The last time New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art was prominent in socialist conversation was probably in 2021 when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attended the Met Gala, a lavish annual display of wealth and fashion, wearing a white dress with the words “Tax the Rich” emblazoned in red. Whatever you made of that intervention — protest? Act of complicity? — the Met deserves even more socialist attention now for an inspired show titled Art for the Millions: American Culture and Politics in the 1930s. (You can look at the entire exhibition here.)

The reasons that artists in the 1930s were so prolific, their work so political and so profoundly engaged with laborers and with left politics, are simple. There were mass left movements, including parties, influencing artists and the wider culture. As well, and as a result, President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR)’s administration offered significant government support for artists, which made it possible for many working-class and leftist artists to pursue creative lives full time.

The show at the Met is beautifully curated to emphasize the period’s left politics and focus on workers. Most of the paintings are in realist style (though some of the same artists did more abstract work before or after this period). The painting most prominently advertised in the show, for example, is Miner Joe (1942), by Elizabeth Olds, a stunning close-up of a miner with his helmet on. The exhibition also includes Ben Shahn’s photos of black cotton pickers, as well as lesser-known works like Curtain Factory (1936–39), by Riva Helfond, which depicts women workers and includes an unmistakable visual reference to Picasso’s Woman Ironing. Next to it is Elizabeth Olds’s Burlesque (1936), an homage to dancers as workers.