (biography)

around 1937-38 

color serigraph 

12 3/4 x 18 3/4" image 

pencil, in image, lower right; silkscreened, lower right margin. 

not stated 

silkscreened title, annotation: "U.A.A. Local 60 U.O.P.W.A. - C.I.O" 

 

antique-white wove 

published 

airtst 

17239 

SOLD

Harry Gottlieb did this color serigraph (screen-print), I.W.O. Picnic around 1937, during the Depression and at the beginning of the Labor Movement in the US that began to give workers a voice in their own workplace.. The image measures 12 3/4 x 18 3/4" and is signed in pencil in the lower right image. The image is signed, titled and annotated "U.A.A. Local 60 U.O.P.W.A. - C.I.O", screen-printed in the lower margin. This impression is printed on an antique-white wove paper and is not editioned. During the depression workers got together and formed unions to protect themselves against physical abuses, fight for minimum wages, limited work hours, 5 day weeks, breaks, etc. This included the artists who were working in the WPA/FAP. In 1937 the Artists Union, together with the Commercial Artists and Designers Union and the Independent Cartoonists Guild, affiliated wit the Congress of Industrial Organizations' new white-collar Union, the United Office and Professional Workers of America as United Artists, Local 60, with the illustrator and painter Rockwell Kent as president. In this print Gottlieb depicts what might well be a Labor Day picnic, an idealized, innocent scene that was designed to uplift the spirits of the worker.