Philip Evergood, “Dance Marathon”, 1934, Oil on Canvas, Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas
For Philip Evergood, painting was a form of social protest. In 1923, he studied at the Art Students League under George Luks, where he began painting contemporary life with artists John Sloan and Reginald Marsh. But it was the Great Depression that inspired the most drastic change in the artist’s oeuvre, as he turned to drawing horrific scenes of poverty directly from the city’s streets.
At the same time, he became an advocate for social change, serving as managing supervisor of the New York WPA easel project and president of the Artists Union. More concerned with conveying emotion than beautiful composition, and influenced by El Greco, Paul Cezanne and the Surrealists, he used what he described as “the nasty color or sickly color, the sweet color or violent color or pretty-pretty-dolly color that will express the mood of what I’m trying to put over.”
During the 1950s Evergood departed from his established “Social Realism” style and concentrated on symbolism, both biblical and mythological. He maintained a socially conscious attitude in his art for the remainder of his career, and was in fact considered to be something of a maverick. He was a figurative painter when much of the art world placed greater value on abstraction, and he was a moralist when moralizing was not considered an option for serious painters. His best-known works are gritty, populist images of contemporary life, and are full of vitality and imagination.