ART

The character and value of art produced in the United States during the 1930s has been the subject of continuing controversy within the discipline of art history since the 1960s. Though it is true that all art is necessarily accounted for retrospectively, in partial and selective histories, it is especially significant that art from the Depression continues to present a range of intellectual, political, ideological, and aesthetic problems for historians and critics.

In orthodox survey histories, 1930s U. S. art is represented as realist or documentary in form and intention, highly parochial in relation to developments in European modern art, and mostly contaminated by left-wing political motivations. The artists Andrew Wyeth, Ben Shahn, and Edward Hopper are claimed to be the most significant in the period, producing paintings, drawings and photographs that supposedly transcend the specific sociopolitical circumstances of their production. But many others who worked in various neoabstract, expressionist, naturalist, realist, social-realist, or socialist-realist styles, motivated by an equally wide set of artistic and sociopolitical interests and values, have little, if any, presence in post-1945 art-history accounts of the so-called "dirty decade." William Gropper, Lucienne Bloch, Jerome Klein, William Zorach, Raphael Soyer, and Berenice Abbott, for example, were all artists with reputations already established by the mid-1930s, and their exhibitions and views were discussed and advertised in contemporary mainstream art magazines such as The American Magazine of Art and Art Digest, but they virtually dropped out of history as work of the 1930s was repressed or villified in the Cold War climate of the later 1940s and 1950s.

By the mid-1960s there was a reappraisal, for a variety of complex and interrelated reasons. President Lyndon B. Johnson's creation of the National Endowment for the Arts evoked Franklin D. Roosevelt's subvention of the arts in the United States as part of the New Deal. The emergence of the New Left, organized around civil rights for minorities and women and opposition to U. S. involvement in the Vietnam War, sparked interest again in the left politics and debates of the 1930s in which artists, through such organizations as the Artists' Union (AU) and the American Artists' Committee Against Racism and Fascism (AACARF), played an important part. The high modernism of U. S. art in the 1950s, symbolized by abstract expressionism, had begun to give way to a wide range of styles and an interpenetration of art forms and practices that, in turn, led to a less, or at least differently, prejudicial reassessment of 1930s art and art debates.

Unsurprisingly, when scholars turned back to the 1930s they found aspects that linked art practice then to developments in the post-World War II period. These included the art of the proto–abstract expressionists, many of whom had used relatively realist styles during the Depression, often as employees of the WPA's Federal Art Project (for example, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning). Other 1930s artists who produced relatively abstract paintings, prints, and drawings, such as Stuart Davis, Balcombe Greene, Hans Hofmann, and Georgia O'Keeffe, also found their latter-day champions, though for Stuart Davis the cost of this revival in his artistic reputation was substantial neglect of his pivotal role in left-wing art politics in New York in the late 1930s. Francis V. O'Connor's research into art in the Depression, conducted in the later 1960s and published in the early 1970s, highlighted the sociology and demography of U. S. artists, and reconfirmed the significance of New York City as the home and inspiration of perhaps a third of all professional or aspiring professional artists in the country. Study of black and women artists active in the 1930s, including Vertis Hayes, Aaron Douglas, Marion Greenwood, and Minna Citron, reflected the growth of 1960s civil rights and feminism as political and scholarly movements for radical social change. What the 1930s meant in arthistorical terms had changed dramatically by the end of the 1970s, though the determinants within this process of reassessment were broadly social and political.

No other decade in the last century attracts such questions or analytic problems, nor commands such putative coherence. To be called a 1930s artist is no mere chronological label: The term implies that artist and his or her paintings or sculptures somehow reflect or embody the combination of realist intent, style, and socialist or Marxist political motivation associated with the Depression and the New Deal. Edward Hopper, then, though active in the 1930s, is not a 1930s artist and his painting Early Sunday Morning (1930) is not in any significant way a piece of art of the 1930s. Georgia O'Keeffe, similarly, though productive in the decade, created works such as Ram's Skull with Brown Leaves (1936) whose value escapes the ideological posturings and political machinations of the 1930s. In contrast, Stuart Davis, socialist chairman of both the AU and the AACARF (but always highly skeptical of the U. S. Communist Party doctrine on art and political matters), will never escape his association with the 1930s. His Swing Landscape (c. 1938), for instance, is far more in debt to Piet Mondrian and Fernand Leger than to any indigenous social art influence, but it remains a permanent prisoner, too, of the "art of the 1930s." The 1930s, then, means the Great Depression, the optimism (or naiveté, depending on one's perspective) of the New Deal, the moral disaster of the U. S. left's alignment with Soviet communism, and the early moves toward disengagement from ideological commitment toward what Arthur Schlesinger influentially called "the vital center" (Schlesinger 1962).

Roosevelt's reorganization and direction of the Democratic Party and the federal government in the 1930s shaped significant aspects of both artistic production and major art institutions and agencies. The Federal Art Project (FAP, 1935–1943) and the Public Works of Art Project (1933–1934), run by two faithful New Dealers, Holger Cahill and Edward Bruce, respectively, are examples of sui generis New Deal activity. Bruce purchased art works for the nation throughout the decade within United States Treasury-funded programs, though he always claimed that acquiring masterpieces was his goal, rather than developing what more radical New Dealers called the "democratization of culture." The progressive and populist image of the New Deal attracted Thomas Hart Benton, one of the regionalist painters of the period (along with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry). Benton's mural cycle America Today (1930–1931) describes and celebrates small town American life. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, though indebted to European artists and styles for its major exhibitions from the decade, supported aspects of New Deal arts policy with its 1936 show of federal art, New Horizons in American Art. The Whitney Museum of American Art was much more programmatic in its support of contemporary artists in the United States, and had initiated economic support for Depression-hit artists before the federal government intervened in 1933.

The FAP and other agencies that employed artists, designers, and photographers in the 1930s had considerable autonomy from federal government policy, perhaps because, on the whole, New Deal administrators had little or no interest in culture initiatives, which only ever received a minute proportion of federal money. Even this support was often cut off for a variety of political and budgetary reasons, undermining the efforts of artists and people in arts management who wished to see culture become a central element in what they believed was a genuine New Deal revolution. But this autonomy/lack of interest meant that, for the most part, art created by federal employees was free of any required propagandistic meaning. If anything, federal art was accused of left-wing bias. This was the case with August Henkel's Mural (1938) at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, New York, which was censored by the FAP on the doubtful grounds that it contained communist symbolism, and with Diego Rivera's Man at the Crossroads (1933–1934) at Rockefeller Center in New York City, which also was embroiled in ideological controversy.

By 1940, the network of organizations (overwhelmingly based in New York City) set up by artists to lobby for the extension of federal aid, or to support socialist and communist activities against fascism in Europe and capitalism in the United States, had begun to unravel under the weight of state-supported anticommunism. But throughout the 1930s, the thriving of complex and intellectually rich debates formed what was arguably the most significant activity of these groups. This vitalization had never been entirely, or even mostly, dominated by the U. S. Communist Party; it involved independent thinkers and artists such as Meyer Schapiro and Stuart Davis, and it supported and sponsored diverse art forms, ranging from the highly abstract to the doctrinally socialist-realist. This creative plurality is the real legacy of the art of the 1930s.

ART

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