| With the Great Depression as their backdrop, social realists Seymour Fogel, Eli Jacobi and Hugo Gellert looked to the working class masses of New York City as their subject matter. Blue collared laborers, barflies and the homeless were cast as unlikely heroes in prints and drawings that underscored the struggles of both the everyday man and the downtrodden. By simultaneously humanizing the city’s outcasts and aggrandizing the proletariat, Fogel, Jacobi and Gellert produced works that not only illuminated the plight of those around them, but also championed the dogged and resolute spirit of New York’s inhabitants. |
