Swann Galleries opened the 2024 season with the fourth iteration of The Artists of the WPA. The timed online auction closed Jan. 25, with an 89 percent sell-through rate by lot, earning $595,286 and delivering six auction records. Im pleased with another successful auction dedicated to the artists of the WPA. The American artists who participated in the New Deal art programs not only benefited fiscally from the government funding; under the structured easel painting exhibitions, print workshops, and juried competitions for federal building decoration projects, these artists put in their 10,000 hours, emerging as seasoned experts of their craft, and the Post-War era of art blossomed in America. Of the many printmakers, photographers, painters, and designers represented in our January timed auction, six achieved the highest value, world auction records, noted Harold Porcher, director of Modern & Post-War Art at Swann and the specialist for the sale. Auction records for particular artists were reached for James Russell Sherman with two mural studies done for the Marion, Iowa, post office ($15,000); Isaac Friedlanders Our Daily Bread, etching, 1935 ($15,000); Joseph de Martinis Six Day Bicycle Race, Madison Square Garden, an oil-on-board, ca. 1941 ($12,500); and George Rodgers Barber with a ca. 1938 painting created for a WPA mural competition funded by the Treasury Section of Fine Arts ($7,000). Print records included Steel Town Panorama, color screenprint, 1941, by Harry Gottlieb ($8,750), and Cement Finishers, a wood engraving from 1939 by Leon Gilmour, ($3,500). Additional highlights featured Claude Clarks ca. 1940-41 oil-on-board painting Drafting, a scarce image of an African-American architect or architectural student, and the top lot of the auction ($17,500); Dorothea Langes Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (variant), silver print, 1936, printed ca. 1990s ($16,250); and Raphael Soyers Untitled (Portrait of a Student), a ca. 1930 oil-on-canvas, ($8,125). For an upcoming auction schedule, visit www.swanngalleries.com.