1936: Meyer Schapiro, "Art Front," and the Popular Front Patricia Hills Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 17, No. 1, Meyer Schapiro. (1994), pp. 30-41. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0142-6540%281994%2917%3A1%3C30%3A1MS%22FA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-W Oxford Art Journal is currently published by Oxford University Press. 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/oup.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Sun Jan 13 12:07:09 2008 1936: Meyer Schapiro, Art Front, and the Popular Front On November 27, 1935, Stuart Davis wrote to Meyer in February 1936.' The two Congresses would both Schapiro soliciting an article for Art Front, the cultivate professional artists, in contrast to the John monthly magazine of the Artists' Union, then edited Reed Clubs which sought to erase distinctions by Davis. 'I would be extremely pleased if you could between amateurs from working-class ranks and find a way to propose an article on some topic within academically trained professionals. our general policy. A critical article on some The editorial policies of Art Front reflected the outstanding figure in the field ofart (who is in the news coming to terms with this new strategy. At the time at the time of publication) would be very welcome.' when Schapiro was being asked to submit an article, Davis adds that he hopes Schapiro can attend an Davis and the active members of the editorial board editorial meeting scheduled for the next day. Such were hammering out their ambitious plans to meetings served as forums where ideas could be revamp the December 1935 issue into a more shared, attacked, debated, modified and tested out in professional art magazine. Previously, from its first practice, and Davis knew that Schapiro, as a Marxist issue dated November 1934, Art Front had been an polemicist, would contribute to the debates.' eight-page tabloid hawked at demonstrations called Davis's invitation to Schapiro to become involved by the Artists' Committee for Action and the Artists' with Art Front came at a time, 1935-36, when the Union. It had provided a forum for union activities, tactics of the Popular Front strategy of the Com- had cheered on social content in art and had carried munist Party were still being worked out. The on a scrappy debate with Thomas Hart Benton and Artists' Union was firmly in the communist move- John Steuart Curry, whom, along with other ment even if not all members were card-carrying Regionalists, they accused of 'self-glorifi~ation'.~In Communists; the Union had, after all, been largely contrast, the new version of Art Front was to be organized by Party members.' By the end of 1935 smaller in format, expanded to sixteen pages, con- Schapiro had also been immersed for several years in tain better reproductions, and be more diverse in its the movement: he had written Marxist analyses for articles. The new guidelines stated: New Masses as early as 1932, had voted the Com- munist Party ticket in the elections that year,3 and Each issue of Art Front contains reports of activities of the had lectured at the John Reed Club School of Art Union and similar groups throughout the country, during the 1934-35 ~eason.~But a year later he had critical articles on outstanding art events, articles by moved away from the Party. The strains in his rela- experts on the social and economic positions of the artists to day [sic], essays of opinion on esthetic directions, on tionship with the Artists' Union and the Party point the social significance of various 'schools' of art, critical not just to Schapiro's independent Marxist position, analyses of outstanding figures in contemporary art, but they highlight some of the contradictions articles on the technique and craft of painting, editorial inherent in the Popular Front strategy. comment and of course important drawings, reproduc- During 1935, the CPUSA, in line with the tions and photograph^.^ response of the Third International to fascist threats to the Soviet Union, called for a 'united front' - a Davis, an incorrigible list-maker, enumerated issues broad alliance of the Communist Party with other 'which must be kept to the fore in Art Front', one of democratic groups and parties to fight fa~cism.~In which was 'controversial articles by artists and critics the cultural field this meant that Party members and - not in A.U'.1° fellow-travellers would phase out the sectarian, The decision by the editors of Art Front to feature proletarian culture organizations, such as the John contributors outside the Artists' Union - particu- Reed Clubs, and develop broadbased organizations larly men and women ofwell-known expertise -also of artists where leadership would be shared with conformed to the new Popular Front strategy. non- communist^.^ The result was a wooing of non- Schapiro would have been seen as a rising star. He communist writers and artists considered progres- taught at Columbia College and had written sive without overtly recruiting them or otherwise brilliantly on Romanesque sculpture as well as on the making political demands on them. The two Post-impressionists; he would obviously lend stature occasions created by the Party to do this were the to the revamped publication. Other major intel- American Writers' Congress, the first conference lectuals and writers not in the Communist Party (at held by the League of American Writers in April least not openly in the Party), were also invited to 1935, and the American Artists' Congress, just then write, such as Lincoln Kirstein and Irwin Edman, being planned by Davis and others for a conference professor of philosophy at Columbia. The artist Charmion von Wiegand, wife of New Masses editor artist Louis Lozowick participated, outlined on Joseph Freeman, and Elizabeth hIcCausland, art paper the role of intellectuals: critic for the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican who wrote under the pen name 'Elizabeth Noble', had a. The intellectual crystallizes, formulates, and interprets both written for New Masses; they now began writing the motivating forces at work in any age. He thinks, for Art Front as well. These, along with staff writers writes, paints, etc. his feelings about the society in which Harold Rosenberg, Joe Solman, and Clarence he lives. b. In this sense, intellectuals are the chroniclers Weinstock, and frequent contributors Louis Lozo- and interpreters of the movement of events. c. They feel the currents and forces underlying movements before wick, Jacob Kainen, Grace Clements and others, those currents and forces reach the surface, and through would make Art Front the most intellectually stimu- their arts and letters bring them to public attention. d. In lating magazine of art and politics of the mid-1930s." a very real sense, therefore, intellectuals may be pioneers Much has been written about the effects that the and forerunners.I6 CP's Popular Front strategy had on the fellow- travellers, liberals, Lovestoneites, and Trotskyists of To Lozowick's committee, the tasks of American the period.'* Many of these began to accuse the intellectuals are 'propaganda among the workers', Communist Party of selling out to capitalism when it 'helping the workers to articulate both their daily toned down its talk of communist revolution and needs and their class goal', and 'filling strategic posi- joined with the forces of Roosevelt's New Deal. To tions on the cultural front', which meant assuming most Communists, on the other hand, it was a war leadership responsibilities of organizations and measure, necessitated by the fact that the Soviet editorships of their publications. Clearly to Lozo- Union was having difficulty making strategic wick's group, the intellectual's role is to diagnose the alliances with France, Great Britain and the United current situation, to prescribe strategies and tactics States.13 With the Popular Front strategy in place, for, in Lenin's words, 'what is to be done', and then Communist Parties of each nation could build to join cadres working for such goals.17 support for the Soviet Union through citizen groups Through the early 1930s Lozowick and others in and professional organizations. Inevitably, problems the communist movement had thoroughly internal- arose when the Marxist rhetoric of Party function- ized these principles, and hence prescriptive art aries began to accommodate too readily to a liberal criticism became the norm. Movement critics dif- and, in the United States, to a Democratic Party fered only in the degree to which each advocated audience. For example, whereas Party Chairman stylistic imagination and experimentation and in the Earl Browder still spoke of the 'class struggle' forcefulness with which each reminded the audience between workers and capitalists when he addressed of the primacy of working-class concerns.