Synopses & Reviews
Includes bibliographical references (p. 336-342) and index.
Synopsis
This remarkable book is the first to examine in abundant detail the relation between visual artists and the American Communist movement during the twentieth century. Andrew Hemingway charts the rise and decline of the Communist Party's influence on art in the United States from the Party's dramatic rise in prestige during the Great Depression to its effective demise in the 1950s. Offering a full account of how left-wing artists responded to the Party's various policy shifts over these years, Hemingway shows that the Communist Party exerted a powerful force in American culture, even after the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939.
The author scrutinizes the works of an array of leftist artists, many of great interest but largely forgotten today. He demonstrates that American art produced within the Communist Party's orbit was far more diverse and had a much more complex relationship with modernism than has been previously understood. Refusing to march in lockstep to Party requirements, artists and critics in and around the Party accepted no single aesthetic line and engaged in heated debates. Hemingway offers radical new interpretations of some familiar works, reassesses the role of the John Reed Clubs and the work of artists in the federal art programs, and revises accepted thinking about art in the United States during the Cold War. In short, he offers a distinguished and original political history that recovers the rich artistic and intellectual legacy of the American left.
Table of Contents
New masses and the cultural movement in the third period. The early New masses ; Mike Gold and the proletarian aesthetic ; The future and the past : USSR versus USA ; New masses and the International Union of Revolutionary Writers ; The rise and fall of the John Reed clubs -- Defining revolutionary art : cultural criticism in the third period. Lessons of Soviet culture ; Mexican revolutionary art ; Proletarian artists versus 100 per cent Americanism : art criticism in New masses up to 1935 ; Art front -- Revolutionary art on display : the John Reed clubs and the Whitney Museum. John Reed Club art exhibitions ; John Reed Club artists outside the clubs -- Communist artists and the New Deal (1) : the federal art projects before the people's front. The CPUSA and the New Deal ; Federal art projects, 1933-1935 ; The ideology of federal art ; The Artists' Union ; The union critique ; Communists in the Public Works of Art Project -- Cultural criticism from the people's front to the democratic front. New masses, 1936-1940 ; Art criticism in New masses, 1936-1940 ; The Marxist Critics Group ; Art front's last year ; The Daily worker's art column -- Social art on display : organisations and exhibitions. The American Artists' Congress ; Exhibitions of the American Artists' Congress ; Artists' Union exhibitions and other initiatives ; The American Artists School ; The American Group, Inc. ; The ACA Gallery ; Social art at the Whitney Museum -- Communist artists and the New Deal (2) : from the people's front to the democratic front. The Federal Art Project and the struggle over WPA ; The CPUSA and the Federal Art Project ; The ideology of the Federal Art Project ; The Treasury Section of Fine Arts ; The WPA Federal Art Project -- Cultural Organising after 1939 : the Artists League of America, Artists Equity and other initiatives. The Artists League of America ; The Victory Workshop and the Graphic Workshop ; The arts, sciences and professions ; The Waldorf Conference ; Artists Equity Association ; The defence of the Rincon Post Office murals ; The ACA Gallery -- Cultural criticism between Hollywood and Zhdanovism. The Maltz affair ; Art criticism in the Daily worker ; New masses and Masses & mainstream ; The end of democratic front aesthetics and the emergence of Zhdanovism ; The crisis of 1956-1957 and its aftermath -- Social art in the Cold War. Changing personnel ; The new symbolism ; Socialist humanism and the portrait ; Jack Levine's comâedie humaine ; African American people's art : Charles White and Jacob Lawrence ; Modernism and social narrative.