Kitsch, Propaganda, and the American Avant-Garde [1 ed.] 1527594114, 9781527594111

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Kitsch, Propaganda, and the American Avant-Garde

Kitsch, Propaganda, and the American Avant-Garde By

Michael J. Pearce

Kitsch, Propaganda, and the American Avant-Garde By Michael J. Pearce This book first published 2023 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2023 by Michael J. Pearce All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-9411-4 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-9411-1

This book is dedicated to my father Ronald Pearce, and to my beautiful wife, Aihua.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ..................................................................................... ix Introduction ................................................................................................ x Bohemian Rhapsody ................................................................................... 1 The Birth of the Avant-Garde ................................................................... 23 Red Stars................................................................................................... 35 Rejects ...................................................................................................... 60 Individuals and Anarchists ....................................................................... 78 Socialist Realism .................................................................................... 100 The Fisher King ...................................................................................... 117 Plumber’s Wages .................................................................................... 138 Miscarriage ............................................................................................. 162 Man at the Crossroads ............................................................................ 178 Red Right Hand ...................................................................................... 201 Primitive ................................................................................................. 219 Dark Arts ................................................................................................ 234 The Day of German Art .......................................................................... 260 The Kitsch Antinomy ............................................................................. 278 An American Avant-Garde ..................................................................... 291

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French Fry .............................................................................................. 319 Elephant .................................................................................................. 358 Bibliography ........................................................................................... 383 Index ....................................................................................................... 392

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I could not have written this book without the help of many people and institutions. Melissa Pincus, Nancy Kim, Lala Badal, and Jennette Bristol were all tremendously supportive and helpful at the Pearson Library at California Lutheran University. Julian Baker was a generous host, allowing me to visit his home to see the entire archive of materials left by his stepfather Clifford Wight. I am exceedingly indebted to my beloved Aihua Zhou Pearce, to Joseph Bravo, David Ian Rose, and to Graham Toms for allowing me to read drafts of the chapters to them, and for their constructive support. Your patience and encouragement made this book possible. Conversely, my selfless editor Jim Willis dedicated many, many hours reading the manuscript to me and we spent countless thoroughly enjoyable mornings and afternoons worrying about punctuation, and style, and words. Without his thorough attention to detail, this book would not be as readable as it is. I am so very grateful to you, Jim. I used archive materials from: The American Presidency Project Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Leo Baeck Institute Archives, Memoir Collection Julian Baker Archive C.I.A. Records Varian Fry papers, Columbia University Gallica Randall Bytwerk Archive of German Propaganda, Calvin College National Archives, Records of the Office of Strategic Services Oral History Program, University of California Los Angeles Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum Ralph Stackpole papers, Bancroft Library, Berkeley Syracuse University Libraries Special Collections Research Center

INTRODUCTION

Some conversations sow the seeds of doubt and provoke more questions than answers. But some, through careful investigation and determination, tease out the threads of truth and resolve the annoyances of uncertainty into a satisfying, almost climactic conclusion. For years Joseph Bravo and I have had a very long conversation about the nature of art. Every week, sometimes two or three times a week, we have spoken about the nature of the avantgarde and the nature of representational art, and the nature of painting and sculpture. We have talked for thousands of hours about these subjects, and dissected them with fresh insights. The currents of this singular, deep conversation have risen and fallen following the swells and dips of our lives, and have developed an irregular rhythm punctuated by delights and celebrations, deaths and crises. We have talked together on three continents, on telephones, through Facebook messenger applications, in person, and at home, but in all these various locations and through all this media, there was always one conversation that threaded itself through the dialogue. This book would not exist if we had not had this conversation. Sometimes Joe wrote one of his famous social media comments and I recognized my ideas in this. Sometimes I wrote a chapter and Joe heard his ideas in that. The dialogue has become a synthesis of thought, and by now it’s hard to separate whose thought originated in whose head. It began as a conversation about the corrosive relationship between kitsch and representational art that began soon after I had published my first book, Art in the Age of Emergence. I wanted to know why the acidic idea of kitsch was so pervasive in the hostile 20th century rhetoric that was aimed at representational painting. It didn’t make sense. According to the theorists who dominated the American avant-garde, kitsch was the antithesis of true art. Kitsch was fake, and evil, and sentimental, and did not deserve to be included with serious art. The idea originated with Plato’s expulsion of the artists from his ideal republic because their imitations of objects were three steps removed from the One, the maker of the universe. All ideas of things began with this creator, and all reality was an imitation of these ideas – consequently artists could only imitate an imitation - and therefore their doubly imitative work could never represent the truth, but only appeal to the untrustworthy sentiments of the viewer, not his detached, analytical, philosophical self. The idea of kitsch was

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tied to representational art with a Gordian knot. The truth about twentieth century art is sharp enough to cut the knot. Although the vast majority of ordinary, non-specialist people clearly favored representational art – comics, magazine illustrations, posters, calendars - most art magazines and academic writers refused to pay any attention to it. What inspired this classist elitism and this tremendous hostility to popular art? Why did America abandon its venerable artistic traditions of representation? Where did the avant-garde come from, and what, exactly, was it? Avant-gardism finds its historical roots in socialist thought. Why then, was the capitalist, deeply materialist American avantgarde elitist and anti-populist? Surely, if avant-garde art was socialist, it should represent the proletariat - why then, were certain works of art held up as exemplars when there was no obvious relationship to class struggle in them? Why did America’s bourgeois industrialist aristocrats and political leaders support avant-gardism? At first, I thought that the book would be a pleasant study defending the ideas behind the sensual representational art of the past and the present, but it soon became clear that without the avant-garde, kitsch simply didn’t exist. To answer my questions, I had to examine the history of avant-gardism, to understand what it was, where it came from and why it came into being. Avant-garde art had its proto-communist origins in France, where it was conceived as a militant tool explicitly wielded for propagandizing the revolutionary cause of collectivists, then later fully applied under the tyranny of the Soviet Union. Although the avant-garde originally belonged to bohemia, it was not the dominant strain of bohemia that its politicallymotivated proponents claimed. Avant-garde was a sub-thread of the symbiosis of the bohemians and the bourgeoisie that has existed since the French and American revolutions overthrew the old aristocratic order and engendered the modern, post-feudal, bourgeois, capitalist culture we still live in today. Bohemia simply cannot survive without bourgeois capitalism. Since those revolutions, bohemian artists have continually attempted to satisfy the bourgeoisie’s hunger for novelty within the free market economy. Whenever government has been involved in art, it has distorted the natural interdependence that connected the bourgeoisie and the bohemians. Although bohemians frequently oppose bourgeois values and deliberately subvert them, that is part of their function within our complex society of the spectacle, and their endless rebellion is an essential part of the capitalist marketplace for art. Although governments have attempted to reroute the bohemian narrative by funding artists for their propaganda, the rapid disintegration of avant-garde into the poorly-named era of

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postmodernism at the end of the cold war quickly revealed how, when bohemia was left to its own devices, political art was a subset within the bohemian rebellion, and most certainly did not encompass the entirety of its art. True bohemians admire anarchic and novel creativity. True bohemians would rather die than join any club that would have them as a member, and prioritize making art over everything else, including politics. True bohemians are Marxists – but they follow Groucho, not Karl. A lot of art history is written backwards, by first looking at images, and then deciphering their meanings and their relevance, as if it were artists who shaped the destiny of culture. Actually, art always follows money, whether it is found in the hands of the wealthy who wish to decorate their homes, or in the hands of powerful ideological governments. In the twentieth century the American avant-garde became a propaganda tool, and vast amounts of money flowed into it from the hands of the powerful, who used it to shape the minds of their people. There is always a complex relationship between art, money, and power guiding the erratic development of cultural streams. In Kitsch, Propaganda, and the American Avant-Garde, I have especially looked for these relationships in the history of the avant-garde. The American avant-garde did not achieve its position only because certain bohemian artists decided to follow a primrose path of reductively exploring media rather than mimesis, but also because very large sums of money changed hands, because it suited political needs, especially those of Nelson Rockefeller and Franklin Roosevelt, who astutely saw the necessity for crafting art into domestic propaganda, first in the form of paying for huge amounts of social realist painting in an attempt to raise America from the great depression, and then quite deliberately switching to funding individualist avant-gardism as a counter to the impressive aesthetic efforts of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. The depression led many to think that (Karl) Marx was the antidote to capitalist failures, and many of Roosevelt’s New Dealers were enthusiastic socialists. Those involved in the Federal Art Projects claimed the powerful support of two ideological pillars: the Mexican muralists and the aesthetics of John Dewey. The principle Mexican muralists, Diego Rivera, David Siqueros, and José Orozco were all staunch communists of different varieties, and John Dewey was a socialist democrat supporter of Leon Trotsky. With these Marxist pillars supporting the temple of American art, it was inevitable that when Stalin revealed the extent of his tyranny by allying himself to Hitler to attack Poland, the United States should seek an alternative to the embarrassment of using social realism – which was now clearly the art of the enemy - as its propaganda. Both Stalin and Hitler had

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embraced representational art to propagandize their people, and oppressed individualism. In 1939, Rockefeller and Roosevelt opened their arms to American avant-garde art to symbolize the individual liberty of America’s citizens. Using the Museum of Modern Art as its flagship, this newly branded American avant-garde became a weapon precisely at the beginning of the Second World War, when Hitler’s aesthetic state required an allied response. After 1939, the word ‘avant-garde’ was used in a new, assertive, and specifically American context by Clement Greenberg and Edward Jewell, to describe anti-conservative, radically individualist, progressive art, deliberately positioned as the antithesis of representational art. Kitsch, Propaganda, and the American Avant-Garde provides a path through the last three centuries of art history that has been neglected in the received narrative of the avant-garde hegemony. I have depended upon firsthand accounts and sources as much as possible, because I dislike the artificial and saccharine flavor of propaganda that stains many of the histories I have tasted, and I don’t want my readers to taste it in my writing. I sincerely hope the book will make the acolytes of the avant-garde uncomfortable, because while they have imagined themselves to be rebellious and cutting-edge and counter-cultural, in fact the US government has used them as either oblivious or willing tools of the state. This is the elephant in the avant-garde room. Michael J. Pearce Thousand Oaks, Spring 2023

BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY

“The greater number of our contemporaries who display the noblest blazonry of art have been Bohemians, and amidst their calm and prosperous glory they often recall, perhaps with regret, the time when, climbing the verdant slope of youth, they had no other fortune in the sunshine of their twenty years than courage, which is the virtue of the young, and hope, which is the wealth of the poor.”1 Henry Murger, Bohemians of the Latin Quarter

The industrial revolution had dramatic consequences upon France. It produced a proletarian class of workers whose hands fashioned products for the consumption of the capitalist society, and a bourgeois class of people who controlled the means of production through their ownership of businesses, or through financial control, and it also created the circumstances for the prosperity of a petite-bourgeoisie, which rose from the proletariat to create a burgeoning class of people who were neither entirely dependent on their own labour to generate an income, nor rich enough to employ large numbers of workers to do the work for them. The bourgeois class had been developing slowly since before the Renaissance, but with the wealth brought to them by the innovations of the industrial revolution this class of city-dwellers had flourished. The revolutions that transformed Europe and America in the 18th and 19th centuries were essentially bourgeois revolutions that saw the monarchy and aristocracy of the obsolete feudal system lose their grip on power. No more divine right of kings – now the government was to be representative of the people, a constitutional rule by elected officials. The bourgeoisie protected itself. As this huge and booming class of people thrived, it stratified: at the top of the social ladder the “haute-bourgeoisie” were the major controllers of wealth and of the means of production – the people we now call the 1% – and at the bottom, the aspiring petite-bourgeoisie were working class people who wanted to raise themselves up, to own property, and live the good life. Between the two, the bulk of the bourgeoisie made up the middle class. Beneath the petit-bourgeois were the proletariat, who were the people who worked in return for a wage. It was in this new, bourgeois world that a new kind of art rose up, leavened by the bohemians. The bourgeoisie wanted pictures of themselves, and pictures of the things that interested them, but they wanted them on

