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2024 post:
Throughout 2024, we're looking back at the 100 year history of art at the Mulvane. The U.S. stock market crashed in October of 1929, marking the beginning of the Great Depression. This lithograph by Samuel Halpert was made in that same year. During the next few weeks, we will be posting artworks made as part of the Works Progress Administration, an agency of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and a source of employment for many artists during the Great Depression.Label
(from 2014.Old Walks and New)
Samuel Halpert, American, 1884-1930
Central Park, 1929, lithograph
Like many American artists in the early decades of the twentieth century, Halpert was fascinated with the modern city. He painted such iconic sights as New York’s skyscrapers, the Brooklyn Bridge, Times Square and Central Park. Halpert was a pioneer of modern art in America, having known in Paris such artists as Henri Matisse, Fernand Leger and Robert Delaunay. Like them, he rejected naturalism, using, in this work, strong lines and simplified forms to capture the movement of the skaters, the bareness of trees and the cold of winter.