Art, Nationalism, Democracy, and Propaganda… Some of the many ideas of American art between the World Wars… American Art in the 1920s and 1930s was fully connected to the social and political context in which it was made. Artists were concerned with creating a truly American art, with integrating their artwork and political and social convictions, and with changing the role of the artist in society. They were also very concerned with surviving the Depression. Artists created propaganda, worked for the government, unionized and were in varying degrees politically and socially engaged. Some actively separated their art-making for money by creating illustrations, children’s books and other mass-market (even in a diminished market) publications while they published radical graphics in socialist magazines. While for years this period of American art was considered un-important, it has recently been the subject of scholarly and popular recognition. More and more people are fascinated with the ways in which artists pictured the world they lived in, used their artwork for political purposes, and worked hard to create an art for everyman. The democratic urges of artists and government programs helped to create artwork which still holds power to communicate about art and history. This history and this art have implications for your classroom. • NYS Standards for Social Studies (Standards 1, 4, 5) • This art is relevant to students lives and interests (visual learners and students with an interest in justice can be easily engaged). • Reading the stories in art from this era helps students gain confidence in reading visual images and in understanding how (and why) artists speak to different audiences. • Artwork created on federally funded art projects helps illuminate the rules and regulations of these programs and how America saw itself during Roosevelt’s New Deal era. • These paintings and prints are fairly easily accessible primary sources which reward active looking and encourage critical reactions. Rachael Baldanza Support for the Gallery’s 2005-06 school programs is provided by Bank of America, Dominion, and the Mary W. Clark Trust. Additional support is provided by the Fred and Floy Willmott Foundation, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas F. Judson Jr., the estate of Estelle B. Goldman and an anonymous donor for the McPherson Director of Education Teaching American History Through American Art Teacher In-Service April 5, 2006 Presenter: Rachael Baldanza Slides shown View of The Armory Show, February 1913 New York City Georgia O’Keeffe, City Night, 1926 oil/canvas. Collection of Minneapolis Institute of Art. John Marin, Region of Brooklyn Bridge Fantasy, 1932. Watercolor on paper. Collection of Whitney Museum of American Art. (hereafter referred to as WMAA because life is too short to type that much…) Stuart Davis, Place pas de Loup, 1928 oil/ canvas. WMAA Windshield mirror, 1928 oil on canvas. WMAA John Steuart Curry, Baptism in Kansas, 1928. WMAA. View of The Mural Show, March 1940 Rochester Thomas Hart Benton, Self-Portrait, 1926 oil on canvas. The Arts of Life in America: Speed, Unemployment, 1932 tempera and oil on wall Both originally made for WMAA library wall Ben Shahn, The Passion of Sacco & Vanzetti, 1931-32. Tempera on canvas. WMAA Study for the Jersey Homestead Mural, c. 1936 tempera on board. William Gropper, For the Record, 1936 lithograph Jacob Lawrence, They arrived in Pittsburgh in large numbers…#45 One of the largest race riots…#52 Both from The Migration Series, 1940- 41, tempera paint on hardboard. Reginald Marsh, Tattoo & Haircut,1932 tempera. Collection of Art Institute of Chicago. Coney Island Beach, etching Peggy Bacon, The Bellows Class, 1918 drypoint etching. MAG collection. Frenzied Effort, 1925 drypoint etching. MAG collection. Mabel Dwight, Burlesque, 1933 lithograph. The Children’s Clinic #2, 1936 lithograph. MAG collection Peggy Bacon, Aesthetic Pleasure 1936 etching. MAG collection Some of the more obscure terms you may hear today…The Left The Mexican Muralists: Diego Rivera, Clemente Orozco, etc. were famous for the success of mural paintings in Mexico, for strong socialist convictions, and for the scandal of the censored Rivera mural Man at the Crossroads at Radio City in Rockefeller Center. A number of young artists, including Ben Shahn, served as Rivera’s assistants at the time and were heavily influenced by his painting and his politics. John Reed Clubs: the most radical of artists gathering spots, these clubs for artists, writers and cultural workers were funded by the Communist Party as part of the Popular Front initiative. John Reed clubs were held in many us cities and offered art classes for all, free of charge, including classes at the St. Louis chapter serving all children in the same de-segregated space. The JRCs were also responsible for a series of radical art shows aimed at presenting a people’s art. The