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demand, not as the product of patronage. Art was no longer the product of the court, in which artists might be supported for life upon aristocratic whims, now it was merchandise to be bought and sold in the marketplace like any other product. But while art was merely a specialized consumer product to the bourgeoisie, to the bohemians it was the most important thing in the world. A bohemian is a person who chooses a rebelliously individualistic, unconventional, anti-bourgeois, and usually impoverished lifestyle in order to be able to pursue an artistic vocation. It seems likely that the first literary use of the word to describe impoverished artists living a libertine life came as early as 1790, in an obscure novel titled The Bohemians, written by the Marquis de Pelleport while he was imprisoned in the Bastille for four years for profiting from writing scurrilous libels (one of his cellmates was another fallen libertine, the Marquis de Sade, who wrote Justine during the same period). But hardly anyone read the novel; it almost disappeared without trace amid the turmoil that followed the revolution, and only a handful of copies survive in library archives today. Nevertheless, something resembling the gypsy lives of post-revolutionary artists – the prototypical bohemian lifestyle – had been described, and it flourished namelessly in the cheap districts on the outskirts of Paris, where young artists congregated, filled with hope that they might live the artistic life, and shape a career for themselves. In English, ‘bohemian’ had quickly entered the lexicon as a euphemism for ‘gypsy.’ Appropriately, one of its early appearances was theatrical, when it was used in 1832 to describe the costume of a gypsy character in a play titled La Tour de Nesle, by Alexandre Dumas. Mary Shelley used the word to describe a horde of gypsies in her Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck of 1830, and Walter Scott used it in the same year in his The Astrologer. Something of the disreputable character of artistic bohemians as subversives was already becoming evident in Scott’s novel Quentin Durward, which included a chapter titled The Bohemians. In the introduction to the novel, Scott describes gypsy bohemians infiltrating and causing dissent throughout France: “A hundred secret combinations existed in the different provinces of France and Flanders; numerous private emissaries of the restless Louis, Bohemians, pilgrims, beggars, or agents disguised as such, were everywhere spreading the discontent which it was his policy to maintain in the dominions of Burgundy.” The “damned bohemians” of the story were “vagabonds,” “cursed,” “faithless,” and “outcasts.” Although these characters were actually gypsies, not artists, Scott’s readers learned directly about the individualist lifestyle from the mouth of a bohemian character who had no religion, no home, and no property except

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“the clothes which I wear, and the horse I ride on.” Scott’s bohemians were “descended from the sage Chaldeans, who did read the mysteries of the stars in the plains of Shinar,” and he cast his principal gypsy, Zingaro, as a palm-reader. He lived under no law, and acknowledged no obedience to anyone unless it suited him. He lived freely, with no allegiance to any master: “I eat when I am hungry, drink when I am thirsty, and have no other means of subsistence than chance throws in my way.” His perplexed questioner demanded of him, “What is it that remains to you, deprived of government, domestic happiness, and religion?” The bohemian’s answer was, “I have liberty …I crouch to no one—obey no one—respect no one. I go where I will—live as I can—and die when my day comes.”2 His casually independent amorality was libertine, and while he had lived as a free and anarchic spirit, he had also murdered and stolen without conscience. But it was in France that the word was used to describe a certain species of decadent young artists. In 1834, the journalist Felix Pyat wrote a sarcastic description of these artists, using the word “bohemian” to describe them. Already Paris was flooded with young people who enthusiastically pursued the artistic life – Pyat said they had all caught a disease, which he called “artistism.” He said that the youths who had caught this contagion all showed the same symptoms of decline – it manifested itself first as a sickness in the brain which attacked reason – first to go was the use of razor and soap, and the afflicted victim’s beard was sure to grow rapidly. Then he would change his appearance – his hair would grow long, his skin colour would turn leaden, and his voice would be affected. Soon he would develop a taste for writing poetry and a thirst for drinking punch, heavy smoking, and acquiring substantial debts. The treatment for the contagion of artistism was to avoid intimacy and gaiety, to eat solid food, to stop going to vaudeville shows, skip admiring sunsets, quit daydreaming, and resume shaving. Leaving Paris was the most effective cure, along with abandoning any interest in the Middle Ages, studying mathematics, returning to provincial society and putting on a white cravat, the uniform of the bourgeoisie. But an even more effective treatment of the truly desperate could be made by “the application of scissors to the head, and a daily regime of the razor.”3 Mocking pretension, Pyat said everyone in Paris claimed they were an artist, even a Dr. Allbutt, who had invented a contraceptive douche pump called a ‘clysopompe,’ and “hairdressers, vaudevillians, glass-makers, theater shareholders, pedicurists, coffee boys, deputies, scrapers, fashion merchants, the Minister of Fine Arts, ticket-sellers, trick dogs, the academicians, educated elephants, working fleas, the men and beasts of Franconi’s circus.”4 Art was like a religious cult which everybody wanted to join, but its true priests were the

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real artists, and nothing, not even all the long hair in the world, would help those aspirants who were not creative in any way – these fake bohemians might as well be members of the national guard, polishing their equipment. Nevertheless, the subculture gradually grew. The poet and journalist Théophile Gautier described a passionate, romantic embrace of art as the defining principle of the bohemians: “One and the same characteristic is common to all the early works of that period: overflowing lyricism and striving after passion. The main points of the programme which every man endeavored to carry out to the best of his ability, the ideals and the secret desires of the Romanticist youth, were to freely develop every caprice of thought, even if it offended taste, conventionality, and rule; to hate and repel to the utmost of one's power the profane vulgar, as Horace called it, the grocers, Philistines, or bourgeois, as the mustachioed and long-haired young painter students named them; to celebrate love in terms that might set fire to the paper on which one wrote; to set it up as the sole end and sole means of happiness, and to sanctify and deify Art, which was to be upheld as a second Creator.”5 The bohemians experimented with hashish and opium. Napoleon Bonaparte’s armies had discovered hash-eating while they were in Egypt, and brought it back to France with them, where it aroused great interest among people who heard of its apparently imagination-enhancing gifts. In the 1830s, Gautier and his romanticist friends drank at the Petit Moulin Rouge, then a simple red-painted tavern in the great waste spaces of the Champs-Elysées before their development, among a few dodgy bars scattered among a sprinkle of houses in the shade of dark trees along the roadway to Neuilly. It was a simple whitewashed room with sand strewn over the floor to catch the spills and spit of drinkers, and a tin-covered countertop, with earthenware cups and jugs, simple iron cutlery, benches, and tables repurposed from wood planks pulled from old boats. A room was reserved for club dinners, and a private room was available for the monied folk, opening out to a hillside garden available for wine and beer. Here they indulged their romantic fantasies of living like Lord Byron at Newstead Abbey. Gautier declared that his friend Gérard de Nerval once made a cup from the skull of a soldier he took from his father’s collection of anatomical samples, and the company solemnly drank wine from it as a gesture aimed against the bourgeoisie, “through sheer bravado, and weariness and disgust of your solemn stupidity.” 6 The artists gathered in the poorer parts of the city, where they could afford to live in studio spaces that allowed them to develop their creative work without the expense of high rents such spaces would cost in wealthier parts of the metropolis, although some bohemians were in favor of

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establishing communes in the countryside, following the utopian principles of Charles Fourier. Sexual license, free love, permissiveness, drug and alcohol use, and communal living, characterized the urban bohemian life. The bohemians had an argot of their own, a filigree of phrases composed of the jargon of the ateliers and the prose of the pamphleteers, an idiomatic salsa of flowery phraseology muddled with the coarseness of street slang, and the craft of lyric poetry. They spoke like Cyrano de Bergerac, with quick irony, and sharp intelligence, using a language nearly incomprehensible to outsiders, with a vocabulary that was, “…the hell of rhetoric and the paradise of neologism.”7 Pyat describes them using an elitist argot similar to Pig Latin, replacing the last syllable of each word with a commonplace term. Thus, the word “grocer” would become “groce-mar;” an “artist,” an “artis-mar.” They tried to stand out from the bourgeoisie by wearing eccentric clothes, unfashionable flat Dutch hats of soft felt, velvet cloaks tossed dramatically over the shoulder, doublets and frogged jackets, and braided Hungarian coats.8 Gautier liked to wear a kaftan and fez, rather than the bourgeois uniform of hat and coat. Describing the mood, Gautier said, “A sap of new life was running hotly; everything was germinating, budding, blooming at one and the same time; intoxicating scents filled the air, which itself went to the head; men were drunk with lyrism and art.”9 It was a brilliant time. Gautier said, “It was all so youthful, so new, so richly colored, and of so strange and intoxicating a savor, that it turned our heads and we seemed to be entering into unknown worlds.”10 The theatre was in turmoil with the introduction of new dramas led by Victor Hugo. Eugène Delacroix had smashed down the doors of the salon with his romanticism. Hector Berlioz appeared to be single-handedly reinventing music. Walter Scott was in full flow. A new translation of the works of William Shakespeare by Pierre Le Tourneur had reintroduced the great playwright to Parisian intellectuals. Lord Byron’s poetry had made the exotic east feel immediate, and inviting. Nerval published a French translation of Goethe’s Faust in 1828, twenty years after its first edition in German. When Hugo heard early in 1830 that classicists planned to disrupt the opening of his new play Hernani by hissing the performance, he placed Nerval in charge of recruiting a large crowd of enthusiastic young romantics, thus ensuring that the drama would be applauded as much as it was hissed, and would certainly get the attention of the press. By now Gautier was among Nerval’s friends, and gleefully received six of the tickets from him, given to him upon his solemn assurances that he would bring only trusted men to the performance. From friends at his art school (he was then an aspiring painter) Gautier chose two “ferocious romantics who would

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willingly have fed upon the body of a member of the academy.”11 They were joined by two young poets and one of his cousins. They even had a password, “Hierro,” stamped onto the bright red tickets Nerval had prepared for his recruits. To prepare themselves for the opening these young bohemians deliberately raided the second-hand clothes stores, creating crazy capriccios of costume, from all periods of history, dressed in mad costumes for the event, deliberately contrary to the conventional black suit customarily worn to the theatre. A contemporary drawing of the audience at the premiere shows a crowd of men in an extravagant variety of get-ups, their heads like a barbershop clip-book of hirsute tonsures, and in the foreground a short, pretty, long-haired person, who is either an effeminate young man, or a cross-dressing young woman, gazing directly at the viewer, besuited and posing in the classic stance of an aesthete, contrapposto with arms akimbo, one hand stretched out to rest upon the head of an angled cane, its point at the toe of a shining shoe, and the other hand placed assertively on their hip. Gautier famously wore an absurdly bright red waistcoat, made especially for the event. He loved the color and wanted to reclaim it from the revolutionaries of 1789, and carefully avoided the pure revolutionary red by dying the Chinese vermilion satin himself with a little admixture of purple. To offset the waistcoat, he wore light sea-green trousers trimmed with black velvet and a grey overcoat with a green satin lining.12 It was a costume deliberately designed to irritate the bourgeois opposition and it made such an impression that people still spoke of it when talking about Gautier years later. The event was more dramatic than the play. The classicists who wanted French theatre to retain its elegant but static formulas hissed, but the bohemians, passionate romantics who were sick of the stagnant conventions that had frozen poetry and drama into a rigid formula, and wanted feeling and desire to pervade the arts, cheered. Arguments and scuffles broke out while the actors attempted to deliver their lines. Gautier attended the play thirty times as a member of Hugo’s claque, and he and his friends could recite all the words of the play by heart and often ran through it to amuse themselves. The bohemian subculture had arrived and would persist throughout the next two centuries, emerging in all of the major cities of democratic capitalist states. As bourgeois capitalism spread throughout the world, it carried bohemia with it. Far away across the Atlantic, the Americans were too busy settling their new lands and fighting out their nasty civil war to focus on building an artistic culture, and the undisputed international epicenter of the bohemian-bourgeois art world of the 19th century was Paris.

