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Millard Sheets fine art print lithograph print by American artist
Millard Sheets titled Family Flats. Created around 1934 or 1935, the work is a depiction of the bustling, crowded life in the Depression-era tenement housing of the Bunker Hill neighborhood in downtown Los Angeles.
Artwork Details
Artist: Millard Sheets (American, 1907–1989)
Title: Family Flats
Medium: Lithograph in black on paper
Date: Circa 1934-1935
Subject: The artwork portrays a dense urban scene featuring multi-story apartments, external staircases, and numerous figures engaged in daily activities like hanging laundry and socializing on porches. The scene uses stark contrasts of light and dark to convey form and mood, influenced by the Ashcan School style.
Context: This print is closely related to an oil painting by Sheets with the title Tenement Flats (1934), which once hung in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's White House office and is now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Both works were created while Sheets was involved with the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), a New Deal arts program.
Millard Sheets was known for his California Scene paintings and sympathetically portrayed poor people not as victims, but as human beings going about their lives. |
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