Evergood, Philip

EVERGOOD, PHILIP (1901–1973). Beginning in the early thirties and continuing until his death, Philip Evergood painted socially and politically engaged images. His most partisan paintings date from the thirties. During that decade he joined numerous artistic organizations affiliated with the Communist Party, and in many cases he became an active leader in them. In the early thirties he exhibited works at the John Reed Club in New York and attended the club’s forums. He helped organize the Artists Committee of Action and the Artists Union and eventually became the president of the Artists Union. He was a member of the executive board of the American Artists Congress during the Popular Front and joined the Artists League of America during the Second World War.

Throughout the thirties and early forties, Evergood wrote and spoke prolifically on artists’ economic rights and their social and political responsibilities. He also ardently defended social realist art against those who accused it of being propagandistic. His own paintings from the thirties often take up themes of fascism and labor, and he donated a number of these paintings to exhibits organized to raise money for Spanish refugees and Russian relief. Although after World War II Evergood still addressed social and political issues in his paintings, these works are more symbolic and less topical than his works from the thirties.

Baur, John I. H. Philip Evergood. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1975.

Hemingway, Andrew. Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement 1926-1956. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.

Hills, Patricia. “Philip Evergood’s The American Tragedy: The Poetics of Ugliness, the Politics of Anger.” Arts, 54 (February 1980).

Taylor, Kendall. Philip Evergood: Never Separate from the Heart. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1987.

Whiting, Cécile. Antifascism in American Art. New Haven: CT: Yale University Press, 1989.

Philip Evergood. Smithsonian Museum of Art. https://americanart.si.edu/artist/philip-evergood-1473