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The socialist revolution of 1848 was bloodily crushed. A persecution of the leftists followed, with mass shootings, deportations, and censorship employed among the tools of their destruction. Soon there was little thought of rebellion against the new regime. After Louis-Napoleon’s coup in 1851 the pendulum of political extremes paused in its wild swings between communal utopianism and imperial ambition, and France settled into the relative stability of the Second Empire. Violence and bloodshed on the streets had played their part in the coup which gave the new emperor dictatorial authority, but in many ways Louis-Napoleon was a benevolent and popular ruler, and managed to hold onto power for almost twenty years. Friedrich Engels said Louis-Napoleon had become “the idol of the European bourgeoisie precisely by dissolving their parliament but increasing their profits.”13 He had earned some disdain because he had seized imperial authority in the wake of a trade crisis that had been disastrous for French production, in which exports declined, business took a beating, many factories were shuttered, and the European trade community was on the brink of a panic. This economic stagnation was blamed upon his political struggle with the assembly. Having seized dictatorial power, he revived the economy, reestablished universal suffrage, modernized banking, agriculture, and labour law. He built an efficient railway system which made possible the rapid development of heavy industry, and with it the growth of a powerful and prosperous bourgeoisie. The magnetic power of manufacturing drew flocks of people to factories as it grew in scale. Of every seven individuals born in the countryside between 1850 and 1900, five would move to the cities, one would emigrate to America, and one would remain at home.14 Under LouisNapoleon’s authority, the French stock market flourished and investment blossomed. Engels was right – the bourgeoisie saw him as one of their own: “…in him the bourgeoisie saw the first great statesman, who was flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone,” he wrote.15 It was Louis-Napoleon who shaped the modern Paris we see today, a city built for the bourgeoisie, the finest city on earth. A year before Louis-Napoleon led the French army into the disastrous Franco-Prussian war of 1870, James Jarves, the celebrated American art critic and collector of 18th century paintings and sculptures, said the emperor had turned Paris into a, “well-scrubbed, waxed, polished, gorgeous town, imposing in its topographical arrangement, geometrically accurate, and largely conceived, pleasurably adorned after a scenic method and as entirely admirably calculated to make the same agreeable impression on a vast scale on a spectator at first view that one of its tastefully ordered shop windows or an admirable toilette of a Parisian lady does in a small way.”16

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A devout lover of classicism, Jarves hated it. He complained about the long modern boulevards like the Avenue de l’Opera, with its gilt balconies, idiotic carvings, trumpery ornaments, the sheet-glass windows and shopping arcades, “…brilliant as gaud for the eye, but vanity of vanities as food for the imagination.” It was, “…a brilliant bazaar, café and theatre; in truth, a well baited trap for money and morals.”17 It was a new world – and this new world needed a new kind of artist to create its products. In 1863, thirty-three years after the Hernani premier, critic Fernand Desnoyers described the artists of Montmartre: “Generally, they are unsavory individuals. They affect in their gait, in their dress, in their language, a flippancy that would prove that art alone preoccupies them. The contours and vulgar haircuts of their faces make them hateful to the eyes before the ears are hurt by their voices, for a horrible vulgarity comes out of them through every pore and through every sense. They create a public image for themselves, which would be excusable if they could understand the insufficiency of those which nature has made them; but no, it is merely a stupid pretension: they want to attract the attention of the bourgeois, in the bars. To make a big public image, they flip their long hair back, tousle it or stick it behind the ear, part it in the middle of the head, or wear it in the style of a malcontent, then let their beard grow, which they trim with the same art. A bizarre note arises from their examination. After a short time, intimacy gives them all the same voice, the same gestures, the same words, the same attitude. If one of them gets himself up in one way, two days later his pal is similarly dressed. Baggy overcoats and broad-brimmed felt hats are of their taste: they are chic or have character, they say. But most often they are to be seen in the neighborhoods or sitting in cafes, dressed in casual trousers with large checks, red smocks and straw hats, berets, or more simply bareheaded. They share with actors a mania for over-familiarity, and it is precisely this which most quickly provokes disgust for them in a man. They never meet without greeting each other with this sacramental phrase, ‘Hello, love, how are you doing?’ A few words of slang add clumsy sparkle to their conversation.”18 The bohemians are often explained as anti-bourgeois, and they have often poured contempt upon their enemy. Baudelaire wrote contemptuously, “The Frenchman is a farmyard animal so well domesticated that he dares not jump any fences. See his tastes in art and literature. He is a Latin animal; garbage in his home does not displease him, and in literature he is

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scatophagous. He loves feces. The bistro litterateurs call this the Gallic soil.”19 But the more one looks at this fascinating tribe, the more one sees that they are simply the other side of the bourgeois coin. Art provided bohemian artists with an entrance into bourgeois wealth, and allowed them to become bourgeois themselves with astonishing rapidity when success came knocking. More often than not, bohemians were born of bourgeois families, and virtually everything they said and did was a response to the values and habits of the bourgeois class. Living in poverty by no means meant that bohemians were proletarian, for they simply did not share the concerns of the working class; their poverty was an aesthetic choice, and was often a temporary state to be endured as a rite of passage. Artists have always been the social inferiors of their patrons, and although their clientele had changed since the beginning of the 19th century, their status remained the same. Before the revolutions that propelled the bourgeoisie to power, art collectors were aristocrats who patronized artists, granting those who possessed special talent with protection and wealth as the servants of power. After the industrial revolution, the art-purchasing market expanded downward through society to include members of the middle and upper-middle class. No longer the exclusive domain of the aristocracy, art became a product to be bought and sold – merchandise to be marketed. Bohemians willingly allowed themselves and their material products to be exploited by their customers in exchange for a middle-class life, while simultaneously adopting a defensive anti-materialist position which justified their social inferiority. Before becoming a great novelist, Émile Zola had been a prolific journalist, writing hundreds of columns of cultural criticism, going from job to job with no guarantee whatsoever of security. But the insecurities of freelance journalism were a dramatic improvement upon the desperate destitution he felt between 1858 and 1867, when he was an absolutely impoverished bohemian, moving from one garret to another. Although from a bourgeois family, unlike many of his bohemian friends Zola lacked financial support because, when he was only seven years old, his engineer father, François, had died, and his mother, Émilie, struggled to support herself on the small inheritance her husband had left her. In the cold winter of 1861, Zola was so broke that he sold most of his clothes, spent the season in bed, and was reported to have eaten sparrows that he trapped on his windowsill and roasted. In 1862, he managed to find a job packing books for a publishing company, Hachette, which paid 100 francs a month, just enough to sustain him. He believed that this meant he could leave the bohemian life behind him, but he was deeply rooted in the Parisian subculture, and it would be many years before he could count himself as a

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solid bourgeoisie. He stayed at Hachette until the end of January 1866, having worked his way to being head of publicity, and writing journalism in his spare time. Among his friends during this period were luminaries like his childhood friend Paul Cézanne, who he supported financially for many years. In 1863, the year of the Salon des Refusés, Zola was 23, Cézanne turned 24, Édouard Manet 31, Henri Fantin-Latour 27, Edgar Degas 29, Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) was an old man of 43, Camille Pissarro 33, Claude Monet 23, Alfred Sisley 24, James Abbott McNeill Whistler 29. Pierre-Auguste Renoir was only 22. Although gypsy bohemians often critiqued their bourgeois patrons, they couldn’t exist without them, and the majority of them were the children of bourgeois families, sucking in bourgeois values at their mothers’ bourgeois breasts. Their bohemian lives were often made possible because the wealth of their parents allowed them to entertain the idea of life as an artist. Cezanne received a monthly allowance from his banker father. Manet was the son of a judge and came from a very wealthy haute-bourgeois family. Fantin-Latour was the son of a portrait painter, and well acquainted with the bohemian-bourgeois life of a working artist. Degas was another well-off banker’s son. The pioneer photographer Nadar was the son of a petit-bourgeois book-seller and printer and had been a medical student until his father’s death. Pissarro’s petitbourgeois father owned a hardware store on St. Thomas Island in the Virgin Islands, and he had been sent to a middle-class boarding school in France. Monet was from a family of well-off ship-chandlers; Sisley from prosperous silk-merchants who gave him a healthy allowance; Whistler was the bohemian son of a railway engineer, living in Paris on his allowance from his bourgeois mother; Renoir struggled more than the rest of the group, coming from modest tailors. Zola called these loosely affiliated young bohemian artists the Batignolles Group, named after the street on which Zola and Manet made their homes. Here they frequented their favourite brasserie, where the friends gathered to talk. The Batignolles district was a bohemian center of Paris in the 1860s. It was not until 1866 that Zola championed the Batignolles’ work, and savagely criticized the jury of the famous salon, in a series of seven articles titled Mon Salon, recognizing his friends’ realism as a new kind of art which these ignorant jurors were unable to appreciate. His campaign on their behalf was disastrous for his journalistic career, for the jurors he criticised were influential and powerful. He embarrassed his employers at Hachette and lost his job, and his editor refused to accept any more of his writing.

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Although the bourgeoisie had risen to its new position of strength after the revolutions of 1789 and 1848, it still clung to the art of the ancient regime, seeing classicism as a symbol of imperial power, longing for the wealth and prestige of the fallen aristocracy. The prosperity that came with the industrial revolution was accompanied by a dramatic growth of the population, and the new, younger generation wanted to assert itself, to take its place on the stage of Paris. This was not a politically motivated avantgarde like that which was insisted upon by the propagandists of the socialist cause. It was a generational rebellion, an artistic revolt, a youth struggle between the up-and-coming young bourgeois-bohemians and their elders. Theirs was a different kind of rebellion. They were confident of their ultimate victory – as Mick Jagger would say ninety years later, time was on their side. And they had the same kind of swagger as the bohemian rock stars of the 1960’s – Zola described them stopping to behold Paris, almost as if the city was a woman laid out before them: “Claude, trembling, cried ‘Ah! this Paris ... she's ours, there for the taking.’ All four were enthralled, their wide-open eyes shining with desire. Wasn't that glory that blew, from the height of this avenue, over the entire city? Paris was waiting there, and they wanted her. ‘Well! we'll take her,’ said Sandoz with a stubborn look. ‘Hell, Yes!’ Mahoudeau and Jory replied, plainly.”20 If he could have, Jagger would have been right there beside them, with an armful of dead flowers, and strutting in their ragged company. By 1870, Zacharie Astruc, Otto Scholderer, Edmond Maître, and Frédéric Bazille were frequent visitors to Manet’s studio, and accepted into his circle enough to be included in Fantin-Latour’s painting A Studio at Les Batignolles. Even though this painting was made as these men were transitioning from being impoverished bohemians to flourishing bourgeoisie, they still wore tidied-up versions of the common costume of a Paris bohemian of the decades before: long hair, an eccentrically trimmed beard, a wide-brimmed hat, checked trousers, and a baggy overcoat. Formulaic by 1870, wearing a beard in the France of the Bourbons had been a big deal. Gautier joked that at the time of the opening of Hernani in 1830 there were only two of them in the entire country, and, “It required absolutely heroic self-possession and contempt of the multitude to wear one.”21 They were romanticist symbols of their wearers’ rejection of middle-class pretensions. Hirsute bohemians were members of, “the hairy, bearded bands that were the terror of the smooth chinned bourgeois.”22 Another life-long bohemian-bourgeois, for all his political pretensions and financial success, was Gustave Courbet, who painted himself in this costume in 1842, and again in 1849 in his famous Self-Portrait With a Pipe, looking suspiciously stoned, and again in a drawing of himself with two of

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his friends wearing the same costume at the Brasserie Andler, one of the vortices of bohemian Paris. The cafés Courbet visited until the 1860s were all bohemian hang-outs. As early as the 1840s, his friends included a scruffy writer named Henri Murger, who was a principal figure in the history of the bohemians.23 In his L’Oeuvre, Zola described meeting an older Courbet in his austere studio, all dressed up in robe and skull-cap, like some cosplay magician. Bohemian costume had room for dandified extravagance, and revealed the socio-economic backgrounds of the bohemians. Late in the 19th century, a conceited Montmartre playwright named Armand Silvestre nit-picked in his bitchy memoirs about who was and who wasn’t a true bohemian. He described the wealthy Manet slumming it among his bohemian friends. Manet preferred a fancier costume than the baggy coat and check pants, costuming himself in “cheerfully garish trousers, short jackets, a hat with a flat-edged brim worn on the back of the head, always irreproachably gloved in suede.” According to the cattish Silvestre, “Manet was absolutely not a bohemian in the slightest. His was the fashion of a dandy. Blond, with a rare and delicate beard tapered to a double point, he had an extraordinary vivacity in his eyes – small, very sparkling pale gray eyes – in the expression of the mocking mouth, – a mouth with thin lips with uneven and unequal teeth – a high dose of Parisian tomfoolery. Very generous and very good, he was easily ironic in his speech, and often cruel. He used acerbic words, cutting and shredding at once. But what effective expression, and what accuracy of ideas!”24 Attacking his literary competition, the caviling thespian said the brilliant writer and editor Gautier had been a fake bohemian too, and condemned him for being overly concerned with providing for his family, and too dedicated to religious belief. But if Gautier was a faker, he had done a thoroughly good job of it, for he was the founder of the Club des Hachichins (the Hashish club), which met monthly at the Hotel Lauzin in the Latin Quarter, where he and the living epitome of a true bohemian, Charles Baudelaire, rented the upstairs apartments, where Baudelaire wrote his famous collection of poems, Les Fleurs de Mal, which he dedicated to Gautier’s name. Gautier was so completely convincing in this pastiche bohemianism that in 1856 he became editor of L’Artiste magazine and used his position to describe the ideas at the heart of bohemia – the doctrines of art for art’s sake. Nadar photographed a middle-aged Gautier wearing the classic bohemian costume of a lumpy overcoat, with unkempt hair, tied back under a thoroughly unconventional headscarf, scruffily bearded, and with the deeply black-bagged eyes of a night-owl hash-eater. In the introduction to his infamously raunchy novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, he wrote, “I would rather have a gaping seam in my shoe than

