Van Gogh in Alabama, 1936

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In October 1935, the American photographer Walker Evans took a permanent position with the agency that would become the U.S. Farm Security Administration (FSA). A month later, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opened the nation’s Ž rst major exhibition of work by the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh. Both are signal moments in American art history. While the MoMA opening initiated a string of events that eventually would make van Gogh an American icon, Evans’s work over the next eighteen months is generally regarded as his deŽ nitive contribution to American photography. The FSA assignments themselves undoubtedly provided the key provocation for this extraordinary creative streak; however, Evans’s approach to these assignments owes a great and largely unacknowledged debt to the MoMA exhibition. Although I know of no direct record that Evans either saw the van Gogh show or explicitly acknowledged its in uence on his government photography, the circumstantial evidence for such in uence is clear in the facts of Evans’s life, in the photographs themselves, and in the texts that shaped their creation and reception. It does no disservice to the quality of Evans’s photography to note that his career beneŽ ted from the in uence of well-placed friends among MoMA’s executive staV. In the early 1930s, Evans lived in New York and traveled in a social circle that included many of the young museum’s curators, directors, and advisory council members, including Alfred Barr, Thomas Mabry, Dorothy Miller, and Lincoln Kirstein. The museum began hiring Evans to photograph its exhibitions in 1930, and in 1933 MoMA’s architectural galleries displayed thirty–nine of his photographs of Victorian houses—the result of a collaborative project conceived by Kirstein. During his eighteen months with the FSA, Evans maintained close contacts with MoMA, and this relationship bore fruit in the 1938 single-artist exhibition American Photographs, a Ž rst both for the museum and for Evans. In 1935–36, then, Evans’s tours throughout the South coincidedwith an increasing nationwide recognition of a triumph both for the artist van Gogh and for Evans’s friends at MoMA.