Laura Cumming reviews America After the Fall: Painting in the 1930s at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, on view through June 4, 2017.

Cumming writes: “In the truest sense, these works are signs of the times. They hold an entire American decade intact with their images of factories, docks, gas pumps and turbines, of new skyscrapers heroically silhouetted against midwestern skies, and cities on hills radiant with limelight. Sailors take shore leave with Lucky Strikes and lascivious leers; stenographers crowd around the new beauty salons; black roustabouts lug coal on the waterfront under the white boss’s pitiless eye.”