NEW YORK, NY.- Swann Galleries is presenting the fourth iteration of The Artists of the WPA auction. Many artists honed their craft while employed in New Deal programs, resulting in this auction’s wide range of objects, including photographs, prints, posters, paintings, mural studies, dioramas, and work program signage. The sale is a timed online auction and will begin closing on Thursday, January 25 at 12 pm Eastern.

Photography includes Berenice Abbott, Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, and Walker Evans, among others. Lange’s connection to her subject is inherent, but her mastery of capturing moving and thought-provoking compositions was developed through practice. A variant on her Migrant Mother, 1936, printed 1990s, gives an alternative look at one of the most recognizable images from the Great Depression ($2,000-3,000). Also by Lange is Son of a cotton sharecropper. Twelve years old. Near Cleveland, Mississippi, silver print, 1937 ($4,000-6,000). Further highlights include Walker Evans’s Connecticut Frame House, silver print, 1933 ($5,000-7,500); Berenice Abbott’s View of Logger using a McGiffert Log Loader, CA, and View of Logger Preparing to cut, CA, together, two silver prints, 1943 ($4,000-6,000); and Marion Post Wolcott’s Highway and Farm During Snowstorm near Barnard, Vermont, silver print, 1940 ($4,000-6,000), as well as a group of six color photographs by Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Delano and Russell Lee ($1,500-2,500).

Among the paintings offered in the sale are works by Robert Gwathmey and Joseph Solman. These artists pushed the boundaries of subject and format with themes of social justice and modernist sensibilities. Gwathmey is present with Flower Freshness, oil on canvas, circa 1970 ($12,000-18,000); and Solman’s Watching an Excavation, oil on canvas, 1938, is a great example of his exploration of themes and aesthetics not widely accepted in the American art market at the time ($6,000-8,000). Further works include Palmer Hayden’s On the Jersey Side, oil on canvas, circa late 1930s ($15,000-25,000); Claude Clark’s Drafting, oil on board, circa 1940-41 ($12,000-18,000); Joseph Delaney’s Seated Woman Reading, oil on wood panel, 1949 ($5,000-7,000); and a run of works by Raphael Soyer including Untitled (Portrait of a Student), oil on canvas, circa 1930 ($800-1,200).

Conceived out of crisis, the Federal Art Project was instrumental in the birth and development of modern and contemporary printmaking and the widespread utilization of mediums and styles that have become synonymous with American art. Printmakers in the sale include Thomas Hart Benton with Departure of the Joads, lithograph, 1939, commissioned by Twentieth-Century Fox Film Corporation, from The Grapes of Wrath ($12,000-18,000), Grant Wood’s July Fifteenth, lithograph, 1938 ($4,000-6,000), and their contemporaries.

The sale is rounded out by mural studies and vintage posters. Mural studies feature Louise Ronnebeck’s Oil Riggers, circa 1937, a sketch for the West Wall Amarillo Texas Post Office and Court House ($2,000-3,000); Egbert Norman Clark’s Fur Traders, & Grist Mills, two studies for mural paintings documenting the history of commerce in Utica, New York ($1,500-2,500); and two mural studies by James Russell Sherman ($1,200-1,800). Posters include works promoting informed participation in democracy, as well as advertisements for the 1939 World’s Fair.