The 30s–Windshield

The decade between the stock market crash of 1929 and the United States’ entry into World War II was marked by economic devastation, mass unemployment, severe drought in the Great Plains, and deep political division. These pressures strained the nation’s social fabric and reshaped its cultural landscape. During the Great Depression, American artists – many facing economic precarity themselves – reconsidered their role in society, asking how art might serve the collective good. Inspired in part by Mexican mural paintings, many of these artists increasingly saw their work as a form of public storytelling – a way to express shared values and visually articulate the forces transforming American life.

Born in Philadelphia in 1904, Benton Murdoch Spruance came of age as an artist during this period of upheaval. Like many of his contemporaries, he believed that art could no longer remain confined to an ivory tower. For Spruance, the imperative to communicate directly with a broad public made printmaking an especially compelling medium. In his 1937 essay The Place of the Print-Maker, he argued that the print tradition ‘commands all creative men to work, integrated into the civilization in which they live, to use as their symbols the broadly understood symbols of the people … this is the very essence of what historians call American.’¹Benton Murdoch Spruance, “The Place of the Print-Maker,” Magazine of Art, Issue 10, October 1937. Lithography, in particular, became a favoured medium because it allowed socially engaged artists to produce large numbers of high-quality impressions. Spruance worked prolifically and almost exclusively in this medium, producing 536 lithographs out of a total of 555 recorded prints.

Spruance’s search for what he termed a ‘personal expression of an American art form’²Ibid arguably reached its zenith in an ambitious, though ultimately unfinished, series reflecting on the 1930s. Of the three works completed for this series The 30s– Windshield, 1939, stands as the most incisive statement on the state of America at the decade’s close.

In this lithograph, Spruance gives visual form to the central tensions of the period. The viewer is positioned behind the wheel of a car, gazing through the windshield onto a fractured, war-ravaged landscape. Straight ahead, the road splinters into jagged shards. To the left, figures struggle to drag carts of hay from the path of falling bombs. To the right, a soldier in a US helmet looks on anxiously, while a skeleton clad in military garb – a stark personification of death – brandishes a bayonet and gestures toward the unfolding chaos.

Although the view through the windshield remains legible, it is deliberately anti-naturalistic. In keeping with the didactic aims of Social Realism, the scene unfolds as a montage of symbolic vignettes rather than a cohesive, illusionistic environment. Spruance evokes the disjointed and precarious state of American society through spatial distortion and the juxtaposition of disparate motifs.

Details within the car heighten the sense of imminent catastrophe. The speedometer tilts sharply to the right, suggesting reckless acceleration. Modern society, Spruance implies, is hurtling headlong toward disaster.

Juxtaposed against this apocalyptic vision is a counter-image in the rearview mirror: a tranquil rural scene in which a farmer ploughs a field while a seated couple relax. This reflected vision draws on the stylistic and thematic conventions of Regionalism, an art movement celebrated for its sentimental portrayal of the American heartland. Unlike social realist artists, who confronted industrial modernity directly, regionalists presented rural life as a corrective to urban chaos. Overlooking the environmental devastation of the Dust Bowl, these idealised depictions evoked stability and communal goodwill, offering a comforting vision for a nation in turmoil.

By confining this pastoral scene to the rearview mirror – visible yet receding –Spruance signals the limitations of nostalgic agrarian imagery in the face of industrialised warfare and looming global crisis. Society, he suggests, is leaving this lifestyle behind. At the same time, the reflection preserves a memory of social cohesion as a potential moral resource, even as it slips from immediate reach.

Despite its prescient anticipation of global warfare, The 30s–Windshield is not entirely despondent. In the upper centre of the composition, a faint inscription reads ‘St. Christopher’, suggesting a medallion of the patron saint of travellers is suspended just out of frame. Traditionally associated with protection and safe passage, this subtle detail hints at the possibility of spiritual guidance amid uncertainty.

Staging a dramatic confrontation between opposing forces – tradition and modernity, pastoral myth and industrial reality, faith and uncertainty – The 30s–Windshield offers a probing meditation on national identity and a concise distillation of the decade’s dominant artistic currents. Rather than trying to identify a single aesthetic that best captures America, Spruance suggests that the essence of the modern nation emerges from the tension between these competing visions.

Eva Christoff is NGV Curatorial Project Officer, Prints and Drawings.

The NGV warmly thanks the Suzette Marie Chapple Bequest, 2026, for the acquisition of this work.

This essay was first published in NGV Magazine | Issue 58 May–June 2026.

Notes