The New Deal paid for this street

The stamp is on the sheet, below the image, in small letters that are easy to miss: FEDERAL ART PROJECT · NYC · WPA. It is not a title and it is not a signature. It is a payroll mark. Somebody in the United States government paid Elias Grossman to walk down William Street and cut what he saw into a copper plate.¹

On the payroll

The Federal Art Project was a division of the Works Progress Administration, and between 1935 and 1943 it put thousands of artists on a federal salary during the Depression.² The prints that came out of it were not sold. They were allocated — sent to schools, libraries, courthouses, government offices — which is why they turn up decades later in odd places, travelling by the paperwork of public property rather than the paperwork of a market.

You can read that route in the museum's own credit lines. William Street arrived at the Smithsonian as a transfer from the D.C. Public Library. The untitled plate came as a transfer from the General Services Administration — the agency that manages federal buildings and what is inside them.³ Neither was bought. Both were reassigned.

Three letters after the signature

On Rain on the Square the pencil signature is followed by three letters: imp. It is short for the Latin impressit — he printed it. Not a workshop, not a hired printer. The same hand that bit the plate inked it and pulled that sheet, and then wrote the title underneath in his own writing, in quotation marks, as if naming it out loud.⁴

That is the difference between the two objects, and it is a difference worth holding. One is a state job. The other is a man alone with a press.

A city with no dates

The museum dates one of the three to ca. 1933–1943 and gives up on the other two entirely: n.d., no date.⁵ Ten years of guesswork on one, nothing on the rest. It is a strange thing to find in an archive, and it tells you what kind of work this was — not exhibitions and not editions, but a man going out into the weather with a plate and coming back with a street.

What is actually on the paper

In Rain on the Square, the arch stands in the wet and everything below it is reflection: the tram, the lamp post, the small hunched figure under an umbrella crossing left to right. The plate is roughly the size of a sheet of office paper. We print the sheet whole, irregular edge and all, so his handwriting stays where he put it.

In William Street the buildings close in until the sky is a strip, and a tower stands at the far end of the canyon. This is the one with the stamp. And the untitled plate looks up at a slab tower with a Gothic spire beside it and two cars at the kerb, on paper that has gone warm brown with age — we left that colour alone, because it is the object.

Grossman was born in Kobryn, then in the Russian Empire and today in Belarus, in 1898, and died in New York City in 1947.⁶ He was forty-nine. The city is what he left.