Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926 - 1938 by francis booth

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‘How wonderful is the field of the history of art. How much work there is here for us Communists.’ Lenin to Lunacharsky

‘The artist’s job is not to pray for pie in the sky. If the revolution is worth hoping for, it is worth working for. Yes sir!’ Hugo Gellert, Reminiscences

‘The revolutionary artist proceeds from the patent factor that the class antagonisms, always present in capitalist society, have reached the acute stage of open class war.’ Louis Lozowick, ‘Towards a Revolutionary Art’

contents

1. background ................................................................................................ 9 introduction.............................................................................................10 sources ..................................................................................................... 19 magazines .......................................................................................... 24 books .................................................................................................. 40 anthologies ......................................................................................... 53 exhibitions ......................................................................................... 54 classes/lectures ................................................................................... 61 2. american critics on revolutionary art .................................................... 65 3. artists’ organisations ...............................................................................73 the john reed clubs ................................................................................. 74 the artists union ...................................................................................... 81 the american artists congress ................................................................ 84 4. what is a revolutionary artist? ............................................................... 89 realism and pessimism .......................................................................... 90 revolutionary artist or artist/revolutionary? ...................................... 102 revolutionary artists and workers ....................................................... 106 leftism and propaganda ......................................................................... 111 fred ellis............................................................................................ 120 is satire a revolutionary art form? ........................................................ 122 art young ........................................................................................... 125 william gropper ................................................................................ 127 revolutionary art and modernism ........................................................129 louis lozowick.................................................................................... 131 rockwell kent..................................................................................... 135 stuart davis ....................................................................................... 135

revolutionary art and surrealism ........................................................ 137 walter quirt .......................................................................................138 revolutionary art and expressionism .................................................. 140 some revolutionary artists .................................................................... 142 william siegel/sanderson ................................................................. 142 russell limbach.................................................................................. 143 joe jones ............................................................................................ 145 hugo gellert .......................................................................................149 phil bard ............................................................................................ 154 jacob burck........................................................................................ 155 conclusion .................................................................................................. 161 5. who’s who of artists ............................................................................... 163 ida abelman ...........................................................................................164 a ajay ...................................................................................................... 165 peggy bacon ...........................................................................................166 phil bard ................................................................................................ 170 maurice becker ..................................................................................... 189 bernarda bryson .................................................................................... 191 jacob burck ............................................................................................194 stuart davis ........................................................................................... 205 adolf dehn .............................................................................................. 211 mabel dwight .........................................................................................216 fred ellis ................................................................................................ 222 philip evergood .................................................................................... 227 wanda gág ............................................................................................. 229 hugo gellert ........................................................................................... 235 boris gorelick ........................................................................................ 256 william gropper .................................................................................... 258 william hernandez.................................................................................277

joe jones ................................................................................................ 283 rockwell kent .........................................................................................291 i. klein ................................................................................................... 298 gan kolski .............................................................................................. 303 herb kruckman ..................................................................................... 306 russell limbach ...................................................................................... 312 louis lozowick ....................................................................................... 320 reginald marsh ..................................................................................... 335 jan matulka ............................................................................................ 341 walter quirt ........................................................................................... 347 gardner rea ........................................................................................... 352 a. redfield .............................................................................................. 354 anton refregier ..................................................................................... 363 philip reisman ...................................................................................... 368 louis ribak ............................................................................................. 372 dan rico ................................................................................................. 374 boardman robinson ............................................................................. 380 william sanderson/siegel ..................................................................... 384 mitchell siporin .................................................................................... 396 otto soglow ........................................................................................... 403 harry sternberg..................................................................................... 410 frank m. walts ........................................................................................ 412 art young................................................................................................414 6. who’s who of critics ...............................................................................419 belinsky ..................................................................................................419 bukharin ................................................................................................419 v. f. calverton ........................................................................................ 420 chernyshevsky ...................................................................................... 420 malcolm cowley ..................................................................................... 421

dobrolyubov .......................................................................................... 421 john dos passos .................................................................................... 422 max eastman ........................................................................................ 422 james t. farrell ...................................................................................... 423 waldo frank ........................................................................................... 423 joseph freeman ..................................................................................... 424 michael gold ......................................................................................... 425 maxim gorky......................................................................................... 426 granville hicks ...................................................................................... 428 lunacharsky .......................................................................................... 429 a. b. magil ............................................................................................. 429 wallace phelps/william phillips........................................................... 430 plekhanov ............................................................................................. 430 philip rahv ............................................................................................. 431 charmion von wiegand ......................................................................... 431 edmund wilson ..................................................................................... 432 zhdanov ................................................................................................ 433 7. bibliography .......................................................................................... 434 primary sources.................................................................................... 435 periodicals ........................................................................................ 436 collections ........................................................................................ 436 books and articles ............................................................................ 438 secondary sources ................................................................................ 469 academic dissertations ........................................................................ 482

1. background

comrades in art

introduction History is written by the winners and art history is no exception. The winners in America’s history of art are the abstract painters who, subsidised by the CIA from the early 1940s1, showed the world the avant garde art American democracy and freedom could produce. The losers were the artists working in the figurative tradition, who were seen from then on as old-fashioned and derivative. And the artists who had political leanings have been virtually erased from the story of American art. I would like to try to put them back. From the late 1920s to the late 1930s, many artists in America became radicalised and moved politically to the far left. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 created extreme poverty, especially in rural America, culminating in the Dustbowl of 1934, immortalised in writing by Steinbeck and others but forgotten in art history. Many artists embraced the idea of revolution and determined to become revolutionary artists, some travelling to the Soviet Union, some fighting in the Spanish Civil War, all wanting to use their art to serve a revolutionary cause. The main aim of this book is to answer the question: what made a revolutionary artist? The 1920s are often portrayed as the Golden Age in America but in fact the decade saw appalling poverty in rural areas and among textile and mine workers. There were also several celebrated examples of American injustice, racism, prejudice against the foreign-born and antiSemitism. Many artists and intellectuals were both Jewish and foreignborn and in the late 1920s even those who were not had sympathy for their causes. Artists and writers became radicalised by several famous causes and became involved in both organising and portraying them: the strikes and attendant police brutality at the Passaic textile works in 1926 and the various miners’ strikes starting in 1927/28 with their attendant starvation and police brutality;

See Guilbaut, Serge, How New York Stole the Idea of Modernism: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, Chicago University Press, 1983; Saunders, Frances Stonor, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, London, Granta 1999. 1

introduction Also of deep concern to artists were the 1927 trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists executed in Massachusetts in 1927 for involvement in a bomb incident; the Scottsboro Boys case, where a group of black teenagers were accused in 1931 of raping two white girls; the attempts to free Tom Mooney and Warren Billings - labour organisers held unjustly in jail since 1916 - and Angelo Herndon, a black labour agitator jailed in 1932. Above all the continuing horror of lynching all exposed the racism and anti-worker bias in American justice and drove writers and artists to protest. By 1932 the Depression had started to affect the whole of society. Capitalism seemed to have failed, while the Soviet Union seemed to be booming under Communism. In Europe, Fascism had taken hold in Italy and Germany, and artists, intellectuals, homosexuals, Jews and dissidents were being victimised. The situation in Spain was also growing worrying. It seemed to the intellectuals that traditional liberal progressivism had failed: the intellectual had to choose between Fascism and Communism. A group of prominent intellectuals signed an open letter1 to the ‘Intellectual Workers of America’ advocating they vote for the communist party’s candidates Foster and Ford in the forthcoming presidential election. Many did, despite the Communist Party’s hard-line ‘third period’ stance (from 1928-1932) which excluded fellow travellers and branded socialists as ‘social-fascists’.

League of Professional Groups for Foster and Ford, Culture and the crisis; an open letter to the writers, artists, teachers, physicians, engineers, scientists and other professional workers of America, New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1932 1

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introduction The Communist Party of the USA1 became well represented in the arts and literature - so much so that many writers and artists even came to believe that they would be disadvantaged if they were not members of the Party. Despite this, by 1935 the Communist movement worldwide had realised that its rejection of ‘social fascists’ was counter-productive and launched the Popular Front to welcome fellow travellers from the broad left. In the art world this had some success, as artists’ groups like the Artists Union and American Artists Congress could become affiliated with the left without joining the Party. However, it also meant that the explicitly communist John Reed Clubs, which had done so much to bring together, exhibit, promote and teach young, working-class artists and writers, together with their publications, were shut down.

For contemporary accounts of the period, see the interviews in Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism, New York: Basic Books, 1977 and Francis V. O'Connor, [ed.]. The New Deal Art Projects: An Anthology of Memoirs, Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1972. Contemporary anti-communist books exposing Communism include Elizabeth. Dilling, The Red Network; a "Who's Who" and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots. Kenilworth, IL: the Author, 1934; Eugene Lyons, The Red decade; the Stalinist penetration of America Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1941. For a history of anticommunism, see M. J. Heale, American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. Histories critical of the CPUSA and its influence include Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism, Chicago, Dee, 1957; Gunter Lewy, The Cause that Failed: Communism in American Political Life, Oxford University Press, 1990. More objective histories include Robert Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young : Student Radicals and America's First Mass Student Movement, 1929-1941, Oxford University Press, 1993; Dietrich, Julia Dietrich, The Old Left in History and Literature, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996; John Patrick Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the American Left, New York, Norton, 1973; Fraser M. Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States : From the Depression to World War II, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1991. 1

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introduction

comrades in art By 1936 many intellectuals had started to worry about the persecution of Trotsky, who was popular in America and about Stalin’s behaviour; the exposure of the Moscow Trials soon helped drive away all but the hardliners. Then in 1939, the Hitler/Stalin pact drove the final nail into the coffin of American Communism as a home for the majority of artists and intellectuals. The opposition Communism/Fascism, which in the early 1930s had seemed so important became the opposition totalitarian/democratic. Communism became associated with unAmericanism and remained so until the end of the Cold War 1. There have been several histories of the left wing intellectuals involved in this period, but from the point of view of the history of art they share certain problems which this book will try to address: 1.

They generally do not cover visual art2.

2. Most of the secondary sources rely heavily on the later autobiographical writings of the protagonists3, some of which were For the early history of the communist witch hunts, see Walter Goodman, The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, London: Secker & Warburg, 1964 and William Gellerman, Martin Dies, HCUA Chairman, New York: John Day, 1944. For a history of art in the Cold War, see Christine Lindey, Art in the Cold War: From Vladivostock to Kalamazoo, London: Herbert, 1990. 2 A recent exception is Virginia Hagelstadt Marquardt, Art and Journals on the Political Front, 1910-1940, University Press of Florida, 1997, which contains a brief survey of the American journals. There are histories of the left wing art of an earlier period: see Rebecca Zurier, Art for the Masses: A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, 1911-1917 Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1988; William L. O’ Neill, Echoes of Revolt: The Masses 1911-1917, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1966. There are also a small number of secondary anthologies covering some of the art on the left: see Joseph North, (introduction by), 36 Years: A Selection of Drawings from The Worker, 1924-1960, New York: The Worker, 1960; Joseph North (edited by), New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties, International Publishers, 1972; Herbert Kline, New Theatre and Film 1934 to 1937, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985. 3 Most of the histories of the intellectuals in this period take as a starting point Daniel Aaron’s, Writers on the Left: Episodes in Literary Communism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Aaron knew some of the protagonists, 1

introduction written during the Cold War, when many of the intellectuals like Wilson, Hicks, Phillips and Rahv who were closely associated with Communism either denied they had ever been associated with it, ignored this period altogether, or predated their ‘conversion’ away from Communism. There are also many histories of the art of the New Deal1, but these do not generally cover any of the left wing activities of the artists, who naturally hid them to get accepted on the New Deal projects. This study will therefore be based entirely on a wide reading of the original sources of left wing art and criticism in the period without reliance on any later or secondary sources. For works originally written in other languages, like the works of the Russian revolutionaries, only those which were available in the U.S. and translated into English at the time and therefore available to the artists and critics concerned will be considered.

especially Joseph Freeman, who wrote Aaron a large number of letters, which to some extent contradict the evidence from the period. See: Terry A. Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle, 1934-1945, University of Wisconsin Press, 1986; William L. O’Neill, The Great Schism: Stalinism and the American Intellectuals, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982; Richard H. Pells, Radical visions and American dreams; culture and social thought in the Depression years. New York: Harper & Row, 1998; Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s, University of North Carolina Press, 1987. However, there are a few more recent books which do not rely on Aaron and go back to the original sources include Cecile Whiting, Antifascism in American Art, Yale University Press, 1989; Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, Verso, 1998; Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929 - 1941, Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. James F. Murphy, The Proletarian Moment: The Controversy over Leftism in Literature, University of Illinois Press, 1991. However, even these do not cover the range of original sources. 1 See Martin R. Kalfatovic, The New Deal Fine Arts Projects: A Bibliography, 1933-1992, Metuchen, New Jersey: 1994.

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sources

sources The main source for the ideas and images in this book is the magazine New Masses. This was the leading left wing journal of the time, both in terms of its circulation, which reached 25,000 in 1934, and its status as an authority. Although its exact links with the Communist Party of the U.S.A. and in Russia varied and were not always clear it was widely regarded as carrying the ‘official’ views of the Party. 1 New Masses was formed in 19262 as a continuation of the Liberator (1918-1924), which itself was the continuation of the Masses, which had run from 1911 to 1917 before being shut down by the government 3.

The issue of Party membership of the figures discussed in this study will largely be ignored as it is virtually impossible to confirm. For obvious reasons many people chose to conceal their membership, and in any case people probably moved in and out of the Party. 2 See bibliography for publication history of this and other journals cited. 3 See Fishbein, Leslie, Rebels in Bohemia: The Radicals of the Masses, 1911 1917, University of North Carolina Press, 1982; O’Neill, William L., Echoes of Revolt: The Masses 1911-1917, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1966. 1

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Michael Gold, the leading voice of the far left and the main driving force behind New Masses for much of its life defined well the moment in the late 1920s at which American intellectuals moved towards to the left. He nodded to the bohemian heritage of the Masses but said that ‘there is no doubt that the Russian Revolution has brought a wiser, harder intellect into being; and this intellect cannot accept the muddle of individualism and Communism that appeared in the Masses pages.’1 New Masses went through several phases: in the early days, from May 1926 until 1928, it shared the original bohemianism of the old Masses; it was radical rather than revolutionary and open to all kinds of radical thought. The first few issues were large and expensively produced with colour, and much of the art was not explicitly political. From mid1928 Mike Gold was sole editor, and he followed the communist ‘third period’ hard line. The art also became more political under Hugo Gellert’s art editorship. From 1934, when Partisan Review was spun off to cover cultural issues (though it never carried any artwork), New Masses became a purely political weekly and even though it remained an illustrated magazine, the amount of art declined dramatically (even the covers were not illustrated after the end of 1934), until 1937, when more illustrations began to appear again.

‘May Days and Revolutionary Art, The Modern Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 3, Feb April, 1926 p. 160. 1

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sources

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magazines However, despite the prominence of the New Masses there were many other outlets for artists which I want to look at. Almost nothing has ever been published about the revolutionary art and criticism contained in these sources. For the left wing or socially-concerned artist, writer and worker the mainstream presses were mostly closed – many major newspapers were owned by Randolph Hearst, a major hate figure for the left, and most publishers would not touch Marxist literature. In any case, most of these artists and critics would not want to be associated with them. Also, many artists on the left either refused or were unable to work for the various government New Deal art programmes, and when they did there was censorship. Many socially-aware artists also refused to be involved in the ‘fine art’ marketplace and the gallery system, both public and private (even if it would have them) and satirised it mercilessly. Nevertheless, there were several sources of and outlets for work (unpaid – most of the magazines did not pay for contributions), advice and inspiration. There were several magazines, of varying degrees of political commitment, which represented the left in art and criticism in this period 1. Called by Robert Minor (a leading cartoonist on the Masses) ‘the poor man’s art gallery’, they were the most prominent outlets for art work.

The standard reference source is Walter Goldwater, Radical periodicals in America, 1890-1950. New York: University Place Book Shop, 1977, though it has many omissions. For a survey of the magazines of this period see Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929 1941, Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.. 1

sources

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daily worker1 This was the main organ of the Communist Party, published in Chicago from 1924. Its staff cartoonists included Fred Ellis and Jacob Burck. It did not cover artistic issues, though Mike Gold wrote a regular Thursday column that often covered culture.

Anthologies are: Daily Worker, Fighting Words: Selections from Twenty-Five Years of the Daily Worker, New York: New Century, 1949; North, Joseph, introduction by, 36 Years: A Selection of Drawings from The Worker, 19241960, New York: The Worker, 1960 1

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international literature This was the journal of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers, formed after the Kharkov Conference and originally called Literature of the World Revolution. It was published in three languages in four cities: Moscow; London; New York and Berlin. It had an International Board, of which several New Masses editors were members, and mainly published critical works by Russian authors, though it covered and sometimes illustrated art and had an international section.

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art front The journal of the Artists Union, with, among others, Hugo Gellert and Stuart Davis on the editorial board, this was more concerned with the conditions of artists than with theory or general politics, though it did include some theoretical pieces and some illustrations.

sources

john reed club magazines The origins of Partisan Review are disputed, but it was formed in 1934, probably by Joseph Freeman1 and others from New Masses who wanted a magazine to represent the John Reed Club of New York 2 to handle cultural issues so the New Masses could concentrate on politics. It briefly merged with Jack Conroy’s poetry magazine Anvil then closed in 1936, reforming in 1937 as a left-liberal journal which took an anti-Stalinist stance. John Reed Clubs in other cities also had their own magazines.

see Who’s Who of Critics at the end of this book. Named for the writer and revolutionary John Reed who had witnessed the Russian revolution at first-hand and personally met many of its leaders. 1

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sources

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modern quarterly/modern monthly This was founded and edited throughout its life by the extremely prolific V.F. Calverton as a vehicle for his own views, which were radical but not exclusively Marxist: he was as much interested in sexual liberation as political. During the mid-1930s it became anti-Stalinist and a rallying ground for Trotskyist views - Trotsky himself contributed as did Max Eastman, and Diego Rivera was listed as art editor, though it published almost no art.

sources

new theatre New Theatre shared views and contributors with New Masses but with specialised coverage: Joseph Freeman contributed and introduced Charmion von Wiegand; Gropper and others designed covers.

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dialectics Published irregularly in the late 1930s by the ‘Critics Group’ a loose association of Marxist and party-oriented critics opposed to Trotskyism, Dialectics carried only theoretical articles and reprints of works by Russian authors. The Critics Group also published a series of book-length works of Marxist criticism around this time.

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the left This was a very short lived but influential journal of theory which included Calverton among its contributors.

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new republic The New Republic: A Journal of Opinion, published in New York weekly throughout the period. Although a liberal rather than a left journal, it included both Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson as editors and contributors, who both tried in its pages to propound Marxist criticism.

comrades in art

african american magazines Following the ‘Harlem Renaissance’ of the 1920s there was a flourishing literary and artistic movement among black Americans, though mainly centred on New York. However, black groups generally resisted being associated with Communists and their activities, though the reverse was far from true: the far left always associated itself with black causes wherever possible, and was committed to ending racism and antiimmigrant sentiments. (Hugo Gellert’s Capital in Lithographs for instance specifically confronts racism; Marx said that race was a false issue – the real issue was class; the working class of one race or country had no quarrel with that of another.) Very few black artists and writers appeared in New Masses or joined the John Reed Clubs.

sources

comrades in art

books Although the far left had an outlet in International Publishers, connected to the Party through its head, Alexander Trachtenberg, very few book length works of criticism or theory appeared. Calverton published several books and pamphlets, but the only other book length attempts to set out and American Marxist criticism are Granville Hicks’s The Great Tradition and James T. Farrell’s A Note on Literary Criticism. Kunitz and Lozowick’s book about Soviet art, Voices of October, was almost the only book available in America at the time to treat Soviet art in depth. Several artists managed to produce illustrated books at a time when many working people, especially the foreign born, would not have been able to read English well or at all. Hugo Gellert’s Capital in Lithographs made Marx understandable, his Aesop Said So rewrote and illustrated Aesop’s fables as anti-capitalist, and Comrade Gulliver rewrote Gulliver’s Travels as a satire on the strangeness of American capitalist society.

sources

comrades in art

sources Art Young also satirised capitalist America, showing it as Hell, using Dante as Gellert used Swift. Young also produced a Socialist Primer for workers.

comrades in art In a similar vein, artists like William Gropper and Jacob Burck illustrated socialist pamphlets for workers.

sources

comrades in art Phil Bard and William Siegel wrote works on social themes almost entirely in pictures, some of them designed specifically for young people.

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Many books and poetry anthologies from left wing writers were also illustrated by left wing artists, as were books about revolutionary heroes like Lynd Ward’s biography in lithographs of John Reed and historical working class movements like Alan Calmer’s book on the Haymarket martyrs illustrated by Mitchell Siporin.

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anthologies Several cartoonists like Ellis, Gropper Redfield and Burck had anthologies published (see bibliography); Red Cartoons, edited by Walt Carmon, the Managing Editor of New Masses, was an annual anthology from Daily Worker, New Masses and other places.

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exhibitions Most of the major commercial galleries and museums were not interested in this kind of work.1 Two galleries, the Weyhe run by Carl Zigrosser and the A.C.A. Galleries, run by Herman Baron2 did however show these artists, and provided them with a mutual support structure.

Except MOMA after 1929 and the Whitney after 1930. One of the key campaigns in the mid-1930s was that for a Municipal Gallery in New York which would show living artists. 2 Co-founded in 1932 by Stuart Davis, Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Adolf Dehn – its second exhibition was of artists from the John Reed Club; it moved in 1933 next door to the Whitney Studio Club and hosted the first American Artists Congress meetings. 1

sources

comrades in art Artists also got together to organise their own exhibitions, curated by the artists themselves and democratically selected. The first John Reed Club exhibition opened in 1929 and it held irregular exhibitions until they became annual in 1932. The exhibition America Today, organised democratically by the American Artists Congress in 1936, advertised as ‘Revolutionary Art!’ consisted entirely of works in editions so that it could open simultaneously in 30 cities and be available to the widest possible audience1 The Congress held its first annual membership exhibition in 1937, again democratically selected and again in several cities. Other artist-led groups like An American Group also organised their own exhibitions democratically and away from the art establishment. There were several major congresses, all of whose papers were published in the U.S., that allowed for public debate on theory: the influential Kharkov conference held by the International Union of Revolutionary Writers (IURW) in 1930 in the Ukraine; the Soviet Writers’ Congress in 1934 at which Socialist Realism was first publicly discussed; the American Artists Congress in 1936 and two American Writers’ Congresses in 1935 and 1937.

The catalogue was published as America Today: A Book of 100 Prints, Equinox Co-operative Press: New York, 1936 , price $5. 1

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classes/lectures Many of the artists on the left attended the anti-establishment Art Students League; the John Reed Club’s primary function was to run classes on art and culture for workers and the unemployed which were given by practising artists until the school closed in January 1936 and artists like Louis Lozowick also gave public lectures on art and theory. 1

His lectures on “A Marxian History of Art” were advertised in Partisan Review vol. 1, no. 1, 1934, p. 64. 1

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The Art Students’ League of New York at 215 West 57th Street

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An Art Students League timetable

comrades in art In all of these many outlets for the revolutionary spirit in art and theory, the artists often described themselves as revolutionary artists. But nowhere is there a coherent description of what a revolutionary artists should be or do. Therefore we will have to put together the pieces of criticism and theory that were available at the time to see if it is possible to define a revolutionary artist and test the work of various artists against this definition.

american critics on revolutionary art

2. american critics on revolutionary art For my generation the problem of art and revolution was to remain a thorny one. Even on the level on which we worked, to break trails meant to struggle with the most elementary questions.’ 1 Joseph Freeman here describes the problem both critics and artists had in defining an American revolutionary art. Even Freeman, who read (and translated from) Russian, knew the works of the Marxists and Bolsheviks, indeed had met many of them and spent long periods in the Soviet Union, could not simply look to Russia for guidance on aesthetic theory. And most workers had more pressing problems: ‘Among the workers the meaning of the class struggle was lucid and forceful . . .You were either a communist or you were not; if you were, your place was in the ranks. The problem of art and revolution would be worked out in the course of time.2 At the Liberator the artists and writers 'had settled the problem of art and revolution in a very general way’. They thought they had broken with bourgeois culture and were ready to serve the struggle of the working class. But the Communist Party had taken over editorial policy and this had ended the freewheeling radicalism and (as Freeman puts it) 'individualism' of the old Masses, whose contributors did not see the difference between art and politics. Under Party control The Liberator had 'political editors' and 'art editors' of which Freeman was one. ‘Among aesthetes we defended revolutionary politics; among Party comrades we argued for art.'3 However, Freeman, partly in reaction against Trotsky 4, expressed the need for a revolutionary art: before there can be a classless art, the proletariat, through the artists who come from its ranks or who go Joseph Freeman, An American Testament: A Narrative of Rebels and Romantics, New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1936, p. 320. 2 Ibid p. 321 3 ibid p. 322. 4 Although an early proponent of radical art forms in the service of the revolution, Trotsky had later denied the existence or even the possibility of a revolutionary art at the current stage of history. See Literature and Revolution, New York: International Publishers, 1925 1

comrades in art over to it from other social classes, must produce a class art which is revolutionary because it illuminates the whole of the contemporary world from the only viewpoint from which it is possible to see it steadily and see it whole.1 One of the most important influences on the development of revolutionary art in America was the conference of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers (IURW) held in Kharkov in the Ukraine November 6-15, 1930, the first international gathering of revolutionary artists writers and critics.2 One of its stated aims was to disprove Trotsky’s contention that there could be no revolutionary art until socialism had been achieved. The conference resolutions separated the ideas of revolutionary and proletarian artists; saying that the former is a step to the latter (there was subsequently no agreement on the use of these two terms in America): ‘the degree to which one revolutionary writer or another masters the outlook of the proletariat - dialectical materialism - is the measure of his transformation into a proletarian artist.’ but admitted that as yet ‘our movement has not even begun to formulate the problems of the creative method.’ 3 The conference issued a resolution to ‘all Revolutionary Artists of the World.’ (American artists Fred Ellis and William Gropper were on the committee which wrote this). It said: ‘Revolutionary artists have never held aloof from the class struggle. In history we meet the names of such great artists as Goya, Van Gogh, Courbet, Daumier, Gaugin and others, who took a direct part in the European and colonial revolutionary movements.’4 As well as defining this tradition the resolution sets out a programme for revolutionary artists: they must fight alongside the proletariat against imperialism, colonial oppression, exploitation of ‘Introduction’ to Hicks, Granville et al eds. Proletarian Literature in the United States, by Joseph Freeman, New York, 1935, p. 18. 2 representatives from the US included Gold, William Gropper, Fred Ellis, Joshua Kunitz, Harry Alan Potamkin (the film critic) and A.B. Magil, who reported on it for New Masses in June, 1931. All the published papers were contained in a special issue of Literature of the World Revolution. 3 Literature of the World Revolution special issue, p. 6. 4 Ibid p. 10. 1

american critics on revolutionary art labour, Fascism and social Fascism. And ‘in the domain of our work, the domain of pictorial art, must struggle’ for revolutionary content and new forms in art, intelligible to the broad masses and based on the class struggle . . . the synthesis of class content and new form in revolutionary art . . . revolutionary artists must carry out the chief aim of revolutionary art - by organization, by their collective efforts, under the leadership of their own international center and of the revolutionary organizations of the workers and peasants in their countries, they must take part in the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.1 Mike Gold was one of the leading lights at Kharkov and had been a key figure well before that in the founding and running of New Masses. During his sole editorship of New Masses from 1928 to 1932 and in his weekly column for Daily Worker he became a passionate and single-minded advocate of proletarian art – almost alone in his crusade until Joseph Freeman and Granville Hicks joined him in it in 1934. His own proletarian (and autobiographical) novel about growing up in the tenements of the Lower East Side in New York, Jews Without Money was his early attempt at proletarian writing and had a major influence on the development of this form. Gold’s aim throughout all his prolific and passionate writing was to encourage workers to become artists and artists to produce art about the lives of workers, a movement which he believed had already begun: ‘my conservative conclusion is that 50,000 revolutionary workers in