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a false rime to my verse, and that I would rather do without shoes than without poems.”25 Like the mad mixture of costumes the bohemians wore, the artistic styles of the second half of the 19th century were a mix-and-match of romanticism, of Gustave Moreau and the dreamy symbolists, of Oscar Wilde’s anarchist aestheticism, of art for art’s sake, of the cruel sensuality of the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, of Baudelaire’s dark obsession with sexuality and death, of the extravagant but fresh and delightful pornography of Félicien Rops, of Zola’s novels describing the new, opulent life of the Parisian streets, of the richly detailed medieval fantasies of the preRaphaelites, of the fabulous illustrator Gustave Doré,26 of the light and lovely plein-air painters who became known as the impressionists, of the brightly colorful canvases of the savage fauvists, and at its very end, the introduction of the luxurious, decorative paintings, sculptures, and architecture of the Viennese Secession. All of these competed with each other, jostling for attention against the backdrop of the continuing traditional classicism of the ruling order. By the end of the century there was no single dominant style, no hegemony of aristocratic authority. The socialist Proudhon had paraphrased Hegel about art being the expression of the dominant ideal of the time. If he was right, the ideal of the capitalist bourgeois era was, and still is, that consumers should enjoy a chocolate-box full of choice delights. Like the realist art of the proto-communist avant-garde all this bohemian novelty was a new kind of work made for a new kind of world, but the claims made by its bohemian proponents were not that art must be used as a tool for propagandizing the people, or that it was for the pursuit of reality alone, but that it was for pleasure; it was a luxury, and it was a replacement for lost religion. This was an artistic rebellion that also sought to reinvent art for the new age, but certainly not for the utilitarian purpose of social reconstruction under communist authoritarianism. This art was made for the consumption of the bourgeois middle class who had the time, the money, and the inclination for amusement. To this burgeoning new middle class, who wanted the world, and wanted it now, it was entertainment. Its products were symbols of their own personal utopia. It was not until 1851 that the word “bohemian” became commonplace. Courbet’s friend Murger lived the bohemian life in Paris, and described his circle in a collection of short stories titled Bohemians of the Latin Quarter. He called the artists “bohémien” because the word meant “gypsy” in French, perhaps derived from the Old French “boëm,” which meant “bewitched.” Their romantic and impoverished lifestyle supposedly resembled that of the wandering Romani, who were said to be descended from the priests and

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priestesses of Isis and Serapis, who had fled from Egypt centuries ago, making a living selling fortunes. According to the historian Étienne Pasquier, the gypsies had arrived in Paris in 1427, and begged Antipope Benedict XIV, Bernard Garnier, for refuge from Saracen persecution. He allowed them to stay, but gave them a penance of going for seven years without sleeping in a bed, establishing their itinerant tradition.27 In 1896, Murger’s hit book was turned into an Italian opera – Puccini’s La Bohème. Murger wrote, "Bohemia is a stage in artistic life; it is the preface to the Academy, the Hotel Dieu, or the Morgue.”28 When it was the academy that followed the bohemian stage, bourgeois success trotted behind. The bohemian world existed in symbiosis with the booming bourgeoisie. Murger said there were many kinds of bohemians, beginning with, “unknown bohemians,” who were fatally condemned to be completely anonymous to history because of their total lack of understanding of the importance of publicity. These passionate lovers of beauty were, “the race of obstinate dreamers for whom art has remained a faith and not a profession; enthusiastic folk of strong convictions, whom the sight of a masterpiece is enough to throw into a fever, and whose loyal heart beats high in the presence of all that is beautiful, without asking the name of the master and the school.”29 Their fault was that they believed their genius and its products were so delightful, and so obviously brilliant that they needed only to produce them, and they would soon be discovered, and plucked from obscurity. Their misfortune was that their delight in art, but complete lack of entrepreneurial skill, would surely lead them to an early death in poverty, for one of the fundamental traits of the bohemian life was that its participants were spendthrift to the point of absurdity. They might even on occasion produce a work of genius, which may be discovered purely by chance after their death. A second group of bohemians was made of the unfortunate youths who had deceived themselves into believing that they had an artistic vocation, when really all they had was a chimerical fancy. As a proper bohemian, Cezanne joked about his own lack of success, saying that his “hair and beard are longer than talent.”30 Members of this class were destined to die young, like their romantic heroes, Gilbert, Malfilatre, Chatterton, and Moreau, the archetypal saints of tragic bohemia. Sarcastically, Murger says Gilbert only became a poet a quarter of an hour before he died. Victor Escousse’s miserable poem became the Marseillaise of these morbid aspirants to desperate tragic failure. “Farewell mankind, ye stony-hearted host, Flint-bosomed earth and sun with frozen ray,

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From out amidst you, solitary ghost I glide unseen away.”

These were the absurd fakes of the bohemian world, “the mediocrities of impotence.” These were talentless non-entities who could only end wretchedly. Another caste of Murger’s bohemians were the amateurs, who were mere visitors to the scene, given to enjoying the adventure of life on the fringes of society, like ethno-tourists dipping into an interesting foreign culture, participating in its exotic rituals, and colorful events, dressing in its shabby-chic costumes, but never becoming true bohemians, and soon scurrying home to the safe lifestyle of a provincial bourgeoise with a nice comfortable middle-class profession, destined to a round belly, a well-filled waistcoat, and nostalgic reminiscences of their youthful exploits shared beside a warm fire in their cosy parlour. The real bohemians were those who genuinely had the call of the artistic vocation and stood a chance of becoming successful in their fields. This was not an easy life, navigating between the abysses of poverty and doubt, but for these talented few, at least there was a road toward success which could be perceived through the fog of bohemian self-indulgence. Only ruthless ambition could keep them on this narrow road. Although often bitten by the teeth of poverty, these profligates loved to party, and were extravagant squanderers, dissolute debtors and most importantly, hard workers. Of course, success accorded them the trappings of the bourgeois life they claimed to despise, causing a few of them discomfort as they found wealth and felt the sting of their own hypocrisy, but then, as now, there was nothing more pathetic than an aged bohemian dragging the tawdry and tattered feathers of their former life behind them like a balding parakeet, and most bohemians willingly and cheerfully slipped into the embrace of bourgeois comfort as they aged without necessarily abandoning their individualism. Zola knew exactly what the bohemian life was like. On March 3rd of 1861, when he was a month shy of turning 21, he wrote to his best friend Cezanne advising him how he would spend his time and money when he came to Paris. At this time the permanently bohemian Cezanne’s monthly allowance from his wealthy banker father was set at 125 francs. From this he would be able to rent a room, buy lunch and dinner, rent a cheap studio, buy canvases, brushes and paints, and still have 25 francs, “for your laundry, light, the thousand little things that come up, your tobacco, your amusements: you’ll see that you have just enough to get by…”31 But, like most of his bohemian brethren, Cezanne was a spendthrift. Zola told their mutual friend Baptistin Baille that whenever Cezanne had any money, he would hurry to spend it before night-time.32 While he lived as a struggling

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journalist, Zola was a proper bohemian himself, and he enjoyed making use of his Batignolles friends as characters and describing their world in the novel he published in 1886 titled L’Oeuvre, (The Masterpiece). In it, his readers could clearly identify the scandalous paintings of Manet. Zola’s sculptor character, Chaine, was a perfect example of one of Murger’s “unknown bohemians.” He had come from the countryside to seek his fortune as an artist in Paris, based on the slender evidence of his ability to carve walking-stick handles. His father had given him an allowance of 1000 francs to live on for one year, which he had stretched out to last for eighteen months, and when the money had run out, he started bunking with his friend and determinedly painting, “while awaiting the promised victory,” despite the complete lack of evidence of having any talent whatsoever. Pyat had noted that voluntary poverty was one of the symptoms of the bohemian disease. This was at a time when a well-to-do worker received 5000 francs per year. Zola’s exceptional talent for brilliant detail brought his cast of bohemian artists to life, and he wrote a sparkling account of the historic Salon des Refusés of 1863, which was the moment at which his fictionalized bohemians took their first steps into respectability. The principal character in l’Oeuvre, Claude Lantier, was a composite of Manet and Cezanne. Manet experienced none of the poverty the Lantier character suffered in the book, while Cezanne was similar to him, having an excessively temperamental personality, withdrawn, over-sensitive and grumpy, and of such low social status that even children mocked him in the street. Self-consciously aware of his dirtiness, Cezanne infamously refused to shake the gentlemanly Manet’s clean hand. Zola appropriated Manet’s paintings as the work of the Lantier character, but Cezanne was always Lantier’s heart, and even ate the same bohemian meals as his fictional double. Like Cezanne, Zola’s Lantier was one of Murger’s true bohemians, moving to the Quai de Bourbon, then an inexpensive part of town where he lived to save money, “like a primitive, with an absolute contempt for everything that was not painting.” Lantier stopped seeing his bourgeois relatives who disgusted him, even breaking with his aunt who owned a charcuterie simply, “because she was doing too well.”33 His studies at the Louvre were a bore, and a waste of time, and he was full of contempt for students who followed the atelier instruction of the classicists, who were daubers of penny prints, who had stolen their reputations. He would prefer to cut his wrists than to continue ruining his natural eye. Alfred Vizetelly was friendly with Zola and knew many of the real artists characterized in l’Oeuvre. He made an unfortunately sanitized and paraphrased translation of the book, and tells us in his preface that the sculptor

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Malhoudeau is Solari; Fagerolles is Gervais; the character Bongrand, whose Village Wedding painting is clearly a reference to Gustav Courbet’s famous Funeral at Ornans, is a mixture of Manet, Courbet, Cabanel and Gustave Flaubert. Thomas Walton wrote a better but perhaps overly liberal translation of l’Oeuvre in 1950. He found notes by Zola that confirmed what Vizetelly had said, and added that the mendacious journalist character Jory was the real writer, Paul Alexis. The character Dubuche was actually one of Zola’s school friends, the engineer Baptistin Baille. The journalist and novelist in the book, Pierre Sandoz, was Zola himself. (Sandoz models for one of the gentlemen in Lantier’s painting The Open Air, which was the novel’s version of Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’Herbe.) Zola attributes the naming of the plein-air movement to Cezanne, in the form of his character Lantier, capturing the moment at which he came up with the idea of painting outdoors in natural light. Lantier was painting Sandoz, and angrily denouncing the salon and the traditional ateliers. Eugène Delacroix and Courbet were the only painters worth speaking about. The rest were blackguards. Lantier described Delacroix as an, “old romantic lion, what a proud appearance! Here was a designer who could set his tones on fire! And what a grip he had! He would have covered the walls of Paris if they had been given to him: his palette was boiling and overflowing.” But his time was past. “I know very well that it was only phantasmagoria; but too bad! It chaps me, but it was necessary, to set fire to the school...” Zola writes that Courbet was, “the truest painter of the century,” but had been completely misunderstood by the classicists who shrieked about his realism and his profaning of the ideal, completely failing to realize that his technique was entirely their own. Both Delacroix and Courbet were the products of their time and had carried art forward. But now something new was necessary. Still painting, Lantier, “was silent, drew back to judge the effect, was absorbed for a moment in the sensation of his work, and then recommenced. Now, something else is needed ... Ah! what? I do not know exactly! If I knew and if I could do it, I would be very strong. Yes, there would be only me ... But what I feel is that the great romantic setting of Delacroix is cracking and collapsing; and moreover, the black painting of Courbet is already poisoned with the musty mold of the workshop where the sun never enters ... Do you understand, perhaps a clear and youthful painting needs the sun, it must be in the open air, (en plein aire) for things and beings as they behave in true light, but I cannot say! Our painting is our own thing, the painting that our eyes have to make and look at today.”34 This kind of youthful enthusiasm regularly infected their conversation. Youth was an important part of the bohemian experience, for the young

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could better withstand the hardships of poverty and the instability of the gypsy life. Fanatical enthusiasm gave them the stamina to negotiate the bohemian path and refreshed them. Whenever Zola’s Lantier and Sandoz were together, “…the painter and the writer usually came to this exaltation. They whipped each other into a frenzy of glory; and there was such a youthful flight of fancy, such a passion for work, that they themselves then smiled at these great, proud dreams, exhilarated, and refreshed with suppleness and strength.”35 And this sense of excitement, of the selfconscious knowledge that these dynamic bohemians were creating a new art for a new era, filled the first half of Zola’s book. He captured the spirited enthusiasm of the bohemian life beautifully. Despite their embrace of poverty, his bohemians acted as if they owned Paris. When they walked the broad new boulevards, they seemed to occupy the whole width of the street; and, “As usual, the expanding band gained comrades little by little on the way, the free march of a horde at war. These lads, with the beautiful broad shoulders of their twenty years, took possession of the pavement. As soon as they were together, fanfares sounded before them, they seized Paris singlehanded and put it quietly in their pockets. Their victory was no longer in doubt, they were disdainful of the miseries of the old shoes and tired overcoats they wore, they were confident that they would be masters. And that came with an immense contempt for everything that was not their art, contempt for fortune, contempt for the world, contempt for politics especially. What's the good of that filthiness? There were only dotards there! A superb sense of injustice stirred them, a deliberate ignorance of the necessities of social life, the crazy dream of there being only artists on the earth. Sometimes they were stupid, but this passion made them brave and strong.”36 But despite their contempt for the non-artistic world, the bohemians lived in an unavoidably symbiotic relationship with the bourgeoisie, who were their parents, their patrons and their class, and despite their best efforts to object to their patronizing values, many young bohemians became pillars of the bourgeois culture when they had achieved public notoriety and its accompanying wealth. This dependence was noted early by Pyat, who was supposed to have said, “scratch a bohemian, find a bourgeois.”37 Welcoming artistic success was not a complete abandonment of affection for bohemian values.38 Many a bohemian-bourgeois was proud of his roots and continued to produce artistic work that deliberately challenged bourgeois mores, even as they embraced the domestic security of prosperity, home and hearth. Even real bohemians had to abandon the poverty of their youth at some point, or eventually die alone and desperate.

