The Sweat on Their Face

Portraying American Workers

David C. Ward (David C. Ward), Dorothy Moss (Dorothy Moss), John Fagg

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Hardback

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English

Smithsonian Books
15 November 2017

Human figures depicted in art

Work always has been a central construct in the United States,

influencing how Americans measure their lives and assess their

contribution to the wider society. Work also has been valued as the key

element in the philosophy of self-improvement and social mobility that

undergird the American value system. Yet work can also be something

imposed upon people- it can be exploitative, painful, and hard. This

duality is etched into the faces of the people depicted in the portraits

showcased in The Sweat of Their Face- Portraying American Workers.

This companion volume to an exhibition at the Smithsonian National

Portrait Gallery examines working-class subjects as they appear in

artworks by artists including Winslow Homer, Elizabeth Catlett, Danny

Lyon, and Shauna Frischkorn. This richly illlustrated book charts the

rise and fall of labor from the empowered artisan of the eighteenth

century through industrialization and the current American business

climate, in which industrial jobs have all but disappeared. It also

traces the history of work itself through its impact on the men and

women whose laboring bodies are depicted. The Sweat of Their Face is a powerful visual exploration of the inextricable ties between American labor and society.

By: David C. Ward (David C. Ward), Dorothy Moss (Dorothy Moss), John Fagg
Imprint: Smithsonian Books
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 279mm, Width: 229mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 1g
ISBN: 9781588346056
ISBN 10: 1588346056
Pages: 224
Publication Date: 15 November 2017
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

DAVID C. WARD is the National Portrait Gallery's senior historian. He has curated exhibitions on Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, American poetry, and the award-winning Hide/Seek- Difference and Desire in American Portraiture. He has also authored several books, including Charles Willson Peale- Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic. DOROTHY MOSS is the National Portrait Gallery's associate curator of painting and sculpture and director of the museum's Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. She has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues, and her articles and essays have been published in the Burlington Magazine, Gastronomica, and American Art.

Reviews for The Sweat on Their Face: Portraying American Workers

CHOICE This is this catalogue for an exhibition running at the National Portrait Gallery through September 2018 featuring paintings, prints, and photographs of Americans at work. As Ward explains in an introduction, this at first seems straightforward. However, he sees the material as paradoxical because it is impossible to create an authentic portrait of a member of the working or laboring class. Ward sees this impossibility as stemming from the historical connection of portraiture to the upper class and from the reality that workers deny one's individual selfhood. The greatest strength of the book is the essay by Moss, in which she juxtaposes different artists' works. For example, she pairs Grant Wood's American Gothic (1930) with a compositionally similar 1942 photograph by Gordon Parks of an African American custodian. David Hockney's painting Man in Shower in Beverly Hills (1964) is matched with a 2013 parody of the Hockney work by Ramiro Gomez titled Woman Cleaning Shower in Beverly Hills. An essay by art historian John Fagg about individual and collective labor is also insightful. The book will appeal to those interested in labor as well as to art historians.