Alma Sewing

The early 1930s were prosperous for the painter Francis Criss (1901-1973), but tough going for most American workers. Criss was born in London, England, in 1901 and moved with his family to Philadelphia at age 4. He began to sketch and paint as a child and won a scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1917. Later he studied art in Europe, at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, and at the Art Students League in New York City. In 1932 he was invited to exhibit his paintings in a one-man show at the Contemporary Arts Gallery in New York and also had his work featured in the First Biennial Exhibition organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1933 Criss had a second solo exhibition and the following year won a Guggenheim Fellowship to make another trip abroad. His career was taking off, and the future looked bright.

Meanwhile, prospects for most American workers were bleak. In 1933, an estimated one-fourth of the civilian US labor force was unemployed. Young people drifted from town to town in search of work and food, and families abandoned their farms in the drought-stricken Great Plains to look for greener pastures in California. Workers who still had jobs organized themselves into unions to negotiate for employment security and better wages, and when negotiation with their employers failed, they went on strike. Under pressure from the voters, the federal government began to provide food and medicine for citizens who no longer had a source of income and jobs for people who needed work. Those who could sew were put to work renovating hand-me-down clothing, those who could use a pick or a shovel were hired to build roads, schools, and parks, plant trees, dig reservoirs, and clear beaches, and those who had artistic talent were given financial aid through the Federal Art Project.

The Federal Art Project funded art production, art instruction, and art research. Working artists were commissioned to create posters, sculptures, and murals for public spaces. Francis Criss, for example, painted a mural for the Williamsburg Housing Project in Brooklyn, New York. Art and work were closely related, in the view of Thaddeus Clapp, a Federal Arts Project staffer. Clapp suggested that the public could gain an appreciation of art if they understood that making art is hard work. Conversely, he said, manual workers who took pride in the things they made could raise the quality of their workmanship to the level of art (O’Connor FV. Art for the Millions: Essays From the 1930s by Artists and Administrators of the WPA Federal Art Project. Boston, MA: New York Graphic Society; 1973:204-206).

During the 1930s, much of the art work of Francis Criss was concerned with these themes. For example, in his painting Alma Sewing (cover), a woman smiles to herself as she fashions a dress, taking pride in her creation. In a time of labor unrest, when union membership was mostly white and mostly male, the artist chose an African American female worker as his subject and gave her a name. In general, black women had few opportunities for employment, but some were skilled at craft work such as making clothes. The challenge of dressmaking is to cut and sew shapes of two-dimensional fabric to fit a three-dimensional body, in contrast to figurative painting, which represents three-dimensional space on a flat surface. In Alma Sewing, the dressmaker in her starched white apron is surrounded by gathers and folds of fabric. The edges of the shapes in this painting are crisp, and the colors are mostly flat with the barest amount of shading needed to suggest depth, revealing the painter's admiration for the overlapping planes of Cubist paintings.

Visually, this painting is a study of planes and surfaces that have been shaped and hemmed to create volume, and its centerpiece is the reflective surface of the lamp that hangs above the sewing machine. Peering out of the lamp is a tiny self-portrait of Criss amid the tools of his trade. There is a long tradition of artists painting their reflections into the background of their canvases (JAMA covers, December 29, 1969, and June 12, 1991), sometimes to demonstrate their virtuosity, sometimes to make a larger point. Criss' point seems to be that black dressmakers, though not represented by organized labor in the 1930s, were workers too, and the best of their craftsmanship rose to the level of art. By adding himself to the picture he made a second, more subtle point that creating art is also meaningful work, not only because artists compose beautiful images, but because art raises hard questions and brings them to the public eye.

The painter's miniature self-portrait is almost identical to a photograph of Criss in his studio that was taken by the photographer Max Yavno in 1940 for the Federal Art Project (http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/searchimages/images/item_3092.htm). In Yavno's photograph, Criss poses in front of one of his cityscapes, Americana (1936). With magnification, this painting can also be seen in the lamp of Alma Sewing. According to the dates, the photograph was taken five years after Alma Sewing was painted, suggesting that Criss and Yavno may have restaged the painter's portrait for the camera. He wears the same suspenders and button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, holds his sketchpad at the same angle, and faces the camera with the steady gaze of an artist at work.