Flop House

Painted in 1937 in tempera on fiberboard at scale approximately 23 by 30 inches, Flop House is among the most reproduced of Millman's Depression-era easel pictures and the work that has come to stand for his social-realist response to the urban crisis of the 1930s. The composition depicts the interior of one of the cheap lodging houses that proliferated in Chicago and the other Midwestern industrial cities during the deepest years of the Depression — institutions on the bottom rung of the housing market in which a transient population of out-of-work men could secure a bed for the night for a few cents. Millman organises the picture around the rhythmic recession of crowded bunks, with the sleeping figures of unemployed labourers arranged in tightly drawn rows that the eye reads as a single collective body rather than as individual portraits. The figures are rendered with the disciplined draughtsmanship he had carried out of the School of the Art Institute under Leon Kroll, but the tempera handling — with its deliberately matte surface, its earth-and-bone palette and its sharply incised contour — owes its principal debt to the example of the Mexican muralists he had encountered in 1934, and to Diego Rivera in particular. The work entered the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1971 as part of the major transfer from the General Services Administration that brought together the surviving easel paintings of the Federal Art Project (accession 1971.447.73), and remains the single most important museum holding of the Federal-period Millman.