Page 127 - Swann Galleries - Modernist Posters - Sale 2314 - May 13, 2013

RICHARD H. JANSEN (1910-1988)
149 ● RESETTLEMENT ADMINISTRATION / FIELDS ARE ROBBED OF FERTILITY BY
MISUSE. Circa 1935.
243/4x38 inches, 63x96 1/2 cm.
Condition B+: vertical and horizontal folds; repaired tears, creases and restoration in margins.
The Resettlement Administration was a New Deal entity created in 1935 to help families affected by
the Great Depression and Dust Bowl. The organization had four divisions: Rural Rehabilitation, Rural
Resettlement, Land Utilization, and Suburban Resettlement. Its primary aim was to move poor families
into newly constructed communities. By 1937, the agency was deemed ineffective and folded into
the Farm Security Administration. Jansen, an artist born in Wisconsin, produced paintings for the
WPA which were exhibited around the country, (primarily scenes from the Civilian Conservation
Corps). Some of his murals in North Carolina and Florida adorn public buildings even to this day. He
was an official war artist during the Second World War, worked for the National Park Service in the
1950s and was head illustrator for the Agricultural Department in the 1970s. This image, one of two
Jansen designed, focuses on land utilization, showing a run-down share cropper’s shack and ravaged
land. Among the other artists who designed posters for the Resettlement Administration were Ben
Shahn and his wife, Bernarda Bryson Shahn. [4,000/6,000]
BEN SHAHN (1898-1969)
150 ● OUR FRIEND. 1944.
293/4x39 3/4 inches, 75 1/2 x1001/4 cm. L.I.P. & B.A., New York.
Condition A- / B+: restoration along vertical and horizontal folds and at edges.
“This poster was used in the hotly contested 1944 campaign in support of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
fourth term. Shahn presented Roosevelt as a warmly sympathetic man whose visage looms father-like
above the crowd” (Prescott p. 128). The poster is infused with pro-Democratic symbolism, including
“buttons for the AFL and the CIO, hat tickets for the Grand Lodge and the National Farm Bureau,
a soldier’s hat, the hands of black and white races . . . a child symbolizing the nation’s future . . . [and
the good omen of ] the blue sky above” (ibid). According to Shahn’s wife, the little boy was actually
their son, Jonathan. Prescott 151, Encyclopedie de l’Affiche p. 367. [4,000/6,000]
150