Ibid. p. 11

comrades in art America are connected with some local group for the discovery and practice of Workers’ Art.’1 However, in the early days Gold was better at saying what he did not like than at providing guidelines for aspiring worker-artists and writers. He certainly did not like Wyndham Lewis and T.S. Eliot, whom he called ‘forerunners of conscious Fascism’ who started as ‘revolutionary experimenters in the arts. But they soon discovered where such a spirit leads in real life; to proletarian revolution. So the reaction begins the full retreat’2 into Catholicism and mysticism. Gold was also unequivocally against individualism. Individualism in art leads only to little café cliques and minor eccentrics . . . The great artist is unique in feeling, in power, and insight. But this is not individualism. It is only genius. . . Two world forces are moving to make it collective - Big Business and the Social Revolution. . . One would establish a collectivism of contented slaves the benevolent feudalism. . . . The other would establish a collectivism of free, self-ruled, creative human beings a Workers’ Republic.’3 Joining Gold in the argument against individualism was V. F. Calverton - though himself a complete individualist - the most prolific, though by no means the most consistent of critics on the left. Calverton had much to say about Marxism and culture although, unlike Gold, he had no particular love for the proletarian in art. Calverton, despite his knowledge of and frequent reference to Marxism was more a

Letter to Workers’ Art Groups, New Masses, September 1929, p. 16. ‘Notes on Art, Life, Crap Shooting, etc.’, New Masses, September 1929, p. 12. 3 ‘American Jungle Notes’, New Masses, December, 1929, pp. 8/9. 1

american critics on revolutionary art free-thinking bohemian radical in the old Masses mould than a real revolutionary and he was as happy to write about sexual liberation as social revolution. Nevertheless, he wrote more on the criticism of American art and literature than any other critic of the time. Calverton issued an early call for collectivism in art which he called ‘our critical manifesto - our revolutionary declaration!’ He said: We must encourage and produce an art that will express our age at the same time that it aids it. . . Art that is social in vision becomes art that is dynamic and form as were the art of the rising bourgeoisie in its time and the art of the Renaissance, which both aimed at universality.1 In the same year he again called for art to have a social purpose and deal with the external not the internal world. ‘If art is to become other than an amusement for the fatigued merchant, the tired flapper and the jaded libertine, it must rise from the individual to the social, and endeavour to attain a revolutionary beauty commensurate with radical vision and aspiration.’2 Later he used a similar idea, talking about the ‘social trend in literature and literary criticism’ which ‘seeks to socialize art so that it will be infused with a more human and intelligible meaning. It would make art serve man, as a thing of beauty, and not man serve art, as a thing of escape. To do this means to revolutionize art as well as life.’ 3 By the early 1930s, as the economic situation rapidly became more serious Calverton urged artists to seek revolutionary solutions to the crisis; in 1932 he outlines the two possible responses an artist has to the ‘present crisis’:

V. F. Calverton, For a New Critical Manifesto’, The Modern Quarterly, vol. 4 no. 1, January - April, 1927, pp. 15/18 2 V. F. Calverton Introduction to Walt Carmon ed., Red Cartoons: From the Daily Worker, and the Workers Monthly, Chicago: Daily Worker Publishing Company, 1927, unpaged. 3 V. F. Calverton, The New Ground of Criticism, Seattle: University of Washington Book Store, 1930, p. 47. 1

comrades in art ally himself with the old world, either by accepting it tough-mindedly . . . or . . . by tender-mindedly despairing of the possibility of a new world creating anything but a fresh range of barbarism. . . On the other hand, the artist can reject the old world by subscribing to the possibilities of the new, believing, as do the proletarian artists of today, that it can create a superior sense of values and a loftier vision. There is no other path that can be pursued.1 And, also in 1932, in a pamphlet unambiguously titled For Revolution he had abandoned any vestiges of liberal progressivism and made his position absolutely clear: ‘in the end, whether we like it or not, it is only a revolution which can solve the social problem at stake’2 However, having written this, although he continued to write prolifically until his death in 1940 he did not return to the subject of the revolutionary impulse in art. In 1935 the New Masses critic Waldo Frank discussed the idea of a revolutionary artist who, ‘to act his part, which is to create the cultural medium for the revolution . . . must see life whole. He will have a political creed; if he is a generous man, it will be hard for him to forgo some share of the daily political-industrial struggle’. The artist’s own life is the ‘material of his art’, but any subject matter is appropriate (Frank separates ‘subject, which is a ‘mere label or container’ from ‘material’) but ‘if his vision be sound, it will make - whatever his subject - the material for revolutionary art.’3 The writer must bring the values of the class struggle to life to ‘stimulate the will to revolutionary action.’ New Masses had only published ad hoc pieces on art and theory and had no art critic until 1934/35 when both Charmion von Wiegand and Stephen Alexander4 became correspondents and wrote many reviews V. F. Calverton, The Liberation of American Literature, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932, pp. 468/9. 2 V. F. Calverton, For Revolution, New York: John Day, 1932, no page numbers 3 ‘Values of the Revolutionary Writer’, reprinted in New Masses, May 7, 1935, pp. 18/20 4 other than this I have been able to find out no information on Alexander or any writings by him in any other journal. Possibly the name is a pseudonym – this was common among writers who sympathised with left-wing views but did not want to be publicly associated with them. 1

american critics on revolutionary art concerned with revolutionary art1. In a review of the 1934 John Reed Club exhibition2, Alexander analyses the rise in revolutionary art, which he says was concurrent with the drive for ‘100% American art, around 1932’. Alexander categorizes the previous period, 1918 to 1932, as the ‘Battle Between the Academy and The Moderns’, when the ‘Moderns’ attacked with relentless vigour and by 1926-27 had the Academy ‘reeling and groggy.’ From 1928 - 1932 the Moderns were ‘[f]airly well established in power and popularity’, but this had little to do with American artists looking for an American way for art with a social dimension. The new, revolutionary force in art ‘began to take its shape and character from the struggle of the American working-class for liberation from the oppressive yoke of American capitalism.’ The artists in this movement come from both academic and modern backgrounds; they have different techniques but all ‘desire to use their art to serve the needs of this new revolutionary class coming to power’. Whereas the previous battle between academic and modern was ‘confined to the technical aspects of art, today the issues are along a much broader front.’ Alexander says that the John Reed Club exhibits, unlike ‘most bourgeois art exhibitions’ are not concerned ‘exclusively with technical problems. You will find here no still-lifes, no landscapes (as such), no “nudes”, no abstractions . . . in short, no “art for art’s sake”’. In the JRC exhibition the revolutionary artist ‘is trying to make a living commentary on the world in which we are living and fighting; to express the basic realities of our time, to depict some phase or aspect of that intense drama . . . the class struggle.’ [elisions in original] Alexander clearly advocated revolutionary art and gave as good definition as anyone: We believe that an art which raises the revolutionary consciousness of the masses, which gives fine plastic and graphic expression to the class struggle - in short, “good revolutionary art” is the most useful kind of art for our purposes, hence for us the “highest” form of art.3

At around the same time Granville Hicks joined as literary critic ‘Revolutionary Front - 1934’, New Masses, November 27, 1934, p. 28. 3 ‘Quintanilla’s Etchings’, New Masses, December 4 1934, p. 28. 1

comrades in art So the revolutionary artist’s task is clear: collaborate with the working class to help create the revolutionary new reality by giving ‘plastic and graphic expression to the class struggle’. Having briefly looked at the views of the leading American critics on revolutionary art we now turn to look at how artists responded to the idea of revolutionary art through self-organisation.

artists’s organisations

3. artists’ organisations

comrades in art

the john reed clubs John Reed (1887 – 1920) was comparatively well known to the American public as the author of Ten Days That Shook The World, a first-hand history of the Russian Revolution. Reed was with the Red Guard when they entered the Winter Palace in 1917 and got to know Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Radek and many others and was elected to the Executive Committee of the Communist International. Middle class and Harvard educated, Reed became involved in politics early and was first arrested in 1913 while supporting the Paterson silk workers’ strike (he gave his occupation to the court as ‘poet’). Contributing editor and then managing editor of the Masses, he also wrote for the Liberator and the Metropolitan, and rode and fought with Pancho Villa in Mexico. Reed was buried in Moscow beside the wall of the Kremlin in a ceremony attended by many veterans of the Russian Revolution1. The first John Reed Club was founded in New York in 1929 as a member organisation of the IURW explicitly to develop revolutionary artists. Several Clubs later opened in major cities. They provided free tuition provided by artists and a forum for exchanges of work and ideas. They encouraged workers with no previous experience of art and had no academic ties or requirements. ‘The purpose of the John Reed Clubs is to win writers and artists to the revolution.’ 2 In the June 1932 issue of New Masses,3 they published a statement of their purposes, and outlined their ‘minimum program.’ They were founded to bring the works of ‘writers, artists and critics who have approached the American scene from the viewpoint of the revolutionary workers’ closer to ‘the daily struggle of the workers’. Their manifesto contains six points

See Rosenstone, Robert A., Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed, Harvard U.P., 1990; Hicks, Granville, One of Us: The Story of John Reed, Illustrated by Lynd Ward, New York: Equinox Cooperative Press, 1935 2 Orrick Johns, ‘The John Reed Clubs Meet’, New Masses, October 30, 1934, pp. 25/26 3 reprinted in Albert Fried, Communism in America : A History in Documents, New York: Columbia University Press, 1997, pp. 176/7. 1

artists’ organisations and revolutionary art 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

Fight against imperialist war, defend the Soviet Union against capitalist aggression; Fight against fascism, whether open or concealed, like social-fascism; Fight for the development and strengthening of the revolutionary labor movement; Fight against white chauvinism (against all forms of Negro discrimination or persecution) and against the persecution of the foreign-born; Fight against the influence of middle-class ideas in the work of revolutionary writers and artists; Fight against the imprisonment of revolutionary writers and artists, as well as other class-war prisoners throughout the world.

At their first national convention in Chicago on May 29-30 1932 the Club restated its commitment to the Kharkov congress and stated its activities to be: (a) To make the Club a functioning center of proletarian culture; to clarify and elaborate the point of view of proletarian as opposed to bourgeois culture; to extend the influence of the Cub and the revolutionary working class movement. (b) To create and publish art and literature of a proletarian character; to make familiar in this country the art and literature of the world proletariat, and particularly that of the Soviet Union; to develop the critique of bourgeois and working class culture; to develop organisational techniques for establishing and consolidating contacts of the Clubs with potentially sympathetic elements; to assist in developing (through cooperation with the Workers Cultural Federation and other revolutionary organisations) worker-writers and worker-artists; to engage in and give widest publicity to

comrades in art working class struggles; to render technical assistance to the organised revolutionary movement1. The mention of ‘potentially sympathetic elements’ already shows the early development of a Popular Front line. In 1932 ‘social fascism’ was still seen as the enemy; in the 1932 presidential election, the John Reed Club’s line was that there was nothing to choose between Norman Thomas of the Socialist Party and the other candidates. However, already by 1932 there were signs that the third period line was softening and even Mike Gold was advocating a Popular Front attitude in the Club, long before it was officially announced. Since the first day of the organization of the John Reed Club I have been in the minority in saying this club should be organized of the broad middle class intellectual workers. It should be the feeder, the contact organization between these and the Communist movement. At Kharkov the platform was simple and political. Any writer who subscribed to the program was admitted. It should be very clear that no one was asked to change his mental habits. Nothing will be dictated to them. . . Clear up the question of fellow travellers. Appeal to the white collar groups in this country who won’t come close to the party and for whom the John Reed Clubs can be the first step into the I.L.D. 2 and into the Communist Party.3 The softer line can also be seen in an application form of 1933 where they say the John Reed Club:

Oakley Johnson ‘The John Reed Club Convention’, New Masses, July 1932, p. 15. 2 The International Labor Defense, founded in 1925 to represent jailed activists and members of minority groups; it was dominated by the CP until 1937. 3 Unpublished Minutes of first John Reed Clubs National Conference, Chicago, May 29 1932, quoted by Aaron p. 224. The meeting was covered in New Masses, June 1932, p. 114. 1

artists’ organisations and revolutionary art recognizes that the interests of all artistic, intellectual and cultural workers are in harmony with those of the working class. It recognizes the irreconcilable conflict between the workers and the capitalists as two contending classes, and concludes from it the necessity of developing a cultural movement devoted to advancing the interests of the whole working class. The John Reed Club opposes all support of capitalism by cultural workers; it aims to clarify and crystallize the creative problems of literature and art in relation to the revolutionary movement, and considers its specific task the development of new worker writers and intellectuals on the side of the revolutionary working class.1 In 1934, when Partisan Review first appeared as ‘the organ of the John Reed Club of New York’ the first Editorial Statement announced its participation in ‘the movement to create a revolutionary art’ and described the magazine’s viewpoint as ‘that of the revolutionary working class’2. However, in relation to the John Reed Club School of Art it merely said that ‘technical training must serve only as a preparation for expressing ideas of social value’3 rather than revolutionary activity. And of course Partisan Review would soon fold in its original form and be reformed in 1937 as an anti-Stalinist journal. However, the Clubs in cities outside New York were slower to change their hard-line stance. In January 1934, an editorial in the first issue of Red Pen, the Philadelphia Club’s magazine was still proclaiming full support for ‘the maximum program’ of Kharkov, including ‘the fight against fascism and social-fascism. . . We struggle for the MarxistLeninist interpretation of culture and go forward under the banner of Lenin on the cultural class-front!’4 By 1934 the Clubs had also started to move from revolutionary political action into more of a concern for practical support of artists themselves. In a 1934 exhibition catalogue their aims were stated as being to show the ibid p. 96 Partisan Review, vol. 1, no. 1, 1934, p. 2 3 ibid p. 64. 4 p. 1 1

comrades in art

works of artists who have been motivated by the militant upsurge of the workers. We hope that these exhibitions serve not only to show what has already been done, but exert an influence which may inspire and encourage artists to express their reaction to economic turmoil. Since tense, deeply-felt material demands new means of effective expression, it is expected that the new influence of these exhibitions will be felt in the creation of new adequate art forms as well as in the realm of subject matter. We cannot say what style, manner, school or form is best suited to the artistic expression of the struggles of the oppressed. That is the artist’s problem. We do say, however, that it is not sufficient merely to record the scene, to describe it, or to illustrate it. The artist, to be artistically and socially vital, must use his art forms to comment, to satirize, to condemn, or praise. He is never passive. He takes sides, not only through his subject matter but in his treatment. He is on one side or other of the historic class struggle. The John Reed Club shows and encourages artists who take the side of the revolutionary working class in its fight against hunger, fascism and war.1 ‘Against War and Fascism’ would soon become the rallying cry of not only the Clubs but of a broader group of artists and intellectuals as the Popular Front began to form. Events in Germany, Italy and Spain gave artists a common enemy to fight: not capitalism but Fascism. The Communist third period opposition to socialism as ‘social-fascism’ gave way to an inclusiveness and acceptance for all prepared to fight Fascism. This led to the disbanding of the overtly political John Reed Clubs after their second National Congress in September 1934 and allowed the committed artists who had been members to join relatively non-political groupings formed to advance the narrower interests of artists rather than the broader interests of the working class, like the Artists Union, the

Quoted by Kendall Taylor, Philip Evergood: Never Separate from the Heart, London & Toronto: Bucknell University Press, 1986, p. 86. 1

artists’ organisations and revolutionary art Artists Committee of Action and the Artists Congress, alongside noncommitted artists. But in order for all artists to organise there had to be a platform they could agree on, and this was not a revolutionary one.

comrades in art

artists’ organisations

the artists union The Artists Union was formed in 1934 out of the Unemployed Artists Group to protest the recently formed New Deal art programme’s process for selecting artists to employ, which was originally based on inviting well known artists from major commercial galleries. It held its first convention on May 7 1936 in New York. Although the Union, along with the Artists Committee of Action1 and their magazine Art Front declared themselves ‘not aligned to any political party’, and a ‘non-political, nonsectarian mass organization of artists’, the Union nevertheless saw a responsibility on its behalf to guide artists on political issues, and the artists’ responsibility to take an interest in, if not political activity, then social issues. It sought a balance between individualism and collectivism that mirrored the emerging Popular Front thinking. The Union was by no means revolutionary, nor did it advocate revolutionary art, though it happily accommodated it. Indeed it was evolutionary rather than revolutionary in areas like its insistence on the Municipal Art Gallery in New York and the employment of artists on New Deal projects. But during the Popular Front era it brought together a whole spectrum of artists interested in working for a better society whether via revolution or social reform - not just a better deal for artists. Writing in reply to an attack on the politics of the Artists Union, in the first issue of Art Front, a committee member said: The artist has nothing in common with politicians. But the artist is part of that world which is in the making. The artist is one with the power that will transform this old and decadent world which holds nothing of hope in it into a new one, where the artist, one with all the workers, will be able to “function freely, aided by the wise appreciation of his fellow citizens”2

An organisation chaired by Hugo Gellert which advocated a Municipal Art Gallery in New York, run by artists to show the works of living artists. 2 Ethel Olenikov, ‘In Answer to the Art News’, Art Front vol. 1 no. 1, November, 1934, p. 5. 1

comrades in art In his report to the American Artists Congress from the Artists Union, former New Masses artist and Executive Secretary of the Union Boris Gorelick portrayed the Union as striking a similar balance between individual artistic efforts and collective responsibility: ‘We artists are met with a double responsibility – not only must we protect ourselves in our individual names, there rests upon us also the obligation to defend the advancement of culture’1 against the ‘forces of reaction’ such as the Hearst press and the Liberty League. Opposition to both these united artists in as much as the threats of war and Fascism, but the unity against these threats did not countenance revolution.

‘Artists’ Union Report’, 1936, speech to American Artists’ Congress, reprinted in Baigell, Matthew et al. eds., Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists' Congress, Rutgers University Press, 1986, p. 185 1

artists’ organisations

comrades in art

the american artists congress The first American Artists Congress happened in February 1936 at which time three forces were shaping: the threat of Fascism in Europe had become apparent to everyone; the reactionary elements in America were becoming stronger and more strident, united in opposition to the New Deal; the communist left, having seen the failure of third period policies was trying to open up to fellow-travelling socialists and liberals. The call for the Congress, in November 1935 was signed by over 400 artists and had Stuart Davis as its National Secretary. It was addressed to those artists, who, conscious of the need of action, realize the necessity of collective discussion and planning, with the objective of the preservation and development of our cultural heritage. It is for those who realize that the cultural crisis is but a reflection of a world economic crisis and not an isolated phenomenon.1 This is a political statement but not a revolutionary one. And in his speech to the Congress, in advocating it become a permanent organization2, Davis said it ‘will not be affiliated with any political group or clique of sectarian opinion’3, clearly to distance the organization from the Communist Party.

reprinted in Baigell and Williams, p. 47. The Congress did continue, and organised exhibitions like America Today, even in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: ‘now, near the marvels of Giotto are housed the paintings of William Gropper, Reginald Marsh, Joe Jones, Max Weber, Doris Lee, Arnold Blanch, Raphael Soyer, and Rockwell Kent, all members of the American Artists’ Congress, organized two years ago to combat Fascism and imperialist war. Each of these artists has contributed drawings to the NEW MASSES’, New Masses editorial, June 8, 1937 pp. 15/16. 3 ibid p, 70. 1

artists’ organisations

comrades in art

artists’ organisations

Although two of the speeches concerned the relationship between artists and trade unions, most of the speakers were artists themselves and they mostly talked about either general issues of the artist in society or the need to fight Fascism; there were no outright political speeches. Even committed artists from the New Masses were conciliatory: Gellert spoke out against Fascism and in favour of the need for close contact with the workers but not in favour of revolutionary activity; Louis Lozowick gave a glowing report on the economic status of the artist in Russia, but did not advocate an American revolution so artists there could attain the same status. Even Joe Jones, often held up as an ideal revolutionary artist, spoke only about censorship in WPA murals. The only talk of revolutionary art was from Siqueiros, reporting from LEAR, the Mexican League of Revolutionary Artists and Writers, which never had an equivalent in America.

comrades in art

issues & debates

4. what is a revolutionary artist?

comrades in art

realism and pessimism For artists on the left realism became essential; modernism and naturalism became the twin evils to avoid. But what did realism mean? From 1932 on, and especially after the Soviet Writers Congress in 1934, Socialist Realism became the official standard, but even this was only loosely defined. And in America Socialist Realism was hardly even mentioned. So what guidance was available to artists wanting to be true realists? Mike Gold was the leading voice (almost the only voice until Joseph Freeman and Granville Hicks joined in around 1934) trying to encourage a proletarian, realistic art. In an article in 1930 1 he set out nine elements of what he called ‘Proletarian Realism’ (his term, which was not taken up anywhere else). This was at least two years before Socialist Realism was propounded, but is almost entirely in line with it. Gold’s Proletarian Realism: 1. Describes the world of the workers accurately, as an insider 2. ‘deals with real conflicts of men and women who work for a living’ not the ‘sickly mental states of the idle bohemians’ (like Proust) 3. Is ‘never pointless;’ it ‘has a social function’ 4. ‘As few words as possible. We are not interested in the verbal acrobats’ 5. ‘To have the courage of the proletarian experience’ not the ‘spiritual drunkards and super-refined Parisian émigrés . . . we must write about our own mud-puddle’ 6. ‘Swift action, clear form, the direct line, cinema in words’ 7. Does not portray the workers’ lives as drab; though there is drabness and horror ‘this manure heap is the heap of the future; we know that not pessimism, but revolutionary élan will sweep this mess out of the world forever.’ 8. Contains no ‘lies about human nature . . . we do not have to lie about our hero in order to win our case.’ 9. ‘No straining or melodrama or other effects; life itself is the supreme melodrama.’ 1

‘Proletarian Literature’, New Masses, September 1930. p 5

realism and pessimism

Even earlier, Calverton had also promoted the idea of proletarian, realist art, though his approach was descriptive rather than normative. The whole proletarian trend is toward a deeper realism, pruned of ornamental trappings, rugged almost with its undecorated exterior and uncurved sharpness of delineation, and fully cognizant of the social origin and meaning of action. . . [It] possesses a comprehensiveness of content, singularly communistic in its development. . . It is collective, not individualistic, and classless rather than working class. It aims for universality but not uniformity. 1 As time went on many critics, even on the far left, began to react against the narrowness of proletarian art in the Gold manner. Even New Masses loyalist Waldo Frank said in 1935 that one thing that ‘murders the effectiveness of so much of our revolutionary writing’ is ‘the drab pedestrian effects of Victorian realism - as if these were adequate to convey the body - tragic, farcical, explosive, corybantic, tender, deep as hell and high as heaven, of American life!’2 By this time too the impact of cinematic techniques had started to work its way into other art forms, and this necessarily changed the artists view of realism, not always for the better. Commenting on the New Masses’ novel competition (which had very few and very disappointing responses) Alan Calmer said: ‘The “realism” of cinema has influenced proletarian writers as well as others. It has led them to twist realistic material into stock formulas of the screen or to fake events in the same way as most scenarios.’3 The effect of cinema was not always negative though. This was potentially one of the forms through which American artists could create a uniquely American revolutionary art. In a review of a John Reed Club exhibition, Charmion von Wiegand praised the way one of the paintings ‘Proletarian Art’, in The Newer Spirit: A Sociological Criticism of Literature, New York: Boni & Liveright, 1925, pp. 144/5. 2 ‘Values of the Revolutionary Writer’, speech at the First American Writers’ Congress, reprinted in New Masses, May 7, 1935, pp. 18/20. 3 ‘Reader’s Report’, New Masses, September 10 1935, p. 23. 1

comrades in art ‘carves out a new segment of reality akin in feeling to that reality captured by Soviet films.’ The portrait of a grandmother facing ‘a tragic contemporary situation’ with pioneer spirit in ‘plastic terms is utterly American, and at the same time, revolutionary.’ 1 Several critics were struggling to find an American form of Marxism, among them Harold Rosenberg. He argued that ‘Marxian insights’ will produce a new sensibility ‘not a “Marxian” sensibility, of course, but a human sensibility in the formation of which the existence of Marxian formulations of real events plays a major role.’ Realism in the Marxist sense would indeed produce distortions, but for a positive reason. Events and values which stand out in relief for us would tend to diminish into the background; others, today more hidden and mysterious, would slowly limn themselves into the consciousness and assume colossal importance. . . Marxism is truly a distortion with respect to the responses and judgments of the past, because in relation to the actual life with which it deals, its effects are nothing less than an “unmasking of reality.” 2 Simply reflecting reality as a ‘mirror’ as Lenin said Trotsky did is not enough: a revolutionary artist needs to help recreate reality. One of the great dangers for artists in this period of depression was a depressed view of life. The revolutionary artist is not pessimistic, but sees the inevitable triumph of the working class movement. Lenin warned artists especially against despair and pessimism, which have no part in realism. He said that Despair is typical of the classes which are perishing. . . Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of

‘The Fine Arts’, New Masses, June 15 1937 pp. 29/30. Rosenberg, Harold, ‘What We May Demand’. New Masses, Mar 23 1937, pp. 17/18. The article is a version of a speech given under their auspices of Partisan Review. 1

realism and pessimism struggle. The modern industrial proletariat does not belong to the category of such classes1. The artist’s job is to help show the way forward, the way out of despair. Pessimism and passivity become part of the ideology ‘when the whole of the old order “has been turned upside down”’ (which it had in the US during the Depression); ‘the masses, who have been brought up under this old order . . . do not and cannot see what kind of a new order is “taking shape”, what social forces are “shaping” it and how, what social forces are capable of bringing release’ The artists can show them. Lunacharsky, who was widely published in America, despite his encouragement of avant-garde art styles, always advocated that artists should present reality as seen by the progressive class: ‘Art can be not only the tool of reality, but also the tool of propaganda for definite views. The artist can make his creation express that approach to reality which to him is most true.’2 In his speech to All-Russian Union of Soviet Writers Lunacharsky made the distinction, which others also made, between negative and positive forms of realism. This negative realism was most effectively expressed in the so-called naturalism of the petty bourgeoisie’ who said ‘we are estranged from politics. Our business is to describe the mean system created by the bourgeoisie, perhaps falling into the mood of caricature, but in the main with scientific honesty. 3 This realism was critical as it was objective and ‘amounted to a disclosure of the seamy side of reality for this reality was far from sweet to the petty bourgeoisie.’ However, being merely negative it could not show any way to a better future. Therefore romanticism was needed as an escape from this reality. ‘This is the diapason of bourgeois art: static realism, negative realism, an attempt to put up romantic illusions against drab reality.’ ‘L. N. Tolstoy and the Modern Labour Movement’, 1910, Collected Works vol 16, p 332. 2 ‘Art and Marxism’, Modern Quarterly vol. 5 no. 1, November - February 1928/29, p. 75. 3 Published as ‘Problems of The Soviet Theatre: On Socialist Realism, Literature and the Theatre’, International Literature 3, 1933, pp. 89/93. 1

comrades in art At the Soviet Writers’ Congress in 1934, Maxim Gorky, a much respected and admired figure in America, defined ‘critical realism’, as a 19th-century bourgeois phenomenon, in opposition to socialist realism. 1 ‘we need that realism only in order to throw light on survivals of the past, and wage a struggle for their eradication. . . While ‘criticizing all things it has established nothing.’ The Congress however came at a time in America when even the party loyalists were opening up the definitions of realism and, American Trotskyist critics opened it up even further. In a review of Dos Passos’ complete USA trilogy, one argued that even a negative and naturalistic portrayal of reality, if it were powerful enough, would lead towards socialism. The ‘moral’ of Dos Passos is inherent in the very subject-matter of the book rather than artificially interjected by party propagandists. . . if you read Dos Passos carefully, the narrowing possibilities of what can be done, short of socialism, stare you in the face. It is Dos Passos’ permanent merit as an artist that he has proved the case for socialism to the hilt without once stating it pontifically, as the omniscient overseer and party fixer.2 A similarly Trotskyist view in the same journal later argued that Russian criticism was against naturalism only recently, and only because it was afraid of the truth (a similar point to that made by Max Eastman for some years previously). Naturalism had a great value ‘when it represented the rebellion against concealment, understatement and the genteelizing of the bare facts of life’ However, now the Soviet Union was against it because, though

