Lucienne Bloch. Study for The Cycle of a Woman’s Life. 1935
Bloch’s design for a mural in a high-rise women’s jail in downtown Manhattan made a bid for the heartstrings and possible reform of its audience with a diverse group of children innocently playing marbles on a city sidewalk. This scene was conceived as part of The Cycle of a Woman’s Life, a series of murals whose theme was approved by the inmates themselves. On such depictions the New York Times commented in 1938, “The first leitmotif that strikes the observer is a preoccupation with the quieter, gayer sides of life in this city… . Children, trees, dogs and flowers squeeze in everywhere, like grass cracking through cement.”
Learn more at MoMA.org/centuryofthechild
