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Philip Evergood, perhaps more than most artists, had the word grotesque lobbed at his work an awful lot. It wasn’t without reason. His paintings were frequently populated by figures with exaggerated features, emaciated forms, and ghastly visages; the scenes they moved through were rendered in skirmishes of colors out of harmony with each other. One collector and dealer who paid a visit to the Whitney Biennial in 1936 quipped some months later that he couldn’t seem to forget the Evergood piece he’d seen there because he “disliked it so much it’s stuck in my mind.” He followed up, though, to remark: “Now I have to see it again, because anything that leaves that much of an impression is worth considering.” So let’s consider The Cheering Crowd. The palette is surely the first aspect to leap out — an aggressive and unyielding mix of reds, oranges, and blues. The painting is dominated by a group of workers (miners, by the look of the lights on their hard hats) peering up at a raised platform. Their expressions are excited and anticipatory, fists pumping and arms thrown wide in reaction to whatever is taking place on the stage, which remains just out of our sight line. A single Black man stands in the middle ground, looking determined and dignified, while the white folks who surround him trend towards a ghoulish emaciation. Evergood didn’t shy away from depicting specific events (his American Tragedy shows the Memorial Day massacre of 1937, a violent clash that ended in the deaths of ten Little Steel Strike unionists at the hands of the Chicago police), he was more prone to ambiguity in both titling and subject matter, something on prominent display in The Cheering Crowd. The brown-orange helmets (a not-infrequent symbol of the working class for Evergood) clue us into the fact that the scene would have occurred after 1930 (when MSA Skullgard starting manufacturing that particular model, and when safety precautions for laborers started becoming more prevalent), while a little provenance research tells us Evergood created this after 1938. Beyond that, details are hazier. Are these workers attending a union rally, or cheering on a tense wrestling match after a long day of labor? Where in the country are we? And when? The Depression of the 30s and automation in the mining industry in the 40s led to the layoffs of scores of miners in the U.S.; Black workers were typically the first to be kicked to the curb. After WWII there was fierce competition for mining jobs, and while Black union miners had fought hard-won victories alongside their white counterparts in intense mining strikes from the late nineteenth century onward, the United Mine Workers Association and the white miners in its ranks failed to fight for Black members to be reinstated in mining jobs post-war. Though The Cheering Crowd evades straightforward interpretation, these struggles assuredly would have been on Evergood’s radar: he was a WPA artist and union man (he briefly served as the president of the New York Artists’ Union in the ‘30s) who regularly and explicitly used his art to shed light on the plights of African Americans and the working class. “The symbol of the underdog has been my bundle and banner,” Evergood once said, a politic born partly out of first-hand experiences with anti-Semitism, partly out of cold nights spent on Christopher Street hearing winding tales from the city’s unhoused ranks, and mostly from the simple decision to not look away. Everyone in The Cheering Crowd appears to train their gaze toward a common cause. Perhaps they’re in this fight together — darkened eye sockets, visible ribs, and all — an image of a reinvigorated battle for equal rights for workers of all races; or perhaps Evergood is giving us a more fraught solidarity. Plenty of questions still remain: Is this a celebration of forward progress? Will it last? Exactly who’s winning here?
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