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Art on the political front in America

Art Journal, Spring, 1993 by Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt

From The Liberator to Art Front

Two major formulations of the relationship between art and society appeared in politically affiliated or aligned magazines in America from the early twenties to the late thirties. These formulations were "revolutionary art" and "proletarian art." Under these slogans, the issues of the social role of art and the formal characteristics and techniques appropriate for a politically activist art were raised. As radical artists in America became overtly pro-Communist during the early thirties, these slogans acquired more sectarian connotations. From the founding of the Liberator in 1918 to the last issue of Art Front in 1937, politically involved artists and writers debated the conflicting demands of technical and artistic merit versus political content, and the opposition between nationalistic American-scene art and propaganda art founded on Marxist-Leninist principles having international application.

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After World War I, the Liberator (March 1918-October 1924) assumed the mantle of the Masses (1911-17), a politically conscious monthly that had served as an organ for liberals and socialists prior to the war.(1) Politically, the Liberator aligned itself with labor, as editor Max Eastman stated in a full-page statement appearing in the first issue: the magazine "will fight in the struggle of labor . . . for the ownership and control of industry by workers . . . will present vivid and accurate news of the labor and socialist movements in all parts of the world."(2) The magazine's sympathy for the Communist line was indicated by the third issue (May 1818) when Alexander Trachtenberg, a member of the American Communist Party, authored the column "International Labor and Socialist Notes." Other contributors expressed pro-Soviet sentiments; Floyd Dell, for example, in "Art under the Bolsheviks," commented that "any American composer or director who is worth his salt" would envy the enthusiasm and freedom for artists that prevailed in Russia.(3) In addition, interest in the cultural life of Soviet Russia appeared on occasion, in articles on the "Moscow Art Theatre" (February 1923) and "The Socialist Theatre in Soviet Russia" (April 1923), both written by Alexander Chramoff.

Although the Liberator was clearly pro-Soviet, the magazine took a nonpolitical position on matters of art. It encouraged experimentation and freedom in art, addressing bourgeois artists working in modernist styles as well as artists seeking to develop an indigenous American art, which, in its implicitly unschooled and working-class origins, anticipated the concept of proletarian art. Eastman expressed the openness and nondoctrinaire position of the magazine in its first issue:

THE LIBERATOR will be distinguished by a complete freedom in art and poetry and fiction and criticism. It will be candid. It will be experimental. It will be hospitable to new thoughts and feelings. It will direct its attack against dogmas and rigidity of mind upon whatever side they are found.(4)

The earliest suggestion of the concept of proletarian art appeared within the first year of publication. In his review of the work of Stuart Davis, which appeared in the August 1918 issue, Eastman associated experimentation and the rise of a native art with the tradition of Walt Whitman, commenting that while the advent of a great American art and poetry "has not fully appeared, there has appeared a mood of reckless experimentation that holds abundant promise of it. And character indeed, rather than loveliness of line and color, is the principal theme and preoccupation of the experimenters."(5) Describing Davis as having "the character of an alley cat," Eastman wrote: "His art lives among the same squalid and strong-smelling and left-out objects, and it goes its sordid way with the suave dirty muscular self-adequate gracefulness of power."(6) Similarly, Lydia Gibson wrote of Adolph Dehn's close identification with the subject matter of a lowly mother and child: "He is not outside his life; he is one with these hills and one with this mutilated and defiant humanity which wells up so unquenchably in cellar cabarets."(7) Both common, everyday subject matter and the untrained critic were given credence. In his reviews, Eastman presented himself as an uneducated commentator on art who nevertheless knew what he liked:

I write with a vast uneducation about these matters, but I love some of the paintings so much that even at the risk of offending the more eagle-eyed experts of art, I will make free to say from time to time what I think and feel about them.(8)

Don Brown, in the same vein, wrote that the response of factory workers was "assuredly more sincere and probably more intelligent than that of the Metropolitan newspaper critics."(9) In these scattered statements are the basic tenets of proletarian art: the self-deprecating demeanor of the unschooled critic; the unsophisticated worker viewed as a genuine appreciator of art; and the elevation of direct, forthright character as the fundamental criterion of art. While these writers and artists alluded to proletarian art, Michael Gold (here using the pseudonym Irwin Granich) addressed the subject directly in "Towards Proletarian Art." In this important essay, Gold, like Eastman, asserted that a distinctly American art would arise spontaneously in a Whitmanesque fashion from the working-class masses.(10)

Art on the political front in America

Art Journal, Spring, 1993 by Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt

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