Left Art, to 1940

LEFT ART, to 1940. Certain conditions inspired art movements expressive of the American Left. First, artists had to aware of the economic, political, and social conditions that the Left was either exposing or attempting to reform and overthrow; and second, there had to be a large art-conscious audience and patronage to encourage artists and, when necessary, offer political and ideological leadership.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century American artists such as John Ferguson Weir and Thomas Anshutz painted industrial workers, but no one attempted an ambitious critique of the capitalist system until Robert Koehler painted The Strike in 1886. By upbringing and inclination he was a product of the socialist movement. His parents were sympathetic to radical ideas when they emigrated from Germany to Milwaukee during Koehler’s childhood; later, returning to Germany to complete his art training, he was drawn to socialist ideas. In 1886, at the National Academy of Design, he exhibited The Socialist, a picture depicting a fiery orator vehemently gesticulating to make a political point. This painting was the first to depict not just the dignity of labor but class struggle, as a group of workers gather to confront the factory owner. Koehler realistically shows many degrees of commitment, from militant anger to puzzled questioning among workers and their wives, with the more firmly committed strikers arguing with others to achieve solidarity. Harper’s Weekly reproduced The Strike as a centerfold in its issue of 1 May 1886, the day designated by labor leaders across the country for a general strike for the eight-hour day.

During the Progressive era, liberal-minded patrons increasingly paid attention to images of immigrants, child laborers, and industrial workers, particularly the photographs of the reforming social photographers Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine. Whereas Riis’s photographs often reinforced the widely held belief that the slums could breed criminality, Hine focused on the dignity of poverty and documented working conditions that needed correction. Conservative patrons particularly appreciated more upbeat pictures, ones of workers shown in harmonious relationship with management and the machinery of industry. Edwin Austin Abbey designed a large mural, The Spirit of Vulcan, the Genius of the Workers in Iron and Steel, executed between 1904 and 1908, for the State Capitol rotunda in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In 1911 Everett Shinn painted a mural for the City Hall council chambers of Trenton, New Jersey, representing steel production and pottery making, both important industries of the state.

The images that came closest to depicting class struggle appeared in the popular press. Shinn was one of the Philadelphia newspaper artists who along with George Luks, William Glackens, and John Sloan followed their mentor, realist painter Robert Henri, to New York City at the turn of the century. Like Henri, they undertook to show in their paintings (as they had in their newspaper illustrations) the “spirit of the people” rather than labor per se. Dubbed the “black revolutionary gang” when they exhibited together as “The Eight” in 1908 at the Macbeth Gallery in New York, they diverted American painting away from academic impressionism to “ashcan realism,” even though few of their paintings sold.

Political ideologies then in currency affected the new subject matter. Henri was a philosophical anarchist; Sloan, the most talented, joined the Socialist Party in 1908. Sloan consciously declined to put “propaganda” into his art; he was not about to carry on the tradition of Koehler. Yet he did not hesitate to draw vivid graphic cartoons of the class struggle for the New York Call and the Masses, the radical monthly edited by Max Eastman. Sloan was, in fact, the unpaid art editor of the Masses from about 1913 through 1915, after which his involvement waned along with his withdrawal from Socialist Party activities.

While the audience of the Masses was limited to middle-class radicals and bohemians, other New York intellectual impresarios attempted to reach a broad audience through exhibitions. John Weichsel, a Polish émigré who wrote on aesthetics and taught engineering at the Hebrew Technical Institute, founded the People’s Art Guild in early 1915. The purpose of the guild was to overcome the elitism of artists and to educate the masses who might be moved toward their own creative self-expression by good artistic examples. To this end, the guild mounted more than fifty exhibitions in its first two seasons in settlement houses, public libraries, newspaper offices, Young Men’s Hebrew Associations, and coffeehouses in the Bronx and on the Lower East Side. The climax came with the exhibition of eighty-nine artists and more than 300 works held in the offices of the New York Jewish Daily Forward in May 1917. The guild folded in 1918, but during its heyday its membership included Henri and Sloan (who was given one of his first solo exhibitions under guild sponsorship) along with early American modernists John Marin, Max Weber, Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, and Stuart Davis, all committed at that time to bring art to the people.

The first significant Left art movement dated to October 1929—not because of the stock market crash (which occurred that month), but because a group of Communist Party artists, writers, and their sympathetic friends, meeting informally in the offices of the New Masses for discussions about the function of art in the revolutionary class struggle decided to rent their own space and to form their own club. Called the John Reed Club, its aims were: “... The development of a cultural movement dedicated to advancing the interests of the working class … [and] the defense of the achievements of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics [and] the development of new working-class writers and artists, as well as alignment of all artists, writers, and intellectuals to the side of the revolutionary working class, stimulating their participation in revolutionary activity.”