‘Soviet Literature: Address to the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers’, August 17, 1934, reprinted in Problems in Soviet Literature: Report on the First Soviet Writers’ Congress, Lawrence and Wishart, 1934, and in Maxim Gorky, On Literature, Moscow: Progress, nd, pp. 235/264. The Congress was reported by Moissaye Olgin in New Masses October 16, 1934, p. 17. 2 Bernard Wolfe, ‘Dos Passos’ America, The New International, vol IV, no. 3, March 1938, pp. 90/91. 1

realism and pessimism it did, in the past, permit of clear exposure of injustices of society, and thereby criticized rather subtly. It is not too far-fetched to suppose that Stalinist officials fear equally accurate portrayal of their non-revolutionary practices.1 However, even Mike Gold once argued that critical realism and pessimism might have a revolutionary use. In a book review he said that there is a revolutionary defeatism which sometimes results in great art. It is the cry of the revolutionist who has seen his hopes shattered, and has not the resilience to rise again . . . These works of pessimism sometimes serve a useful purpose; they are a form of agonized selfcriticism, the means by which the revolution painfully corrects its own mistakes, repaints its picture of the world.2 Calverton also argued against the need for all proletarian art to be optimistic; proletarian art should be able to encompass tragedy as bourgeois art does. Calverton criticises the ‘theory that all proletarian literature must be optimistic in conclusion; otherwise, the theory goes, it tends to exercise a discouraging influence over its audience and to serve a reactionary instead of a revolutionary purpose.’3 He says that this has been a disaster and has made people graft on gratuitous, unnatural false endings. Nevertheless, pessimism was widely condemned as incompatible with the kind of realism appropriate to revolutionary art. The writer William Saroyan was criticised in a New Masses editorial: ‘pessimism is the only truth he is persuaded of. This, of course, the Marxist critic challenges. He insists on the whole truth, and in that truth one finds the marching armies of the working class, fighting and dying daily to establish a better world.’4 Edna Margolin, ‘Art by Ukase’, The New International, October 1938, pp. 315/6. ‘Stale Bohemianism’, New Masses, April, 1933, p. 30. 3 ‘A Plea for Proletarian Tragedy’, Modern Monthly, March, 1937, p. 14. 4 October 23 1934, p. 15. 1

comrades in art But while Americans were trying to Americanise revolutionary art, for some Russian observers this was leading to pessimism and defeatism. A scathing article in International Literature on New Masses from a young Russian critic in 1932 had criticised it for ‘insufficient politicization’ and failing to carry out the resolutions of Kharkov. She criticises all the artists for passivity, and showing class struggles as individual acts like strikes, and not as part of a coherent revolutionary programme. The workers are portrayed as thoroughly downhearted and subdued people that are incapable of putting up any resistance. . . In some cases this empiricism, this passive registration of facts of class ‘oppression” amounts to a complete repudiation of the revolutionary class struggle’1 Otto Soglow for instance embodies a clear demonstration of how the revolutionary artist who has not yet reached a sufficiently high ideological political level proves incapable of embodying in his creation the dialectical unity of the part with the whole, how he concentrates the whole fire of his critique on isolated phenomena of the capitalist system without showing their connection with the system as a whole. 2 Another outside observer, the British Marxist John Strachey, in a lecture to the John Reed Club in New York called this trend in art and literature the ‘world-weary school’, which, although it had produced in the past a great tradition of ‘the tragic view of life’, had recently degenerated. ‘A

A. Elistratova, ‘New Masses’, International Literature, 1932 (1), pp. 109/111. Mike Gold apparently took this criticism to heart. Otto Soglow certainly did no more work for New Masses after this, though it is hard to see why: Soglow was a satirist rather than a serious revolutionary artist; all his works are humorous like many others in New Masses and tightened up the artistic policy. Gold acknowledged the ‘Bolshevik’ values of criticism and self-criticism. 1

realism and pessimism sense of tragedy has degenerated into a sense of despair; and a sense of despair has been succeeded by a mere depression.’ 1 Stephen Alexander was heavily critical in general about the American Scene painters and critics, led by Thomas Craven and Thomas Hart Benton and including John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood. Their stress, Alexander said, was on observing America and nothing else, but this is defeatist: when you examine them you find a chaotic agglomeration of unrelated, disorganized, St. Vitus-like aspects of American life. A prizefight, a dance hall, a revivalist preacher, etc., etc., all scrambled together with only one meaning . . . AMERICAN LIFE HAS NO MEANING. LOOK AT IT BUT DON’T TRY TO FIGURE IT OUT.2 In contrast, Alexander praises Jacob Burck, who looks at America but is not defeatist, his drawings are ‘a powerful force in remaking America.’ Burck, along with Hugo Gellert, Phil Bard, Joe Jones and others were not seen as defeatist. They showed the workers as strong and in control. This seems to have been what the workers wanted. At a workers art exhibit, where there were ‘no aesthetes here, but young workers from the shops of New York come to view an exhibition of revolutionary pictures with the artists’. One of the workers commented: ‘why always picture policemen beating workers, why not show a worker landing on a cop once in a while, we are in a militant period, comrade.’3 Gellert, for example, certainly did show miners as immensely strong, landing on cops as well as capitalists. Some artists however did show workers as defeated and without hope; these artists would have called themselves socially concerned but not revolutionary. Despite their genuine concern for the workers, farmers and unemployed, they did not see revolution as the way out. In fact they did not see a way out at all.

John Strachey, Literature and Dialectical Materialism, New York: Covici Friede, 1934, pp. 35/36. Reviewed in New Masses, April 2, 1935, p. 32. 2 ‘Jacob Burck’s America’ (review of Hunger and Revolt), New Masses, March 5 1935, p. 26. 3 Joseph Pass, ‘At a Workers Art Exhibit’, New Masses, May, 1930 p. 21. 1

comrades in art Stephen Alexander criticised Raphael Soyer along these lines, while hoping to recruit him to the revolutionary cause. Alexander praises Soyer for moving out of his studio and its intimate little personal world, into the bigger and more important world of the social drama, which the sixth year of deepening capitalist crisis has brought to the attention of an increasingly large number of artists. He has been strongly affected by the tragic spectacle of unemployment: of men rotting on park benches, in flophouses, and has painted them with sympathy and directness . . . The low-keyed somber color logically reflects the despair and resignation written in the men’s faces1 However, this is not enough for Alexander; it is defeatist and ‘cannot be said to constitute a healthy tendency in revolutionary painting’ except in so far as it is a change for Soyer (and by implication others) in the right direction. However, he considers (perhaps too hopefully) that in at least one canvas in the exhibition ‘Soyer has already given us an indication of coming out of his spell of the blues to join the revolutionary artists in their fight against capitalism.’ But despite Alexander’s profession of faith in Soyer, none of the Soyer brothers (Raphael, Isaac and Moses), who all painted defeated, hopeless-looking people waiting in Employment Agencies and railroad waiting rooms seem to have escaped their pessimistic outlook. At this time similar comments might have been made about other artists: Mabel Dwight and Reginald Marsh for example. Both had moved from painting lighter scenes of American life - in Dwight’s case ordinary people in mass pursuits, and in Marsh’s the burlesques and street life of New York - to portraying the darker side, having been genuinely affected by the depression, unemployment and poverty, which were new to them, unlike most of the artists who considered themselves revolutionary, for whom poverty and unemployment were part of their upbringing. Dwight’s paintings like Derelicts show men retreating to drink to escape reality rather than facing reality and trying to change it. 1

‘Raphael Soyer and Arnold Blanch’, New Masses, March 12 1935, p. 28.

realism and pessimism Some of Marsh’s earlier work had shown strong workers, but by the mid-1930s he seemed to believe the situation had become impossible. The Jungle and No-one Has Starved shows defeated, hopeless men, even more downtrodden than Soyer’s. Compare this to Jacob Burck’s No-one Will Starve, which although a satirical attack of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia has a more combative title and more satirical work (Despite their differences, Burck and Marsh once shared a John Reed Club show).

comrades in art Marsh’s East 10th Street Jungle is even more pessimistic, showing a vision of unemployment and homelessness as a hell from which there appears no escape. Stuart Davis said Marsh’s problem was that he was an observer not a participant; his interest in ‘the Bowery and the burlesque show’ were merely artistic and not social1 The same might be said of Philip Evergood, even more of a stranger to poverty (he was educated in England at Eton and Oxford), who was ‘converted’ to social awareness like Marsh and Dwight. Even the title of his American Tragedy, a record of a time when police brutally attacked a crowd of protesters that Evergood was part of, is defeatist, as are works like Sorrowing Farmers and The Pink Dismissal Slip. However, Evergood himself considered himself a ‘better’ social artist than Marsh. Marsh recorded what he saw with feeling, but when Marsh painted his bowery bums, he was seeing them through the eyes of a social observer and not through the eyes of a social thinker. Oh, yes, Marsh saw the sadness and the unfairness and Marsh was sorry for the bums, but he accepted the state of society and this picturesque scene . . . Marsh’s bums are ‘classical’ bums, ‘acceptable’ bums, acceptable as lost souls and classical in their tragic hopelessness. My bums, which I painted at the same time as Marsh, were dangerous bums, discontented bums, because mine had not accepted their lot . . . because the social system had made bums out of workers. Mine were not bums because of their own decadence.’2 Of course, artists like Burck, Gellert, Bard and Jones did not portray ‘bums’ at all. Their workers are strong and undefeated; even their unemployed never give up the struggle for a better life. However, by 1936, even in New Masses a new, more inclusive attitude to realism prevailed. In the very positive review in New Masses of the collectively produced, democratically selected, exhibition America ‘The New York American Scene in Art’, Art Front vol. 1 no. 3, February 1935, p. 6. 2 Quoted by Kendall Taylor, Philip Evergood: Never Separate from the Heart, London: AUP, 1973, p. 91. 1

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realism and pessimism Today in 1936, which came out of the Artists Congress and was advertised as ‘revolutionary art’ the term ‘critical realism’ reappeared, but this time as a positive aspiration. ‘Emergence of this work marks the upswing of a new period in American art. Critical realism becomes a major objective. And there is a corresponding decline in extreme forms of subjectivity or “pure art”.’1 Frank welcomes the entry of so many artists in to a ‘people’s art’ and the broadening of audience this will bring. The hard-line Soviet-style Socialist Realism, which had never gained much popularity in America, either as an idea or as a style anyway, was now not an issue. It was enough to help in the fight against war and Fascism, but only in styles the workers could understand, and that made the question of modernism very important. Hard-line adherence to realism was not seen as a major issue for artists in America, but there was nevertheless a feeling that ‘critical’ realism which (at least until the Popular Front) was inadequate for revolutionary art, and that pessimism was incompatible with it. Revolutionary artists were realist (whatever pictorial style they worked in) in the sense of portraying the forward movement of the progressive working class, rather than merely mirroring their current position.

O. Frank, ‘America in Art’, February 23 1937, pp. 24/25.

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revolutionary artist or artist/revolutionary? ‘The revolutionary artist has no compartments in his mind, one for individualistic art and the other for communistic revolution’. Michael Gold, ‘May Days and Revolutionary Art’ In a New Masses review of the Mexican artist Quintanilla 1, Stephen Alexander raises the important distinction between the ‘revolutionary artist’ and the ‘artist revolutionary’: These plates raise some interesting problems for the artist who is sympathetic to revolution and trying to formulate a set of values. Quintanilla’s art may be characterised as “classconscious” art. His deeply sympathetic portrayal of the Spanish worker. . . leaves[s] no doubt as to the class position of this artist. . . But Quintanilla is not a revolutionary artist, as some have claimed for him. He is an artist-revolutionary. There is a difference, a very important difference. The revolutionary artist makes his art a class weapon, whereas Quintanilla is a revolutionary who happens to be an artist, whose art does not reflect his feelings and reactions to the world in which he is living, whose art has little or no relation to his social and political ideas. Quintanilla is in jail for his political activities. He is a revolutionary in his politics but not in his art. I am

A later edition of Quintanilla’s drawings of the Spanish Civil War had a preface by Ernest Hemingway, not a figure of the left. See Quintanilla, Luis, All the Brave: Drawings of the Spanish War, text by Eliot Paul and Jay Allen, New York, Modern Age Books, 1939 1

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revolutionary artist or artist/revolutionary? not attempting here to advocate one form of activity as preferable to the other. Both are necessary. 1

‘Quintanilla’s Etchings’, New Masses, December 4 1934, p. 28, illustrated on next page 1

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This is a rather different view to the majority’s. Most critics said that the artist should serve the cause of the working class as an artist (though they greatly admired Robert Minor, one of the main cartoonists on the Masses, who gave up his art to become a full time organiser). A Reply letter from a reader accuses Alexander of arbitrary, individualistic set of definitions . . . I fail to see why we must define a revolutionary artist as one who “makes his art a class weapon”. Such a notion introduces a split among the artists, separating the politically advanced from the rest. Is it not more intelligent to appeal to the artist on the basis of his trade and to say that the artist should portray reality as he sees and feels it as a member of the working class, and that consequently, with the revolutionization of himself and the working class, and with the strengthening of economic, political and psychological links between them, the creative work of the artist will necessarily be revolutionary? 1 The reader says that ‘Quintanilla’s shortcomings should bring out clearly to us the need for and significance of a bold and clear-cut cultural, revolutionary program, as THE NEW MASSES and The John Reed Club are offering to the American intellectual and artist.’ However, most critics agreed with Alexander: It is necessary to face the fact that the Communist poet and the poet who happens to be a Communist sympathizer are not equivalent. The true Communist poet has an integrated philosophy which enables him to see beyond defeat and “this dark hour”. . . The poet who happens to be a Communist may not close his eyes to the present, yet may be blind as a bat to its ultimate significance. 2

1 2

Mark Land, January 22, 1935. Edwin Seaver, ‘Another Writer’s Position’, New Masses, Feb 19, 1935, p. 21.

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Joseph Freeman also agreed that, unlike Robert Minor, artists should serve the revolution with their art. Let the artist remain an artist. Let every man do the work he is best fit to do. The law of the division of labor demands it. It is not a question of pinning professions of political faith on the pages of books. But the writer must be on the side of the exploited against the exploiters, on the side of the oppressed against the oppressors, unmistakably and honestly on their side.’1 Alexander later wrote a review of a show by George Grosz where he implied that Grosz was the opposite of Quintanilla: a revolutionary in his art but not in life (Grosz had recently deserted the Communist Party. 2) His sympathies are clear: he hates ‘wealthy parasites’ and his ‘treatment of workers is always sympathetic. There is no mistaking the clear-cut class alignment in his art.’ However he ‘presents a cleavage between the class alignments in his art and in his everyday non-creative political activity.’ His rejection of the Communist Party is as a result of confusion - the ‘real’ Grosz is in the art.3 The true revolutionary artist is revolutionary equally in his art and life, not merely in his life and best serves the cause of the revolution as an artist.

‘Homage to Barbusse’, New Masses, September 10, 1935. See Barbara McCloskey, George Grosz and the Communist Party : Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918 to 1936, Princeton University Press, 1992. 3 ‘George Grosz at An American Place’, New Masses, April 9, 1935, p. 28. 1

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revolutionary artists and workers Among Hugo’s friends there are factory hands. They come, bringing their friends into this quiet gallery in the fashionable shopping district just off Fifth Avenue. They like Hugo’s work. I think it lets them look into a calmer, happier world. A world which is real, sane and bright, not stupid, false and fictitiously romantic 1 This quote sums up many workers’ and artists’ feelings about the ideal (if not often actual) relationship between artists and workers. Around the time of the founding of New Masses, Gold wrote about the difference in advancement between Soviet art and American. In Russia the workers’ world exists; we can see what it will be like and Russian artists can portray it. Their art, says Gold is connected intimately with the lives of the workers. The Soviet artists have completely broken with the old shop-keeping idea that art has nothing to do with the life of the masses - that it is a toy, to be purchased and enjoyed by a few idle rich . . . Art, the bolsheviks say, is useful or it is nothing. It springs from the life of the masses. It shapes the thought of the masses; in their expression, their daily accompaniment. It is not the monopoly of a few - it is shared, like the land and the factories, by everyone who labors. 2 Gold sees that this has not happened yet in America but senses the beginnings of it in the works in Red Cartoons. ‘No one need offer any dogmas or definitions as to what is workers’ art. The fact is, it exists. And its beginnings exist even here in capitalist America.’ Some artists in America have given up ‘all the false promises of a bourgeois career, and ‘Hugo Gellert - Happy Rebel’ review by Don Brown, in Hugo Gellert papers, nd, unknown source. 2 ‘Art is a Weapon’, introduction to Red Cartoons 1926, no page numbers. 1

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revolutionary artists and workers have plunge themselves boldly into the dramatic and hopeful world of the workers.’ The relationship between revolutionary artists and workers was a key question at the time. Could artists themselves be considered workers (many of them worked for wages on the New Deal art projects) and if so should they be organised like other workers? And what should their relationship be, as artists, to industrial workers? Waldo Frank’s speech at the LEAR1 conference in 1937 on the subject expressed a widely held (though not widely acted upon) view in America. ‘We must declare and enact our loyalty to the working classes, being ourselves workers. . . We must sharpen this loyalty by declaring open though impersonal war. . . on the exploiters’ 2 Freeman paraphrased Frank on the revolutionary artist: ‘What of the artist’s duty as a worker, which means as an artist? Art, he explained, is the means whereby the individual experiences his organic connection with life; in great art, with the whole of life. There is a great name for this experience that comes from the loving acceptance of one’s share in the necessary whole: that name is freedom. All social revolution is but the creating of the means to the enjoyment of this freedom. The experience of art is the means to the recognition of what freedom is . . . The artist might be called the minister of freedom . . . But Marxism, he went on to say, is an organic view of history which demands the collaboration of the artist. Here indeed was the dialectical relation that must be maintained between the revolutionary worker and the revolutionary artist. “If we artists,” he concluded, “do our work in dialectical conjunction with the workers, our revolution must release into birth a new kind of world.”’3

The Mexican League of Revolutionary Artists and Writers. Quoted by Joseph Freeman, ‘Artists in Action’, New Masses February 23, 1937, pp. 5/7. 3 ibid 1

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comrades in art The Artists Union was organised along industrial lines and had the backing of the trades unions. Speaking at the Artists Congress in 1936, Francis J. Gorman, first vice-president of the United Textile Workers of America said that all professionals needed to be organized; they are exploited as badly as the unemployed. This, it seems to me, is particularly important for the artist and for the writer. These two professions are among those most ruthlessly attacked when they are not organized into economic and political groups for their own protection. Unorganized professionals help Fascism rise. ‘It is time that the artist came down from his aloof position, and soiled his hands with helping his fellow-workers struggle for a living wage. His fellow-workers will then help him in the same struggle.’1 A correspondent of the New Masses, writing in relation to an earlier exhibition by the John Reed Club in New York on ‘Hunger, War and Fascism’ was disappointed with the commitment of the artists to the working class movement, and their lack of ability to understand and explain it. He suggested a three-point programme for what should be an ‘organization for revolutionary artists’: First, to develop the concepts of revolutionary, proletarian art in theory and in practice and to fight on the cultural front. Secondly, to cater to the cultural needs of the revolutionary masses and help in their day to day struggles. And, thirdly, to develop the latent artistic capacities of many members of the working class who, deprived of opportunities for training, nevertheless are struggling to express the events and emotions which affect them. 2

Speech reprinted in ‘Artists and Trade Unions’, New Masses April 7, 1936, p. 26; and in Baigell and Williams. 2 Mark Graubard ‘The Artist and the Revolutionary Movement”, July 31, 1934, p. 24 1

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revolutionary artists and workers Mark Graubard suggested that groups of artists in the John Reed Club should be organised into affiliations with ‘specific trades unions or mass organizations. . . according to the interests and work of each individual artist.’ This would, he said link them closely to the working class movement so that they would understand the workers better and the workers would have a better understanding of the usefulness of art in their daily lives. Their art would become ‘of direct use to the revolutionary movement, since their contents will deal with real and living situations understandable to the workers and helpful to them in their activities.’ In this way: Both artist and the revolutionary movement become organically fused. The artist gains in knowledge of his material and in understanding the situations that he deals with, a gain which necessarily improves him as an artist. The revolutionary movement, on the other hand, benefits from the propaganda value of such works. Future exhibitions by this organisations would not be ‘an exclusive gathering place for intellectuals but for many thousands of workers who will have become familiar with art in their own trade unions’ Graubard’s advice does not seem to have been heeded and the plan was not put into place. However, later exhibitions were sometimes organised on industrial lines, like the Waterfront Art Show in 1937. A reviewer noted that a special limitation is always needed to furnish unity to an art show. . . The organization of art by industries becomes a natural unifier of schools. We can have Lozowick showing the cranes, Jones and Orozco the workers, Gropper their political life, Raphael Soyer social gestures - all supplementing and criticizing one another. 1 The local longshoremen were invited and asked to criticize. ‘Naturally, the longshoremen were largely in agreement with the artists who knew

Sparks, Leonard, ‘Waterfront Art Show, New Masses, February 2, 1937, p 17

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comrades in art them best. Pitiful things were particularly hated. Real work, pain, tragedy and the like were admired.’ The revolutionary artist is not merely sympathetic to the workers, he is a worker. He must also make sure that he understands very well – as well as the workers themselves – the world they work in. When he portrays workers, the artist must do it from understanding, not mere observation.

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leftism and propaganda ‘I want to be a propagandist and I want to be nothing else. I want to be a propagandist of Communism’ Diego Rivera, ‘The Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Art’ Should revolutionary art be overtly propagandistic? Or is all art propaganda of some kind? Joseph Freeman had written an article in the Worker in 1923 on the illusion that there was a mysterious and fundamental difference between literature and propaganda. If there was a difference it could be stated thus: literature was propaganda in favor of accepted ideas; propaganda was literature in favor of new ideas.1 Writing at the same time, Trotsky had said that ‘art is always a social servant and historically utilitarian . . . independently of whether it appears in a given case under the flag of a “pure” or of a frankly tendentious art.’2 Diego Rivera later also argued the commonly accepted view on the left that all art has been propaganda, either for the existing order, or for a new one. ‘All painters have been propagandists or they have not been painters.’ Giotto for the ‘spirit of Christian charity’; Breughel for the Dutch petty bourgeoisie against feudalism 3. This question of art as propaganda was fundamental to questions of revolutionary art; Lozowick had said that although ‘the revolutionary artist will admit partisanship he will most emphatically deny that it need affect unfavorably his work.’4 Although all artists on the left disputed the ‘art for art’s sake’ arguments, at the same time they were often afraid to Quoted in American Testament, p. 323/4 Literature and Revolution, p. 30. 3 ‘The Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Art’, The Modern Quarterly, vol VI no. 3, Autumn, 1932, p. 57. 4 ‘Towards a Revolutionary Art’, Art Front July/August 1936 p. 13. 1

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comrades in art let it seem that art was purely at the service of politics, especially as the Popular Front developed and the left did not want to frighten away the less committed among artists or critics. Friedrich Engels’ letters to the authors Margaret Harkness and Minna Kautsky were first published in the US in 19331. Engels said that he was not against tendentious writing as such but ‘I believe the tendency must spring forth from the situation and the action itself, without explicit attention called to it; the writer is not obliged to offer the reader the future historical solution of the social conflicts he depicts’ The issue of tendentiousness was examined in detail in György Lukács’s essay ‘Propaganda or Partisanship’, which was published in an abridged form in Partisan Review in 19342. In a rather technical argument which probably did not have a great influence on American critics (there are very few contemporary references in America to the Hungarian Lukács, despite his later prominence in Communist cultural criticism) he distinguishes between the two terms, concluding that the former – ‘a merely subjective (because uncreated) “wish” on the author’s part’ is undesirable but not the latter, which makes possible a dialectical, objective re-creation of the entire process of our time’ 3. This line of argument was carried through in the Soviet Writers Congress in 1934, where Socialist Realism was first discussed in public, propounded in particular by Stalin’s cultural commissar Zhdanov ,who said that Soviet literature is not afraid of the charge of being “tendentious” . . . for in an epoch of class struggle there is not and cannot be a literature which is not class literature, is not tendentious, is allegedly nonpolitical.’4 The Soviets are proud of this tendentiousness ‘because the aim of our tendency is to liberate the toilers, to free all mankind from the yoke of capitalist slavery.