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The French middle class had emerged from the revolution of 1848 stronger than ever. Baudelaire’s friend Alfred Delvau said that the reason the middle classes did not turn on the bohemians in response to their harsh criticisms of the bourgeois life was because the typical bourgeois recognized his youthful self in his younger counterparts, and, “had heart before he acquired his tummy, because he had debts before he had bonds, because he had long hair before he had a trimmed lawn, because he had mistresses before he had a wife.”39 They knew themselves. They saw themselves reflected.

Notes 1

Henry Murger, Bohemians of the Latin Quarter, Doubleday Page & Co, 1901, 29 Walter Scott, Quentin Durward (The Waverley Novels.) Robert Cadell, Whittaker & Co, 1831, 14 3 Felix Pyat, Paris Moderne, Les Artistes, In: Nouveau Tableau de Paris, au XIXme Siècle, T.4. Madame Charles-Béchet, Dec 31, 1834, 21 4 “Les coiffeurs, les vaudevillistes, les vitriers, les actionnaires de théâtre, les pédicures, les garçons de café, les députés, les décrotteurs, les marchandes de modes, le ministre des beaux-arts, les vendeurs de contre-marques, les chiens savants, les académiciens, les éléphants instruits, les puces travailleuses, les bêtes et les hommes de Franconi, tout le monde veut être artiste.” Ibid, 3 5 Théophile Gautier, Ed. & Trans. F. C. de Sumichrast, A History of Romanticism, The Progress of French Poetry, In: The Works of Théophile Gautier, Volume Sixteen, George D. Sproul, 1908, 89 - 90 6 Ibid, 74 7 Henry Murger, Bohemians of the Latin Quarter, Vizetelly & Co, 1888, 34 8 Théophile Gautier, Ed. & Trans. F. C. de Sumichrast, A History of Romanticism, The Progress of French Poetry, In: The Works of Théophile Gautier, Volume Sixteen, George D. Sproul, 1908, 101 9 Ibid, 16 10 Ibid, 19 - 20 11 Ibid, 23 12 Ibid, 133 13 Freidrich Engels, The Role of Force in History, International Publishers, 1968, 58 14 Michael Gibson, Symbolism, Taschen, 1999, 12 15 Freidrich Engels, The Role of Force in History, International Publishers, 1968, 39 16 James Jackson Jarves, Art Thoughts, Hurd and Houghton, 1869, 284 - 285 17 Ibid, 285 18 “Généralement ils sont malpropres. Ils affectent dans leurs allures, dans leur mise, dans leur langage, une désinvolture qui voudrait prouver que l’Art seul les préoccupe. Les lignes et les coupes vulgaires de leur figure les rendent odieux aux yeux avant que les oreilles ne soient blessées par leur voix car l’horrible vulgarité leur sort par tous les pores et par tous les sens. 2

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Ils se font des têtes, ce qui serait excusable s’ils pouvaient comprendre l’insuffisance de celles que la nature leur a faites; mais non, ce n’est qu’une prétention bête: ils veulent attirer les regards des bourgeois, dans les estaminets. Pour se faire de grands fronts, ils rejettent leurs longs cheveux en arrière, les ébouriffent ou les collent derrière l’oreille, les séparent par une raie au milieu de la tète ou les portent à la mal-content, en laissant alors croître leur barbe qu’ils taillent avec le même art. Une remarque bizarre résulte de leur examen. Au bout de peu de temps, l’intimité leur donne à tous la même voix, les mêmes gestes, les mêmes paroles, la même démarche. Si l’un d’eux s'accoutre d’une façon, deux jours âpres le camarade est affublé pareillement. Les paletots-sacs et les feutres à larges bords sont de leur goût: ça a du chic ou du caractère, disent-ils. Mais le plus souvent on les voit passer dans le quartier ou s’attabler dans les cafés, habillés de pantalons à pied à larges carreaux, de vareuses rouges et coiffés de chapeaux de paille, de bérets, ou plus simplement tète nue. Ils partagent avec les acteurs la manie du tutoiement, et ce sont justement leurs propos qui prevoquent dans l’homme les hauts-le-coeur les plus précipités. Ils ne s’abordent jamais sans s’adresser cette phrase sacramentelle «Bonjour, ma vieille, comment qu’ça te va?» Quelques mots d’argot étincellent maladroitement dans leur conversation.” Fernand Desnoyers, Salon des Refuses. La Peinture en 1863, Azur Dutil, 1863, 12 14 19 “Le Français est un animal de basse-cour si bien domestiqué qu’il n’ose franchir aucune palissade. Voir ses goûts en art et en littérature. C’est un animal de race latine ; l’ordure ne lui déplaît pas, dans son domicile, et, en littérature, il est scatophage. Il raffole des excréments. Les littérateurs d'estaminet appellent cela le sol gaulois.” Charles Baudelaire, Mon Coeur Mis à Nu: Journal Intimes, XXXI – XXXII, Brins de Plume 10. Maximilien Vox, 1945. 20 “Claude, frémissant, cria— Ah! ce Paris... Il est à nous, il n’y a qu'à le prendre. Tous quatre se passionnaient, ouvraient des yeux luisants de désir. N’était-ce pas la gloire qui soufflait, du haut de cette avenue, sur la ville entière? Paris tenait là, et ils le voulaient. — Eh bien! nous le prendrons, affirma Sandoz de son air têtu. — Parbleu! dirent simplement Mahoudeau et Jory.” Emile Zola, l’Oeuvre, Chartentier, 1886, 89 21 Théophile Gautier, Ed. & Trans. F. C. de Sumichrast, A History of Romanticism, The Progress of French Poetry, In: The Works of Théophile Gautier, Volume Sixteen, George D. Sproul, 1908, 38 22 Ibid, 29 23 Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris, Johns Hopkins, 1986, 79 24 “Ce révolutionnaire — le mot n’est pas trop fort — avait les façons d’un gentleman accompli. Avec des pantalons volontiers voyants, de courts vestons, un chapeau à bords plats posé sur le derrière de la tête, toujours irréprochablement ganté de Suède, Manet n’avait rien d’un bohème et n’était bohème en rien. C’était

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une façon de dandy. Blond, avec une barbe rare et menue qui s’effilait en pointe double, il avait dans la vivacité extraordinaire des yeux — de petits yeux gris pâle et très constellés, — dans l’expression de la bouche moqueuse, — une bouche aux lèvres minces avec des dents irrégulières et inégales, — une forte dose de gaminerie parisienne. Très généreux et très bon, il était volontiers ironique dans le discours et souvent cruel. Il avait le mot à l’emporte-pièce, coupant et déchiquetant d'un coup. Mais quel bonheur dans l’expression, et souvent quelle justesse dans l’idée!” Armand Silvestre, Au Pays des Souvenirs: Mes Maîtres et Mes Maîtresses, La Librairie Illustree, 1892, 161 25 Théophile Gautier, Trans. F. C. de Sumichrast, Mademoiselle Maupin, George Sproul, 1900, 80 26 Uptight Jarves said, “If the Devil has ever created such an office as Designer-inchief to Hell, it is now filled by Doré.” James Jackson Jarves, Art Thoughts, Hurd and Houghton, 1869, 279 27 Louis Viardot, Lettres d'un Espagnol. Vol. 1., P. Mongie, C. Gosselin et Ponthieu, 1826 pp. n.46 - 48 28 Henry Murger, Bohemians of the Latin Quarter, Vizetelly & Co, 1888, 29 29 Ibid, 36 30 Paul Cezanne, Letter to Numa Coste, 27 February, 1864, In: Ed. Alex Danchev, The Letters of Paul Cezanne, The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2013, 114 31 Émile Zola, Letter to Paul Cezanne, 3 March 1861, In: Ed. Alex Danchev, The Letters of Paul Cezanne, The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2013, 105 - 106 32 Émile Zola, Letter to Baptistin Baille, 2 October 1860, In: Ed. Alex Danchev, The Letters of Paul Cezanne, The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2013, 103 33 “Il y vivait en sauvage, d’un absolu dédain pour tout ce qui n’était pas la peinture, brouillé avec sa famille qui le dégoûtait, ayant rompu avec une tante, charcutière aux Halles, parce qu’elle se portait trop bien, gardant seulement au cœur la plaie secrète de la déchéance de sa mère, que des hommes mangeaient et poussaient au ruisseau.” Émile Zola, l’Oeuvre, Chartentier, 1886, 45 34 “Après ça, entends-tu! ils ne sont que deux,Delacroix et Courbet. Le reste, c’est de la fripouille... Hein? le vieux lion romantique, quelle fîère allure! En voilà un décorateur qui faisait flamber les tons! Et quelle poigne! Il aurait couvert les murs de Paris, si on les lui avait donnés: sa palette bouillait et débordait. Je sais bien, ce n’était que de la fantasmagorie; mais, tant pis ! ça me gratte, il fallait ça, pour incendier l'École... Puis, l’autre est venu, un rude ouvrier, le plus vraiment peintre du siècle, et d'un métier absolument classique, ce que pas un de ces crétins n'a senti. Ils ont hurlé, parbleu ! ils ont crié à la profanation, au réalisme, lorsque ce fameux réalisme n’était guère que dans les sujets; tandis que la vision restait celle des vieux maîtres et que la fac- ture reprenait et continuait les beaux morceaux de nos musées... Tous les deux, Delacroix et Courbet, se sont produits à l’heure voulue. Ils ont fait chacun son pas en avant. Et, maintenant, oh! maintenant... Il se tut, se recula pour juger l’effet, s'absorba une minute dans la sensation de son œuvre, puis repartit. - Maintenant, il faut autre chose... Ah ! quoi? je ne sais pas aii juste ! Si je savais et si je pouvais, je serais très fort. Oui, il n’y aurait plus que moi... Mais ce que je sens,

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c’est que le grand décor romantique de Delacroix craque et s’effondre ; et c’est encore que la peinture noire de Courbet empoisonne déjà le renfermé, le moisi de l'atelier où le soleil n’entre jamais... Comprends-tu, il faut peut-être le soleil, il faut le plein air, une peinture claire et jeune, les choses et les êtres tels qu’ils se comportent dans de la vraie lumière, enfin je ne puis pas dire, moi ! notre peinture à nous , la peinture que nos yeux d’aujourd’hui doivent faire et regarder.” Ibid, 48 - 49 35 Dès qu’ils étaient ensemble, le peintre et l'écrivain en arrivaient d'ordinaire àcette exaltation. Ils se fouettaient mutuellement, ils s'affolaient de gloire; et il y avait là une telle envolée de jeunesse, une telle passion du travail, qu'eux-mêmes souriaient ensuite de ces grands rêves d'orgueil, ragaillardis, comme entretenus en souplesse et en force.” Ibid, 51 36 “C'était l’expansion habituelle, la bande peu à peu ac- crue des camarades raccolés en chemin, la marche libre d'une horde partie en guerre. Ces gaillards, avec la belle carrure de leurs vingt ans, prenaient possession du pavé. Dès qu’ils se trouvaient ensemble, des fanfares sonnaient devant eux, ils empoignaient Paris d’une main et le mettaient tranquillement dans leurs poches. La victoire ne faisait plus un doute, ils promenaient leurs vieilles chaussures et leurs paletots fatigués, dédaigneux de ces misères, n’ayant du reste qu’à vouloir pour être les maîtres. Et cela n’allait point sans un immense mépris de tout ce qui n’était pas leur art, le mépris de la fortune, le mépris du monde, le mépris de la politique surtout. A quoi bon, ces saletés-là? Il n’y avait que des gâteux, là dedans! Une injustice superbe les soulevait, une ignorance voulue des nécessités de la vie sociale, le rêve fou de n’être que des artistes sur la terre. Ils en étaient stupides parfois, mais cette passion les rendait braves et forts.” Ibid, 86- 87 37 Pyat would soon become one of the leaders of the commune, and with Courbet, lead the charge to tear down the Austerlitz column in the Place Vendôme. 38 Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris, Johns Hopkins, 1986, 154 39 Ibid, 155 - 156

THE BIRTH OF THE AVANT-GARDE

“We must have bearers, and outriders, and perhaps an elephant — they are so imposing, nothing says ‘Get out of the way’ quite like an elephant in the front...”1 Neil Gaiman