New Masses: was the re-incarnated version of The Masses, a radical paper which was active from 1911 to 1917, and edited by Max Eastman. The Masses featured drawings by John Sloan, Robert Minor and a few by Stuart Davis. The New Masses, was published between 1926 and 1948 and featured the writing and artwork of Max Eastman, Upton Sinclair, Sherwood Anderson, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, James Agee, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, Floyd Dell, Art Young, William Gropper, Albert Hirschfeld, Crockett Johnson, Carl Sandburg, Waldo Frank and Eugene O'Neill. By the mid 1930s the publication was essentially directed by Stalinist Russia. After the Hitler/Stalin pact of 1939, many writers and artists disassociated themselves with the publication. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JmassesN.htm Support for the Gallery’s 2005-06 school programs is provided by Bank of America, Dominion, and the Mary W. Clark Trust. Additional support is provided by the Fred and Floy Willmott Foundation, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas F. Judson Jr., the estate of Estelle B. Goldman and an anonymous donor for the McPherson Director of Education. Peggy Bacon, American (1895–1987) Aesthetic Pleasure , 1936 Drypoint Collection of the Memorial Art Gallery The only child of a pair of artists, Peggy Bacon apparently started drawing when young and never stopped.1 Although her parents discouraged her and in 1913 her own father committed suicide in his studio (sales and shows of his paintings had virtually stopped), Bacon at age 18 was determined to be an artist. She studied at a number of art schools and with the painter Jonas Lie, who set up her first solo show in his own studio. After working with Lie, she enrolled in classes at the Art Student’s League in New York, where she met a group of painters and printmakers many of whom also became leading artists of the day. While an art student, she began drawing caricatures of her fellow students and working with drypoint printmaking. In 1920, she married fellow artist Alexander Brook with whom she had two children. She drew constantly and produced many prints which soon garnered her critical and popular success. She enjoyed writing and illustrating books and in 1927 Macmillan Press published the first of a series of children’s books, The Lion-Heated Kitten and Other Stories, based on the stories she told her own children. Through the 1930s, Bacon continued to create witty prints which ridiculed the human condition or exaggerated the physical characteristics and foibles of well known artists, writers and politicians. In 1934, she was awarded a Guggenheim Artist’s Fellowship which allowed her to publish a book of caricatures of famous people, Off with Their Heads! In 1936, she began teaching at the Art Students League. Her books, illustrations, prints and teaching jobs were steady enough that when asked in a later interview how she was affected by the Depression, Bacon replied, “Not at all.” 2 Self Portrait of Peggy Bacon, from Off With Their Heads! New York: Robert M. McBride, 1934. This print is in the Graphic Arts Division, Gift of Frank Jewett Mather Jr. Princeton University Library http://infoshare1.princeton.edu/rbsc2/ga/unseenhands/printers/bacon.html 1 Roberta Tarbell, Peggy Bacon: Personalities and Places. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1975. 2 As stated in Interview with Peggy Bacon conducted by Paul Cummings at the artist's home in Cape Porpoise, Maine, May 8, 1973 located in the Archives of American Art and available for download on its website at http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/bacon73.htm Thomas Hart Benton, American (1889-1975) Boomtown, 1927- 1928 oil on canvas Collection of the Memorial Art Gallery Thomas Hart Benton was the son of a prominent Missouri congressman. He developed an interest in art and as a young man went to Europe, dabbled in modern art, and became actively interested in socialism. In 1924, as he returned to his hometown to be with his father, Benton had an epiphany: I cannot honestly say what happened to me while I watched my father die and listened to the voices of his friends, but I know that when, after his death, I went back East I was moved by a great Desire to know more of the America which I had glimpsed in the suggestive words of his old cronies…1 From 1926 to 1935, Benton taught classes at the Art Students League but he was increasingly more interested in the Middle West than in the New York art world. He took sketching trips across country to see the real country, including such spectacles as the boomtown of Borger, Texas and in 1928 this became his first major Regionalist painting. He defined his paintings by their American subject matter (folk stories, popular songs, and his own distinct reading of American history and culture) and by their ability to be read by ordinary people.