International Literature 3, 1933, p. 114. pun no doubt unintended. 3 vol. 1, no. 2, 1934, p. 46. 4 Zhdanov, A. A., et al., Problems in Soviet Literature: Report on the First Soviet Writers’ Congress, New York: International Publishers, 1934, p. 13. 1

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leftism and propaganda However, George Dmitrov1, reporting on the Congress in New Masses, said the revolutionary writer is not one who merely repeats: Long live the revolution! The only writer who can claim to be revolutionary is the one who actually promotes the process of the revolutionizing of the masses of the workers, and mobilizes them in the struggle against the enemy. 2 Joseph Freeman, like most of the critics on the left had never advocated explicit, overt propaganda as a message added to a work of art, despite the charges brought against Marxist critics at the time by liberals and subsequently by lapsed Marxists themselves. Art, he said ‘should come from feelings not the dictates of the party or Marxist theory’; an artist ‘must violate his feelings when he attempts to translate Marxian science into art.’3 By the time of the Popular Front the ‘red ivory tower’ of communist sectarianism had come down (many people, especially Max Eastman would disagree), as had the old bourgeois ‘white’ ivory towers; now the former liberal or left-leaning artists and the former ‘sectarian’ communist artists were both realizing that they needed to master their craft and that commitment alone was not enough to be a revolutionary artist. Mike Gold of course was the earliest and most insistent advocate of proletarian art in America, but even he always maintained that party affiliation of itself was not relevant to the artists, only a personal commitment to the working class: ‘Party affiliations are of life and death importance in the political field, but it is almost impossible to approach literature and art in the party spirit.’4 Gold mentions that the Soviet C.P. refused to give a stamp of approval to any particular group (at this time) and did not wish to control art. Like many other critics, he argued against extrinsic political messages being tacked on. (1882-1949), secretary of the Communist International. ‘Required Reading for American Writers’, New Masses April 16, 1935, p. 21. 3 ‘Introduction’ to Hicks, Granville et al eds. Proletarian Literature in the United States, Critical intro. by Joseph Freeman, New York, 1935, p. 16. 4 ‘On Upton Sinclair’ New Masses, December, 1929, p. 23 (in reply to letter about his review) 1

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The function of a revolutionary writer in this country is not to suggest political platforms and theses, but to portray the life of the workers and to inspire them with solidarity and revolt.1 In the same year, Calverton, broadly agreeing with Mike Gold’s rejection of James T. Farrell’s attack on Marxist criticism as too narrow, said: Revolutionary criticism has seldom sought to deny the importance of literary values because of its desire for social significance. On the contrary, except in the United States revolutionary critics have often been harder taskmasters from the point of view of literary qualities than esthetic critics.2 Art is a trade with skills that need to be mastered. ‘Revolutionary art has to be good art first before it can have deep meaning’ and the true revolutionary critic understands this: revolutionary criticism departs from reactionary criticism not in its disregard for form, but in its stress upon the end that form should serve. After all, forms change, but form remains. Nevertheless, Calverton argued elsewhere that revolutionary artists should not add extrinsic material as this weakened the propaganda effect; the revolutionary effect on the audience should come from issues intrinsic to the work. ‘When artists convert their materials into stereotyped forms in order to illustrate an hypothesis, or add matter not intrinsic to the substance in order to enforce a theory, we may call it propagandistic’3 and this should be avoided.

ibid. ‘The Need For Revolutionary Criticism’, The Left, vol. 1, no. 1, Spring 1931, pp. 8/9. 3 The New Ground of Criticism, Seattle: University of Washington Book Store, 1930, p. 57. 1

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leftism and propaganda Farrell himself later produced a book-length attempt, (of which Gold was critical) to define an American Marxist criticism where he tried to find a path between ‘leftism’ and ‘rightism’. He criticised the art for art’s sake argument, which divorces the social from the aesthetic, but he also criticised ‘functional extremism’ which divorces the function and which applies both to right- (e.g. Catholic) and left-wing critics. ‘Leftism’ includes two tendencies: 1. ‘revolutionary sentimentalism’, which is anti-rational and reduces art to banality, idealizing the worker regardless of the works’ artistic qualities. The prime representative of this trend is Michael Gold. 2. ‘mechanically deterministic “Marxism”’; assuming a direct link between economics and art; represented by Granville Hicks. 1 He also notes that leftism ‘freezes the categories of bourgeois and proletarian and insists that they be standards of measurement.’ 2 But these categories are not absolutes and change over time so they cannot form the basis of a critical judgment that could stand the test of time. However, Farrell believes in Marxist criticism: ‘It can be formally stated that the problem of the relation of the functional aspect of literature to the aesthetic can be resolved by fitting the latter into a framework of Marxian principles.’3 Farrell tried to show that Marxism did not need to reduce art to politics: ‘the recognition of the relative objective validity of literature as a branch of the fine arts is not inconsistent with Marxism as a body of thought and a method of analysis.’4 The aim of defining a line between rightism and leftism had previously been attempted by Wallace Phelps and Philip Rahv, editors of Partisan Review, in its second issue while it was still the magazine of the John Reed Club. The article praises proletarian literature in general;5 A Note on Literary Criticism, New York: The Vanguard Press, 1936, pp. 29/30. pp. 92/93 3 p. 34 4 p. 54 5 and calls New Masses ‘the central organ of the cultural movement’, noting its ‘phenomenal success’. 1

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comrades in art good proletarian art (which they do not distinguish from revolutionary art) shares a perspective with its audience, ‘which gives revolutionary literature an activism and a purposefulness long since unattainable by writers of other classes.’1 But its activism must come from the inside; ‘cannot be produced by applying abstract Communist ideology to old familiar surroundings.’ The authors distinguish two trends among proletarian artists: 1. Leftism, which is ‘sloganized and inorganic’ where the artist ‘tacks on’ political perspectives and which ‘assumes a direct line between economic base and ideology’, an error which ‘stems from the understanding of Marxism as mechanical materialism.’ 2. Rightism, which ‘work differs but slightly from that of liberal bourgeois writers. . . acceptance of the revolutionary philosophy is half-hearted . . . The source of his attitude and practice is political fence-straddling, disinterest in Marxism, and lack of faith in the proletariat’ The artist is searching for a ‘synthesis’ not mere innovation and the measure of success lies not only in his sensitiveness to proletarian material, but also in his ability to create new landmarks in the perception of reality; that is, his success cannot be gauged by immediate agitational significance, but by his recreation of social forces in their entirety. The previous year, Edmund Wilson, regarded as America’s leading literary critic, who had recently come around to Communism, tried to show that Marxist views of art do not have to lead to leftism, that this was an early aberration, and that no Marxist critic would uphold it. Wilson explains that art is part of the superstructure not the base and that liberals should take the trouble to understand the real position of revolutionary artists and critics. He counters the objections of those who

‘Problems and Perspectives in Revolutionary Literature’, Partisan Review, June-July 1934, pp. 3-11. Reprinted in part in Fried, pp. 181/5. 1

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leftism and propaganda ‘believe they are opposed to propaganda in literature and art. They object, for example to what they consider the propaganda in Russian film.’ All art is propaganda for the values (or a set of values) of its time, but ‘the same people who take propaganda for granted when Virgil or Giotto has done it, will outlaw it when Eisenstein or Diego Rivera has done it.’1 A few months later, Malcolm Cowley, in one of the articles in the same journal in which he tried to lay out an American Marxist criticism, argues a similar point about art and propaganda. Romanticism, says Cowley, took the idea from Kant and Schopenhauer of the opposition between art and action. “Art” is vision, form, repose, truth and beauty, the eternal, everything that is “good” for the artist. “Propaganda” is effort, change, science, philistinism, falsity and ugliness, everything that is artistically “evil.” Once we have accepted these definitions of art and propaganda, the question of choosing between them seems ridiculous. 2 But Cowley argues that we cannot accept these ‘metaphysical’ ideas any longer, and should abandon the Romantic view of art in favour of a materialist one. Of course, most liberals, and many on the left, disagreed. Leading among them was Max Eastman, former editor of the Masses, and an early advocate of the new Soviet Union in America soon after the October Revolution. However, Eastman had quickly become disillusioned with it after Lenin’s death, one of the first on the left to do so. Already in 1916 he had warned about art becoming journalism3 and by 1928 he had resigned from the New Masses under Mike Gold’s editorship in disgust at what he considered the new hard line of the third period 4 and later found a home for his writings in Calverton’s Modern Monthly as it and he were ‘Art, the Proletariat and Marx’, New Republic, vol. LXXVI no. 977, August 23, 1933, p. 44. (Wilson is writing just after the destruction of Rivera’s mural at the Rockefeller Centre, which a New Republic editorial condemned.) 2 ‘Art Tomorrow’, New Republic vol. LXXIX no. 1016, May 23, 1934, p. 34. 3 Journalism Versus Art, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1916. 4 ‘Resignation Letter to New Masses’, January 27, 1928. 1

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comrades in art moving towards Trotskyism. His Artists in Uniform was an early outright attack on Stalinism in art1. In an attack on Wilson and Cowley as part of a review of Art Young (an icon to all on the left, of whom even Eastman can only speak favourably), Eastman does not agree that all art is propaganda: art of its own essence is not propaganda - that is exactly why it is so effective a vehicle for propaganda when thus used. I thought that art would flourish better - and propaganda also carry farther - if it were not always thus used in a revolutionary magazine.2 (Eastman is here justifying the artistic policy of the Masses and Liberator in including ‘the extreme apostles of art as individual expression’ in a magazine with ‘a left-socialist editorial policy’.) Perhaps the best summary of the role of art in propaganda came from Waldo Frank who tried to show art not as a ‘chorus of revolutionary politics, not as an echo to action: but as an autonomous kind of action.’3 Frank believed that art’s primary function as a means of social exchange was to prepare people for the future. ‘The basic social function of art is so to condition men that they will as a social body, be the medium for the actions of growth and change required by their needs.’ Their needs being freedom from capitalism. Frank separates in the phases of social change the functions of ‘conditioning’, which is the job of art and ‘preparation’, which is the function of ‘teachers, theorists, organizers’ An artist who disbelieves in the role of art ‘as art in the organic growth of man and specifically in the revolutionary movement’ leads him to ‘capitulate as artist: leads him to take orders, as artist, from political leaders.’ If artists are honest and understand and portray the movement of history, the question of as propaganda does not arise: their art will necessarily, and of itself contribute to the future of the working class. Part of this was published as ‘Artists in Uniform’, The Modern Monthly, vol. VII no. 7, August, 1933; in book form as Artists in Uniform: A study of Literature and Bureaucratism, New York: 1934. 2 ‘Art Young’, New Republic, vol. LXXVIII no. 1012, April 24, 1934, p. 311. 3 ‘Values of the Revolutionary Writer’, speech at the First American Writers’ Congress, reprinted in New Masses, May 7, 1935, pp. 18/20 1

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If we believe that Communism is the organic next step of the world . . . we must believe in art revealing man’s depths which bear this destiny . . . knowing that insofar as we create this truth, we are moving, and moving those who hear us, toward the Revolution. By 1936 Harold Rosenberg had detected the beginnings of these values being internalised into some new art rather than being external to them. In a review of a William Gropper exhibition he said: What the show says to the audience is: It is no longer a question of crudely conceived “left-wing” pictures of bread-lines, pickets, mounted police; everything of value in the art of painting is becoming the property of the revolutionary movement. It will soon be possible to speak of a revolutionary landscape, of a revolutionary still-life.’1 Nevertheless, this view did not impress Eastman and the non-Stalinist left.

‘The Wit of William Gropper’, Art Front, March, 1936, p. 7/8.

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fred ellis One of the artists who might have been accused of leftism, despite his impeccable left wing pedigree and his high esteem on the left, both in Russia and America, was Fred Ellis1, staff artist on the Daily Worker from its founding in 1924 for many . Ellis grew up in Chicago, worked in the stockyards (the setting for Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle – a key work of the left) then as a sign painter until a fall made him change careers. John Reed, Art Young and Robert Minor came to see him in hospital. He drew in Chicago for trade union, socialist and I.W.W. papers and joined art school for four months during the 1905 strike. Ellis worked briefly for Rote Fahne in Berlin on the way to Moscow, where he was on the staff of Pravda and Trud (Labour). Along with Gropper and Gold, Ellis was one of the U.S. representatives at the Kharkov conference representing the John Reed Club and the New Masses. Ellis was described by Joseph North as ‘[t]his plainsman of serene temper, placid of bearing, of quiet irony an jocose expression, as American as the blue of Lake Michigan, where he hails from.’ 2 Another critic said of him: He recognizes the impossibility of separating the true satire from exaggeration, that satire bars pedantry, that against the rottenness and savagery of the moribund class there is the vivifying power of the rising proletariat that the contradictions of our age can be most vividly rendered in the light of satirical art.3 However, Ellis’s work is almost entirely grim and without humour, which may make him a propagandist rather than a satirist. Compare, for example, Ellis’s set of drawings on the Sacco and Vanzetti case in 1927 1885 – 1965 Foreword to A Selection of Drawings from The Worker., in which many of Ellis’s drawings are reproduced. See also Those Who Built Stalingrad: As Told by Themselves, foreword by Maxim Gorky, drawings by Fred Ellis, London: Martin Lawrence Ltd., 1934. 3 Durus, Alfred, ‘Fred Ellis: Artist of the Proletariat’, International Literature, no. 11, 1935, p. 61. 1

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leftism and propaganda (published as a book)1 with those of Art Young. Ellis’s miners are as strong as Gellert’s but his drawings always contain an explicit message rather than letting the strength of the workers speak for itself. So, despite Ellis’s very high standing both in America and Russia, he could be seen as a ‘leftist’ rather than either a satirist or a revolutionary artist. Despite the view of liberal critics (and later secondary sources) most artists and critics on the left in America rejected the charge of explicit propaganda, and tried to avoid it, while at the same time maintaining that all art is propaganda, explicit or not.

Ellis, Fred, The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti in Cartoons from the Daily Worker, New York: Daily Worker Publishing Company, c 1927. 1

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is satire a revolutionary art form? ‘The proletariat is relentless, if it laughs - it laughs to death’ Lunacharsky, ‘Problems of The Soviet Theatre’ Satire was a very popular medium for attacking capitalism; many of the cartoons in New Masses and Daily Worker are satirical, but is satire enough from a revolutionary artist? Satire attacks the existing order, but can it help develop a new order, as revolutionary art, as we have seen, should do? Satirical cartoons were generally seen as a powerful weapon in the propaganda war. Calverton, in his review of Red Cartoons of 1926, said the works were proletarian cartoons, conceived in the spirit of the class struggle and devoted to the definite purpose of class propaganda. And so RED CARTOONS satirizes with a purpose that is as social as it is significant1 In his introduction to the next year’s Red Cartoons, Calverton explained how the cartoon form ‘immediately lends itself to social interpretation.’ It ‘represents a kind of snap-shot logic that often is sharper than words and more effective than argument.’ Cartoonists ‘can by their directness of presentation agitate, propagandize and inspire.’ 2 Like Trotsky, Calverton said that humour must become subservient to the real purpose of the satire. The proletarian cartoonist is a new figure to emerge. In the attitude of the radical cartoonists of today there is firm-set realization that the time for playful piquancies is past, and that pictorial satire and exposure must be undertaken in profound seriousness . . . The absurdities and injustices of a class-struggle society must not be 1 2

New Masses September 26, p. 28. No page numbering

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is satire a revolutionary art form? twisted into form evocative of laughter, but revealed with candor productive of hatred. Henri Barbusse, an influential figure on the American left, was more critical of the possibilities of satire. Barbusse said that this was an age of decay, reflected by its art. ‘In the midst of all this, we can distinguish more or less isolated attempts at revaluation and renovation, but they usually take the form of satire, and are satisfied with provoking scandal.’ Art must do more than this, and sometimes it does, serving ‘the purpose of discrediting ancient rules and outworn formulae.’ 1 A letter from a New Masses reader however praises the satire of its artists: I have no quarrel with Gropper, Klein, Burck and Bard. They supply what satire and punch you have and that’s plenty! . . Our gifted fellows should be exposing the hokum around us. And drawing in the language of the streets; get rough.2 The reader asks for more of Art Young, and complains about “arty” pictures like Lozowick’s (he likes them but thinks they are not appropriate for a revolutionary magazine like New Masses). He continues: like Marxian criticism in books, right now we need satire and incentive to struggle in our drawings. With the world flaming around our ears . . . these are no days for “art”. Dip your brush in acid. Let’s sharpen the talent of our artists to greater revolutionary purpose! A later New Masses feature on satire in Soviet cartoons also praises the use of satire not only as criticism but also as self-criticism. ‘In the struggle for a classless society, the Soviet Union has evolved new motivations, new incentives, new corrections and new deterrents. . . One of the most powerful deterrents has been satire. And one of the best

1 2

‘Where Are We Going? A Manifesto’, New Masses April 1927, p. 13. October 1930, p. 22.

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comrades in art corrections, Bolshevik self-criticism.’1 A key feature of the country’s success had been ‘the ruthless and at times almost savage way in which the Bolsheviks criticize themselves . . . Cartoons are proving a most powerful weapon in satirizing foibles and criticizing failures.’ An even more intellectual justification for satire came from Harold Rosenberg: in an article in New Masses he pointed out that ‘Marx once remarked that the last phase of a historic form is its comedy. History prepares matters thus, he asserts, in order that humanity may separate itself joyfully (his italics) from its past.’2 At the lighter end of the satirical spectrum, and seemingly a world apart were the many humorous cartoons which appeared in Daily Worker and New Masses, which, while political, seem to be meant to raise a smile rather than as a spur to revolutionary action. A regular cartoonist on the Daily Worker was A. Redfield. Humourist Robert Forsythe,3 in his introduction to the collection of Redfield’s humorous cartoons says of him ‘I suppose it is true that Redfield is a revolutionary rather than a proletarian artist. Whether the distinction means anything, I don’t know. What I am trying to say is that there are artists and writers who are good on attack - Jacob Burck, Phil Bard, Michael Gold, Joseph Freeman, Granville Hicks - and others, like Redfield and myself, who are strictly counter-fighters.’4 Forsythe unfortunately does not mention either of the two most famous satirists in his classification: Art Young and William Gropper.

unsigned editorial ‘Self-Criticism in Soviet Cartoons’, New Masses, April 17, 1934, pp. 16/17. 2 ‘Aesthetic Assault’, New Masses March 30, 1937, p 25. 3 Pseudonym of Kyle Crichton. Forsythe was the humour writer on New Masses. 4 Redfield, A. The Ruling Clawss, New York: Daily Worker, 1935, p. 9. 1

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art young Art Young was an undoubtedly great satirist who was universally admired, even loved; throughout his long career he spanned the whole spectrum of the left. The original, most famous, well-loved and long-lived of all the radical cartoonists, Joseph North called him ‘that gallant knight of the pen’ whose drawings spanned an American age – from the time of the Haymarket Martyrs whose trail in 1886 he sketched, to World War II. The invitations to his 80th birthday party were signed by both Norman Thomas, leader of the Socialists and Earl Browder, leader of the CPUSA; probably no other event could have brought these two together. Born in Wisconsin, he grew up in rural Illinois and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago where he published cartoons to support himself. Later he studied at the Art Students League in New York and in Paris with Robert Henri under Bouguereau. Young was a cartoonist on several Chicago papers alongside Thomas Nast, the father of the American political cartoon. Young stood unsuccessfully for the New York State Assembly as a socialist in 1913 and for the Senate in 1918. Young saw himself in a long line of political satirists, and even wrote a book on Thomas Rowlandson. He strongly felt that artists had to be propagandists, whether explicitly or not. No historic writer ever convinced me that the artists of the Renaissance did not feel the truth of their propaganda paintings for the cause of Christianity. Similarly, is it not obvious that Hogarth, Daumier and out own Tom Nast could not have done good work without honestly feeling their ideas as well as having technical skill for graphic satire?1 Mike Gold very favourably reviewed his book length satire Inferno, which compares America to Hell as Gellert’s Comrade Gulliver compared it to a strange foreign country. Going through capitalist Hell with him, I am shaken with horror and indignation. Only a great imaginative artist 1

The Best of Art Young, New York: The Vanguard Press, 1936, p. xviii.

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comrades in art could illuminate so plainly the truth we are prone to forget: that we are living in Hell. War is Hell. Peace is Hell. Everyday life under capitalism is hell. There is no compromising with such a system - it is hell, and must be destroyed1 So satire, though not of itself revolutionary, may be able to move the audience to revolutionary action.

Michael Gold, ‘Go to Hell with Art Young’, New Masses, February 6, 1934.

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william gropper A more ‘serious’ satirist, and very regular contributor to left journals was William Gropper1, usually considered a ‘revolutionary artist’ though his cartoons are all satirical, as well as propagandist, and so are most of the paintings. Born in New York City, he grew up on the Lower East Side and worked in garment sweatshops before studying at the anarchist Ferrer Center under Robert Henri and George Bellows and later at the National Academy of Design and the New York School of Fine and Applied Art. He was an extremely prolific cartoonist, published very regularly in New Masses, Morgen Freiheit (staff cartoonist until 1948) and Daily Worker as well as many non-communist journals. Gropper started drawing cartoons on the anti-communist New York Tribune, but was fired two years later. He was art editor of the Liberator from 1922-1924 and visited Russia for a year in 1927 with Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis. Gropper was a founder member of the John Reed Club and one of the invited US attendees (with Mike Gold) of the Kharkov Conference in 1930. His satire certainly had an effect: in 1935 his cartoon of Emperor Hirohito offended the Japanese government so much they demanded it be withdrawn, so Gropper did a series of similar drawings. According to Rosenberg: Gropper’s exhibition proves that the revolutionary painter, far from being a grim specialist of a world seen in a contracted focus, is precisely the major discoverer of new pictorial possibilities as well as new uses for the old. Rosenberg adds though that there is a possible criticism of satire in that it is very traditional in form and does not develop any new, revolutionary forms. Gropper has not discovered any new techniques for his revolutionary art, and works in a tradition incorporating ‘Breughel, Ryder, cubism, Japanese landscape art, Forain and Daumier.’ But for Rosenberg, the way Gropper ‘loads revolutionary material into old applecarts’ shows that ‘the art developed in and adopted by modern civilization since its beginnings possesses a natural continuity with the revolutionary impulse of the art of today and tomorrow’ Gropper has not 1

(1897-1977)

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comrades in art waited for revolutionary art to develop any new techniques, nor attempted to ‘distinguish revolutionary art from other types of art by the rejection of all technical values’ but simply painted ‘revolutionary pictures of excellent quality.’ Despite Rosenberg’s and others’ praise, and despite the universal and deserved love for Young and Gropper this does not make satire true revolutionary art. Satire attacks the existing order; this is useful, even essential, but criticism of itself is not enough. And artists, to be a true revolutionary, must help show, and thus bring about, a new order, not just criticise the existing one. A distinction might be made between ‘serious’ and committed revolutionary satirists like Young, Gropper, Russell Limbach, Boris Gorelick and Louis Ribak - the ‘attackers’ - for whom their satire was an essential expression of their revolutionary commitment and lighter, more ‘frivolous’ satirists - counter-fighters or humourists - like Redfield, Peggy Bacon, Gardner Rea and Otto Soglow However, this distinction is tentative and not borne out in writings of the period.

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revolutionary art and modernism I cannot accept the products of expressionism, futurism, cubism and other isms as the highest manifestations of artistic genius. I don’t understand them. They give me no joy’ Lenin to Clara Zetkin1

From the Armory Show in 1913 to the MOMA show of Surrealism in 1936 American artists were exposed to a whole range of modern art from Europe. Many artists went to Europe to study and some tried to Americanise modernism. However, most artists who considered themselves revolutionary saw modern European art as irrelevant to them and anyway could not afford to travel to Europe to study it. Experiments with form were seen as indicative of the lack of content. Artists experimented with form because the problem of content had become insoluble. Since they could not accept the values of the society they lived in there was no content. It is significant that the experimenting with forms was destructive. What had been heralded as new forms are mostly the pieces of the old forms shattered.’2 Russian revolutionary art was of interest to American revolutionary artists but during the period under study there was not much knowledge in U.S. of Russian avant-garde art. Freeman, Lozowick and Kunitz’s Voices of October was about the only work available in English to treat Russian art sympathetically and this sought to show the place Russian modernism in the Revolution without defending it too much. The productivist aesthetic was not discussed and none of the Formalist critics like Shklovsky, Eichenbaum and Tinyanov were quoted in ‘Lenin on Art’, New Masses, January 1929. Isidore Schneider, ‘Red Front’, New Republic, vol. LXXVI no. 980, September 13, 1933, p. 134. 1

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comrades in art published in English at this time, though Trotsky referred scathingly to Shklovsky in Literature and Revolution and there was a ‘Debate on Formalism’ in International Literature1 to which Russian critics contributed.2 The Workers Cultural Federation of New York, formed as a result of Kharkov conference, quotes approvingly in its programme Stalin’s dictum “proletarian culture - national in form, proletarian in content”3 But there was little debate about what this meant in practice. One of the few figures from Russia to write about modernism in art in America was Lunacharsky, who, had earlier supported avant-garde art in Russia. In an essay in Modern Quarterly, he described the class history of art in Marxist terms. He said that classes beginning to decay, having no ideology, having no hope of maintaining their dominancy, turn to the purely formal in art, which subdues and polishes life, making it more acceptable to them.4 In a class which is stable, the ‘artist is certain that his work is of value, and that it will be accepted by his people; he is confident of his ability to put his ideas into a certain form. The classic age dawns.’ But when a class is rising, the artist aims to ‘find also a political form for its class interests. . . and as a result forms appear restless.’ So Lunacharsky is saying, cautiously, that rising classes experiment with form. However, very few American artists had any experience of what this had meant in Russia.

no. 6, 1936 Their main recommendation was that art must not experiment with form for its own sake and should include elements of narodnost (literally ‘peopleness’, of the people). 3 New Masses August 1931 p. 12. 4 vol. 5 no. 1, November - February 1928/29, p. 76. The same arguments are repeated in ‘Marxism and Art’, New Masses, November, 1932. 1

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louis lozowick Although artists like Ellis and Burck had worked in Moscow, the main bridge between the American left and Russian artists was Louis Lozowick, one of the founders and central pillars of New Masses1 and International Secretary of the John Reed Clubs, who gave regular lectures on Russian art, led tours there for workers and co-wrote Voices of October. Lozowick knew Lissitsky, Rodchenko, Malevitch and Leger among others, having travelled and lived in Paris, Berlin and Moscow in the early 1920s, and spoke Russian, having been born in the Ukraine and studied art in Kiev. He visited the VKhUTEMAS workshop in Moscow in 1922/3, though even by this time, after AKhRR was formed in 1922, realism was winning the political battle even before Lenin’s death. Lozowick was the only American in the Société Anonyme’s 1924 show of Russian Suprematism and Constructivism in New York. His lecture on Suprematism for the society and his 1923 article on Russian art in Broom in 1923 (with a cover by Lissitsky) formed the basis of Modern Russian Art of 1925 (with a Constructivist cover by Lozowick). Lozowick also lectured on Modern art, including Picasso, Braque, Leger and others at the educational Alliance Art School in 1924. He had several other exhibitions in the next few years, including one pairing him with Charles Sheeler, and the important Machine Age Exposition in 1927. However, in his later lectures, like the ones to the John Reed Club in 1932 and 1934 even he was less concerned with explaining modernism (one in a series on the situation in Russia was titled ‘Hegemony of the Modernists’) and more oriented to explaining Socialist Realism and Marxist theory. Lozowick did not consider himself a modernist and criticised modernists for having ‘no contact whatever with the working class’2 and pandering to a small number of rich collectors. However, Lozowick’s ‘machine aesthetic’ evident in his works did not appear to sit easily with the revolutionary views expressed in his writings, though it had support as a revolutionary form. In an essay published in America in 1934, Bukharin approved of the use of images of the machine in a socialist society, which had a different function than in a capitalist society. ‘We are 1 2

Lozowick designed the cover for the original proposal for New Masses ‘Art in the Service of the Proletariat’, International Literature 4 1931, p. 126.

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comrades in art reproached with having turned the machine into an icon’ 1 but the machine only depersonalises in capitalist society: ‘With us, the machine plays a great liberating role’, lightening labour and bringing leisure. ‘The machine under socialism is the greatest factor in the growth of culture.’ Bukharin had also addressed modernism at the Soviet Writers’ Congress where he said that formalism in art and criticism are unacceptable, but analysis of ‘formal elements in art’ is essential. 2 Lozowick himself covered this issue: whereas the German Expressionists portray the city as ‘apocalyptic’ and the Italian Futurists as ‘inhuman’, the American revolutionary artist . . . departs from realistic appearance and paints the city as a product of the rationalization and economy which must prove allies of the working class in the building of socialism.’3 An earlier reviewer of a workers’ art exhibit had expressed a similar sentiment on the machine in revolutionary art: ‘these lithographs of oil tanks, they look clean, sturdy and beautiful, that is how they will look after the revolution.’4 Lozowick’s entries in the 1927 Machine Age Exposition were also favourably reviewed in New Masses by Genevieve Taggard who says they are in ‘the same machine style that we associate with the NEW MASSES’ and ‘[o]bjectify the dominant experience of our epoch in plastic terms that possess value for more than this epoch alone.’5 Lozowick however was one of the targets of criticism in a reader’s letter about New Masses art being too ‘arty’ (not an uncommon theme in the letters pages). The writer has ‘no quarrel with Gropper, Klein, Burck and Bard.’ but too often our artists go “arty”. Take Lozowick: an almost perfect technician, his drawings have a neutral, static quality about them. In New Masses they’re proletarian art. What do you call them when they appear in the Bukharin, Nikolai, Culture in Two Worlds, New York: International Pamphlets, no 42, 1934. 2 ‘Poetry and Poetics’ p. 204. 3 ‘Art in the Service of the Proletariat’, International Literature 4 1931, p. 127. 4 Pass, Joseph, ‘At a Workers Art Exhibit’, New Masses, May, 1930, p 21. 5 July 1927, p. 18. 1

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revolutionary art and modernism bourgeois business magazines, as they do? Siegel, Dehn, yes even Gellert, swell artists also, have a tendency to stray on occasion. Now all these, Lozowick included, are great stuff. I like them, but now is the time for satire and revolutionary action, not “art”1. So, despite his writings on revolutionary art, and his occasional political content, Lozowick should probably be considered an artist/revolutionary rather than a revolutionary artist.