Mark Twain is supposed to have said that history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. One of time’s great couplets is the pairing of the French and American revolutions, which despite their similarities as expressions of freedom from tyranny, had differing causes and consequences. The American revolution was a bourgeois revolution that immediately produced liberal democracy, but the French revolution first led to the tyranny of the terror, then the tyranny of reactionary imperialism, and eventually, after much turmoil, to a democracy. The bourgeois middle-class thrived in both instances. Friedrich von Gentz’ essay comparing the two revolutions so impressed John Adams that he translated it into English for the benefit of American and British readers. Gentz said the French revolutionaries, “wished to tear up the world from its poles, and commence a new era for the whole human race,”2 while the Americans essentially wanted legally established freedom from taxation without representation, “with their lawful pride in the rights derived from their British descent.”3 The great British parliamentarian, Edmund Burke, described America’s revolution as a civil war fought by an American citizenship resolute in their desire to preserve the traditional rights of British subjects. The rhyme was there, but the revolutions did not share the same meter, and though the sentiments expressed by their poetry were similar, the circumstances of each, and their outcomes, were distinctly different. Naturally, art was profoundly affected by both revolutions. 19th century American political thinkers were quite content to see artists responding to their conflict by continuing the traditions of their Anglo-centric people. In France, proto-communist political thinkers responded to their revolution by proposing that art should be political propaganda for their utopian cause. However, the artists there began inventing new art for the new era, with an emphasis on the art, rather than on the revolution. It was in France that the avant-garde grew as a subset within the burgeoning bohemian-bourgeois subculture of Paris. It is impossible to understand the nature of the true

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avant-garde without knowing something of the history of French art during the century of French revolutions. The close relationship between revolutionary proto-communism and avant-garde art began in France during an economic downturn caused by an exceptionally bad harvest in 1825. In this season of unrest, Olinde Rodrigues, a disciple of the radical Henri de Saint-Simon, appropriated the military term ‘avant-garde’ to the context of art, writing in a book devotionally published in the name of the revered Saint-Simon himself, “It is us, artists, who will serve you as avant-garde: the power of the arts is indeed the most immediate and the fastest. We have weapons of every kind: when we want to spread new ideas among men, we inscribe them on marble or on canvas; we popularize them by poetry and singing; we use alternately the lyre or the galoubet, the ode or the song, the story or the novel; the dramatic scene is open to us, and it is here especially that we exert an electric and victorious influence. We address the imagination and the feelings of man, and we must always exercise the most lively and decisive action; and if today our role seems nil or at least very secondary, it is because the arts lack what is essential to their energy and their successes, a common impulse and a general idea.”4 From this moment, the birth of the avant-garde, we witness a shotgun marriage between art and revolutionary proto-socialist politics, and an indication of the ministerial role of the avant-garde artist as an intellectual leader, guiding a sheep-like congregation of the proletarian herd. Rodrigues placed artists at the heart of a utopian government, claiming they deserved to be part of a ruling triumvirate of leaders from three classes of men: the industrialists, the scientists, and the artists. Artists – literary men, painters, sculptors, musicians, and so on – were included in this Saint-Simonian government because they were to provide a moral compass to society. Although Rodrigues acknowledged that it would be tough to persuade the proletariat that these artists had an important role to play in government, he believed that the arts were essential, “to rehabilitate passion, directing their work toward the common goal, the greatest physical and moral improvement of the human species.”5 What kind of art was Rodrigues talking about when he described the radical Saint-Simonist artistic avant-garde? He wrote that imagination had had a powerful hold on the experience of art, but this was the time for it to serve the cause of social reform, the “common goal.” Art was to be in service to the public good. The glorious role of artists and writers was to work to “impassion” society as leaders of humanity, united in joy and labour. He cried, “What better destiny for the arts than to exert upon society a positive power, a true priesthood, and to leap ahead of all the intellectual

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faculties at the time of their greatest development!”6 Thus, Rodrigues established the idea of an elitist avant-garde of artists as a quasi-religious priesthood that ministered to the people by inspiring enthusiasm for the utopian government. Artists were to be propagandists. Until Rodrigues adopted it, ‘avant-garde’ had only been known as a military term used to describe a formation of soldiers who advanced ahead of the main body of an army. It included scouts reporting on what was approaching, officials to demand the surrender of the enemy as they encountered it, and engineers to clear any hindrances. It was a remarkable association that would stand for two hundred years. His use of ‘avant-garde’ separated politically motivated artists from other kinds of artists as if they led the way with the rest meekly following. However, the socialist avant-garde described by the Saint-Simonists had little in common with the bohemian search for the new art of the capitalist, bourgeois era. A nostalgic letter by the famed playwright Joseph Bouchardy, written to Théophile Gautier after the death of their mutual friend Nerval, captures the bohemian spirit perfectly: “Whilst the Fourierists started phalansteries, the Saint-Simonians new social contracts, and the Democrats formed new plans, we, deaf to all these voices, heard only the whisper of art as it moved in the childbirth of progress. Our only weapons were the pen, the brush, the lyre, and the sculptor's chisel; our only gods were the great masters; our only standard that of art, which we meant to unfurl and defend.”7 The bohemians had no specific school. Theirs was a continuous, generational rebellion against convention, and it was firmly based upon the individual. Its heroes embraced the romantic idea of the bohemian genius at the expense of everything else. And although they were the fiercest critics of the bourgeoisie, hurling their name as the ultimate insult, the bohemians cohabited with their foes, without whom they could not survive. While bohemians objected to the bourgeoisie, they needed them for financial sustenance, whereas avant-gardists wanted to destroy bourgeois capitalism completely. Bohemians wanted to live for art and create new individualistic works. Avant-gardists wanted to use art as a weapon to overthrow the traditions and practices that had built Western civilization. This was the beginning of the cultural civil war that has continued into the present, defining the role of artists either as individualists, or as the servants of collectivism. Who was this authoritative Henri de Saint-Simon, in whose name Rodrigues wrote? Saint-Simon was born into a land-rich aristocratic family with property in Paris and Berny. He refused his first communion in 1774 when he was thirteen years old, because he saw no relevance to it. His father had him briefly imprisoned for this grave atheistic lapse, and the two would

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be distant for the rest of their lives. Four years later he joined the army as a second lieutenant and quickly promoted to captain in the following year, serving with distinction in America, where his brigade fought against the British on the side of the American revolutionaries. His American military career culminated in fighting for victory under Washington’s command at Yorktown. During his military service, Saint-Simon believed, like many French soldiers, that the American democratic experiment offered a potential solution to the problems the autocratic rule of the Bourbons had brought to working people in his own country, and wrote to an American friend, “During my stay in America, sir, I occupied myself much more with social science than with military tactics. The war in itself did not interest me, but its aim interested me greatly, and that interest led me willingly to support its cause. I desire the end, I often used to say to myself, I must certainly desire the means.”8 His enthusiasm for democratic revolution was noticed and he was granted membership in the French chapter of the quasi-Masonic Order of Cincinnati, an American fraternity of officers who had fought in the Revolutionary War, committed to mutual care and assistance. The order was named for the legendary Cincinnatus, a Roman general who had achieved ultimate power as a dictator, only to return the government to the people and retire to life as a farmer. Convinced by the righteousness of the democratic cause and determined to play a role in social science, SaintSimon returned to France after serving briefly in the Caribbean, where he was wounded, and a short visit to Mexico to pitch a plan for a Panama Canal to the Viceroy. Idealistic to the core, in 1790 Saint-Simon abandoned his aristocratic title and changed his name to Bonhomme (Goodman). Taking advantage of the post-revolution windfall of cheap land formerly owned by the church, he invested, made a small fortune, and was able to set up a finely served house in Paris, where he entertained a social circle of artists and writers. Refusing to organize his ideas into books, between 1815 and 1825 SaintSimon wrote discourses as letters, and produced pamphlets and notes which he shared with his admirers as correspondence. This produced a devoted following of thinking men and women. His writing can be divided into three periods: first, a period of interest in science, followed by a second period focused on politics, and finally, in the last two years of his life, a third period in which he was preoccupied with creating a new modern version of Christianity.9 Saint-Simon was an unashamed, albeit non-violent, revolutionary, urging industrialists, scientists and artists to lead a new government. He told

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artists and scientists they had a duty to use propaganda to shape society, and cast them as defenders of the righteous radical faith. He implored them, “… examine with the eye of genius the present condition of the human mind. You will perceive that the scepter of public opinion is in your hands; seize it therefore, boldly. You have the power to bring happiness to yourselves and to your contemporaries; to preserve posterity from the evils we have suffered and are suffering still.”10 One of his most explicitly radical essays, A Political Parable, got him into serious trouble in January of 1820. In it, he imagined that three thousand of the best scientists, artisans, and artists in France were lost. This, he said, would be a complete catastrophe for the country, which would have to wait for an entire generation to recover from the disaster. Next, he imagined a scenario in which ten thousand of the richest property owners were lost, including the usurper King’s brother, many dukes and duchesses, all ministers of state and the great officers representing the crown, bishops, cardinals, archbishops, judges and magistrates. In this scenario, the loss would not result in any grave political harm to France, and would only cause sentimental grief because such positions could easily and quickly be filled by other men and women. The nobility contributed nothing to benefit the state and drained it of millions of francs in annuities, pensions, and salaries for filling formal roles. Saint-Simon also gave a list of names of members of the aristocracy he considered especially useless. The rich possessed an over-abundance of wealth, at the expense of the poor, who, “… daily deprived themselves of necessities in order to increase the superfluous luxuries of the rich. The most guilty men, the robbers on a grand scale who oppress the mass of the citizens.”11 The extravagant differences between the abundance of the aristocracy and the comparative destitution of the working masses were the symptoms of France’s sickness, and revolution was its cure. He was accused and promptly arrested on 13th February of having been involved in revolutionary violence when a radical stabbed to death the Duc de Berry, who was one of the royals on his list. Saint-Simon was charged with subversion, but because there was no evidence connecting him to the murderer, he was acquitted on appeal.12 In his Geneva Letters of 1803, Saint-Simon laid out for the first time his ideas about class struggle, which Karl Marx would take and describe to great effect in the Communist Manifesto he wrote in 1848. Saint-Simon divided the population into classes: a ruling class of the rich which contributed little to society; a middle class which flew a banner that read “no change;” and a third class, “which rallies to the word ‘equality.’”13 Responding to the failures of revolutionary rule and monarchic tyranny, he described an ideal

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society divided into separate classes of industrials, artists, and scientists, each represented in a Parliament which would replace the feudal system. Sovereignty was to be enacted by elected representatives of the social body of these three classes, rather than by aristocratic functionaries. The egalitarian new government’s “sole and permanent object” was to distribute and aid in the production of prosperity “to apply as well as possible the knowledge acquired in the sciences, fine arts, and arts and crafts to the satisfaction of men’s needs.” The role of artists within the new order was fundamental to its prosperity, and as propagandists they must persuade the people of the route to be taken to achieve it.14 Saint-Simon’s followers organized as a quasi-religious sect after his death in 1825. At first, there were two ‘supreme fathers’ leading it: Amand Bazard and Barthélemy Enfantin. Bazard gave popular lectures on SaintSimon’s ideas and wrote a two-volume book with Enfantin in 1828 titled Exposition de la Doctrine de St Simon, which brought still more credibility to the movement. However, Enfantin became enthused with reinventing Saint-Simonism as a radical socialist Christianity infused with free love. He fell out with Bazard, and became the cult’s sole charismatic leader, paternally teaching a dedicated European following with a core of priestly disciples complete with shaved heads and vows of celibacy. This was the unsettling time of the Bourbons, when the monarchy was restored after the fall of Napoleon I. Ultra-conservative, the new regime had set about disposing of many of Napoleon’s key administrators, and instituted harsh punishments for anyone who dared to oppose them. As activists for egalitarian change, the Saint-Simonists’ involvement in the run-up to the July Revolution of 1830 gave them a measure of authority, and their ideas percolated throughout French society for years. They made use of Le Globe, a newspaper owned by one of their followers, Pierre Leroux, to popularize their ideas. The July Revolution upended French society once again, and gave the radical Saint-Simonists a brief period under the sun, in the glow of which they were able to establish a commune in Paris where genders were theoretically equal. They set up free schools and a soup kitchen for the hungry, and mounted a program of weekly lectures for the working people of the city. Following in the footsteps of the revolutionary pamphleteers of the first revolution, their propagandists were very productive, emulating the agitators whose products had been written, printed, and distributed in the streets of Paris of 1789, at an average of ninety-two publications a week.15 And, just as Tocqueville, the great commentator upon that revolution said, “These ideas did not stay on the pages of books; they filtered down to all minds, fused with men’s customs,

