When Philip Evergood began his study with George Luks at the Art Students League in New York, the aspiring artist’s painter father, Miles Blashki, rejoiced, imagining the possibilities that might come of his son’s non-traditional studies with the free-spirited Luks. “Luks is a damned good painter,” Evergood recalled his father’s counsel, “I’m glad you’re with a man like that. He’s a human guy . . . I hope you get the spirit of life from him as well as learn a bit about painting.” [1] He still lacked the confidence at that moment in 1923 and 1924 to throw himself into painting, instead insistently working to hone his draftsmanship under Luks. It was Evergood’s association with the famed Ashcan school painter and his burgeoning friendships with the likeminded John Sloan and Reginald Marsh that helped draw Evergood out of the studio and into the artists’ haunts around Fourteenth Street in Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side in the late 1920s. “I was beginning to make a few sketches of a Bowery movie theater I remember,” Evergood recalled, “with a little yellow-haired girl at the ticket counter with her little face sticking out of a round hole in the glass and a big fat cop standing at the curb.” [2] He was not yet a painter when he first drew there—but the Depression would make him one, Evergood said: “[T]he real urge to paint America . . . only came when the Depression came and people were actually sitting on the curb with their tongues hanging out. That’s what really brought me to life.” [3] So, from his earlier shorthand pencil jottings and his now disturbed musings, Evergood in 1932 painted that kaleidoscopic scene at the Comet movie theater—the yellow-haired, round-face girl, the big, black, threatening-looking policeman, the movie posters, and an innocent child blithely putting on her roller skates—when the tensions of that time and that fraught place, the Bowery, were made palpable. [4] And he painted in a kind of agitated manner that would become his signature style.

His encounter with homeless and hungry and beleaguered men in a shantytown on Christopher Street that winter of 1932 turned Evergood into a political artist: “That’s what woke me up more than anything Luks could have done to me.” [5] The Depression awakened him to a sense of purpose in art making from which he never wavered. He believed that the working artist was bound to all other working men and women, that his art was an instrument to address the economic and social injustices they suffered, and that art could and should as its highest calling raise up the masses in solidarity and hope. He was an enthusiastic participant in the New Deal art programs, as both a muralist and an easel painter. Evergood fought for artists’ rights and advocated for an extension of the WPA, for a permanent federal program both to support artists and to advance the arts in America. [6]

His Classroom History was painted as a submission to the Fine Arts Program in 1938, its subject reflecting its intended audience of school children, the children of immigrants, who here learn the lesson of their past as the foundation of what Evergood believed to be the promise of their future in a multi-racial, multi-ethnic America. [7]

— Patricia Junker

[1] Evergood to Forrest Selvig, Oral history interview with Philip Evergood, December 3, 1968, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Miles (originally Myre) Evergood Blashki was from a family of Polish Jews; he came to the United States by way of Australia, where he was born. In 1914, Miles Blashki legally dropped his surname in 1914 and retained “Evergood” for his son and himself; see Kendall Frances Taylor, “Philip Evergood and the Humanist Intention,” PhD diss., Syracuse University, 1979, 9.

[2] Evergood to Forrest Selvig, December 3, 1968. The jottings are reproduced in Taylor, figs. 11–12.

[3] Evergood to Forrest Selvig, December 3, 1968.

[4] A photograph of what appears to be this painting but in a preliminary stage of development, and still undated, is reproduced in Taylor’s dissertation, fig. 14, and again in Taylor’s 1987 monograph, expanded as an exhibition catalogue: Philip Evergood: Never Separate from the Heart (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1987), p. 64. Evergood at first included the figure of a down-trodden man sitting on the curb in the foreground, an element that dominates the composition, even more than the figure of the policeman, who attracts little attention at the periphery. Yet such a sobering and dominant foreground figure does not appear in the pencil studies for “Bowery Movie.” He painted it out on second thought, opting for less editorializing perhaps and more nuance in this scene of street life, adding in its place the child and her roller skates—only a vague silhouette of the earlier figure remains as a shadow on the pavement. The “fat policeman” Evergood remembered so vividly is just that in the revised version of the painting. With these changes, he then dated the painting, 1932. I am grateful to Andrew Schoelkopf and Erin Cecil for these observations.

[5] Evergood to Forrest Selvig, December 3, 1968.

[6] See Patricia Hills, “Art and Politics in the Popular Front: The Union Work and Social Realism of Philip Evergood,” in Alejandro Anreas, et al, The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2006), 181–200.

[7] According to an inscription on the back of an archival photograph in the files of the Federal Art Project (FAP), the painting was hanging in P.S. 70 in May of 1938. The FAP archives also includes a photograph of another large painting which is a much expanded version of this same subject—that photograph is erroneously identified as a watercolor sketch, and it is also labeled as a work for P.S. 70. The painting’s whereabouts are unknown. See Federal Art Project, Photographic Division collection, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Evergood painted a related large-scale composition in 1938, The Future Belongs to Them (with Debra Force Fine Art, New York, 2018).