Vern Jessup, ‘And Now the Artists...’, October 1930, p. 22.

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Lozowick on an anti-war march

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rockwell kent The same might be said of Rockwell Kent, like Lozowick a superb technician, and influenced by modernism, but unlike him an individualist in his life, much of which was spent alone in the wildernesses of Greenland and Alaska, and in his art, which has no discernible political content. However he was at the same time a socialist and a member in the 1930s of many organizations promoting peace, relations with the Soviet Union and organized labour, including President of the International Workers Order. Later, in 1948, he ran unsuccessfully as the American Labor Party's candidate for Congress and appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Kent gave his paintings to the Soviet Union and was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1967. But none of this was visible in his art.

stuart davis Another candidate for the category artist/revolutionary is another modernist, Stuart Davis, though he never called himself revolutionary and was more of an organiser, being National Secretary of the Artists’ Congress and editor of Art Front. Born in Philadelphia, he was the son of the editor of the Philadelphia Press and knew Robert Henri, John Sloan and others as family friends and studied with Henri. Davis was on the editorial board of the Masses 1913-1916 (and resigned during the artists’ strike), contributed to the Liberator and other magazines (especially Harper’s Weekly) as well as the early New Masses. Davis’ fellow editor on Art Front, Clarence Weinstock, conducted a debate on modernism with Davis in its pages. Responding to Davis’ introduction to the catalogue for the ‘Abstract Painting in America’ show at the Whitney, he criticizes Davis’ statement that painting is a ‘twodimensional plane surface, and the process of making a painting is the act of defining two-dimensional space on that surface.’ 1 Weinstock considers this ‘mechanical’ and ‘anti-dialectical’, ‘confined only to the physical description of a canvas, and to the act of composition.’ Davis’ 1

‘Contradictions in Abstractions’, Art Front, April 1935, pp. 6/8.

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comrades in art view restricts art to the narrow field of form, and omits meaning, which is ‘the element in terms of which nature and art are united. . . The modern artist, more specifically the revolutionary artist, confronts an altered world.’ The artist must try to incorporate the meaning of this world into the painting, and not ‘mistake one phase of his painting for the painting itself.’ The ‘conflicts of classes of society, insofar as they are embodied in individuals, are as much a part of his normal, and consequently aesthetic experience’ as are the formal elements. Davis, in the next issue (which has his design on the cover) says that Weinstock is an advocate of dialectical materialism (implying that Davis himself is not). He points out that abstract art is an important part of the current scene, and by no means the worst, though he admits that most of it is not produced with a revolutionary consciousness. In terms of revolutionary art, Davis claims that all abstractions ‘were the result of a revolutionary struggle relative to the bourgeois academic traditions.’ 1 The materialism of these abstractions is in itself a negation of bourgeois values, unlike the American Scene paintings of Benton and others, which Davis says have ‘fascist tendencies’. But, again, Davis’s art, at least in terms of content, does not appear to reflect his political activity, and the same should be said of Jan Matulka, a collaborator with Davis, with whom his work shares visual similarities, and who contributed regularly to the early New Masses but without explicit political content.

‘A Medium of 2 Dimensions’, Art Front, May 1935

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revolutionary art and surrealism

revolutionary art and surrealism One form of modern art that made a great impression in America was surrealism: some surrealists moved to America to escape from Fascism, and at the end of 1936 MOMA held the show ‘Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism’, but most left wing artists and critics thought that surrealism actually reflected Fascism. In fact some thought it had entered and adversely affected American revolutionary art. In a review of a John Reed Club exhibition, the reviewer said: ‘Surrealism is a false medium for the revolutionary artist. It uses an occult language which needlessly separates the artist from his audience.’ 1 It was commonly felt on the left that both surrealism and symbolism were retreats from reality rather than challenges to it: Lozowick allowed that there could be a revolutionary surrealism: revolutionary artists could work in the same surface style but ‘[w]here the surrealist postulates irrationalism and automatism, the revolutionary artist must substitute reason, volition, clarity.’2 This probably reflected a general view of Surrealism on the American left at the time when Dali, Breton and others were being shown and making claims for their art being revolutionary3. The critic of the New York Post, Jerome Klein, in a letter to Art Front at this time disputed ‘the old argument that the discrediting of reality is revolutionary’4, maintaining that, although surrealism represents ‘ a late phase of the artist’s struggle for the realization of freedom’, the surrealists, ‘neurotically incapable of giving their effort a point of leverage in the real world, have dodged the vital issue of revolutionary art.’ One possible instance of an American surrealism of the left is Peter Blume, whose speech at the Artists Congress, ‘The Artist Must Choose’, advocated artists taking a political stand, especially judging by his famous painting The Eternal City, an attack on Italian Fascism. Marguerite Duroc ‘Critique from the Left’, Art Front January 1936, p. 7. ‘Towards a Revolutionary Art’, Art Front July/August 1936, p. 13 3 Breton, Rivera and Trotsky co-wrote ‘Towards a Free Revolutionary Art’, Partisan Review, IV, no. 1, Fall 1938, 4 February 1935, p. 8. 1

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walter quirt Another artist sometimes associated with surrealism, but also regarded as a revolutionary, was Walter Quirt, secretary of the artists group of the John Reed Club of New York, whose murals for the worker’s club in New York were illustrated in International Literature under the heading ‘American Revolutionary Paintings by Walter Quirt.’ 1 Quirt was born in Milwaukee and studied and taught there as well as at the American Artists School in New York. He was staff artist on the magazine Labor Unity and a contributing editor of New Masses from 1930-1932. Quirt’s work moved from an earlier realist and propagandist style to incorporate surrealist elements around 1934, after he had stopped contributing to New Masses in 1932. This divided the critics. The Art Front review of Quirt’s entry in the John Reed Club show, despite condemning surrealism in general, said that Quirt’s ‘application of surrealism seems possibly a happy one.’ 2 But, writing much later, Milton W. Brown said that ‘Quirt never fulfilled himself as a socialrealist’ and that he ‘never managed to reconcile his social theories with surrealist aesthetics.3’ Quirt’s first one-man show was in 1936 at the prestigious Julien Levy Gallery, which had shown Dali but had not previously shown what the gallery called ‘radical painting.’ The gallery explained its choice of Quirt: Until recently radical painting has bordered on the field of caricature and cartoon. Bad painters have claimed that their work is important if their propaganda is important. Quirt’s work, however, remains important even if its specific content be disregarded.4

4 1934, pp. 66/67. Margaret Duroc, ‘Critique from the Left’, Art Front, January, 1936. 3 Foreword to Walter Quirt: A Retrospective, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1979, p. 9. 4 Mary Toley Swanson, ‘Walter Quirt’, Walter Quirt: A Retrospective, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1979, p. 19. 1

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revolutionary art and surrealism In his review of this show in Art Front, Clarence Weinstock praises Quirt’s move away ‘from his former rather uninteresting stylization of strike conflicts, war scenes and the like.’ 1 Weinstock identifies Quirt’s starting point as T. S. Eliot’s the Waste Land, 1922 (another essay on Quirt says he ‘painted surrealist poetry about social injustices’ 2), but, unlike the ‘modern bourgeois poets’ Quirt’s faith is in the ‘armed worker’ rather than in religion, and says that Quirt ‘owes really little beyond suggestions to the surrealists.’ Quirt certainly did not feel that his new technique was a betrayal of his Marxist beliefs, which he continued to express strongly: however in a symposium held by MOMA around its Surrealist show, Quirt did publicly equate the work of Dali, also on the stage, with Fascism.

1 2

April 1936, p. 13. Swanson, p. 15.

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revolutionary art and expressionism The other form of modernism that affected revolutionary artists was expressionism. Again, critics on the left generally disapproved this of but there were exceptions. Charmion von Wiegand associated expressionism with decay: ‘Expressionism is a style in art which always occurs historically in a period of social breakup.’ 1 Earlier she had said: ‘Expressionism represents not a beginning but an end. It celebrates the destruction of old forms in art and society and their dissolution into separate units. In expressionist art, the boundaries of form are loosened. . . Form in painting is dissolved into juxtaposed spectral colors. The disintegration of a social class sends its destructive vibrations into the most distant ivory towers of the intelligentsia, and the arts prophetically assume the sunset colors of the end.’2 Nevertheless, some artists around New Masses combined an expressionist technique with a revolutionary content, like Mitchell Siporin whose Haymarket series of drawings3 were used to illustrate Alan Calmer’s book on Parsons and the Haymarket martyrs. Siporin was on the executive board of the Chicago John Reed Club and organised travelling exhibitions for workers’ centres in the mid-west, as well as insisting that every member of the Club contributed to the ‘revolutionary press’ at least once a month4. Similarly, the woodcuts of Gan Kolski, who jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge in 1932 in protest against unemployment, and those of Dan Rico are influenced by Expressionism. ‘ Little Charlie, What Now?’, New Theatre, March, 1936, reprinted in Kline p. 248. 2 ‘The Quest of Eugene O’Neill’, New Theatre, September, 1935, reprinted in Kline p. 57. 3 Some of which were published in New Masses May 7, 1935, p. 12. 4 New Masses, October 1931, p. 29. 1

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revolutionary art and expressionism However, they were the exception in mixing politics with modernism; most artists who were influenced by European modernism were not also influenced by Communism, and therefore did not contribute to New Masses or anything similar. An exception was Wanda Gág whose early New Masses illustrations are expressionist in style, but show no discernible political content. As late as 1937 the issue of modernism was still not resolved. Milton W. Brown wrote that in every art form there is the new need, the old form, a period of struggle or transition, a synthesis in a new artistic era, a new artistic style. The contemporary artist desirous of expressing a revolutionary content is faced with an artistic heritage of abstractionism, expressionism, theories of art for art’s sake and of personal aesthetics . . . Some of these must be immediately rejected, others accepted, still others transformed until finally a new style will emerge, a style fitted to the direct expression of a revolutionary content.1’ So, although there were strong arguments in favour of modernism as a revolutionary form, provided that it portrayed revolutionary content and avoided the danger of formalism, and provided it was understandable to the workers, in practice there seems to have been very little revolutionary modernist art.

‘The Marxist Approach to Art’, Dialectics #2, Critics Group, New York, 1937, p. 30. 1

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some revolutionary artists Some artists were at the time regularly described as revolutionary by themselves and the critics. Charmion von Wiegand, writing on the American Artists Congress Exhibition in 1937 1 lists Gropper, Gellert, Henry Glintenkamp, Lozowick and Burck as ‘social revolutionary painters’ as opposed to ‘the social theme in the naturalistic manner of the Soyers or the primitive manner of a Guglielmi’. This list would not have raised many eyebrows. Freeman had also mentioned 'the extremely gifted work of revolutionary cartoonists’ like Fred Ellis and Jacob Burck'2 So, having examined some of the issues and debates around the issue of revolutionary art, can we identify any artists who unquestionably fit the description revolutionary?

william siegel/sanderson One good candidate would be William Siegel, the pseudonym for William Sanderson. As well as being a regular contributor to New Masses, he illustrated many books with strong political content – both historical and contemporary – as we have seen, including the children’s book Our Lenin and the cover for Gold’s Jews Without Money. He wrote, illustrated and published The Paris Commune in 1934 and illustrated Our Revolutionary Forefathers about the French revolution. In contemporary politics he illustrated Walt Pickard’s Burlington Dynamite Plot and Bananas, an exposure of the treatment of workers in the Caribbean. New Masses said of him: now living in New York, was born in Russia in 1905. Arrived in the U.S. in 1923. Wasted a lot of time in the School of the National Academy. After receiving a prize

Sights and Sounds, May 4, 1937, p. 35. See also ‘Ishikagi’s Two Traditions’, New Masses, April, 1936 on Gropper as a revolutionary artist. 2 American Testament, p. 304. 1

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some revolutionary artists there, he realized that things were not as they should be. Began drawing for books and magazines always hoping to find time to do something decent. He thinks an artist has a lousy job. He insists he won’t change his mind unless conditions change a lot. He is a contributing editor to the New Masses.1 Throughout the above and in his regular contributions to New Masses his drawings show working class progressive movements in an easy style for workers to understand and exhibits an optimism for and sympathy with the working class that make him an exemplary revolutionary artist.

russell limbach Another mainstay of New Masses was Russell Limbach, known as ‘Butch’, whose drawings appeared regularly on page 3 throughout most of 1934-1936 when the magazine carried few other illustrations. On his first appearance in New Masses he said of himself: Born in 1904 in a small Ohio town, worked in factories and steel mills to get dough to go to Art School where I got disgusted with academic art, later with Paris also, so I came back to draw the American Bourgeois in his own surroundings.2 In the first Issue of the Red Spark, the magazine of the John Reed Club of Cleveland, of which Limbach was an editor, he very favourably wrote about the status of the artist in the U.S.S.R., though he said that the artist who is a true product of the revolution has not emerged yet:

April, 1930, p. 22.

New Masses, September, 1931, p. 23

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comrades in art No artist of course has yet come forward who is totally a product of the years since the Revolution. All the present painters are inherited from the old regime and are struggling, some more and some less successfully to find themselves positively in the new order1 Limbach here also comments positively on the Russian ‘Futurists’: despite the fact that they later ‘developed and expired as the “constructivists”, lost in a maze of theoretical impractibilities [sic] impossible of realization or growth’, they contributed to the success of the Revolution; ‘fanned revolutionary enthusiasm by doing posters, creating monuments and staging revolutionary mass festivals on a scale never attempted before.’ Thus they were, in the true sense, revolutionary artists. In the next issue of Red Spark, Limbach described bourgeois art as a commodity which obeys capitalism’s laws of supply and demand so has no room for addressing contemporary issues, let alone presenting solutions. Despite the efforts of the John Reed Club, Limbach sees little evidence that the bulk of local artists can yet see this. Art is not yet seen as a thing of extreme social significance, a thing socially created but now used as a means of personal enrichment. Blinded by a bourgeois conception of art, the artist sees only his market . . . Instead of using his work as a weapon in the class struggle, in furthering a revolution . . . he clings to capitalism and hinders the proletarian struggle towards socialism.2 However, by 1936 and the time of the Popular Front, Limbach was much more accepting. He praised the group of breakaway artists who refused to show at the 1936 Art in Venice exhibition because of its links with Fascism and reviewed very favourably the Artists Congress exhibition:

1 2

‘Art in U.S.S.R.’, The Red Spark, vol. 1, no. 1, October 1932, p. 12. ‘Art is a Commodity’, The Red Spark, vol. 1, no. 2, December 1932, p. 16

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some revolutionary artists ‘To those who want art, here is ART, the best that you can see in one group anywhere today.’1

joe jones Joe Jones was an artist widely described as both proletarian and revolutionary. Herman Baron said that in his New York exhibition of 1933/4 ‘Jones gave legitimacy to proletarian painting.’2 He was so influential that when he came to New York in 1936 a symposium on ‘the adaptation of art to life’ was held in his honour with Davis, Gropper, Freeman and the art critic Joseph Klein speaking.

Jones was not only appreciated on the left; even the liberal critic Thomas Craven, by no means a supporter of revolutionary art, praised his work, saying that, although he was ‘vocally a member of the Communist Party’, he showed a ‘welcome absence of the underscoring from which so much “proletarian” art suffers’ - that is, a freedom from leftism - and an ability

1 2

‘Against War and Fascism’, New Masses, May 5 1936, p. 28 Catalogue to 1937 A.C.A. Gallery exhibition, no pagination.

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comrades in art to let ‘reality bring its own persuasions to bear’ and make ‘two men at rather dull work a beautiful picture to see 1. Jones was born in St. Louis and remained there until 1935, when he left for New York and joined the John Reed Club. Also unusually, he painted the local farm scenes, but with a completely different political perspective from the Regionalists. On Jones’s farms there is racism and exploitation, rather than nostalgic rural romanticism. His collectively painted mural in St. Louis was illustrated and covered approvingly in both New Masses2 and International Literature3 Both tell the story of how Jones had set up an art school in a disused courthouse building for the unemployed with free tuition. He had ‘just returned from Provincetown, bent on a final swing toward revolutionary art.’4 About half the class were Negroes, which had led him into conflict with many of the local people. ‘Jones’ policy is to give them all hard work, a sound preliminary practice in form, and let the real workers emerge from the mass of dilettantes’ The class was so popular it grew to 4 nights a week, with the doors being open all day for those ‘half dozen who are always at work.’ Jones designed a collective mural and drew the cartoon of a Mississippi levee scene with workers, marchers, the unemployed and typical river-front groups. . . One, for example, is a Negro baptism which merges into a demonstration of the victorious Nut-picker strikes last year, in which several members of the John Reed Club took an active part. Jones led the work by designing and finishing, but allowed a collective imagination to develop (including a religious element).

A Treasury of 100 Prints, plate 59. Orrick Johns, ‘St. Louis Artists Win’, New Masses, March 6, 1934 3 anonymous, ‘American Unemployed and Art: The Story of Joe Jones, Revolutionary Artist, and his Co-Workers’, International Literature, 2, 1934, p. 95 (see Illustration 2-8/9). The mural is also illustrated in New Masses, March 13 1934, p. 28. Jones’ work is also discussed and illustrated in International Literature, 1, 1935, p. 52, and in International Literature, 12, 1935, pp. 120/3. 4 Johns, p. 28. 1

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some revolutionary artists A certain number of students had already shown their aptitude for revolutionary drawings, making spontaneous panels of working class subjects . . . Jones allows wide initiative before his own finishing, and the result is real originality. Stephen Alexander spelled out the differences between Jones, a Midwesterner (perhaps implying but not saying that Jones was a dyed in the wool American and neither a European immigrant nor Jewish as so many of the urban minded, New York based left wing artists were), and the Regionalists. Unlike Wood and Benton, Alexander says, he loves his country and his people and is honest about them. Although he uses straightforward, honest observation. . . he does not stop at simply giving a faithful visual report. It is when he adds a class-conscious mind to a trained hand and eye, that he achieves his most significant expression.1 He has ‘none of the slick waxen lies of a Grant Wood prettying up the Middle West in overmantel paintings for drawing rooms’ (Wood’s paintings were always very expensive) nor ‘Benton’s patronizing attitude towards the Negro, whom he views as a picturesque “native”’. Clarence Weinstock in Art Front also praised Jones’s technique and the way he varied it to suit the subject: ‘he thinks of technique, not as the means by which forms are established, but the way form and content achieve corporal unity.’2 Weinstock sees Jones as an ‘important artist’ who ‘sees himself subject to society, bounded by enmities and alliances, member of a class, a worker.’ Weinstock points out that in Jones’s style landscapes are treated differently to ‘proletarian subjects.’ Whereas the ‘structural medium of the landscape is color, the worker scenes are organized chiefly in line.’ This allows Jones the distortions needed to portray the strength of the workers, who in one painting of a demonstration ‘come out on a clear foreground, so drawn as to become completely expressive of their militant meaning.’ But, for Weinstock, Jones’s technique is not an end in itself but always ‘the servant of an

1 2

‘Joe Jones’, New Masses, May 28, 1935, p. 30. July 1935, p. 6.

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comrades in art intelligence which his economic position as a worker, and his political insight as a class conscious one, furnish him with constantly increasing material. The proletariat repays the artist for his alliance; it renews his technique by clarifying its purpose.’ However, not all the critics on the left appreciated Jones’s technique. His entry in a John Reed Club exhibition in 1936 was criticized for ‘a style which is inappropriate for the revolutionary artist. High Renaissance, which in this case is “humanized” by a little of the Saturday Evening Post’.1 And as we have seen, Rosenberg criticised Jones’s ‘labored yet slick finish’. However, Herman Baron, probably aware of this criticism of Jones, writing in the catalogue to the 1937 exhibition of Jones’s paintings at the A.C.A. Gallery, addressed the issue. ‘Joe Jones is a realist. His realism stems from the old masters and is as fundamentally vital as theirs. He could not paint in any other style and be effective. He is a son of the people whose collective experience he is expressing.’ This realism was not merely a ‘mirror’ however, it contained the kind of distortions approved of by advocates of revolutionary realism. Baron particularly praises one painting in the exhibition in which ‘Jones put all the resentment he ever felt against society. The mighty fist of the man carrying the placard is functionally distorted to become a symbol of crushing strength and intelligent awareness’

Margaret Duroc, ‘Critique from the Left’, Art Front, February, 1936, p. 8.

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hugo gellert I used to be redder than any roseMy novels and plays never failed to extol The embattled worker (in a Gellert pose) As he mounted the System’s slick greased pole 1 Gellert was one of the leading artists and organisers on the left. Art editor of New Masses and head of the Artists Committee for Action, he also published artist’s books, including Capital in Lithographs to help workers understand Marx, and Aesop Said So and Comrade Gulliver, satires on American society for which he wrote the words. He also produced illustrations for political works by others and engaged in many different political groups. Born in Hungary, he went to America in 1906; attended Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design. In 1916 his first anti-war cartoons were published in the New York Hungarian socialist daily, Elöre. Gellert’s covers illustrated the first issues of both Liberator and New Masses of which he was an art editor; he also worked on New Yorker where he was staff artist 1925-1946 . In 1927 he became head of the Anti-Horthy League, the first anti-fascist organization in the United States, and in 1928 he painted a 50 foot mural for Worker's Cafeteria in Union Square, New York City; possibly the first labor mural in the United States, now lost or destroyed. He was Director of the first John Reed School of Art and was head of the Artists’ Committee for Action; organised the Mural Artists Guild of the United Scenic Painters, AFL-CIO and chaired the committee, which exhibited artists at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Joseph North called him ‘this mustachioed man of the gentle voice and laughing eye whose figures convey the indestructible strength of the working-class.’ As the poem above shows, his portrayals of workers commanded great respect. A remark made by Lenin, visiting an art exhibition and criticising the modernist paintings and expressing his preferences in art might have been describing Gellert:

Simon Eddy, New Masses, May 25, 1937.

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comrades in art I always admire the magnificent sturdiness, the special manliness of those who have just come from behind the machines or the lathes. Notice their intelligent, fine and expressive faces, their particular assurance, that steadfastness of glance, that determination to achieve whatever they have once decided to undertake. . . Here are only those who have mastered with pride, the full seriousness of the new class, definitely creating a new world. Why is not this phase represented on canvas or in marble?1 Gellert’s workers were always determined, strong and united- exactly as Lenin demanded. Contemporary critics on the left were universal admirers of Gellert. Reviewing an exhibition of Gellert’s work, Edwin Seaver said 2: Gellert is a rebel, a rebel against sacrosanct ideas of art. He would overthrow the old art which exists merely by virtue of being a luxury for the leisure class. He would get deep down to the heart of things, show men and women to each other, capture the strong and tender sensibilities which lurk behind the obvious show of things. To see his work is to come away enriched and close to the heart of life Even critics not on the left admired Gellert. Reviewing Capital in Lithographs in a brief but positive piece in the New York Times3, John Chamberlain said Gellert juxtaposes text with ‘forceful, big-muscled pictures of laborer versus capitalist. A glowing review in another ‘mainstream’ paper said: Hugo Gellert has done a courageous thing: he has illustrated the Bible of Communism. . . I find the lithographs superb; harsh or tender, argumentative or Bonch-Bruevitch, ‘From my Recollections of Lenin: An Old Bolshevik About Lenin and Art’, International Literature, no. 2, 1934, p. 109. 2 Art Notes, nd unknown source, in Hugo Gellert papers. 3 Feb 2, 1934. 1

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some revolutionary artists prejudiced, or full of action, they are all absorbingly interesting. Sometimes they are inspired in their quick rendering of the subject; a woman and a child tied to cogged wheels illustrate the effects of machinery on human beings. Sometimes the symbolism is powerful: the great closed fist of the proletariat emerged from ingots of gold or break through cams and levers of a vast machine. There are ghastly pictures of capitalism as a swollen money-sack on which a death’s head reposes; there are memorable pictures of cruelty and tyranny. Opposite each picture is a page from the text of “Das Kapital”. Made easier reading by Gellert’s illustration, these pages are still terrifying in the accuracy with which they foretell so many things which have been written any time within the past three weeks.1 However, despite Gellert’s closeness to almost everyone on the left, neither New Masses nor Daily Worker reviewed it positively, a fact that Earl Browder, secretary of the CPUSA, noted ‘with chagrin’. He called it a ‘brilliant, throbbing, and thrilling translation of some fundamentals of Marxism into the medium of pictures.’ Browder wonders if their neglect is due to the fact that ‘their judgment of Gellert’s magnificent book has been warped by the knowledge that Gellert is not a Party member.’ 2 Even though Gellert was a great activist and a committed Marxist he was not at this time a member of the Communist Party. I am not a member of the Communist Party. However, if my unqualified loyalty to the working class makes me a Communist, then the enemies of the working class admit that Communist leadership is the only leadership which is worthy of the confidence of the workers.3 Gellert did not believe in the artist as individualist, but in the artist as activist, and he lived this out. He said that with the passing of the phrase Gilbert Seldes in Roanoke, Virginia World News, Feb 5, 1934. New Masses, April 3 1934, p. 35 3 ‘Mystery of a Cablegram’, New Masses, March 1930, p. 23. In fact, Gellert did join the Party at some stage as his later membership card is in his papers. 1

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comrades in art ‘Art for Art’s sake’ the individualist artist dies too. The world is not divided into ‘artists’ and ‘other people’.1 Although he published very little about art, he wrote in an unpublished draft about how artists in the twentieth century had become spiritual exiles from society and ‘had their own highly specialized set of values’, so when artists became tired of ‘their own effeteness’ and tried to rejoin society, they put themselves into a position which would have led straight to Fascism. They felt that a new social adjustment was imperative, but they were not in any way prepared to make a direct approach to the people. Instead of coming down to earth they retreated into the dead past. They looked for something authentic and they finally found it in the idea of an ‘intellectual aristocracy.’ This was based on a ‘hatred of democracy, as the leveler of culture and the root of all evil, and a profound contempt for the masses as the despoilers of culture. These were causes artists could subscribe to and still remain aloof. They saw no paradox in the position they took against democracy. They simply argued that culture had to be concentrated in order to flourish.’2 Gellert never provided any prescriptions for how art should look, but in this paper he says: while it would be ludicrous to prescribe or insist on a proletarian art technique and curriculum, nevertheless, may we not aspire to create an art eloquent and unfailingly clear in its social import, as clear as is the religious meaning and decorative beauty in the frescoes of Giotto, and Francesco or Uccello, an art so evocative and illuminating that it will not fail to bring new light and hope to the masses? In another unpublished draft in Gellert’s papers, he gives a brief history of the tradition of political cartooning in America (crossings out in the original have been preserved):

‘I Meet an Individualist’, New Masses September 27 Hugo Gellert Papers, Folder ‘Later Reflections’, 13 typed pages undated with many hand corrections by Gellert re the Masses founding etc. (may be notes for speech), p. 8. 1

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some revolutionary artists POLITICAL CARTOONING OF THE LEFT - A GREAT AMERICAN TRADITION The Poor Man’s Art Gallery In the New World leftist political cartooning thrived during the unrest before the Revolutionary War for Independence. Paul Revere’s engraving of the Boston massacre and Benjamin Franklin’s “Join or Die” (drawing of snake cut into sections representing the colonies) are examples. During the second faze [sic] of the American Revolution - the abolishment ending emancipation of slavery (in its more overt forms) - Thomas Nast came into his own. A great political cartoonist, he was an ardent partisan for the abolishment of slavery and for social reform. His cartoons helped to crush the empire of the plundering Tammany Hall of New York. And the Republican National Committee earmarked $10,000 to buy Nast for its 1876 campaign. But Nast refused to comply. During the 1880s rapacious trusts reared their heads and anti-monopolist cartoons like those of Joseph Keppler (?) began to appear were printed in the press. Control by huge corporations was exposed and condemned in his drawings and the drawings of others. However the golden age of political cartooning began a short time before U.S. involvement in World War One. developed around the Masses about the time of the First World War. Gellert obviously felt himself, and was felt by others to be a worthy successor to this history.

