Robert Gwathmey, The Hitchhiker, a colour
screenprint
United States of America, 1937
Robert Gwathmey (1903–1988) was born in
Richmond, Virginia to a family that had lived in the state for
eight generations. He was shocked at the treatment the African
Americans received in Virginia and the Southern states and their
poverty and oppression informed the social content of his paintings
and screenprints of the 1930s and 1940s.
The Hitchhiker was his first
screenprint. The unemployed men shown here are itinerants hitching
rides in search of work during the Depression. The roadside
billboards of show girls with toothpaste smiles and appetizing
lobsters stand in mocking contrast.
Gwathmey took up screenprinting in the late
1930s as a suitable technique for translating the flat colour and
black outline of his socially conscious paintings. He was one of
many American artists to exploit the artistic possibilities of
screenprinting at this time. Printmaking was encouraged through the
Graphic Arts Division set up by the Federal Art Project of the
Works Progress Administration as part of the US government’s
national reconstruction programme from 1935 to 1943.
Gwathmey’s career as a printmaker was
intermittent: he made only 26 prints, of which the first 12 were
screenprints produced between 1937 and 1954, the key period of his
career.
R.W. Williams, "The Prints of Robert Gwathmey"
in Hot off the Press: Prints and Politics, vol.15 in the
Tamarind Papers (1994)
M. Kammen, Robert Gwathmey: The Life and
Art of a Passionate Observer (Chapel Hill and London, The
University of North Carolina Press, 1999)