The rhetoric changes, yet the art endures

American Expressionism

Art and Social Change 1920-1950

Bram Dijkstra

Harry N. Abrams/Columbus Museum of Art: 272 pp., $60

*

This is a marvelous, passionate and irritating book that proposes to retrieve a once-powerful movement in American painting from the rubbish heap of art history.

That lost Depression-era movement has been sloppily labeled Social Realism by the clerks of academic art criticism, with their iron need for categories. The label is unfortunate, as cultural historian Bram Dijkstra states (over and over again), because it suggests affinities with the “socialist realism” of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Each was, of course, political, but they were utterly different.

“The socially concerned artists of the thirties,” Dijkstra writes, “quickly recognized that these modern stylistic means could serve to add emotional depth to their documentation of the plight of the dispossessed. They used the stylistic innovations of the ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ movement to enhance the visual impact of their political statements. In the process, they developed a uniquely American variant on expressionism.”

The 100 or so young artists he prefers to call American Expressionists began to emerge in the 1920s, in the era of Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover and George Babbitt (as imagined by Sinclair Lewis). During that period, a new American art seemed to be emerging in the work of Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry, full of “real” Americans moving through the baroque countryside of the Midwest and West. Their vision was heroic, filled with Americans building, fighting, farming. Some of their work remains valuable, as a failed attempt to create a virile myth of America. At the same time, it depicted a dream world, rural, Jeffersonian (in the sense that it was anti-city), free of Prohibition gangsters, widespread hypocrisy and the infantry of the Ku Klux Klan. It also displayed a stylistic contempt for the breakthroughs of European art, including Expressionism.

But the national palette darkened with the onset of the Great Depression. Much of the emerging American art was produced by immigrants or their children, many of them poor or working-class urban Jews, and their work combined considerable artistic skill with left-wing visions that ranged from revolution to reform. Much of it had a moral component, as old as the Old Testament. Too much of it offered heavy-handed ironies. It’s difficult to generalize about artists with so many styles and viewpoints. But this we do know: The so-called Social Realist painters were making an urban art, their visions emerging from the forcing ground of American cities, in particular New York. Many were nurtured intellectually and aesthetically by the vehement cafeteria culture of Greenwich Village and Union Square, where the air was rich with left-wing rhetoric, hurled anathemas, the burnt offerings of schism.

That world is now lost too, but its ghosts can be sensed from the works reproduced here. Many of the artists are now justifiably forgotten, since they were (as Dijkstra acknowledges) mediocre or worse. But the book opens with a moving account of the 1944 dumping of thousands of canvases made by artists for various Depression-era government agencies. A Long Island junk dealer bought a ton of the bundled canvases for 4 cents a pound from a government warehouse, thinking they’d make good insulation for hot water pipes. He then discovered the unframed canvases were a sampling of the more than 150,000 paintings produced under New Deal arts programs. The lot was quickly sold to a secondhand Manhattan bookstore, and the best of it resold at bargain prices.

Dijkstra -- who has written such books as “Georgia O’Keeffe and the Eros of Place” and “Cubism, Stieglitz and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams” -- gives us another look at some artists whose accomplishments have not been fully recognized or celebrated. Of their work reproduced in this book, I’d like to see more of Joseph Solman, Matthew Barnes and Clayton Price. But the volume (produced in collaboration with the Columbus Museum of Art) also shows us work by many artists who have been honored in the years since their critical heyday. They have not been erased from history, and the selection of their work is gorgeous.

The best (in uniting an artistic vision to social content) was Ben Shahn, born in Lithuania, raised in Brooklyn, an assistant to the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera on the destroyed 1933 mural at Rockefeller Center. But here too are the elegant, off-center paintings of the Japanese-born Yasuo Kuniyoshi; the Italian-born, California-based master draftsman Rico Lebrun; the exuberant painted blues of Jacob Lawrence of Harlem; the crawling, disturbing paintings of Ivan Albright, the poet of decay. Here is the homoerotic mastery of Paul Cadmus. Here is the shimmering dark humor of Jack Levine and the disturbing modern mythologies of Philip Evergood.

There are also paintings in Dijkstra’s book that are interesting documents but worthless art. The works of Anton Refregier, Harry Sternberg, Harry Gottlieb and others give us a taste of the mood of the times; as art they are reminiscent of the later murals of Diego Rivera, where he was illustrating his ideas instead of expressing them.