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phil bard Bard joined New Masses as a cartoonist in 1930 at the age of 19, and was later a contributing editor. He also wrote plays and essays about art and socialism and was an art instructor at the John Reed Club in the early 1930s. Bard was the first political commissar of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain but had to leave in 1937 because of illness, and formed the Friends of the Brigade back in the U.S. which raised over $10,000 1. Reviewing Bard’s No Jobs Today, a story in pictures, in New Masses, Walt Carmon said of him: he joined the group of revolutionary artists who believe that if art is any good at all, it should also be good for chalk-talks at workers’ clubs, demonstration posters and cartoons in the Daily Worker. In other words, he threw his lot in with that talented an growing group of American revolutionary artists who mix the class struggle with their paint and crayon: they believe in propaganda.2 Carmon comments positively on the fact that novels in pictures are ideal for workers who do not read English well, and that it is ‘a little book that you can slip into your pocket’ about the problems of unemployment among the young. Carmon also approves of the style of the pictures, which the workers will understand: ‘All this is told in virile drawings that are not “arty” and are damn good art. They swing along page after page, like the healthy stride of the young worker in the story.’ Bard’s workers and unemployed are not defeated. The same is true in Bard’s other ‘story in pictures’ It Happens Every Day, published for young workers by Youth Publishers and about the turning of a young educated but unemployed worker to socialism. In his early 1920s, according to another article by Walt Carmon, Bard had already ‘matured rapidly as a revolutionary artist.’ 3 Carmon relates how Bard had won the competition to design the murals for the Volunteer for Liberty, vol. II no. I, p. 4. ‘Written in Pictures’, New Masses, August 1931, p. 18. 3 ‘Phil Bard: American Artist’ International Literature, 5 1934, p. 80. 1

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some revolutionary artists headquarters of the Daily Worker and quotes Bard on his relationship with visiting workers while he was painting them: the workers would criticise the accuracy of details like the belt worn by one of the figures and the fact that a priest was painted ‘too thin’. Carmon quotes these examples to show how close Bard was to the ordinary workers, and how they felt the art belonged to them.

jacob burck Dear Fellow-Workers: Your heroic struggles against hunger and exploitation, your striving for a world in which no one will starve amidst plenty or die to swell the coffers of the profit and war-makers, - this, together with the wonderful revolutionary art of Boardman Robinson, Robert Minor, and Fred Ellis, are responsible for these drawings! What I know how to do best is to make pictures. This is my contribution to the great future you, together with the workers throughout the world, are building.1 Another artist universally admired on the left was Jacob Burck. A New Masses article said he was born in New Jersey2, with a pencil in his mouth in 1907. Was a star “drawer” in school. Spent most of his youth in Cleveland, Ohio, living the luxurious life of nurse for vegetables in a fruit market, dishwasher, busboy and working up to sign painter. Wanted to paint portraits, for no reason at all, came to New York full of ambition and other things. One look at Park Ave. faces, he abandoned

Jacob Burck, dedication to Hunger and Revolt: Cartoons by Burck ; New York: The Daily Worker: 1935. 2 Burck was in fact born in Poland and came to the U.S. as a child. 1

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comrades in art bourgeois art and began drawing cartoons for the Daily Worker. Now staff cartoonist and still at it. 1 Burck had followed Fred Ellis in the job. His Daily Worker drawings were anthologised in Hunger and Revolt and he later became art editor of New Masses until in 1935 he moved to Moscow to become staff cartoonist for Komsomolskaya Pravda (youth edition of Pravda). Burck won the Pulitzer Prize in 1941 for a cartoon about the war in Europe. Reviewing his work, Walt Carmon said his works were ‘often in a satirical vein, dipped in acid . . . They reach the worker with their message as sure as revolution.’2 He is not ‘essentially instinctive’, like many cartoonists, he ‘reads, studies, consciously directs his work along lines dictated by Marxian principles. . . Jacob Burck is the thinking, conscious artist.’ In his contribution to Burck’s anthology Hunger and Revolt, Earl Browder, leader of the CPUSA, said of Burck’s work: In these cartoons is combined all the force of Communist theoretical analysis with that of the strongest tradition of American cartooning. It is an essential part of the history of our times. . . This book will become the strongest possession of all our agitators and propagandists as well as for everyone interested in revolutionary art. 3 Henri Barbusse’s entry in the same book said of Burck that his drawings are a ‘spectacle taken from nature’, but not just photographic. A photograph presents only an arrested instant of life. A drawing gives you that vision of the whole which is quite as exact but more complete. The pencil of a true artist is a perfected machine which, at a single stroke, creates the synthesis and the general aspect of individual portraits, and which embraces many meanings implicit in a few lines. October 1930, p. 22 ‘Jacob Burck: American Political Cartoonist’, International Literature, no. 2, 1935, p. 83. 3 P. 103. 1

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Another contributor to Hunger and Revolt, in an ecstatic appreciation1 referred to Burck as ‘a sturdy child of the revolutionary struggle. His art has drunk deep from the clear swift stream of Marxism-Leninism and its proletarian culture.’ Dunne said The art of Jacob Burck cannot be separated from the revolutionary movement, from the continued struggle of the working class against robbery and oppression, against hunger, fascism and imperialist war, any more than the Communist Party can be separated from the working class. . . Burck’s cartoons depicting daily developments, the clash of revolutionary and reactionary politics in the labor movement, strikes, official labor leaders and their sordid but dangerous disloyalties . . . strip these fat gents of their respectability and kick their halos into startling angles. . . Burck and Fred Ellis are the legitimate heirs of the revolutionary art of Robert Minor. They are no longer only American Artists of the American proletariat. They are of the international proletariat. . . The Communards “stormed heaven’” said Marx. Jacob Burck storms the citadels of ruling class art every day - and demolishes another bastion with each cartoon. Burck brings to the workers ‘lightning insight into a difficult question of strategy and tactics.’ In a later article on revolutionary art Burck himself addressed Thomas Hart Benton’s answers to ten questions on American art in the same issue of Art Front2. Benton says there is a tradition of revolutionary art in America, but it has nothing to do with Communism or Marxism. Burck replies that revolutionary art in America is new and ‘still in the process of defining itself’, though those artists who ‘strive to produce it already know its character and see it as the full expression of the richest human experiences.’ Revolutionary art is not ‘satisfied with mere surface

1 2

William F Dunne ’Strikes and Strikers’, p. 41. ‘Benton Sees Red’, Art Front, vol. 1 no. 4, April, 1935, p. 8.

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comrades in art appearances’ which ‘usually tell very little of the complete story.’ Benton’s art, which Burck puts in the American tradition of ‘tabloid art’ merely ‘mirrors’ the surface, which is ‘in the revolutionary sense, unreal and false . . . Revolutionary art aims to tear off the surface veil of things and expose the thing itself in its naked reality.’ Burck admits that there is a question of the success so far of this trend in America, but ‘this revolutionary art has already created artistic giants in our time’ though he does not name any. In a letter to New Masses, from the time Burck was working in Moscow, which makes no allowance for fellow travellers and takes a much harder line on form in art (just at the time when the Artists Union was specifically opening up to broader elements) Burck comments approvingly on the high status of the artist in Russia and the importance of art to Soviet society, especially the workers, as compared to the American situation. The involvement of workers in the criticism and selection of art leads to the elimination of formalism on the one hand and naturalism on the other. The Soviet workers have long been dissatisfied with their art. Their phenomenal respect for culture has made them tolerate nearly every art form at one time or another, from cubism down to the rankest naturalism. Has there ever been a time in history when an industrialized nation of this size has devoted itself in a body to the development of its culture? That great art will grow out of such conditions can hardly be doubted. No artist of any time has ever had such backing and such an audience1. Pravda publishes articles on art, music and literature which has started the whole country seething with art questions, and not only are the artists talking about it, but workers are becoming acquainted with art terms such as “formalism”, “naturalism” and “socialist realism”. No longer are the problems of art the sole 1

April 21, 1936, p. 20.

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some revolutionary artists concern of special sects... The workers of the Stalingrad Auto Plant demanded in a resolution to the government “art that lives and inspires” them, “not the painted photographs” which have threatened Soviet art. . . The twin art forms developed by bourgeois society “formalism” and “naturalism” - are being hunted down, defined and put on trial with the zeal with which former saboteurs were liquidated. Every group discussing art problems is a court, and in the prisoner’s dock are “formalism” and its somewhat older bourgeois brother “naturalism”. This is the means by which “socialist realism” in art is being brought about. This is maligned in the west and identified with ‘fascist retrogression’ but Burck instead identifies revolutionary art with the needs of the workers, which is the opposite if Fascism. He sees it as the ‘battle to express happiness and life in art form’ as opposed to formalism, ‘that rarefied attitude toward life, and “naturalism”, the supreme expression of vulgar bourgeois materialism.’ In fact, Burck’s comments on revolutionary art, despite the hard line he took while living in Russia are probably as near to definitive as it is possible to get. In a letter in New Masses1 he replied to an earlier review of a John Reed Club exhibition 2 which accused them of following Thomas Craven’s ‘vague liberalism’ and including too many nonrevolutionary ‘guest’ artists and non-JRC members (the show included Benton). Burck in turn accuses Kwait of ‘leftism’ and points out that ‘these men happen to be the leaders of the leftward movement of the artists’ (a point made at the Kharkov conference about fellow-travelling artists). The reason for inviting them was not to gain ‘respectability’ for the show, but to help draw the artists and their audience into ‘the cultural program of the club’ as well as to show the JRC member artists to what degree they themselves retain the same illusions as the guest exhibitors, and to what extent they have

1 2

Jacob Burck, ‘Sectarianism in Art’, New Masses, April, 1933, pp. 26/27. John Kwait, ‘The Social Viewpoint in Art’, New Masses, February, 1933.

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comrades in art succeeded in breaking with bourgeois culture in their progress toward a revolutionary class culture. It is clear to Burck who is and who is not a revolutionary artist - the difference is between a ‘revolutionary social viewpoint’ and the merely ‘social viewpoint’ - but those who are should include those who are not in order to encourage them and their audience to understand and move towards the revolutionary position. It is up to the revolutionary artists to help pave the way for a complete break with bourgeois culture by developing new plastic revolutionary expressions which are an outgrowth of the class struggle and which embody the aspirations of the working class for the desired classless state. This means full participation in the class struggle, and not mere spectating. ‘The revolutionary artist (and this applies equally to the revolutionary critic) cannot remain aloof from the class struggle and expect to create revolutionary art. He must consider himself as a unit in the struggle. In no other way can he acquire vitality and development in his work and escape from an individualistic subjectivity.’ Without the revolutionary viewpoint, an artist’s work will be ‘a mere decorative treatment of workingclass subject matter . . . static, inert art without the dynamic, lifegiving force of class struggle.’ This is as good a final comment on revolutionary art as one could wish for.

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conclusion Art history is indeed written by the winners. Realism, and especially socially concerned realism, disappeared from American art by the end of the 1930s and it was as if it had never been. Almost all the former fellow travellers and former communists had disavowed Stalinism in particular and Communism in general, often denying their prior affiliations, or at least predating their reaction against Stalinism. In American art the New Deal projects, under which realist art had flourished, were finally closed down in 1943 because of the fear of Communism among artists, and already by this time Abstract Expressionism was beginning its rise as the ‘triumph’ of American art. The production, criticism and consumption of art moved finally out of the control and understanding of the masses and back into the hands of the elite. Socially concerned art virtually disappeared from the history as well as the present of art. For this reason, as outlined in the Introduction, the secondary sources on the period are unreliable and have been consulted but not used as evidence. Therefore, writing this book involved going back to a detailed reading of a vast amount of original material including not only the complete New Masses, Modern Monthly/Quarterly, New Republic and Partisan Review, but of even more obscure journals like International Literature, Art Front, Left, and the various local John Reed Club magazines, as well as the many critics’ and artists’ books of the time and also the archives of the John Reed Club, the Art Students League and the papers of artists like Hugo Gellert and Art Young. This comprehensive rereading of the period has revealed that art with a social content had a very large following and a great influence. It was a key part of a broad range of political movements and had within itself a broad range. Within the art normally classed together as ‘Social Realism’ existed a multitude of styles and political views, from the rural nostalgia of the Regionalists through the pessimism of the ‘critical’ realists, the experimentation of socialist modernists, and the use of humour as a weapon by the satirists to the political activism and optimism of the committed revolutionary artists. Although no formal classifications of these types of art were ever agreed on, and the issues around them were rarely debated, I have tried to reconstruct from all this 161

comrades in art evidence some criteria by which these groups might be separated and some revolutionary artists identified. This has never been attempted before. Although these issues seem less important today, being a true revolutionary artist was an aspiration shared by many at the time. The artists I have identified as revolutionary and briefly discussed do not form an exhaustive list and within the limited confines of of this book it has not been possible to discuss even the work of these few in depth. However, I hope to have shown how, from this vast wealth of material, a consistent set of criteria: optimism; being a revolutionary in both art and life; avoiding leftism; transcending satire; using modernist techniques selectively, can be extracted and applied to the enormous number of artists who exerted such an important influence at the time but have since been almost entirely forgotten.

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5. who’s who of artists

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ida abelman (1910-2002) Ida (York) Ableman. Born in New York to Russian and Polish immigrants, studied at Grand Central Art School; National Academy School of Fine Arts; City College of the City of New York; Hunter College, New York. A member of the American Artists Congress. Designed murals for the Works Progress Administration in several cities.

Miner’s Kids, from New Masses, March 2 1937

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a ajay

a ajay (1919-?) Abraham Ajay. Almost no information is available on Ajay, an infrequent contributor to New Masses, though he was registered as a WPA artist. References: "Working for the WPA," Art in America, Sept/Oct 1972.

New Masses, March 9 1937, caption: “Of course there’s a future in art; look at Mr. Mellon” (Andrew Mellon was the tax-cutting Secretary of the Treasury in the Hoover and previous administrations; he founded the National Gallery of Art with his own collection. Mellon died later in 1937.)

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peggy bacon (1895-1987) Born in Connecticut to artist parents and studied at the Art Students League where she was influenced by John Sloan and George Bellows. Her 1934 book of caricatures of thirty-nine fellow artists Off With Their Heads was successful commercially and made her reputation as a leading satirist. Much of her work is satirical and light-hearted and frequently a commentary on the New York art world. Bacon contributed irregularly to New Masses from 1926 to 1928 and then briefly again in the mid-1930s.

Mid-Summer Picnic, from New Masses, July 1927

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Esthetic Pleasure, from Thomas Craven, A Treasury of American Prints, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1939

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New Masses, January 1928 “Your gang’s all right but they don’t know the artists” 168

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phil bard (1912 – 1966) Joined New Masses as a cartoonist in 1930 at the age of 19, and was a contributing editor. Also wrote plays and essays about art and socialism. His pictorial novel No Jobs Today (written without words for those who could not read English) was very favourably reviewed by Walt Carmon in New Masses, August 1931. Bard was an art instructor at the John Reed Club in the early 1930s and at the same time drew daily cartoons for the back page of The Daily Worker, following Fred Ellis and alternating with William Gropper. References: unsigned article, New Masses October, 1930, p. 10; Phil Bard Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

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Illustrations for Michael Gold, Our Congresses and Theirs, from New Masses, January 22 1935

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From It Happens Every Day 177

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maurice becker

maurice becker (1889-1975) Son of a Russian army soldier, born in Gorky. Immigrated to America in 1891. Lived on Lower East Side; worked in a garment factory before studying with Robert Henri from 1908. Exhibited in Armory Show in 1913. Contributed to the Masses at Rockwell Kent’s suggestion and also had cartoons published in the New York Tribune and Metropolitan. Becker was a pacifist, though never joined any political party, and a large number of his cartoons concerned the First World War. Later contributed to Revolt, Toiler, Liberator, and to New Masses irregularly until the late 1930s. Becker lived in Mexico in the early 1920s and exhibited with Orozco and Rivera. References: Zurier Rebecca, Art for the Masses: A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, 1911-1917 Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1988.

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Supreme Court, from New Masses, March 9, 1937

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bernarda bryson

bernarda bryson (1903-2004) Born in Ohio to a socially-active family. Married in 1969 the socially-committed artist Ben Shahn, whom she met as a journalist when she interviewed Diego Rivera in 1933 – Shahn was then Rivera’s assistant. She and Shahn travelled across America working on New Deal programmes documenting the depression and collaborating on murals. Later became an illustrator of children’s books. References: Archives of American Art interview with Liza Kirwin, April 29 1983

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The Art Committee, from New Masses, January 30 1934

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jacob burck

New Masses, January 9 1934, caption: Relief Investigator – “but can you prove he’s hungry?”

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jacob burck (1907- 1982) Born in New Jersey, ‘with a pencil in his mouth in 1907. Was a star “drawer” in school. Spent most of his youth in Cleveland, Ohio, living the luxurious life of nurse for vegetables in a fruit market, dishwasher, busboy and working up to sign painter. Wanted to paint portraits, for no reason at all, came to New York full of ambition and other things. One look at Park Ave. faces, he abandoned bourgeois art and began drawing cartoons for the Daily Worker. Now staff cartoonist and still at it’ (New Masses, October, 1930, p. 22), following Fred Ellis and later became art editor of New Masses. In 1935 moved to Moscow to become staff cartoonist for Komsomolskaya Pravda (youth edition of Pravda). Published articles and letters in New Masses and elsewhere, including an attack on Thomas Hart Benton in Art Front. Won the Pulitzer Prize in 1941. References: Walt Carmon, ‘Jacob Burck’, International Literature No. 2, 1935.

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The Automobile Show, from New Masses, January 16 1934

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Solving the Unemployment Problem, from New Masses, October 1930

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Double page spread from New Masses, February 20 1934

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The Higher Court (the Scottsboro Boys case), from New Masses, October 16 1934

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stuart davis

stuart davis (1894-1964) Born in Philadelphia, son of the editor of the Philadelphia Press. Knew Robert Henri, John Sloan et al as family friends and studied with Henri. Was on the editorial board of the Masses 1913-1916 (resigned during the artists’ strike), also contributed to the Liberator and other magazines (especially Harper’s Weekly) as well as the early New Masses. Art editor of Art Front, and National Secretary of the American Artists Congress. References: Davis, Stuart, Stuart Davis, New York: American Artists Group, 1945; Goossen, E. C. Stuart Davis, New York, Braziller, 1959; Lane, John R. Stuart Davis: Art and Art Theory, New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1978; Sims, Lowery Stokes. Stuart Davis: American Painter, New York: Abrams, 1991; Stuart Davis Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

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In a Florida Auto Camp, from New Masses, May 1926

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adolf dehn

adolf dehn (1895-1968) Born in Minnesota, studied at the Art Students League in New York with Boardman Robinson and Kenneth Hayes Miller, where he met Wanda Gag. A conscientious objector in World War I, he spent the war years in jail. Spent 1921-29 and subsequent periods in Europe, mainly in Vienna. Contributed to the Liberator, the Worker and New Masses, of which he was a contributing editor, from 1926 –1934 as well as many non-political magazines. References: Young, Mahonri Sharp, Adolf Dehn, New York: Kennedy Galleries, 1971; Lumsdaine, Jocelyn Pang, and Thomas O'Sullivan, The Prints of Adolf Dehn, A Catalogue Raisonné, Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1987.

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Art Lovers, from Thomas Craven, A Treasury of American Prints, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1939

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For Whom?, from the American Artists’ Congress Exhibition: War and Fascism, reproduced in New Masses, April 1928 1936

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Turn Left, from New Masses, May 12 1936

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mabel dwight (1875-1955) Born in Ohio, studied in San Francisco, moved to New York in 1903, travelled to Paris in 1926-27. After her return to New York, began to make lithographs of street life in the style of John Sloan. Contributed to Vanity Fair in the late 1920s. Became interested in social issues in the 1930s and contributed to New Masses from 1934-1937, as well as supporting the American Artists Congress, having been invited by Stuart Davis. References: Robinson, Susan Barnes and John Pirog. Mabel Dwight: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Lithographs, Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996.

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lithograph, Derelicts, 1931

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Stick ‘Em Up, from New Masses July 26 1934

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fred ellis (1885 – 1965) Grew up in Chicago; worked in the stockyards (the setting for Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle – a key work of the Left) then as a sign painter until a fall made him change careers. John Reed, Art Young and Minor came to see him in hospital; drew in Chicago for trade union, socialist and I.W.W. papers. Joined art school for 4 months during the 1905 strike; was staff cartoonist for Daily Worker from its founding in 1924; worked briefly for Rote Fahne in Berlin on the way to Moscow. Was on the staff of Pravda; work appeared in several other publications; but mainly worked for Trud (Labour) where he was staff artist. Ellis’s cartoons on the Sacco and Vanzetti case for Daily Worker were published as a book. Along with Gropper and Gold, Ellis was one of the US representatives at the Kharkov conference representing the John Reed Club and the New Masses. Described by Joseph North as ‘[t]his plainsman of serene temper, placid of bearing, of quiet irony a jocose expression, as American as the blue of Lake Michigan, where he hails from.’ (Foreword to A Selection of Drawings from The Worker.) References: review of his work in International Literature, 1933, no. 1; Fred Ellis Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

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Make Way for the Union, from Daily Worker, 1927

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Capitalism’s Scrapheap, from Daily Worker, 1930

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philip evergood

philip evergood (1901-1973) Born in America, studied at Eton and Oxford in England. Called variously a ‘Social Realist’; Humanist Realist’; ‘Social Surrealist’; ‘Magic Realist’. Influenced by German Expressionism. ‘Converted’ to socialism by seeing groups of homeless black people in a Hooverville; got beaten by police and arrested during protest against WPA cuts. President of American Artists’ Union from 1937; friend of Moses Soyer, George Biddle and others. Wrote on dialectical materialism (quoted by Taylor), and joined the John Reed Club. References: Baur, John I. H., Philip Evergood, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1960; Lippard, Lucy R. The Graphic Work of Philip Evergood, New York: Crown Publishers, 1966; Taylor, Kendall. Philip Evergood, Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1987; Philip Evergood Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

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Portrait of a Miner from America Today

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wanda gág

wanda gág (1893-1946). Born in New Jersey of East European ancestry. Gág arrived in New York in 1917 and studied at the Art Students League where she met among others Peggy Bacon and Adolph Dehn, with whom she had a long relationship. She contributed to Liberator and Broom but became well known later as a children’s illustrator and painter of cats. Gág regularly published work in the early days of New Masses, though they are always domestic interior scenes and have no apparent connection to revolutionary art. References: Winnon, Audur H., Wanda Gág: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Prints, Washington D.C., 1993.

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Departure, from New Masses, February 1927

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Progress from America Today

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Saturday Night, from New Masses, May 1926

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Back Porch Studio, from New Masses, April 1928 234

hugo gellert

hugo gellert 1(1892-1985)

Born in Hungary, went to America in 1906; attended Cooper Union and National Academy of Design. In 1916 his first anti-war cartoons were published in the New York Hungarian socialist daily, Elöre. Gellert’s covers illustrated the first issues of both Liberator and New Masses of which he was an art editor. Also worked on New Yorker (staff artist 1925-1946) and produced three artists’ books during the 1930s as well as illustrating several novels and political works. In 1927 he became head of the Anti-Horthy League, the first anti-fascist organization in the United States. In 1928 he painted a 50 foot mural for Worker's Cafeteria in Union Square, New York City; possibly the first labor mural in the United States, now lost or destroyed. He was Director of the first John Reed School of Art and was head of the Artists’ Committee for Action; organised the Mural Artists Guild of the United Scenic Painters, AFL-CIO and chaired the committee, which exhibited artists at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Joseph North called him ‘this moustachioed man of the gentle voice and laughing eye whose figures convey the indestructible strength of the working-class’. References: Gellert, Hugo, ‘Reminiscences’ in Deak, Zoltan, ed, This Noble Flame, New York: Heritage, 1982; Kiseloff, Jeff: Hugo Gellert, New York: Mary Ryan Gallery, 1986; Hugo Gellert Testimonial Committee: Hugo Gellert: Artist-Educator-Organizer; Hugo Gellert Testimonial Committee, 1981 Hugo Gellert Papers, Tamiment Library Collection, Bobst Library, New York University, and Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

Portrait by Mayakovski

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Primary Accumulation from Karl Marx’ ‘Capital’ in Lithographs

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Machinery and Large Scale Industry from Karl Marx’ ‘Capital’ in Lithographs

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The Working Day from Karl Marx’ ‘Capital’ in Lithographs 246

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Law of Capitalist Accumulation from Karl Marx’ ‘Capital’ in Lithographs

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The Working Day from Karl Marx’ ‘Capital’ in Lithographs

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Cooperation from Karl Marx’ ‘Capital’ in Lithographs

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Machinery and Large Scale Industry from Karl Marx’ ‘Capital’ in Lithographs

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From Aesop Said So 251

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From Comrade Gulliver 252

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From Comrade Gulliver 253

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boris gorelick (1912- ?) Born in Russia, moved to the US as a child. He was one of the founder-organisers and a President of the Artists Union, and represented them at the 1936 American Artists Congress, where he presented a paper reporting on the Union. Contributed to New Masses in 1934 and 1935. Moved to California in 1940 and worked on cartoons in the movies. References: Hoag, Betty Lochrie, Oral History Interview with Boris Gorelick, Los Angeles, California May 20, 1964, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.

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The Week in Germany, from New Masses, August 10, 1935 257

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william gropper (1897-1977) Born in New York City, grew up on the Lower East Side and worked in garment sweatshops. Studied at the anarchist Ferrer Center under Robert Henri and George Bellows and later at the National Academy of Design and the New York School of Fine and Applied Art. Extremely prolific cartoonist; published very regularly in New Masses, Morgen Freiheit (staff cartoonist until 1948) and Daily Worker as well as many noncommunist journals. Started drawing cartoons on the anti-communist New York Tribune, but was fired two years later. He was art editor of the Liberator from 1922-1924. Visited Russia for a year in 1927 with Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis. Gropper was a founder member of the John Red Club and one of the invited US attendees (with Mike Gold) of the Kharkov Conference in 1930. In 1935 his cartoon of Emperor Hirohito offended the Japanese government so much they demanded it be withdrawn. In 1937 he toured the US drawing and writing about the dustbowl and rural poverty. References: International Literature, 1932, no 2-3, p. 9; Lozowick, Louis, William Gropper, Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1983; Gahn, J. Anthony, ‘William Gropper--A Radical Cartoonist: His Early Career, 1897- 1928’ New-York Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. LIV, No. 2, April 1970; William Gropper Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, New York.

