| Radical art: art historian looks at activist prints of the ’30s BY SALLY ACHARYA
Photo by Jeff Watts |
It was the height of the Depression. Americans were jobless and standing in breadlines. There were labor strikes in factory and mining towns, lynchings in the South, and fascism was on the rise in Europe. Many artists wanted to make a difference in their troubled times, but they were also frequently among the jobless, since art wasn’t much of a priority to a country singing “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” That’s the context of art historian Helen Langa’s highly praised book, Radical Art: Printmaking and the Left in 1930s New York (2004). It looks at the challenges, aesthetic decisions, and sometimes conflicted goals of a group of artists in New York City who lived at a time of bleakness and turmoil, and tried to make art that both reflected and impacted the world around them. The artists who explicitly addressed the turmoil of the Great Depression were relatively small in number. And they have tended to be overlooked by art historians, in part, Langa says, because tolerance for leftist critiques faded during the war years and then evaporated in the tense anti-Communist atmosphere of the early Cold War. In reality, some of these artists were New Deal liberals, while others were members of the Communist Party. Yet they tended to share a perspective that called for racial equality, labor rights, and opposition to fascism, and often embraced printmaking as a medium well-suited to bring their message to a broad public.
Moses Oley’s “Worker with Mallet” was produced in 1938 for the WPA. Langa points out the sickle in the foreground, noting that “in viewers with leftist sensibilities, it could have sparked several politicized associations.”
|
Printmaking is often treated in art history as a kind of footnote, ranking far below painting and sculpture in importance. Yet the fact that prints could be mass produced gave them a special status among these activist artists in the 1930s. “Art for the millions” is the phrase that was used at the time. “Art has turned militant,” printmaker Mabel Dwight said in a quote highlighted by Langa. “It forms unions, carries banners, sits down uninvited, and gets underfoot. Social justice is its battle cry.” In widely distributed prints, Dwight and other artists searched for visual forms to express the struggles they saw around them. Yet their images also had to be accessible, since they were directed at a mass audience, and created in part out of a desire to create change. They often distorted the figure to create an emotional impact, yet if they went too far in the direction of abstraction, they would risk losing the audience they hoped to gain. On top of that aesthetic challenge came the dilemma of paying the rent. Many of the artists studied by Langa drew a paycheck from the Federal Arts Project of the Works Project Administration (FAP-WPA), which employed out-of-work artists to create posters, murals, and paintings. Their work was bankrolled by the government; how far could they go in their social critiques? Their most radical work was often printed privately. For instance, in a privately funded 1939 lithograph, Elizabeth Olds portrayed Jesus chasing bankers from Wall Street at the front of a parade of workers marching with banners for Social Security and racial equality. The year before, Olds had created a more documentary image of factory workers on the job for the FAP-WPA. Yet the New Deal agency did fund art of unemployed and striking workers, and even such dramatic images as Nan Lurie’s “Technological Improvements,” which shows a despairing line of African American men waiting by a “No Help Wanted” sign as a construction claw drops excess workers into their midst.
Chet La More’s serigraph “Unemployed” (1936-39) was funded by the WPA and highlights the plight of the out-of-work laborers the New Deal agency was formed to address. |
The usual term for this type of work is Social Realism. Langa, though, prefers the term used by artists and critics at the time: Social Viewpoint Art. The term Social Realism, she says, was coined in the 1970s by critics who wanted to reevaluate the art but felt that the term “social viewpoint” was too closely linked with dismissive perceptions of the work as leftist propaganda. In fact, Langa notes, many were close to the Communist Party. Some were party members, while others identified themselves as socialists or shared concerns with the radical left and participated together in groups and activism. In the rhetoric that would take hold in future years, they were “fellow travelers.” But to dismiss them as propagandists, or to envision their politics as directed at the overthrow of the government, is to misunderstand the reasons these artists were attracted to the radical politics of their times, Langa says. In the depths of the Depression, when capitalism did not seem to be delivering on its promises, “socialism seemed like a pretty good alternative to capitalism, and a lot of people did turn to Communism, not understanding its deepest meanings,” she says. Communist leaders by the late 1930s were distancing themselves from revolutionary rhetoric, opposing fascism and racism, and endorsing democratic pluralism. This may well have encouraged leftist and liberal artists to ally themselves with the Communists of their time— unaware, of course, that this alliance could come back to haunt them in the future. Langa’s study grew out of her dissertation work, and a long-standing interest in the social context and uses of the visual arts. Reviewers have called Langa’s book “compelling,” a “landmark study,” and “an indispensable source for students and scholars of twentieth-century American art.” Her work was recognized in October 2006 with an award for excellence in scholarly research and publication from the Southeastern College Art Conference. |
