From the euphoria of the 1918 victory to the dark hours of the Great Depression, the inter-war period was a period when America’s booming economy was stopped. The Great Depression disrupted American society and led the country into an era of unemployment and poverty. To this, between 1930 and 1940, was added an unprecedented drought, which would unleash dust storms and destruction of crops (the Dust Bowl), plunging the agricultural population of Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, into misery and exodus. These upheavals find an echo in the artists of that time. The clear, joyful, carefree painting of the Impressionists of the 1920s was soon followed by a more realistic art that did not erase social realities. Thus, Alexandre Hogue devotes to agricultural disasters many paintings where we discover animals buried under the dust. Arthur Ladow was interested in orange pickers, peasants driven from their lands by the Dust Bowl who found employment in California orchards, in disastrous social conditions. As for Paul Meltsner, he claims the status of manual worker for the artist, in order to bring him closer to the working world affected by the crisis.