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Southern Landscape

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The World We Live In, from New Masses, April 28 1936 261

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New Masses April 9 1935

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Towards a Classless Society, from New Masses, November 1932

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The Slave Market – Sixth Avenue, New York, from New Masses, May 1930

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The Miners Are Starving in the “Richest” Country in the World, from New Masses, September 1931 267

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Untitled drawing from New Masses, December 1931

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Hunger March, from New Masses, January 1932

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Graduation Day, from New Masses January 11

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william hernandez

william hernandez (1905- ?) ‘was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., 26 years ago. Lived in an Army Fort in Georgia for 10 years, came north during the world war. After leaving high school, worked on freight and passenger ships to Argentina, Brazil, Belgium and England. Worked as a runner in Wall Street; as a factory hand in New York; harvested wheat in Montana. Attended the N.Y. Workers School for two years. Now doing office work and studying under Thomas Benton at the Art Students League. Contributed drawings to the Southern Worker and the Daily Worker. Contributing editor to New Masses.’ (New Masses, June 1931, p. 23).

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New Masses, March 23 1937, caption: “I love the theater. It’s the only place I can escape from myself.”

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New Masses, January 19 1937, caption: “Twenty thousand for fifty strikebreakers. Oh well, easy come, easy go.”

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Solving the Unemployment Problem, from New Masses, November 1931

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The Immaculate Conception of the Next World War, from New Masses, September 1931 282

joe jones

joe jones (1909-1963) born in Missouri and worked as a house painter. His early paintings of wheat farming in his native Midwest appear to be regionalist, but Jones was a political activist. He organized art classes for unemployed youngsters in the old St. Louis courthouse in 1934, outraging the local community as he did not discriminate on grounds of race or income. A member of the John Reed Club in New York from 1937; in the same year awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. During the WPA Jones was awarded five major mural commissions. References: Jones’ work is discussed and illustrated in International Literature, 2, 1934, p 95; 1, 1935, pp. 52; 11, 1935, pp. 102/3; see also Johns, Orrick, ‘St. Louis Artists Win’, New Masses, March 6, 1934; Freeman, Joseph, ‘Artists in Action’, New Masses, Feb 23, 1937, pp. 6/8.

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Sharecropper Member, Southern Tenant Farmers Union, from New Masses, June 30, 1936

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American Justice, oil, dimensions and whereabouts unknown, from the A.C.A. Gallery catalogue, 1937

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Roustabouts, detail of mural, reproduced in New Masses, May 28 1935

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rockwell kent (1882-1971) Born in New York State, studied architecture then painting under William Merritt Chase, and later Robert Henri and Kenneth Hayes Miller. Although a successful illustrator and printmaker, and a great individualist (he spent long periods in Alaska and Greenland) he was also a socialist and a member of many organizations promoting peace, relations with the Soviet Union and organized labor, including President of the International Workers Order. In 1948, he ran unsuccessfully as the American Labor Party's candidate for Congress. He appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee President of the International Workers Order. Kent gave his paintings to the Soviet Union and was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1967. References; Rockwell Kent Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

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The “American” Peace Policy, from New Masses, May 18 1937

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i. klein (1897-?) Isidore Klein. Born in New Jersey; studied art in the evenings ‘while working in shops and factories by day. He studied later at the National Academy of Design. For ten years he was “cartoon animator” for the movies drawing Mutts, Jeffs and Krazy Kats’ (New Masses, March, 1930, p. 22) Klein contributed to the New Yorker, Colliers, Saturday Evening Post, Life as well as being a contributing editor of New Masses.

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New Masses, February 1927, caption: WORKER: “Workers of the World Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.” BRAIN WORKER: “True, but I love my chains.”

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gan kolski (1899-1932) Born and studied in Poland, later came to the US and attended art classes at the John Reed Club; produced mainly woodcuts. Kolski jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge in protest against unemployment.

The Weight of Sorrow from New Masses October 1929

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Man and Steel from New Masses April 1930

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herb kruckman (1904-1928) Illustrator, cartoonist, author, born in New York. Contributed cartoons to New York Evening Graphic before studying under Boardman Robinson at the Art Students League. Contributed to New Masses and Art Front during the 1930s, exhibited at the A.C.A. Gallery and was part of the New York Group. Kruckman was on the board of the Artists’ Union and suggested the title of their magazine Art Front in 1934. Also the author and illustrator of Hol' up yo' head , ‘The life of Christ told in Negro dialect’, published in 1936.

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From his 1936 illustrated book Hol’ up Yo’ Head (‘The life of Christ told in Negro dialect’), reproduced in New Masses, June 16 1936 307

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Escorting Strikebreakers, number 2 from the Seeing America First series, New Masses, January 19 1937

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Flood Refugees, number 5 from the Seeing America First series, New Masses, February 9 1937 309

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Child Labor, number 9 from the Seeing America First series, New Masses, April 6 1937 310

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Eviction, number 11 from the Seeing America First series, New Masses, May 11 1937

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russell limbach (1904-1971) Russell T. (‘Butch’) Limbach. Born in Ohio, studied at the Cleveland School of Art and in Paris and Vienna. Worked as an illustrator and printmaker and taught printmaking as professor of art at Wesleyan University. Limbach was commissioned by the WPA/FAP in 1935/36 to set up and run its first central printing shop for lithographers; he was also its technical adviser and produced the first colour lithograph for the FAP. On his first appearance in New Masses he said of himself “Born in 1904 in a small Ohio town, worked in factories and steel mills to get dough to go to Art School where I got disgusted with academic art, later with Paris also, so I came back to draw the American Bourgeois in his own surroundings.” (New Masses, September, 1931, p. 23)

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Am I Doing Alright? New Masses January 1934

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louis lozowick (1891-1973) Born in the Ukraine, he became well known for his technically superb precisionist lithographs of skyscrapers, constructions, and machinery. He attended the Kiev Art School from 1904 to 1906 and immigrated to the United States at age 14. In New York, he studied at the National Academy of Design. Travelled extensively in Europe including Russia, where he met the major Constructivists, Berlin where he met the major Expressionists, and Paris, where he met almost everyone else. Co-wrote Voices of October: Art and Literature in Soviet Russia with Joseph Freeman and Joshua Kunitz. Also travelled extensively in Central Asia with Kunitz and published lithographs from the trip. He ran study trips for workers to Russia, lectured on art for the John Reed Club and Société Anonyme, published articles in Broom and International Literature as well as contributing both articles and lithographs to New Masses, of which he was art editor in the early 1930s. References: Lozowick, Louis, Survivor from a Dead Age: The Memoirs of Louis Lozowick, Washington: Smithsonian Institute, 1997. Flint, Janet. The Prints of Louis Lozowick, New York: Hudson Hills, 1982; Marquardt, Virginia Hagelstadt, ‘Louis Lozowick: An American’s Assimilation of Russian Avant-Garde Art of the 1920s’ in Roman, Gail Harrison and Virginia Hagelstadt Marquardt, The Avant-Garde Frontier : Russia Meets the West, 1910-1930, University Press of Florida, 1992; Louis Lozowick Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, New York, and Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C..

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Pioneers on way to School, Tajikistan, from New Masses October 2 1934

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Red Tea House, from New Masses, October 9 1934

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reginald marsh (1898-1954) Born in Paris, son of two American artists, moved to the US aged two. Studied at the academic Yale Art School. Joined the New York Daily News in 1922 as a staff artist, then with the New Yorker from its founding in 1925; also contributed to Esquire, Fortune and Life as well as occasionally to New Masses. He met Sloan, Luks and Kenneth Hayes Miller, with whom he became closely associated, at the Art Students League, where he studied and, later, taught. Most of his many lithographs and etchings are of New York street life and, especially, the burlesque shows. Marsh produced murals for the FAP in Washington’s Post Office and New York’s Custom House. References: Sasowsky, Norman. The Prints of Reginald Marsh: An Essay and Definitive Catalog of his Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1976; Cohen, Marilyn. Reginald Marsh’s New York Paintings, Drawings, Prints: Whitney Museum/Dover Pub. Inc.: New York, 1983; Goodrich, Lloyd,. Reginald Marsh, New York: Abrams, 1975..

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Attaboy! from New Masses, April 1927, caption “We are a peashful people, but when American property is threatened we shall arish in our glorious young manhood and lay our livesh on the altar of our country.” 336

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Pneumatic Drill, from New Masses, January 18 1928

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Tattoo – Haircut – Shave, from Thomas Craven, A Treasury of American Prints, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1939

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Bread Line- No One Has Starved, 1932, from New Masses, July 12 1934 339

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Etching, East 10th Street Jungle, from New Masses, April 2, 1935 340

jan matulka

jan matulka (1890-1972) Born in Prague, moved to New York in 1907 and lived in poverty in the Bronx. Studied at the National Academy of Design in the US from 1908-1917 after which he received a Pulitzer travelling scholarship. Went to Paris in 1919 and 1927 (on a scholarship from the National Academy) where he was influenced by Cubism. Worked both in a cubist style in collaboration with Stuart Davis but produced drawings for New Masses from 1927 to 1929, when it was still open to modernism, in both realist and cubist styles. Matulka taught at the Art Students League from 1929 to 1931. Reference: Jan Matulka, 1890-1972, Washington: Smithsonian, 1970.

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Coney Island, from New Masses, July 1927

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Excavation, from New Masses, February 1927, caption: “Well, Wash, this is goanta be a swell dump. Have you picked out your room yet?” “Lordy no! Ah’ll work with white folks, but when it comes to eatin’ and sleepin’ ah sticks to Harlem”

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New Masses, April 27, caption: “I see where Babe Ruth draws down seventy thousand a year. That’s a lotta jack all right.” “Yeah, us workin’ classes is on the up-and-up.”

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walter quirt

walter quirt (1902-1968) Born in Milwaukee; studied and taught there as well as at the American Artists School in New York. Quirt was a member of An American Artists Group, the American Artists Congress and the Artists Union. He was also (around 1931) secretary of the artists group of the John Reed Club of New York and staff artist on the magazine Labor Unity. Quirt was a contributing editor of New Masses from 1930-1932. He produced tempera murals and paintings on subjects such as racial equality and historical labour subjects like the Haymarket martyrs and the Ludlow Massacre. References: ‘American Revolutionary Paintings by Walter Quirt’, International Literature, 4, 1934, p. 66. University of Minnesota, Gallery, Walter Quirt, a Retrospective, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1979.

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On To Washington, from New Masses, January 1932, caption: ‘sketched on the hunger march passing thru Delaware’

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gardner rea (1892-1966) was already a freelance cartoonist at the age of 15. He worked extensively for Judge, Puck and then, from 1925, for the New Yorker. Rea contributed humorous cartoons to the New Masses from 1934 onwards.

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From Robert Forsythe’s Redder than the Rose, New York: Covici, Friede, 1935, caption: “Did you try reasoning with the officer?”

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a. redfield (1912-2004) The pseudonym of the prolific cartoonist Syd Hoff. An irregular contributor to New Masses, he contributed many cartoons for other magazines, including 571 cartoons for the New Yorker alone. Hoff also drew strips for William Randolph Hearst publications; his character Tuffy appeared in 850 Hearst publications. Many of his satirical cartoons were published in the book The Ruling Clawss. He was also a prolific children’s author; Danny and the Dinosaur, published 1958, sold over 10 million copies.

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“But darling, we can’t deport all of them”, from New Masses, April 30 1935 357

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Daily Worker, April 29 1936, caption: “I love the machine age, but he invented one that does away with us.” 359

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From Daily Worker, July 3 1936, caption: “Just work hard for the next twenty years, son, and maybe you’ll be where I am now.” “Where’s that, Pop!” “On this side of the machine.” 360

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From The Ruling Clawss, 1935, caption: “Isn’t the machine age marvelous, Honey? All papa does is talk into the dictaphone and presto – a hundred men are laid off!”

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From The Ruling Clawss, 1935, caption: “I can’t forget the last lynching – I still have a hoarse throat from cheering.”

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anton refregier

anton refregier (1905-1979) Born in Moscow, studied art in Paris with the sculptor Vassilief and in Munich with Hans Hofmann, Moved to the US in 1920 and studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. His first job in the US was as a strike-breaker in a factory. Moved to New York in 1925. He also worked for Eastman Brothers studio in 1926 where one of his jobs was to wake up Willem de Kooning in the mornings. Refregier ‘worked in textile mills in Rhode Island, washed dishes, worked in bakeries, house painter and Jack of all Trades. . . Staff artist for the Office Worker, contributor to New Masses, Solidarity and other revolutionary publications.’ (New Masses, December, 1931, p. 31) Refregier became well known as a mural artist for the WPA He painted murals at U.S. Post Offices in San Francisco and in Plainfield, New Jersey. References: Trovato, Joseph, interview with Anton Refregier, Smithsonian Archives of American Art

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High Cost of Living, from America Today

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New Masses March 9 1937 365

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untitled drawing, from New Masses, December 1932

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philip reisman (1904-1992) Born in Poland, Reisman studied at the Art Students League and was a member of An American Group. He taught Reginald Marsh etching. Contributed to New Masses irregularly from 1928-1936. References: Bush, Martin H.: Philip Reisman : People are His Passion ; Wichita: Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, 1986; Bianco, George, The Prints of Philip Reisman: A Catalogue Raisonné. New York, 1992.

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University, from New Masses, February 13 1934

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Exercise and Keep Cheerful (Herbert Hoover), from New Masses, December 1932

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louis ribak (1902-1980) Born in Lithuania, moved to the US in 1912. Studied at the Pennsylvania Fine Arts Academy and then under John Sloan (with whom he first visited Taos, New Mexico) at the Art Students League. Exhibited annually at the Whitney Studio Club in the late 1920s, and at the Jewish Art Center in 1926/7 with Lozowick and Raphael Soyer. In 1932 he exhibited with An American Artists Group and in the John Reed Club’s The Social Viewpoint in Art in 1933. Ribak was a contributing editor to New Masses.

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dan rico (Donato Rico; 1910-?) Born in New York State, studied in New York at Cooper Union School of art and the Evening School of Industrial Art. Rico worked as a teacher and artist in various Federal Art Projects. He drew for several comic books including Blue Beetle, Daredevil, Doctor Strange and Young Allies as well as contributing to New Masses from 1934 onwards.

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Scrapped, from New Masses, March 12 1935

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boardman robinson (1876-1952) Born in Nova Scotia, spent his childhood in Wales, moved to the United States and studied at the Massachusetts Art School. Robinson worked as a cartoonist for the New York Morning Telegraph, New York Times and the New York Tribune where he developed a distinctive style by using black crayon with ink washes. He was a strong supporter of woman suffrage and he contributed to the Congressional Union for Women Suffrage’s magazine, the Suffragist. Robinson went with John Reed to Russia in 1914 and was a regular contributor to the Masses and a contributing editor of the Liberator. Robinson’s were among the cartoons the US government objected to after its entry to the war in 1917 when the journal was charged under the Espionage Act. He continued contributing to New Masses until 1928. References: Christ-Janer, Albert, Boardman Robinson: A Catalogue Raisonné, Chicago University Press, 1946.

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New Masses, February 1927, caption “Hank, they ain’t nothin’ in the house to eat”. “That’s awright! Ain’t got no time to eat nohow.”

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william sanderson/siegel (1905-1990) Born in Latvia, moved to New York in the early 1920s. Studied in Berlin and at the National Academy of Design from 19231928. Worked as a staff artist on New York newspapers 1938-1942 but spent most of his life in Denver, Colorado. Contributed political cartoons regularly to New Masses from 1934 onwards and was also a contributor to New Yorker. ‘Now living in New York, was born in Russia in 1905. Arrived in the U.S. in 1923. Wasted a lot of time in the School of the National Academy. After receiving a prize there, he realized that things were not as they should be. Began drawing for books and magazines always hoping to find time to do something decent. He thinks an artist has a lousy job. He insists he won’t change his mind unless conditions change a lot. He is a contributing editor to the New Masses.’ (New Masses, April, 1930, p. 22). Siegel was Sanderson’s pseudonym.

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William Siegel, The Miners – Who Will Lead Them?, from New Masses, June 1927

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New Masses, October 1927

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November 1917, from New Masses, November 1932

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william sanderson/siegel Next Page: Capitalism on Parade, from New Masses, June 11 1935. Many of the left’s targets of 1935 are included here: the newspaperman William Randolph Hearst leads the parade, spreading hysteria and red scares; the populist, right-wing radio preacher Father (Charles) Coughlin, who was anti-Semitic and praised the Hitler and Mussolini is at the top and Frances Perkins, Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor and author of many New Deal programmes (opposed equally by big business – as anti-individualist - and Communists – as liberal and gradualist rather than revolutionary) is at the right. Behind her is Friedrich Hauptmann of Rutgers University, German-born pro-Nazi professor who had fired another German-born, anti-Nazi professor in 1935. The eagle representing the National Recovery Administration – at the heart of the New Deal – held by William Green, head of the American Federation of Labor, has been shot down by the Supreme Court, who opposed and struck down many of the New Deal programmes. Next to Green is Robert Wagner, author of the 1935 Wagner Act, which created the National Labor Relations Board (though pro-union, this legislation was initially mistrusted by workers on the left). On his right, a gangster with a machine gun has Company Union on his cap. and next to him is a young member of C.C.C., the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal organisation which gave work to young people in parks and forests. Huey Long – the Kingfish, with fish on his jacket – formerly Governor and now Senator (most said dictator) of Louisiana is under a lynching post. (Long, a radical who opposed Roosevelt and attacked the amassing of great wealth, was nevertheless seen by the left as pro-lynching. He was assassinated a few months later). War planes fly overhead and troops in gas masks follow behind.

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The American Youth Congress demonstrating against war and fascism, from New Masses, July 2 1935

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New Masses, July 2 1935

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New Masses 1931

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mitchell siporin (1910-1976) Born in New York to immigrant parents, his father a union organiser, ‘now living in Chicago, Ill., was born on the East Side of New York in 1910. Went to school in Chicago and Detroit, attended Crane College, Chicago. Scholarship student at the Art Institute of Chicago. Worked as a laundry driver, commercial artist and scenic designer and painter. Designed Whirl of Machines and Diamonds for the New York Artef Theatre. At present, like everyone else, looking for a job…’ (New Masses, October, 1931, p. 31). Member of the American Artists Congress and United American Artists. Contributed to Esquire and Ringmaster as well as New Masses from 1931 to 1935. Siporin was on the executive board of the Chicago John Reed Club. He painted murals for the Works Progress Administration and won a competition in 1939 to paint 17 frescoes in the new Post Office in St. Louis, the biggest murals ever commissioned by them. During World War II he was an artist reporter in Italy. Reference: O’Toole, Judith Hanson, Mitchell Siporin: The Early Years, New York: Babcock Galleries, 1990.

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from New Masses September 1931, caption: ‘O’Neil and Grey, two of the negro workers murdered by the Chicago police. Drawings made at the funeral by Mitchell Siporin’ 397

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The Father, the Sons, and the Holy Guns, from New Masses, October 1931

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otto soglow

otto soglow (1900-1975) Born in New York City, was inspired by early comic artists like Winsor McCay, George McManus and George Herriman. His first illustration was published in 1919, in Cartoons magazine. In the mid1920s he published cartoons in College Humor, Lariat, Life and Judge, and was a contributor to the New Yorker. One of Soglow's characters, The Little King, became famous, attracting the attention of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. From 1934 on, The Little King ran as a newspaper strip, gaining popularity in the US and eventually appearing all over the world. Soglow was a co-founder of the National Cartoonists Society, and continued to draw The Little King until his death in 1975. Soglow regularly contributed satirical cartoons to New Masses from its founding to 1932.

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When Beer Was Lawful Instead of Awful, from New Masses, May 1927 404

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harry sternberg (1904- ?) Born on the Lower East Side of New York to East European Jewish immigrants. Met Philip Reisman, with whom he later shared a studio, and Peter Blume at school. Attended the Art Students League, where he worked for 33 years from 1933 onwards as an instructor in etching, lithography and composition. Diego Rivera moved into a studio below Sternberg’s in 1934 to work on fresco panels for the New Workers’ School. Sternberg was active with artist rights organizations (such as the Artists Union, the National Society of Mural Painters, and the Artists League of America; he was also on the planning committee of the American Artists Congress) and as an organizer for workers’ rights in the coal, steel, maritime, and garment industries, all of which industries were reflected in his work.

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frank m. walts (dates unknown) Born in Indiana. Contributed many covers to the Masses, Liberator (of which he was on the staff and drew all the covers from 1922 to 1923) and New Masses in 1926 and 1927. He also contributed to Good Morning, International Communist, Harper’s Weekly, Collier’s and New Yorker. Apart from his cartoons he was well known for Broadway theatre posters.

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art young (Arthur Henry Young; 1866-1943) The original, most famous, well-loved and long-lived of all the radical cartoonists. Joseph North called him ‘that gallant knight of the pen whose drawings spanned an American age – from the time of the Haymarket Martyrs whose trail in 1886 he sketched, to World War II when he impaled Hitler on the lethal point of his pen’. Even during the split in the 1930s between socialists and communists, Stalinists and anti-Stalinists, Young was respected by everyone. The invitations to his 80th birthday party were signed by both Norman Thomas, leader of the Socialists and Earl Browder, leader of the CPUSA; probably no other event could have brought these two together. Born in Wisconsin, he grew up in rural Illinois, studied at the Art Institute of Chicago where he published cartoons to support himself. Later studied at the Art Students League in New York. Studied in Paris with Robert Henri under Bouguereau. Was a cartoonist on several Chicago papers alongside Thomas Nast, the father of the American political cartoon. Met John Sloan in 1909 and Piet Vlag (original founder of the Masses). Young stood unsuccessfully for the New York State Assembly as a socialist in 1913 and for the Senate in 1918. The most famous of many stories about him is that while on trial, possibly for his life, in 1917 as an editor of the Masses, which was accused of sedition, he fell asleep and snored at a crucial moment; this is said to have helped the jury see the idiocy of the charges. Young contributed to every political journal throughout his life and produced several books. References: Young, Art, On My Way: Being the Book of Art Young in Text and Picture. New York: Liveright, 1928; Young, Art, Art Young; his life and times. Edited by John Nicholas Beffel. New York: Sheridan House, 1939.

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6. who’s who of critics belinsky Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky (1811-1848) championed the new realism; e.g. Pushkin’s Eugen Onegin, as opening up ‘unartistic’ subjects for art. Art should reflect life, and serve the progressive current in history. Realism is not passive but brings optimism for the upward current in history; the artist shows this emotionally, unlike the scientist, who ‘proves’ it with logic. The key to realism is the ‘type’ who synthesises the individual and the general. References: Matlaw, R. E. Ed, Belinsky, Chernyschevsky and Dobrolyubov: Selected Criticism, Indiana University Press, 1976.

bukharin Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, (1888-1938; executed after show trial). His Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology, published in the US in 1925, was a seminal work in the sociology of art. He connected content and form: style is ‘embodied content’. At the Soviet Writers’ Congress in 1934 he said that formalism in art and criticism are unacceptable, as it tries to separate form from content and social context; it is individualistic to the point of solipsism and confuses the ‘specific laws of art’ (Bukharin accepted that the artistic superstructure does not move exactly in line with the base) with art’s complete autonomy, assuming that art can change independently of society.

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v. f. calverton (born George Goetz, 1900-1940). Born and lived in Baltimore; influenced by the Village Left of the Seven Arts and Masses. Prolific and well-connected writer and critic; his home was always a salon for left intellectuals. Founded Modern Quarterly (later Modern Monthly) in 1923 and edited it until his death (it did not survive him). Never formally associated with the Party, his writings were always radical and often Marxist but always individual. References: Abbot, Philip, Leftward Ho!: V. F. Calverton and American Radicalism, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1993; Hook, Sidney, ‘A Chapter in American Radical History: V.F. Calverton and his Periodicals’, in Modern Quarterly: A Journal of Radical Opinion, Volume 1, 1923-1924, New York: Greenwood Reprint Corporation, 1968; V. F. Calverton Papers, Rare Books and Manuscript Division, New York Public Library.

chernyshevsky Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky, (1828-1889). Leading member of the group of Russian Democratic critics (see Dobrolyubov and Belinsky. Had a major effect on Lenin’s thinking: Lenin’s What is to be Done is named after the title of a novel by Chernyschevsky. Said that art should serve life, to which it is in all respects inferior, though artists and scientist can help us explain life. His work Life and Esthetics was serialised in IL, 6-9, 1935. References: Matlaw, R. E. ed, Belinsky, Chernyschevsky and Dobrolyubov: Selected Criticism, Indiana University Press, 1976.

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malcolm cowley (1898-1989). Born in Pittsburgh; his education at Harvard was interrupted during World War I but he graduated cum laude in 1920, then went to study in Paris where he met the artistic avant-garde and contributed to the expatriate little magazines Secession and Broom. He returned to the United States in 1923 and supported himself by free-lance writing and translating. His Exile's Return: A Narrative of Ideas of 1934 is a social and literary history of the expatriate American writers of the 1920s. Cowley also wrote about the writers of the 'Lost Generation' of the 1920s in Exile’s Return. He was literary editor of New Republic from 1929 to 1944, and contributor to New Masses. Although not a communist, he attempted to provide a balanced and objective Marxist analysis of American literature. He used Marxism as a critical tool not a political one, but he did advocate that American writers should consider their position in regard to the ‘revolutionary movement’.

dobrolyubov Nikolai Alexandrovich Dobrolyubov, (1836-1861) took Belinsky’s focus on typicality, optimism and service to history and narrowed it to a point where literature was an ‘auxiliary force’, whose only importance was propaganda. The hero must not just be a type but a heroic type. References: Matlaw, R. E. ed, Belinsky, Chernyschevsky and Dobrolyubov: Selected Criticism, Indiana University Press, 1976.

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john dos passos (1896-1970) Born in Chicago and educated at Harvard University. His wartime experience as an ambulance driver in France was background for his first novel One Man's Initiation (1920). Both critical and popular recognition came to Dos Passos with his next bitter antiwar novel, Three Soldiers (1921). Manhattan Transfer (1925), a panoramic view of life in New York City between 1890 and 1925, became immensely successful. His trilogy U.S.A. (collected in 1938; Reginald Marsh did the illustrations), in the same style, expanded his panorama to encompass the entire nation. The trilogy depicts the growth of American materialism from the 1890s to the Great Depression of the early 1930s. Despite his modernist techniques, Dos Passos was immensely influential and widely read and discussed in the Soviet Union.

max eastman (1883-1969). Editor of the Masses and founder and editor of the Liberator. Never a communist, he was however strongly influenced by the Soviet revolution, and was one of its earliest advocates, but lost faith in it after Lenin died and Stalin took over. From the mid-1920s all his books, including Artists in Uniform and The End of Socialism in Russia, and articles (he was a regular contributor to Modern Quarterly but stopped contributing to New Masses after 1927) contain attacks on Stalinism and defences of his own views against attacks on him from the circle around New Masses. References: O’Neill, William L., The Last Romantic: A Life of Max Eastman, New York: Oxford University Press, 1978; Max Eastman Papers, Lilly Library, Indiana University.

