From the Liberator to Art Front Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt Art
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Art on the Political Front in America: From The Liberator to Art Front Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt Art Journal, Vol. 52, No. 1, Political Journals and Art, 1910-40. (Spring, 1993), pp. 72-81. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0004-3249%28199321%2952%3A1%3C72%3AAOTPFI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-C Art Journal is currently published by College Art Association. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/caa.html. 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For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Sun Jan 13 12:31:12 2008 Art on the Political Front in America From The Liberator to Art Front 72 wo major formulations of the relationship between art occasion, in articles on the "Moscow Art Theatre" (February and society appeared in politically affiliated or 1923) and "The Socialist Theatre in Soviet Russia" (April Taligned magazines in America from the early twen- 1923), both written by Alexander Chramoff. ties to the late thirties. These formulations were "revolution- Although the Liberator was clearly pro-Soviet, the mag- ary art" and "proletarian art." Under these slogans, the issues azine took a nonpolitical position on matters of art. It encour- of the social role of art and the formal characteristics and aged experimentation and freedom in art, addressing bour- techniques appropriate for a politically activist art were geois artists working in modernist styles as well as artists raised. As radical artists in America became overtly pro- seeking to develop an indigenous American art, which, in its Communist during the early thirties, these slogans acquired implicitly unschooled and working-class origins, anticipated more sectarian connotations. From the founding of the Libera- the concept of proletarian art. Eastman expressed the open- tor in 1918 to the last issue of Art Front in 1937, politically ness and nondoctrinaire position of the magazine in its first involved artists and writers debated the conflicting demands issue: of technical and artistic merit versus political content, and THE LIBERATOR will be distinguished by a complete free- the opposition between nationalistic American-scene art and dom in art and poetry and f~twnand criticism. It will be propaganda art founded on Marxist-Leninist principles hav- candid. It will be experimental. It will be hospitable to new ing international application. thoughts and feelings. It will direct its attack against dogmas After World War I, the Liberator (March 1918-October and rigidity of mind upon whatever szde they arefo~nd.~ 1924) assumed the mantle of the Masses (1911-17), a politi- cally conscious monthly that had served as an organ for The earliest suggestion of the concept of proletarian art liberals and socialists prior to the war.' Politically, the Liber- appeared within the first year of publication. In his review of ator aligned itself with labor, as editor Max Eastman stated in the work of Stuart Davis, which appeared in the August 1918 a full-page statement appearing in the first issue: the maga- issue, Eastman associated experimentation and the rise of a zine "will fight in the struggle of labor . for the ownership native art with the tradition of Walt Whitman, commenting and control of industry by workers . will present vivid and that while the advent of a great American art and poetry "has accurate news of the labor and socialist movements in all not fully appeared, there has appeared a mood of reckless parts of the w~rld."~The magazine's sympathy for the Com- experimentation that holds abundant promise of it. And char- munist line was indicated by the third issue (May 1818)when acter indeed, rather than loveliness of line and color, is the Alexander Trachtenberg, a member of the American Commu- principal theme and preoccupation of the experimenter^."^ nist Party, authored the column "International Labor and Describing Davis as having "the character of an alley cat," Socialist Notes." Other contributors expressed pro-Soviet Eastman wrote: "His art lives among the same squalid and sentiments; Floyd Dell, for example, in "Art under the Bol- strong-smelling and left-out objects, and it goes its sordid sheviks," commented that "any American composer or direc- way with the suave dirty muscular self-adequate graceful- tor who is worth his saltn would envy the enthusiasm and ness of p~wer."~Similarly, Lydia Gibson wrote of Adolph freedom for artists that prevailed in Russia." In addition, Dehn's close identification with the subject matter of a lowly interest in the cultural life of Soviet Russia appeared on mother and child: "He is not outside his life; he is one with propagandist business-the artist is not merely the adorer. He is also the critic. The very conditions of his craft make him criticize whatever he looks upon. That is: he selects, re- arranges. So, when his social sense is stronger than his purely visual faculty, he not improbably becomes a cartoonist, ifhe can get a job .I1 The nonpartisan tone of Robinson's definition of propaganda art was more explicitly expressed by Don Brown, a cartoon- ist, who asserted that the very nature of creating works of art made the artist a rebel: Every creative artist is a rebel, a revolutionist. Whether he is in conscious alliance with a revolutwnarygroup or not, he is still a rebel, a creator of nau forms, afoe of stale conventions, an exponent of Conception as opposed to Representation. He knows that a work of art does not have to be about anything, that it is FIG. 1 Stuart Davis. Bolshevism in Bohemia: "Shame! Shame!-you Bourgeois pigs!-to jump on a man when he's sober!" The Liberator1 something.12 (February 1919): 4. Although issues of proletarian art and propaganda art these hills and one with this mutilated and defiant humanity were discussed or alluded to in the Liberator, the visual 73 which wells up so unquenchably in cellar cabaretsn7 Both imagery of the magazine included all formal and thematic common, everyday subject matter and the untrained critic directions. Most of the illustrative material consisted of draw- were given credence. In his reviews, Eastman presented ings and cartoons, principally by Cornelia Barns, Maurice himself as an uneducated commentator on art who neverthe- Becker, Brown, Davis, Fred Ellis, Wanda Gag, Hugo Gel- less knew what he liked: lert, William Gropper, Louis Ribak, Robinson, and Otto I write with a vast uneducation about these matters, but I love Soglow. The tone of these works was mildly critical or satir- some of the paintings so much that even at the risk of offending ical, as indicated by the titles; for example, Bolshism in the more eagle-eyed experts of art, I will makefree to sayfrom Bohemia by Davis fig. 1)and Work like Hell and Be Happy by time to time what I think andfeel about them.8 Gropper fig. 2). Less frequent were figural compositions by Dehn, Gellert, Gibson, Reginald Marsh, Robinson, and Don Brown, in the same vein, wrote that the response of Frank Walts; views of factory buildings by Dehn; cubistically factory workers was "assuredly more sincere and probably rendered cityscapes by Louis Lozowick and Niles Spencer; more intelligent than that of the Metropolitan newspaper and primitivistic woodcuts by J. J. Lankes. In a typically ~ritics."~In these scattered statements are the basic tenets of satirical approach to social commentary, Gag's cover for the proletarian art: the self-deprecating demeanor of the un- October 1924 issue depicted autumn's leaves of red and schooled critic; the unsophisticated worker viewed as a genu- green; each leaf was identified as a country characterized by ine appreciator of art; and the elevation of direct, forthright red (Bolshevik) or green (capitalist). character as the fundamental criterion of art. While these Reflecting the Liberator's dual commitment to politics 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 impor- tant essay, Gold, like Eastman, asserted that a distinctly American art would arise spontaneously in a Whitmanesque fashion from the working-class masses. lo In addition to proletarian art, the idea of propaganda art was also introduced, albeit in a nonpartisan context, in the Liberator. In ''A Letter from Boardman Robinson," the artist wrote: "Should an artist be a propagandist?" I dont think there is any "should" about it. Everyone is a partisan and to some extent a propagandist of what he likes. If he likes what he work like hell adbe happy. thinks to be truth then he is very apt to be a propagandist of it. .Art certainly can't exist until somebody gets interested in FIG.