New York Breadline

Clare Leighton trained as an artist in London but immigrated to the United States after World War II broke out, becoming a well-known and prolific wood engraver, etcher, and book illustrator. Her mother had told her that "no woman is a lady by reason of being an artist. Only with difficulty can she be a lady in spite of it." This sentiment is indicative of women artists’ struggles to establish their reputations without transgressing social codes. Finding success more easily in printmaking than in painting and sculpture, women were integral to the etching revival. Commenting on the art of wood engraving, a relief method in which the design is incised on the end grain of a piece of wood, Leighton noted: "It is more dramatic, with its keyboards of the deepest black to the whitest white, than the muted browning tones of the etching." The "deepest black" of the Depression is powerfully rendered in New York Breadline, where a mechanistic and hopeless line of workers appears crushed both by circumstances and by the dark, chasm-like street, whose massive skyscrapers symbolize an earlier prosperity.