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james t. farrell (1904-1979) Novelist and short-story writer, author of Studs Lonigan trilogy, which was criticised by the left for naturalism and pessimism. His book of criticism A Note on Literary Criticism is a serious attempt to define a Marxian criticism while avoiding ‘leftism”, which includes two tendencies: ‘revolutionary sentimentalism’, which is anti-rational and reduces art to banality, idealizing the worker regardless of the works’ artistic qualities. (The prime representative of this trend is Michael Gold.) and ‘mechanically deterministic “Marxism”’, assuming a direct link between economics and art (represented by Granville Hicks).

waldo frank (1889-1967) Born in New Jersey. Published 14 novels and 18 volumes of social history as well as a huge volume of articles. In 1914, he was made associate editor of Seven Arts, a key journal for the ‘lyrical left’, all of whom he knew. Contributed to the New Yorker and was a contributing editor of the New Republic. Despite his personal influences being more Whitman, Emerson and Freud than Marx, he became associated with the hard left, was a contributing editor of New Masses and taught evening classes in modern art at the New School for Social Research in 1927. He was a speaker at the LEAR (Mexican communist artists) congress in 1937 at which he advocated the artists’ duties as a worker and class warrior. References: Aaron, Daniel, Writers on the Left: Episodes in Literary Communism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982; Blake, Casey Nelson, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, & Lewis Mumford, University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

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joseph freeman (1897-1965). Born in the Ukraine, moved to the US at the age of seven. Described by Art Young as the ‘”wayward” son of a millionaire real estate operator’. Started as European correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, then became Max Eastman’s assistant at The Liberator. Joined the Communist Party in 1921, served as New York correspondent for TASS from 1925-1929. Co-founded the New Masses with Gold and Freeman. Married first Ione Robinson, sometime assistant to Diego Rivera, then Charmion von Wiegand. Became disillusioned with Stalinism by 1937 and left the Party in 1939. An American Testament tells the story of these years. His later correspondence with Daniel Aaron formed the basis of Aaron’s book which has become the source for most subsequent books on the period References: Freeman, Joseph, An American Testament: A Narrative of Rebels and Romantics, New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1936; Robinson, Ione, A Wall to Paint On, New York, Dutton, 1946. Bloom, James D. Left Letters: The Culture Wars of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992; Aaron, Daniel, Writers on the Left: Episodes in Literary Communism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982; Murphy, James F, The Proletarian Moment: The Controversy over Leftism in Literature, University of Illinois Press, 1991; Joseph Freeman Papers, Hoover Institution for War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University.

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who’s who of critics

michael gold (Mike Gold; born Itzok Isaac Granich, later Irwin Granich, 1893-1967) Born to immigrant Jewish parents in New York; his only novel Jews Without Money is about his experiences growing up on the Lower East Side. A founder of New Masses, and sole editor from mid-1928. Also wrote a weekly column in Daily Worker and was on the International Board of International Literature from its founding. Attended the Kharkov Conference whose resolutions were very influential in the U.S. Almost single-handedly carried the crusade for a proletarian literature for many years until others like Granville Hicks took up the cause. Widely regarded as representing the ‘official’ Party line on artistic matters in America, his writings were widely read and anthologized. References: Bloom, James D. Left Letters: The Culture Wars of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992; Pyros, John. Mike Gold: Dean of American Proletarian Writers, New York: Dramatika Press, 1979; Aaron, Daniel, Writers on the Left: Episodes in Literary Communism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982; Murphy, James F, The Proletarian Moment: The Controversy over Leftism in Literature, University of Illinois Press, 1991.

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maxim gorky (Real name Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, 18681936; ‘gorky’ means ‘bitter’ in Russian.) Was universally admired on the left in Russia and USA, corresponded at length with Lenin, who asked him to be literary editor of his magazine Proletariy (at Lunacharsky’s suggestion). Most of his works were available in English, including his pamphlet To American Intellectuals of 1932 (not available in English until 1939). Regularly published in New Masses. At least two biographies of him were written in the 1930s, and published in the US including one by Moissaye Olgin, editor of Morgen Freiheit, the Yiddish Communist paper and regular contributor to New Masses. Analysed and defined bourgeois ‘critical realism’ but advocated socialist realism and making labour the real hero of literature. References: Olgin, Moissaye J., Maxim Gorky, Writer and Revolutionist; New York: International Publishers, 1933; Olgin, Moissaye, Homage to Maxim Gorky’, New Masses, June 30, 1936.

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granville hicks (1901-1982) Born in New Hampshire, attended Harvard University. Initially intended to become a minister of the church. Became literary editor of New Masses and joined the CPUSA in 1934. The Great Tradition was the first attempt to interpret American literature from a Marxist point of view and Proletarian Literature in the United States was the first anthology to pick up Michael Gold’s ideas on this subject. Sacked from a teaching job at Rensselaer in 1935 and attacked in the mainstream press, becoming the centre of a debate over academic freedom. Later publicly broke with the communists in 1939. References: Hicks, Granville, Where We Came Out, New York, Viking, 1954; Hicks, Granville, Part of the Truth: An Autobiography, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1965; Levenson, Leah, Granville Hicks: The Intellectual in Mass Society, Temple University Press, 1993; Pells, Richard H. Radical visions and American dreams; culture and social thought in the Depression years. New York: Harper & Row, 1998; Granville Hicks Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, New York.

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who’s who of critics

lunacharsky Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky, (18751933). Under Lunacharsky, who was head of Narkompros (the Commissariat for Education, which included Izo, the visual art department) the avant-garde had been encouraged. (Rodchenko was even in a government post.) Lunacharsky had been famously criticised in 1912 by Plekhanov for his lack of objectivity and Lenin said he should be ‘flogged for his futurism’. After 1921 and the New Economic Policy, funding was drastically reduced for constrtuctivist and other abstract art. Lunacharsky changed his public views following the Central Committee resolution of 16th June 1925, which marked the end of artistic debate in Russia, now supporting realist art. His works were widely published in the US. References: Olgin, Moissaye, ‘Comrade Lunacharsky: A Brief Appreciation’, New Masses, January 9, 1934.

a. b. magil (1905- ?) Born in Philadelphia, studied at the University of Pennsylvania ‘emerging abysmally ignorant of the world he lived in. Came to New York in the fall of 1925 and began his education with a two-month course in job-hunting. The Passaic strike, the needle trades struggles of 1926 and a few other experiences turned him Red. Has contributed poems, reviews, literary and political articles to the Daily Worker, New Masses, The Communist, Labor Defender, etc. Formerly on the staff of the Daily Worker. Member of the John Reed Club.’ (New Masses, September, 1930, p. 22.) Magil was one of the American attendees at the Kharkov conference and reported on it for New Masses.

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wallace phelps/william phillips (Known until 1935 as Wallace Phelps, then William Phillips; 1907- ) Born to poor, socialist, family in the Bronx, New York, got his masters’ degree at New York University where he was later an instructor in English. His influences as a young man were modernist art and literature rather than socialism, but, through teaching he became familiar with the Nation and New Republic and the political left. He joined the John Reed Club, becoming secretary of the writers’ group and met Philip Rahv, like whom he contributed reviews to the New Masses before they both became founding editors of Partisan Review, originally the organ of the John Reed Club of New York. Partisan Review was suspended in 1936 after briefly merging with Jack Conroy’s Anvil, and resumed in 1937 independent of the Communist Party. Phillips is still its editor today. References: Cooney, Terry A. The Rise of the New York Intellectuals : Partisan Review and Its Circle, 1934-1945, University of Wisconsin Press, 1986; Wald, Alan M., The New York Intellectuals : The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s, University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

plekhanov Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov, (1856-1918). Russian Marxist, often called the founder of Russian Marxism; organised the Emancipation of Labour Group, the first Marxist group in Russia, in Geneva in 1883. Became a leading Menshevik but was always regarded as a great dialectician and authority figure, even during the Stalinist period. Said by Freeman (NM, May 29) to have largely developed Marxist art theory. Often quoted as an authority for realism, he took Chernyshevsky and added a revolutionary dimension, insisting on the active role of art. His ‘productivist’ view implies that art can become part of the base, rather than the superstructure and was taken up later by the Constructivists, but was explicitly denied by Zhdanov in 1934. However, Plekhanov famously argued in public with Lunacharsky, and condemned Cubism and individualist art. His Art and Social Life was published in America in 1931 and 1936. 430

who’s who of critics

philip rahv (Born Ivan Greenberg; 1908-1972) Born in the Ukraine of Zionist parents; moved to Austria after his family’s shop was appropriated in the October Revolution, then moved to the US at the age of 14. Rahv never graduated from high school but worked as an advertising copywriter. In 1932 he was taken to a meeting of the John Reed Club and joined the Communist Party and changed his name. He chose the name "Rahv" which means "rabbi" in Hebrew. Rahv became secretary of a monthly magazine put out by the Revolutionary Writers Federation called Profit Folio. He joined the Rebel Poets group and published reviews in the Daily Worker and New Masses, until being asked to edit the new magazine of the John Reed Club, in 1934 with William Phillips. In 1936 they suspended Partisan Review over differences with the Communist Party. In 1937 Partisan Review reappeared as an independent, Marxist, anti-Stalinist journal. References: Cooney, Terry A. The Rise of the New York Intellectuals : Partisan Review and Its Circle 1934-1945, University of Wisconsin Press, 1986; Wald, Alan M., The New York Intellectuals : The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s, University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

charmion von wiegand (1896-1983). Artist and critic. Born in Chicago, grew up in Arizona, and attended Barnard College and the Columbia School of Journalism. She then worked as a newspaper reporter in New York City, being a correspondent for the Hearst newspapers in Moscow; she was the daughter of Karl von Wiegand, Hearst’s well-known foreign editor. She returned to New York where she had become associated with the Avant Garde art movement and had started painting in 1926. By 1929, she was devoting herself full time to painting and to writing about art. She was managing editor of Art Front as well as writing on art for New Masses (after marrying Joseph Freeman) and on theatre and cinema in New Theatre, for which magazine she used the Hearst presses surreptitiously to print lithographs for publication. Later on, after meeting and becoming close to Piet Mondrian and after 1941 began painting in an 431

comrades in art abstract style. She was later a member of the American Abstract Artists, a group formed to protest Social Realism, and served as President from 1950 to 1953. References: Kline, Herbert, New Theatre and Film 1934 to 1937, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985; Charmion von Wiegand Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

edmund wilson (1895-1972). One of the most influential critics of his generation, Wilson was educated at Princeton University, he served in World War I and then started his career as a reporter and cultural journalist. In the 1920s he wrote about Hemingway, Fitzgerald, O’Neill, and Cummings for the New Republic, Dial, and the Bookman. His first major critical book, Axel’s Castle, explored the world of Proust, Joyce, Yeats, and Stein. Wilson expressed his anti-Establishment convictions in an essay on Sacco and Vanzetti, and his opposition to capitalism in American Jitters. The American Earthquake, reflects the Depression with essays on the urban unemployed and the dazed and ruined middle classes, as does his work on the history of revolutionary writing and action, To the Finland Station. In 1936, he travelled to the USSR, studied socialism and cultural life, and wrote positively of the Soviet experiment in his journals, but by the late 1930s he had become critical of Stalinism and rejected communism completely in The Triple Thinkers. Wilson edited Vanity Fair before becoming literary editor of New Republic (succeeded by Malcolm Cowley). Argued for a socially responsible literature but was never a communist and did not use Marxist analysis.. References: Pells, Richard H. Radical visions and American dreams; culture and social thought in the Depression years. New York: Harper & Row, 1998.

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zhdanov Andrei A. Zhdanov, (1896-1948) secretary of Central Committee of CPSU, Chairman of Supreme Soviet of USSR. Defended Leningrad as a general in WWII. Presented the official view of Socialist Realism at the Soviet Writers’ Congress in 1934 and attacked constructivism. Zhdanov compares ‘objective’ reality, which is ‘dead, scholastic’, with ‘revolutionary reality’. For Zhdanov, the radical change is in reality itself, not the means of depicting it, though following Gorky and Plekhanov, he allows for a revolutionary romanticism. The later period of party control of art, which lasted from 1946 to 1956 is known as the zhdanovschina.

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7. bibliography

434

bibliography

primary sources

435

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periodicals

Art Front. New York. vol. I no. 1 - vol III no. 8, November 1934December 1937. Daily Worker. Chicago; New York. vol. I no. 311 - vol. XXXII, January 13 1924 - 1955. Superseded The Worker (which remained the name of its Sunday edition) and continued as The Worker after 1955. Dialectics. New York, nos. 1 - 9, 1937 - 1939. International Literature. Moscow, New York, London. 1932 no. 1 - 1945 no. 11. Superseded Literature of the World Revolution. The Left: A Quarterly Review of Radical and Experimental Art. Davenport, Iowa. vol 1 no. 1 - vol 1 no. 2, 1931. Literature of the World Revolution: Central Organ of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers. Moscow. nos. 1 - 2 and Special Number, Second International Conference of the Revolutionary Writers. Continued as International Literature The Modern Monthly. New York. vols. VII - X, February 1933 - June 1938. The Modern Quarterly: A Journal of Radical Opinion. Baltimore & New York. vols I - VI, March 1923 - Autumn 1932; vol. XI, Fall 1938 Fall 1940. New Masses. New York. vol. I no. 3 - vol LXVI, no. 3, May 1926 - January 1948. Monthly 1926 - 1933; thereafter weekly. No issues May 1928, March 1933, October - December 1933. The New Republic: A Journal of Opinion. New York. Weekly throughout the period New Theatre. New York. vol. III no. 2 - vol. 3 no 11, January 1934 November 1936; superseded Workers’ Theatre; continued as New Theatre and Film, vol. IV no. I - vol. IV, no. 2, March 1937 April 1937. Partisan Review. New York, vol. 1, 1934 - onward

collections

436

bibliography

ACA Galleries’ Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. American Artists’ Congress Printed Materials, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. Phil Bard Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. V. F. Calverton Papers, Rare Books and Manuscript Division, New York Public Library. Stuart Davis Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. Max Eastman Papers, Lilly Library, Indiana University. Fred Ellis Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. Philip Evergood Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. Joseph Freeman Papers, Hoover Institution for War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University. Hugo Gellert Papers, Tamiment Library Collection, Bobst Library, New York University, and Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. Michael Gold Papers, Fales Collection, Bobst Library, New York University. William Gropper Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, New York. Granville Hicks Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, New York John Reed Club Papers, Tamiment Library Collection, Bobst Library, New York University. Rockwell Kent Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. Louis Lozowick Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, New York, and Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. New Masses Publishing Co. - Related Papers, Tamiment Library Collection, Bobst Library, New York University. Charmion von Wiegand Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 437

comrades in art Art Young Papers, Tamiment Library Collection, Bobst Library, New York University.

books and articles

Alexander, Stephen, ‘Broad-Minded Medici, New Masses, March 20, 1934. ----------------, ‘Revolutionary Front - 1934’, New Masses, November 27, 1934. ----------------, ‘Quintanilla’s Etchings’, New Masses, December 4, 1934. ----------------, ‘Murals By Burck and Laning’, New Masses, January 22, 1935 ----------------, ‘Jacob Burck’s America’ (review of Hunger and Revolt), New Masses, March 5, 1935. ----------------, ‘Raphael Soyer and Arnold Blanch’, New Masses, March 12, 1935. ----------------, ‘Painting, Sculpture and Graphic Art in the U.S.S.R.’, New Masses, March 26, 1935. ----------------, Review of George Grosz at An American Place, New Masses, April 9, 1935. ----------------, ‘Joe Jones’, New Masses, May 28, 1935. American Artists' Congress, ‘Call for an American Artists’ Congress’, New Masses, October 1, 1935, reprinted in Joseph North, ed. New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties, International Publishers, 1972. ----------------, America Today: A Book of 100 Prints, Equinox Cooperative Press: New York, 1936 . ----------------, First Annual Membership Exhibition, foreword by Lynd Ward, Note by Yasuo Kuniyoshi, New York, American Artists’ Congress, Inc., 1937. American League against War and Fascism, Manifesto and Program, 1933, reprinted in Fried, Albert, Communism in America : A History in Documents, New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

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bibliography ----------------, Proceedings of Second U.S. Congress, 1934, reprinted in Fried, Albert, Communism in America : A History in Documents, New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. American Writers’ Congress, ‘Call for an American Writers’ Congress’, New Masses, January 22, 1935, reprinted in Joseph North, ed. New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties, International Publishers, 1972. Arvin, Newton, ‘Literature and Social Change’, The Modern Quarterly, vol. VI no. 2, Summer, 1932. -----------------, ‘Criticism’, Partisan Review, vol 2 no. 7, 1935. -----------------, ‘A Letter on Proletarian Literature’, Partisan Review, vol. 3 no, 1, 1936. Barbe-Marbois, Francois: Our Revolutionary Forefathers - The Letters of Francois, Marquis de Barbe-Marbois 1779-1785, illustrated by William Siegel; New York: Duffield & Co. 1929. Barbusse, Henri, ‘Where Are We Going? A Manifesto’, New Masses, April 1927. -----------------, ‘A Fighting Manifesto’, The Modern Quarterly, vol. V no. 2, Spring 1929. Bard, Phil, No Jobs Today, New York: Young Communist League, 1931. -----------------, It Happens Every Day: A Story in Pictures, New York: Youth Publishers, 1933. Bates, Ernest Sutherland, ‘Picture of American Literature in 1933’, The American Socialist Quarterly, Vol. 2 No. 4, Autumn, 1933. Benton, Thomas H., ‘Art and Nationalism’, The Modern Monthly, vol. VIII no. 4, May, 1934. ---------------, ‘On the American Scene’, Art Front, vol. 1 no. 4, April, 1935. Biddle, George, An American Artists’ Story, New York: Little Brown, 1939. Blume, Peter, ‘After Superrealism’, New Republic, vol. LXXX no. 1039, October 31, 1934. ---------------, ‘The Artist Must Choose’, 1936, speech to American Artists’ Congress, reprinted in Baigell, Matthew et al. eds., Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists' Congress, Rutgers University Press, 1986. Bonch-Bruevitch, ‘From my Recollections of Lenin: An Old Bolshevik About Lenin and Art’, International Literature, no. 2, 1934 439

comrades in art Boswell, Peyton. Modern American Painting. New York, Dodd Mead & Co., 1939. Bourke-White, Margaret, ‘An Artist’s Experience in the Soviet Union’, 1936, speech to American Artists’ Congress, reprinted in Baigell, Matthew et al. eds., Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists' Congress, Rutgers University Press, 1986. Breton, Andre, Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky, ‘Towards a Free Revolutionary Art’, Partisan Review, IV, no. 1, Fall 1938, reprinted in Harrison & Wood Brooks, Obed, ‘The Literary Front’, The Modern Monthly, vol. VII no. 1, February, 1933 to Vol VII no. 4, May, 1933. Broun, Heywood, ‘Artists Must Organize’, 1936, speech to American Artists’ Congress, reprinted in Baigell, Matthew et al. eds., Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists' Congress, Rutgers University Press, 1986. Brovman, A., ‘Leninism and Art’, International Literature, no. 4, 1934. Browder, Earl, ‘Notes on a Review: Hugo Gellert’, New Masses, April 3, 1934. ----------------, Communism and culture. New York: Workers Library Publishers, August, 1941. Brown, Milton W., ‘The Marxist Approach to Art’, Dialectics #2, Critics Group, New York, 1937. ----------------, Painting of the French Revolution, New York: Critics Group, 1937. Bukharin, Nikolai: Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology, New York: International Publishers, 1925. ----------------, ‘Poetry and Socialist Realism’, Partisan Review, vol. 1, no. 5, 1934. ----------------, ‘Crisis of Capitalist Civilization and Cultural Problems of the USSR’, International Literature, no. 5, 1934. ----------------, ‘Crisis of Capitalist Culture’, New Masses, December 4, 1934. ----------------, Culture in Two Worlds, New York: International Pamphlets, no 42, 1934. ----------------, ‘Poetry, Poetics and the Problem of Poetry in the U.S.S.R.’, in Gorky et al., Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934: The

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bibliography Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism, New York: International Publishers, 1934. Burck, Jacob, ‘Sectarianism in Art’, New Masses, April, 1933. ----------------, ‘For Proletarian Art’, American Mercury, March, 1935. ----------------, ‘Benton Sees Red’, , Art Front, vol. 1 no. 4, April, 1935 ----------------, Hunger and Revolt: Cartoons by Burck ; New York: The Daily Worker: 1935. ----------------, letter to New Masses, April 21, 1936 ----------------, ‘Rivera’s Mexico’, New Masses, September, 1939. Burnshaw, Stanley, ‘Notes on Revolutionary Poetry’, New Masses, February 20, 1934. ---------------, ‘Middle-Ground Writers’, New Masses, April 30, 1935. Burroughs, Alan, Kenneth Hayes Miller, New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1931. Cahill, Holger. New Horizons in American Art, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936. Calmer, Alan, ‘Reader’s Report’, New Masses, September 10, 1935. --------------, ‘All Quiet on the Literary Front’, Partisan Review, vol. 3 no. 2, 1936. --------------, ‘Down with “Leftism”’, Partisan Review, vol. 3 no. 5, 1936. --------------, Labor Agitator: The Story of Albert R. Parsons, illustrated by Mitchell Siporin, New York: International Publishers, 1937. Calverton, V. F., ‘Sociological Criticism of Literature’, The Modern Quarterly, vol. 2 no. 1, 1924. ---------------, The Newer Spirit: A Sociological Criticism of Literature, New York: Boni & Liveright, 1925. ---------------, review of Red Cartoons 1926, New Masses, September 1926. ---------------, ‘The American Literary Radicals’, The Modern Quarterly, vol. 3 no. 4, September - December, 1926. ---------------, Introduction to Walt Carmon ed., Red Cartoons: From the Daily Worker, and the Workers Monthly, Chicago: -Daily Worker Publishing Company, 1927. ---------------, ‘For a New Critical Manifesto’, The Modern Quarterly, vol. 4 no. 1, January - April, 1927. ---------------, ‘The Revolution in Russian Literature’, The Modern Quarterly, vol. 4 no. 2, June - September, 1927.

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comrades in art ---------------, ‘The International and Marxian Literature’, The Modern Quarterly, vol. 4 no. 2, June - September, 1927. ---------------, ‘Revolt and Reaction in Contemporary European Literature’, The Modern Quarterly, vol. 5 no. 1, November February, 1928/29 ---------------, ‘Whither Art?’, The Modern Quarterly, vol. V no. 2, Spring 1929. ---------------, ‘The Revolution in the Wordists’, The Modern Quarterly, vol. V no. 3, Fall, 1929. ---------------, The New Ground of Criticism, Seattle: University of Washington Book Store, 1930. ---------------, ‘Humanism: Literary Fascism’, New Masses, April, 1930. ---------------, American Literature at the Crossroads, Seattle: University of Washington Book Store, 1931. ---------------, ‘The Need for Revolutionary Criticism’, The Left, vol. 1, no. 1, Spring, 1931. ---------------, ‘Art and Social Change: The Radical Approach’, The Modern Quarterly, vol. VI no. 1, Winter, 1931. ---------------, For Revolution, New York: John Day, 1932. ---------------, The Liberation of American Literature, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932. ---------------, ‘Leftward Ho!’, The Modern Quarterly, vol. VI no. 2, Summer, 1932. ---------------, ‘Can We Have a Proletarian Literature’, The Modern Quarterly, vol. VI no. 3, Autumn, 1932. ---------------, ‘Open Letter to the New Masses’, The Modern Monthly, vol. VII no. 2, March, 1933. ---------------, The Passing of the Gods, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934. ---------------, ‘T.S. Eliot: An Inverted Marxian’, The Modern Monthly, vol. VIII no. 6, July, 1934. ---------------, ‘Criticism on the Barricades: James T. Farrell and Leon Trotsky’, parts 1 and 2, Modern Monthly, Vol. IX. No 12, August 1936; Vol. X No I, October 1936. ---------------, ‘A Plea for Proletarian Tragedy’, Modern Monthly, March, 1937. ---------------, The Awakening of America, New York: The John Day Company, 1939. 442

bibliography Cary, Elizabeth Luther, George Luks, New York: Whitney Museum, 1931. Carmon, Walt, ed., Red Cartoons: From the Daily Worker, The Workers Monthly and The Liberator - Communist Publications, Chicago: Daily Worker Publishing Company, 1926. ---------------, Red Cartoons: From the Daily Worker, and the Workers Monthly, Chicago: Daily Worker Publishing Company, 1927. ---------------, Red Cartoons: From the Daily Worker, New York: Daily Worker Publishing Company, 1928. ---------------, ‘A New Science’, New Masses, February, 1929. ---------------, ‘Written in Pictures’, New Masses, August, 1931. ----------------, ‘An American Artist in Moscow: Fred Ellis’, International Literature, 1933, no. 1. ---------------, ‘Phil Bard: American Artist: About a Revolutionary Mural Painter’, International Literature, no. 5, 1934. ---------------, ‘Jacob Burck: American Political Cartoonist’, International Literature, no. 2, 1935. Carter, Huntly, ‘The Challenge of the New Russian Art Expression’, The Modern Quarterly, vol. 4 no. 3, November - February, 1927/28. Chernyshevsky, Nicolai Gavrilovich, ‘Life and Esthetics’, International Literature, nos. 6-10, 1935. Communist Party. National Campaign Committee. Communist Election Platform: Against Imperialist War - For Jobs and Peace. New York: Workers Library Publishers, June, 1932. --------------, The election platform of the Communist Party. Ratified at the National Nominating Convention of the Communist Party, USA, held at Madison Square Garden, New York City, June 28, 1936. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1936. Communist Party of the USA. Appeal to Socialists, New York: CPUSA, 1936 Conroy, Jack, Writers in Revolt: The Anvil Anthology, 1933 - 1940, New York, Lawrence Hill, 1973. Cowley, Malcolm, ‘Portrait of a Publisher’, New Masses, January, 1929. ---------------, ‘To a Revolutionary Critic’, New Republic, vol. LXXVI no. 988, November 8, 1933. ----------------, ‘Art Tomorrow’, New Republic, vol. LXXIX no. 1016, May 23, 1934. ----------------, ‘A Note on Marxian Criticism’, New Republic, vol. LXXXI no. 1052, February 6, 1935. 443

comrades in art ----------------, ‘What the Revolutionary Movement Can Do for a Writer’, New Masses, May 7, 1935. ----------------, ‘On Literature and Revolution’, New Republic, vol. LXXXIX no. 1148, December 2, 1936. ----------------, ‘Marx and Plekhanov’, New Republic, vol. LXXXIX no. 1152, December 30, 1936, continued in vol. LXXXIX no. 11153, January 6, 1937. ----------------, ‘Stalin or Satan?’, New Republic, vol. LXXXIX no. 1155, January 20, 1937. ----------------, ‘The Arts in Russia’, New Republic, vol LXXXXIV no. 1219, April 13, 1938.. Craven, Thomas editor. Treasury of American Prints: Selection of 100 Etchings and Lithographs by the Foremost Living American Artists, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1939. Curran, Dale, ‘Only One Subject’, New Masses, April 9, 1935, Daily Worker, Fighting Words: Selections from Twenty-Five Years of the Daily Worker, New York: New Century, 1949. Davis, Stuart, ‘The New York American Scene in Art’, Art Front vol. 1 no. 3, February, 1934. ----------------, ‘Abstract Painting in America’, 1935, reprinted in Harrison & Wood, Art in Theory 1900 - 1990, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. ---------------- ,‘A Medium of 2 Dimensions’, Art Front, May 1935, reprinted in Harrison & Wood, Art in Theory 1900 - 1990, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. -----------------, ‘”We Reject” - The Art Commission’, Art Front, vol. 1 no. 6, July, 1935. -----------------, The Artist Today: The Standpoint of the Artists’ Union’, American Magazine of Art, XXVIII, August 1935, reprinted in Herschell B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art: A Sourcebook by Artists and Critics, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. -----------------, ‘Why an Artists’ Congress?’, 1936, speech to American Artists’ Congress, reprinted in Baigell, Matthew et al. eds., Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists' Congress, Rutgers University Press, 1986. ----------------- ,‘Abstract Art in the American Scene’, Parnassus XIII, New York, 1941, reprinted in Herschell B. Chipp, Theories of

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