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Art on the political front in America
Art Journal, Spring, 1993 by Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt
Art Front articles of 1935 and early 1936 promoted the Marxist-Leninist doctrine that the function of revolutionary art was to emphasize the class origins of social struggle and to show a "solution" to the problem, the latter requisite being rarely achieved. The work of the Spanish social-realist artist Luis Quintanilla received high praise from Davis, who found that Quintanilla integrated "the outward world with an inward comprehension and understanding of the forces at play in that world."(37) Similarly, Paul Elliot described Quintanilla as a good example of a painter "effective as an agent of progress and sanity."(38) Critics did not always agree on the success of revolutionary artists' political interpretation and formal presentation, especially their appropriation of techniques from past and modernist movements. In their reviews of the work of John Reed Club artists, Jacob Kainen and Margaret Duroc criticized revolutionary artists for either being too dependent upon borrowed styles or for inadequately analyzing or ambiguously presenting the subject.(39) Jerome Klein warned against the extremes of transforming a scene to "pure ornamentation" or of being indirect or ambiguous in presenting it. He was particularly critical of Isaac, Moses, and Raphael Soyer, whom he described as having "taken a step to the left . . . they have looked out from the studio into the street, but they have not yet stepped down into it."(40) In contrast, Clarence Weinstock praised Joe Jones for his use of line and organization to emphasize the meaning embedded in his subjects.(41) Duroc faulted revolutionary artists for appropriating both High Renaissance and Surrealist styles in what she described as "tokens of sympathy" for the working class.(42) In contrast, Weinstock found that Walter Quirt created a distinctly socialist content while including "suggestions" of Surrealism and the old "proverb idea" used by Bruegel.(43) Though critics differed in their assessment of revolutionary art, Mary Randolph voiced American radicals' general antipathy toward Trotsky in her two-part article "Rivera's Monopoly," in which she accused Diego Rivera, a Trotsky supporter, of painting for tourists and the Mexican government, not for workers, and labeled him a counter-revolutionary.(44)
Abstraction was also debated at length, with writers revealing their respective forms of political activism. On the occasion of Fernand Leger's lecture "The New Realism," delivered at the Museum of Modern Art in 1935, Balcomb Greene and Weinstock wrote conflicting assessments of Leger's abstract idiom. Greene noted that Leger's work, like that of any specialist, "must often fall beyond the comprehension of most people" and argued that "the complete revolutionist," unlike the strictly political revolutionary, who, according to Greene, was incomplete, would welcome a new art that although rejecting literal representation integrated "intellectual and emotional habits toward clarity, conciseness, and precision."(45) In contrast, Weinstock, arguing the social-realist position, dismissed Leger's work as demonstrating "a semi-idealistic relation to the visible world."(46) He opposed two-dimensional abstract painting as lacking a structured and relevant meaning and thereby allowing for subjective interpretation.(47) Davis countered Weinstock's argument with the assertion that the dialectical process required knowledge of the bourgeois tradition and abstraction. He suggested that the abstract artist might be best equipped to provide artistic expression to social problems because "he has already learned to abandon the ivory tower in his objective approach to materials."(48) Phil Bard captured radicals' view of the whimsical subjective techniques of the abstract artist in a drawing depicting the abstract artist painting from the perch of a rocking horse that alluded to Don Quixote's tilting at windmills.