There are surprises too. I had always thought of William Gropper as a gifted cartoonist of the New Masses school: heroic workers, cruel capitalists, brutal policemen, and all that. But his bold Goya-like paintings in this book have surprisingly fresh power, executed with a vigorous use of paint. Marion Greenwood was a minor figure in the mural movement in Mexico in the early 1930s; her 1958 painting in this book, with its superb draftsmanship, mastery of textures, form and light, suggests that her work deserves much greater attention. Early works by Milton Avery and Philip Guston are fascinating, since we now know that they would later move on to their own versions of Abstract Expressionism. Seeing this early work is like hearing Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie while they worked for big bands.

That “low, dishonest decade,” as W.H. Auden called the 1930s, made much of this art possible, even necessary. It was difficult to paint businessmen’s portraits or geometric abstractions when humiliated men were standing on breadlines. The time demanded an angry merger of art with protest. It was a time, as so many said, to choose sides. Most chose the sides of the unemployed, the trade unions, the Spanish Republic and various sects of socialism, including Stalinism.

When the art markets collapsed after 1929, the arts programs of the New Deal -- most under the Works Progress Administration -- gave some comfort to almost 5,000 artists. Most WPA artists received about $40 a week for basic needs and art supplies and were obligated to turn in one painting a month. Others made murals for public buildings, including many post offices. For the first time in American history, it seemed possible to be a painter and also eat.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the Depression swiftly ended, and so did the era that helped create the Social Realists. Some artists went to war as soldiers, some as combat artists, while others (Shahn was one of them) worked for the Office of War Information creating seldom-used posters. When the war ended, their world had changed.

Disillusionment was common among them. Some abandoned art. Others, painters Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko (WPA artists), for example, became fierce anti-communists and embraced Abstract Expressionism. A few aging cafeteria socialists still made the case for Lenin or Stalin or Trotsky; for most, the whole debate was an old movie. They moved on.

Dijkstra tells the story of the postwar rise of Abstract Expressionism and the decisive influence of the critic Clement Greenberg, who dismissed Social Realist art as “tripe.” Dijkstra elaborates on the familiar theory that the lack of realistic content in the new painting was perfect for the Cold War era. Such art (which had its own right-wing detractors of the my-5-year-old-can-do-better-than-that school) was embraced by big business and those who mounted exhibitions for the State Department, in addition to a new generation of rich collectors. Painters such as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Gottlieb and Rothko were offered to the world as proof of the bold freedoms of American artists in sharp contrast to the imprisoned imaginations of their Soviet counterparts. Artists now discussed theories about painted space, heroic gesture, the push-pull of the picture plane, and ignored talk of strikebreakers. That allowed them to escape the punishment of the revived post-Roosevelt American right-wing, which with the House Un-American Activities Committee, Joe McCarthy and the blacklisters, was trying hard to shove the United States into its own hard demand for political orthodoxy.

This story is important to all who care about American art and society, but Dijkstra often blurs it with grating, windy repetition. Since he is studying shifts in artistic reputation, his narrative wanders through art journals, reviews, museum catalogs and what James Joyce once called Those Big Words Which Make Us So Unhappy.

The text is lavishly illustrated with 182 full color plates and dozens of black-and-white representations. But the artists themselves never come to life, speaking in their own words about the art they made. The book lacks a biographical appendix that could have told us what happened to them after their moment had passed.

In addition, Dijkstra too often sees conspiracy where none might have existed. When explaining the abandonment of the 1930s visions, he never considers that the times, they were a-changin’, and if an artist is rigidly locked into the certainties of youth, he or she will surely look amusingly old-fashioned. An embrace of the Abstract Expressionist faith wasn’t always a surrender to fad, fashion, the marketplace or Greenberg (and his fellow critic, Harold Rosenberg). Those artists who moved on from the 1930s might have had a more human motivation: embarrassment over their gullible or dogmatic 1930s paintings. In that sense, they resembled many 1960s radicals in the 1980s. They didn’t need to deny their youthful (and honorable) passions to acknowledge that a stage of life and art was over.

For all that, Dijkstra’s book should lead readers back to the art itself. The label doesn’t matter. Social Realist or American Expressionist: In the end, who cares?

What matters is the abiding value of the art itself. Time has eroded the issues that helped create that 1930s art, and now the paintings can be judged simply as paintings. Some of them are very good indeed.