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entered social habits and spread everywhere, even affecting everyday life.”16 Enthusiastic propagandists, Saint-Simonists founded the first feminist newspaper, the Tribune des Femmes, and published numerous pamphlets about their socialist idealism. They had a seductive message that was declaimed in the sensual prose of evangelical sermons, but within five years the Saint-Simonist movement had been suppressed by the government of Louis-Phillipe and its adherents dispersed into other socialist and communist groups. Despite the deterioration of Saint-Simon’s ideas into quasi-religious cultism after his death, his sociological writings would be hugely influential, capturing the imaginations not only of Nicholai Chernyshevsky, the father of Russian socialist realism, but also of the important egalitarian politician Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who, while critical of the Saint-Simonist’s sentimental religious approach to social change, and opposed to collectivization, acknowledged his debt to him in his philosophy of economics and politics. Marx and Friedrich Engels viewed him as a precursor to their own revolutionary program. A Saint-Simonist publication La Ruche Populaire (The Popular Hive) took pride in publishing proto-communist essays by proletarian writers who might swing a sledgehammer one day and a pen the next, even encouraging illiterate workers to dictate their thoughts to friendly copyists who could scribe their ideas for them. Émile Varin, a foreman in a chemical plant, was one of La Ruche’s writers. He explained that the purpose of the publication was “to elevate the People in the minds of those who ignore them; to reveal the interiors of their naked hearts; to prove, with facts, that they are worthy of being admitted to the banquet of society, where they have up to now been rejected as political outcasts, even while being proclaimed sovereign.” Echoing Rodrigues’ Saint-Simonist creed, Varin tied the production of La Ruche’s propaganda to the military avant-garde, saying, “we will serve as a vanguard exporting electoral reform, which will in turn bring all the others, our genuine participation being a witness to our trust in the people. We will take pride in it and hasten to show ourselves worthy of it.”17 Saint-Simonist ideas about crafting art as propaganda to persuade the people to change the structure of society were spread in publications extolling the virtues of revolution in the familiar language of totalitarianism. In Étienne Cabet’s pamphlet titled Propagande Communiste, published less than two decades after Saint-Simon’s Opinions Littéraires, we find the utopian author discussing strategy for the production of communist propaganda. The pamphlet quickly became doctrinal as he pointed out that propaganda must be simple to be effective, which meant that communists

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must be clear about the principles for which they stood. There should be no more public bickering about whether or not the establishment of communism required the obliteration of marriage, or the eradication of religion, or the destruction of cities, because the disclosure of such internal arguments could only present communists in a bad light. The revolution would have unintended consequences, but they were not its goal. Instead, propaganda should have a clear focus upon the principles of the community, which “… suppresses egoism, individualism, privilege, domination, opulence, idleness and domesticity, transforming divided personal property into indivisible and social or common property. It modifies all commerce and industry.” Good socialist propaganda was “useful, engaging, persuasive, pleasant, winning propaganda, which multiplies followers,” while bad “fatal” propaganda, “… repels, disgusts, frightens and furnishes pretexts and weapons to enemies and slanderers … sows the seeds of confusion and division, and hinders and retards conversion instead of making it easier and faster.”18 Access to information was to be limited, and the priority of the literary and other artists serving the cause was to create evangelism designed to persuade people to become disciples. Cabet established the principle destined to be followed by dictatorial socialist states, that the limited publishing resources of the communists must be centralized in order to make them stronger, controlling information, censorship, and authority. In 1830, in the aftermath of the July Revolution, Émile Barrault published an essay, Aux Artistes: Du Passé et de l'Avenir des Beaux-Arts, (To the Artists: Of the Past and Future of the Fine Arts), describing it as part of the doctrine of Saint-Simon. In it, Barrault declared that romantic artists – bohemians – were merely decadent fable-writers, “with no faith in love they could only think of voluptuousness, and crowning themselves in flowers, and savoring choice wine, to seek the favors of women, this they saw as the role of humanity.”19 Among these decadent artists who exploited sensuality there were those classicists, who as “… nobler talents, whose activities require another food, return to the sources of inspiration, retreat to the past, and seem to be innovators; they recommence the epoch, rediscover hymns; and if they do not have the faith of the Christian, at least they have the faith of the artist.” 20 But even these imitators of the past reduced art to mere decoration and repetition. Although the architecture of his age might imitate the great monuments constructed in religious times, because they lacked the spiritual anchor of those epochs, they also lacked poetic life. The temples of the Greeks were built to the sound of the lyre and sang its song in their architecture, but those built without its melodies must be silent. Consequently, in this imitative, dried out era, the critic dominated

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the art world with royal scepter in hand, because when the arts come to an end, only criticism of its products remains. But how could criticism nurture a new harvest from these desiccated and overworked fields? The fundamental characteristic of religious architecture, Barrault wrote, was to be a sign, to instruct the people,21 and the same went for other cultural production. Even the novel, a relatively recent development in the literary entertainment of the bourgeoisie, was useful for exposing the baseness and corruption of human nature. With the righteous zeal characteristic of leftwing activists since the inception of socialist thought, Barrault issued his aesthetic instructions: “Dare to be humanity’s teachers, we say to the artists, and learn from Saint-Simon what you must teach today … we predict it boldly, every true artist will rally to us; he will come to us, as we go to him; for we will not say anything to him that he has not already said himself.” And what were the mutual avant-garde ideas of Saint-Simonists and the artists? Barrault claimed they shared a thoroughly socialist ideology that was meant to refresh the tired art of the past: “The complete emancipation of women, the liberation of the working class disinherited of their fortune, and the improvement of their lot, human activity developing in the threefold direction of science, arts, industry, under the invocation of an enlarged God of all the progress of humanity.”22 He appealed to the bohemians to join the Saint-Simonist cause because its doctrine would empower them, by bringing them into an equal alliance with industrialists and scientists as the governors of the coming utopian state. They would be the sacerdotal voice of the new order. “Come, come to us all whose heart knows how to love, and ignite your mind with a noble hope,” he sang, “Join our efforts to bring humanity to this future; united with us, like the harmonious strings of the same lyre, let us begin today those holy hymns which will be repeated by posterity; henceforth the fine arts are worship, and the artist is the priest.”23 Dramatic claims were made for the future of socialist art, which would usher in “… a new era for Aesthetics, a broad, grandiose, social and religious era.” Eugène d’Izalguier, well known for his comments on art, declared that the critic who supported this propaganda would be a sort of savior. Perhaps thinking that he might fill the role himself, d’Izalguier wrote enthusiastically, “This consideration of the social goal is indeed the only source of life and rebirth for Art. The critic who, armed with this torch, would cross the field of Aesthetics, would inevitably throw unexpected light on many of the obscure points of his domain, would in all senses bring unexpected solutions, and without running the risk of misadventure could explore the entire labyrinth where all the poetics went astray. This one would be welcome, the Messiah of Art, the savior of many young and strong

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individuals...”24 But it would take more than a few articles grumbling about decadence to usher in the messianic era of socialist art, and d’Izalguier’s libertarian character and style was too far removed from the charismatic socialist Christ to lead it. Who could carry the torch?

Notes 1

Neil Gaiman, Stardust, Harper Collins eBooks, June 2001, 318 Friedrich von Gentz, Trans: John Quincy Adams, The Origin and Principles of the American Revolution Compared with the Origin and Principles of the French Revolution, Liberty Fund, Inc., 2010, 81 3 Ibid, 26 4 “C’est nous, artistes, qui vous servirons d’avant-garde: la puissance des arts est en effet la plus immédiate et la plus rapide. Nous avons des armes de toute espèce: quand nous voulons répandre des idées neuves parmi les hommes, nous les inscrivons sur le marbre ou sur la toile; nous les popularisons par la poésie et le chant; nous employons tour à tour la lyre ou le galoubet, l’ode ou la chanson, l’histoire ou le roman; la scène dramatique nous est ouverte, et c’est là surtout que nous exerçons une influence électrique et victorieuse. Nous nous adressons à l’imagination et aux sentiments de l’homme, nous devons donc exercer toujours l’action la plus vive et la plus décisive; et si aujourd’hui notre rôle paraît nul ou au moins très secondaire, c’est qu’il manquait aux arts ce qui est essentiel à leur énergie et à leurs succès, une impulsion commune et une idée générale.” ClaudeHenri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon, Olinde Rodrigues, Jean-Baptiste Duvergier, Léon Halévy, Opinions littéraires, philosophiques et industrielles, Lachevardiere Fils, 1825, 341 5 “… ce serait aux artistes à réhabiliter la passion, en dirigeant leurs travaux vers le but commun, ‘la plus grande amélioration physique et morale de l’espèce humaine.’ Ibid, 360 6 “On verra ce résultat s’opérer, quand l’égoïsme, ce fruit bâtard de la civilisation, aura été refoulé jusque dans ses derniers retranchements ; quand la littérature et les beaux-arts se seront mis à la tête du mouvement, et auront enfin passionné pour son bien-être la société, que jusqu’ici on a tant de fois et si facilement passionnée pour son malheur et sa ruine. Quel plus riche avenir, quel tableau plus propre à enflammer l’imagination et à étendre les sentiments, que celui de l’espèce humaine pour jamais unie par la fraternité des jouissances et du travail, cette morale pratique de tous les temps ! Quelle plus belle destinée pour les arts, que d’exercer sur la société une puissance positive, un véritable sacerdoce, et de s’élancer en avant de toutes les facultés intellectuelles, à l’époque de leur plus grand développement!” Ibid, 346-347 7 Joseph Bouchardy, Letter to Théophile Gautier 12th January 1857, in: The Works of Théophile Gautier, Volume 16, The Jenson Society, 1916, 122 8 Henri de Saint-Simon, Keith Taylor, Henri Saint-Simon, Selected Writings on Science, Industry and Social Organisation, Routledge, 2016, 15 2

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M. MacIver, Saint-Simon and His Influence on Karl Marx. In: Economica, no. 6, 1922, 239 10 Henri de Saint-Simon, Trans. Felix Markham, Letters From an Inhabitant of Geneva to his Contemporaries, First Letter, In: Social Organization, the Science of Man and Other Writings, Harper Torchbooks, 1964, 2 11 Ibid, 2 12 Henri de Saint-Simon, Trans. Keith Taylor, Selected Writings on Science, Industry and Social Organisation, Routledge, 2015, 26 13 Alice M. MacIver, Saint-Simon and His Influence on Karl Marx. In: Economica, no. 6, 1922, pp. 241-242 14 Henri de Saint-Simon, Trans. Keith Taylor, Selected Writings on Science, Industry and Social Organisation, Routledge, 2015, 208 15 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime and the Revolution, Penguin, 2008, 82 16 Ibid, 77 17 Émile Varin, A Tous, In: La Ruche Populaire, I December 1839, 3. Trans. Paul E. Corcoran In: Before Marx. Socialism and Communism in France, 1830-48. MacMillan, 1983, 96 18 Étienne Cabet, Trans. Paul E. Corcoran, Propagande Communiste, 1842. In: Paul E. Corcoran, Before Marx. Socialism and Communism in France, 1830-48. MacMillan, 1983, 82 19 “Sans foi dans l’amour, ils ne croient qu’a la volupte; et se couronner de fleurs, savourer un vin choisi, rechercher les faveurs des femmes, tel leur parait le role de l’humanite.” Émile Barrault, Aux Artistes: Du Passé et de l’Avenir des Beaux-Arts, Alexandre Mesnier, 1830, 56 20 “Et cependant, de plus nobles talens, a l’activite desquels ii faut un autre aliment: remontent aux sources de l’inspiration, reculent vers le passe, et semblent des novateurs; recommencent l’cpopee, retrouvent des hymnes; et, s’ils n’ont la foi du chretien, ils ont au moins la foi de l’artiste.” Ibid, 61 21 “Le propre des monumens des époques religieuses, c’est d’ être un signe.” Ibid, 16 22 “Osez donc etre les precepteurs de l’humanite, dirons-nous aux artistes, et apprenez de Saint-Simon ce qu’il faut aujourd’hui lui enseigner. Ne dedaignez pas de nous lire; que la forme encore severe peut etre de notre exposition ne vous rebute pas; lisez , et nous le predisons hardiment, tout veritable artiste se ralliera a nous; il viendra a nous, comme nous irons a lui; car nous ne lui dirons rien qu’il ne se soit deja dit Iui-meme. L’emancipation complete des femmes, l’affranchissement des classes laborieuses desheritees de la fortune, et l’amelioration de leur sort, l’activite humaine se developpant dans la triple direction des sciences , des arts, de l’industrie, sous l’invocation d’un Dieu agrandi de tous les progres de l’humanite.” Ibid, 76 23“Viennent, viennent donc à nous tous ceux dont le cœur sait aimer, et le front s’enflammer d’une noble espérance ! Associons nos efforts pour entraîner l’humanité vers cet avenir; unis entre nous, comme toutes les cordes harmonieuses d’une même lyre. Commençons dès aujourd’hui ces hymnes saintes qui seront répétées par la postérité; désormais les beaux-arts sont le culte, et l’artiste est le prêtre.” Ibid, 84