Members of the John Reed Club, including the artist-cartoonist William Gropper, traveled to the Second World Plenum of the International Bureau of Revolutionary Literature held in Kharkov, USSR, in November 1930. They returned with suggestions for a cultural program along the lines of the experimental, Proletcult movement—a program of Marxist theory and practice—to bring art to the people and encourage art of the people. Soon John Reed Clubs sprang up across the country, and a convention was held in 1932 representing eleven such clubs. The John Reed Club artists put on exhibitions of socially concerned art, some of which traveled to workers’ clubs and to the Soviet Union. The New York club even started its own art school, which included as instructors Nicolai Cikovsky, Anton Refregier, Louis Lozowick, and Raphael Soyer. Although the Communist Party influenced their political activities, many John Reed Club artists maintained that a Party “line” was rarely imposed on their art, since the spirit of individualism exerted a strong force. As might be expected, the most consistently “revolutionary” content appeared in the graphics of the period.
The clubs were disbanded in the winter of 1935, in line with the Communist Party’s new Popular Front policy, formulated in August 1935 at the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International, which called for broad alliances with other socialist and democratic groups to fight against fascism. The new line was incompatible with the John Reed Clubs, which had been associated with a more narrowly political outlook.

When the John Reed Clubs folded, artists turned their attention to the American Artists’ Congress, an organization formed in the fall of 1935 to include acknowledged professional artists of all political persuasions. At that time the goal was to organize for a large conference later held in February 1936 in New York City. The theme of the conference was the struggle against war, fascism, and, as artist Stuart Davis stated, “every manifestation of war-mongering reaction.” The published papers, First American Artists’ Congress (1936), constitute an important document of the times. The congress, which put on exhibitions and provided a forum for ideas, continued until early 1940 when a faction of the membership forced a split over the issue of the Russian invasion of Finland.

Crucial to the Left art movement’s success throughout the 1930s was an audience and a patronage favorable to these artists of social issues. The audience comprised great numbers of the urban intelligentsia: critics, dealers, curators, and labor unionists as well, all of whom encouraged the expression of revolutionary ideas in art. New public patronage also benefited such artists. By the mid-1930s the government had thousands of needy artists on its payrolls through such programs as the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (or, for photographers, the Farm Security Administration). In return, artists such as Allan Rohan Crite, Philip Evergood, Jacob Lawrence, Jack Levine, and Alice Neel periodically submitted artwork or taught in community art schools. Through these programs hundreds of thousands of artworks (murals, easel paintings, sculpture, posters, prints) found their way to hospitals, post offices, municipal and federal buildings, schools, and airports, where they could be viewed by the broadest spectrum of people. This experience of having a common employer—the government—contributed to the artists’ camaraderie and identification with workers. (However, by the end of the 1930s these programs were under attack by Red-baiting congressmen such as Martin Dies of Texas).

Fostering such camaraderie was the Artists Union, formed in September 1933 as the Emergency Work Bureau Artists Group to act as bargaining agent for artists on the government projects. The union, along with the Artists Committee of Action, organized the publication of Art Front (November 1934-Decemer 1937). Art Front was then the premier magazine for Left artists, containing news items, reviews of exhibitions and books, announcements of meetings and rallies, and polemical essays on the political and aesthetic issues facing artists. Major artists and critics of the 1930s wrote for the magazine, including Harold Rosenberg, Meyer Schapiro, William Phillips, Kenneth Rexroth, Irwin Edman, and Elizabeth McCausland (under the pseudonym “Elizabeth Noble”), and artists Louis Lozowick, Philip Evergood, Moses Soyer, Max Weber, Fritz Eichenberg, and many others.

The Public Use of Art Committee of the Artists Union cooperated with trade unions to bring workers art that would have popular appeal. An article in the December 1936 issue of Art Front reported that the Union of Dining Car Employees had suggested “works showing the effect of speed-up on dining car employees; the battle for union recognition on the Santa Fe; antiwar subjects; exploitation of women employed in hotel dining rooms and kitchens; anti-lynching subjects; scenes in the culinary industry; Negro discrimination.” The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters explicitly implored: “Kindly have running through the entire series of paintings relative to the Pullman porters and the Brotherhood a pattern of struggle, sacrifice, and fighting.” The trade unions were mandating social realism with a content of class struggle, and many artists took their requests seriously.

However, the Popular Front policy eventually acted to modify critiques of capitalism since its aim was to unite the workers’ movement with “progressive” capitalists and liberals in the fight against fascism. Also, social realist artworks depicting strikes and lynchings or lampooning well-known capitalists and politicians were unacceptable as submissions to the Works Progress Administration. Thus, both the Communist Party and the government encouraged artists to back away from proletarian politics and to support Roosevelt’s efforts to reform capitalism. As the Communist Party lost its vanguard edge, it was only a matter of time before it lost its cultural influence with artists. Later, when the United States entered World War II, it seemed unpatriotic to paint pictures of class struggle. Many artists further repressed their radical views when they joined the war effort: designing posters, going to the front as artist-journalists, or simply serving in the armed forces.

The rise of abstract expressionism in the post–World War II years was one manifestation of the eclipse of the Left; a new era had arrived, concerned less with social issues and more with aesthetic form, concerned less with collective goals and more with individualized insight. Many reasons have been advanced for this change and its relationship to Cold War ideology; among them are: the conditions of a new private patronage that supplanted government patronage; the promotion of new, individualist philosophies such as existentialism and a redefinition of the meaning of “avant-garde”; the corresponding political swing to the Right, the failure of a Left party to rally against political reaction, and anticommunist pressures on critics and writers; and the new obsession with consumerism, affluence, and control of world markets.

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