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About this work
Grabach's *Taking The Hurdles* captures a moment of athletic struggle and determination rendered in his characteristic urban realist idiom. The title suggests movement interrupted—figures in the act of leaping, straining, pushing through obstacles—and the composition likely arranges bodies in mid-exertion against a compressed, energetic space. Given Grabach's palette evolution by the 1930s, expect a muted ground of grays and browns punctuated by darker accents, the better to isolate human effort from distraction. The hurdles themselves become metaphor as much as physical fact: barriers that define the scene's drama and the subjects' resolve.
For Grabach, athletic and laboring bodies were never mere sport. Throughout his career—from the washing women of tenement yards to the trudging masses of *The Fifth Year*—he found in everyday physical exertion a dignified subject worthy of serious paint. *Taking The Hurdles* aligns with his deepening social consciousness as the Depression bore down; the act of clearing obstacles takes on weight beyond the track. His Post-Ashcan inheritance from Sloan and Bellows pushed him toward raw, unsentimental observation, and here that unflinching gaze finds heroism not in victory but in the straining muscles and bent backs of people simply pushing forward.
This print belongs in spaces that value grit over polish—a study, a studio, a room where work matters. It speaks to viewers who recognize struggle as a legitimate subject, not something to aestheticize away. Hung in natural light, the muted palette gains subtlety; the figures emerge as witnesses to their own perseverance.
About John Grabach
Few American painters captured the gritty backyards and industrial edges of New Jersey with the same unsentimental affection. Working from his studio in Irvington and later teaching for decades at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art, he came of age as part of the Ashcan tradition, painting tenement rooftops, snow-covered tracks, and the small dramas of urban life between the wars. His sporting and landscape scenes carry the same eye for atmosphere, finding poetry in weather and working-class motion rather than in grand subjects. For contemporary viewers, his canvases offer a vanished American vernacular rendered by someone who genuinely lived inside it.
