I was midway through Dan Kaufman’s book, The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics, when I visited the Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA) to see the current retrospective of Joseph Friebert, “A Life in Art” (through Oct. 7). Kaufman’s text considers what happened to Wisconsin’s rich history of progressive politics and social activism. A visual investigation of this history might easily begin on one of the bleak Milwaukee avenues of Joseph Friebert’s early paintings—works that began a painting career ever-informed by leftist politics and a deep connection to Milwaukee’s working class.
The exhibition unfolds chronologically in MOWA’s Hyde Gallery, leading off with early paintings shaped directly by the social and political circumstances of the Great Depression. In 1939’s Two Lines, One Job, hopeful laborers queue up for a potential opportunity. Its dark tonal palette offers formal as well as a literal unity; a unity in paint, of cause and spirit. The faceless bodies coalesce into a single husky volume, and, as it happens, a perfect metaphor for the movement and politics with which Friebert so sympathized.
A painting from a year later, Back of Fourth and State, pans outward from that line of faceless men, providing a wider angle on the workers’ city. But still, even without the personalized drama, it remains a less-than-sanguine place: a landscape of industrial buildings rising like tombstones in drab earth-tones, interrupted only by the actions of a solitary figure working in the foreground lot and a lonely wisp of blue smoke from a stack in the distance. It’s the urban equivalent of tumble weeds in the desert or creaking gates on the prairie; somehow desolate and foreboding at once.
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When Friebert painted these works, the reputations of Regionalists like Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton were already well established. Their output as artists, like Friebert’s, was tied to the mythology of the American worker, only, many social realist painters, Benton especially, tended toward aggrandizement; qualities that would sow the seeds of their decline after World War II when art turned inward, and the Social Realist style became forever associated with Soviet propaganda.
It was a turn that Friebert’s work, always soulful and subjective, avoided. This abiding sensitivity is most palpable in his later figural work. Paintings from the 1960s, like Human Folly and Human Carnival, confront the figure with a throbbingly melancholy touch. With subtle traces of the social turmoil of the ’60s, they distill the tumult of the moment into a universal, timeless condition.
Dan Kaufman’s book—and another from several years back, What’s the Matter with Kansas by Thomas Frank—question why the sympathies of the American worker took a right turn away from their own best interests. Read those texts for deeper sociopolitical inferences and conclusions, but the visual evidence of the transformation can be seen by doing a simple comparison of the aforementioned Benton and Friebert. Where Benton glorifies, Friebert humanizes.
One might wonder what’s wrong with glorifying a subject, especially one as unassailable as the American laborer. Nothing, necessarily, but glorification tends to dispense with both truth and trauma. A passing thought about the glory of the working man had me musing about contemporary country music while I was looking at Friebert’s work. An off-topic flight, maybe, but one that sweetly corroborates the sweepingly broad narrative that ties all these stories together. Anti-establishment work songs like “Sixteen Tons” have given way to a culture of anthems of complicity and opiated resignation in populist America—Lee Bice’s 2015 hit, “Drinking Class,” for example—but there’s no shortage of others. Listen if you have any doubts. By heroizing the noun (the agents and actors), we risk forgetting the verb (the struggle itself.)
I hesitate to say we’re at a social crossroads in 2018; every generation believes it invented sex, after all. But something has changed significantly, especially in our own humble state, leaving us wondering about how labor politics mutated and where went our social solidarities and collective empathies. Joseph Friebert’s work might not locate them, but it’ll give you a hint about where they once were—and might be again—if humanity can limp across that intersection.