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“Cette considération du but social est en effet la seule source de vie et de renaissance pour l’Art. Le critique qui, armé de ce flambeau, parcourrait le champ de l’Esthétique, jetterait infailliblement sur beaucoup de points obscurs de son domaine des clartés inattendues, porterait en tout [sic] sens des solutions inespérées, et sans courir le risque de se fourvoyer, pourrait explorer en entier le labyrinthe où s'égarèrent toutes les poétiques. Celui-là serait le bienvenu, le messie de l'Art, le sauveur de bien des individualités jeunes et pleines de force…” Eugène d’Izalguier, Loi de la corrélation de la forme sociale et de la forme esthétique, In: Trois Discours Prononcés à l’Hôtel de ville, Faisant Complément à la Publication du Congrès Historique, Paris, 1836, 112-114

RED STARS

“… one day I’ll be right – they will all be wild for Realism.” 1 Gustav Corbet

The Saint-Simonist aesthetics of revolutionary socialism quickly crossed borders. In Russia the foundations of avant-garde socialist realism, which would become dominant in the Soviet Union, were provided by the proto-communist Nicolai Chernyshevsky, translator and critical commentator of John Stuart Mills’ Principles of Political Economy. An enthusiastic reader of Saint-Simon, and other radicals, he was the editor of a subversive magazine, Sovremennik (Contemporary), for which he wrote economic and analytical texts, critiquing the Tsar’s government and calling for revolutionary change. A thoroughly radical intellectual, while the bohemians of Montmartre were busy drinking in bistros, worrying about whether or not their paintings would make it through the selection committee of the Salon, thirty-five-year-old Chernyshevsky was being arrested and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul fortress in St. Petersburg for demanding the overthrow of the Tsar in public demonstrations. Behind bars in Moscow, the inspired Chernyshevsky persuaded his captors that he should be allowed to write, and he quickly produced a revolutionary novel which would become regarded as one of the most influential texts inspiring the Russian revolution – What is to be Done – published in Russia in 1863 and in English translation in 1886. The book described a group of young characters who became ascetic revolutionaries, entirely dedicated to the cause of the workers – although they had middle-class backgrounds. A weirdly asexual romance sprang up between Vera Pavlovna and her brother’s tutor, an idealistic medical student named Lopukhov, who rescued her from the trap of her bourgeois life by abducting her and taking her to a priest friend who married them without her parents’ consent. The newlyweds moved in together, but lived in separate bedrooms, and although Lopukhov was allowed to watch his bride dress and undress, he was never welcomed into her bed. Pavlovna was a role-model for communist life, forming a sewing commune with other women. A friend of Lopukhov’s named Kirsanov started visiting and fell in love with Pavlovna, so Lupokhov obligingly killed himself on a bridge over the River Neva, but his body was lost, and only a cap with a bullet hole in

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it remained as evidence of his death. One of the lead male characters, a sort of materialist saint named Rahkmetov, who ate raw meat and slept on a bed of nails in his efforts to reject his aristocratic past and become one with the proletariat, advised Pavlovna to marry Kirsanov. Then, Rahkmetov inexplicably disappeared from the story, and it was implied that he would return in three years to take radical action as a socialist revolutionary. Next, an ex-patriot Russian named Beaumont came home from America. Plot twist – Beaumont was Lopukhov, who staged his own death and changed his name so his friend Kirsanov could marry Pavlovna. More important than the sludgy plot were the radical, feminist, and communal ideas of the proto-communist characters, who provided the models for a new class of Russian populists known as narodniks. The narodniks were a prototypical intelligentsia who would fanatically support the proletarian revolution when its moment came in 1917, taking the popular but dreadfully written What is to be Done for their inspiration. Chernyshevsky had been able to arrange the publication of the novel in serial in Sovremennik even though he was confined to his cell. No sooner had he finished the novel and sent it to his magazine for publication than he was dragged from his cell to face the horror of a mock execution, then shipped off to prison in the frozen landscapes of Siberia. After six years, he faced another twelve years in exile in Yakutsk. It was the end of his public literary life, although he continued writing in exile. But while he struggled for his survival in frozen Siberia, his novel became wildly popular. It was said to have been more inspiring to the October revolutionaries than the works of Marx, and it spurred radicals to action. To Chernyshevsky, the proper response to nihilism was to serve others as an ascetic revolutionary, and to find self-fulfillment in that service. Preceding Nietzsche, Chernyshevsky had arrived at the idea of a new man, who transcended the superfluous problems of the immaterial distractions of existence to be reborn, when, “the life that follows is rigorous, dedicated, and self-disciplined, we are told, but quite lacking in hesitation, anguish, or doubt. When the new man has reached his full stature, he is a model of modest, virtuous behavior. He has overcome ‘inertia’, ‘ennui’, ‘exaltation’, ‘romanticism’, ‘whimsicality’, all the vices of his superfluous predecessors, and has learned ‘tact, coolness, activity … the realization of common sense in action’. He is ‘bold’, ‘resolute’, and of ‘irreproachable honesty.’”2 His fictional character Rahkmetov was the epitome of this new man. Imitating Rakhmetov, the revolutionary Sergei Nechayev slept on boards and ate only black bread. Famous for his original catchphrase, “the ends justify the means,” he modeled the lead character in his shocking pamphlet, Catechism of a Revolutionary, after Chernyshevsky’s hero.

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The radical Nikolai Ishutin formed a circle of followers who emulated the fictional life of Rakhmetov by living lives of voluntary privation, sleeping on the floor and devoting themselves to the revolutionary cause. In homage to Chernyshevsky, Ishutin and his cousin Dmitry Karakozov plotted to assassinate Tsar Alexander II, choosing April 4th 1866, as the date for the planned murder. It was three years to the day after the publication of What Is to Be Done, romantically planned, as if Rakhmetov had returned and taken the promised radical action. For their role in the conspiracy, Ishutin and Karakozov were sentenced to death by hanging. Cruelly spared the relief of death, Ishutin’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he went mad after years of solitary confinement. The famous revolutionary Vera Zasulich imitated Pavlovna and began working for a communal book bindery within two years of the publication of the novel, while her sisters and mother joined a sewing co-operative. In 1878, Zasulich tried to kill the Chief of Police in St. Petersburg, enacting the revolutionary violence which Chernyshevsky’s novel had encouraged. Marx and Engels, working in Paris and London to promote their ideas about the class struggle and hoping for the violent revolutions that would bring freedom to the proletariat, recognized Chernyshevsky as a fellow idealist and considered campaigning to have him freed from exile. However, Chernyshevsky’s friends discouraged them, thinking it would do him more harm than good to be associated with them. Nevertheless, Marx commented on the writer and his work with high praise, describing him in his seminal Das Kapital as “a great Russian scholar and critic,” “a master mind,”3 and “the greatest of today’s revolutionary writers.”4 Engels described him as a “socialist Lessing.”5 It was twenty-one years until Chernyshevsky finally returned from exile to the western side of Russia, now cast in the role of a heroic revolutionary martyr, but speaking only with the faded echo of a voice that had been hushed by the experience of harsh imprisonment. But perhaps the old writer could take comfort in the influence that his work had had. His novel was an influential best-seller, and his essay on aesthetics, The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality, published in 1853, would become the fundamental guide to the communist state’s ideas about art for more than a century. Here’s a key sentence from the introductory paragraph of his dissertation, in which he critiques the fact that many works of art simply serve as a souvenir of a beautiful place, or person: “This is the sole aim and object of very many (the majority of) works of art: to give those people who have not been able to enjoy beauty in reality the opportunity to acquaint themselves with it at least to some degree; to serve as a reminder, to prompt and revive memories of beauty in reality in the minds of those people who

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are acquainted with it by experience and love to recall it...”6 In this, he was completely in tune with the French politician Proudhon, who would later write, “In effect, to reproduce a pleasing object as a painting, as statuary, or in any other way, is to enjoy it anew, to compensate for its absence and its loss, and often, truly, to beautify it again.”7 To both Chernyshevsky and Proudhon, art was decadent and must be reformed. This reformed art must serve as propaganda for the socialist cause; and it should always be subservient to the needs of man. Chernyshevsky said, “…man does not live to be a scholar or an artist (as many great philosophers have thought, among them Aristotle) but science and art must serve man’s welfare.” 8 Chernyshevsky’s ideas in his The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality preceded Proudhon’s The Principle of Art and its Social Purpose by thirteen years. Chernyshevsky’s book was published in Russian in 1853, Proudhon’s in France and Russia in 1866. The principal theme of Chernyshevsky’s aesthetics follow the SaintSimonist theme that art should not idealize man’s experience of nature and life but should serve to lead the people. Works of art, “...do not correct reality, do not embellish it, but reproduce it, serve as a substitute for it” – but art could not exist merely to satisfy consumption, and should not simply be beautiful for its own sake. He wrote, “Let art be content with its fine and lofty mission of being a substitute for reality in the event of its absence, and of being a manual of life for man. Reality stands higher than dreams, and essential purpose stands higher than fantastic claims.” 9 Art must serve the needs of the people. With an active distaste and resentment of paintings that merely imitated reality, Chernyshevsky took a deeply materialistic approach to art, insisting that works of art must have a purpose other than mere imitation or beauty – they must also satisfy man’s needs. Works of art that lacked content disgusted him. Beauty was not enough, and did not distinguish art, which “… seems to be a pastime too sickly sentimental for adults, and not without its dangers for young people.” No, the purpose of a work of art was not merely to fulfill vague and useless notions of beauty for its own sake, but to serve man’s “inner life” by explaining his experiences to him. Chernyshevsky thought art was similar to history, which explained the narrative of life, and provided an interpretation of it. Artists must be thinkers, providing an explanation of reality for the people, and giving them instruction on how to live, and naturally, the only correct way to live was as a socialist revolutionary. An avid reader of Saint-Simonist thought, Chernyshevsky’s ideas about art were expressions of those already described by Barrault, which had quickly spread across Europe’s borders through revolutionary circles. But

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art produced under coercion is the propaganda of tyranny. Even the French anarcho-socialist Proudhon recognized the trap, and wrote sharply, “The Communists, toward whom all socialism tends, do not believe in equality by nature and education, they supply it in sovereign decrees which they cannot carry out, whatever they may do. Instead of seeking justice in the harmony of facts, they take it from their feelings, calling justice everything that seems to them to be love of one’s neighbor, and incessantly confounding matters of reason with those of sentiment.” Despite the serious tone of his economic writing, Proudhon was prone to hyperbole with an occasionally humorous jibe thrown in. A self-declared anarchist, and later a restless republican, he criticized the authoritarian tendencies of the communists, jibing at their undemocratic claims, writing, “Fraternity! Brothers as much as you please, provided I am the big brother and you the little.”10 Despite Proudhon’s warning, this authoritarian theme would be repeated wherever selfappointed representatives of the proletariat took control. Predictably, Proudhon himself fell into the trap in his last long book about Courbet’s realist school. For the next two centuries the dictatorial refrain would sound increasingly familiar as the song sung by revolutionary activists convinced of their right to rule over the people by edict rather than by representation. If Proudhon worried about the danger of art becoming the tool of tyranny, others jealously pointed to the insignificance of Chernyshevsky’s influence. Exiled to London, the romantic Socialist aristocrat and leader of Russian revolutionary journalists, Alexander Herzen, founded the Free Russian Press to publish Polyarnaya Zvyezda (Polar Star), Kolokol (The Bell), and Golosa iz Rossii (Voices from Russia), papers criticizing the Russian government. Herzen acidly pointed out the minor role played by Chernyshevsky’s magazine, saying he was, “A wonderfully clever man and so much the more astounding it is that with such an intellect he should still have such conceit. He is sure that Sovremennik is the hub of Russia.”11 And still others complained about the wretchedness of Chernyshevsky’s thought. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, European intellectuals struggled to defend the West from the infection of Bolshevism. In 1922, the Slavonic Review was established by intellectuals interested in foreign policy in Slavic countries, providing intellectual commentary on Eastern affairs and publishing highly critical articles about the insidious revolution. In its December issue it published an extraordinary mock-theatrical dialogue first written in 1918 by the prominent Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov. Following the tradition of Saint-Simon, Bulgakov used multiple characters to discuss the various sides of a social issue, but flipped the message, dissecting the catastrophe of the revolution, and firmly blaming the unholy trinity of Vissarion Belinsky, Alexander Herzen, and Chernyshevsky for

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leading the people to destruction. Bulgakov wrote, “… this miserable intelligentsia has poisoned the people with nihilism and wrecked Russia. Let us say it outright – it is the intelligentsia that has ruined Russia. The world has never seen anything so horrible as what is happening now: the wild and furious wrath of a primitive people, poisoned by nihilism – a combination of the darkest sides of barbarity and civilization. Nihilistic savages! This is the work of our intelligentsia. It has ravaged the soul of the people and done sacrilege to its faith, its holy of holies.”12 The English word ‘intelligentsia’ is borrowed from Russian. In English, the word describes an elite group of intellectuals or highly educated people. In Russian, the intelligentsia were the radicals who followed the principles adopted by the characters in Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done, characterized by a fanatical belief in the need for socialist revolution and the ensuing utopia. While Chernyshevsky was hauled off to exile in czarist Russia, in France the chaotic cycle of revolt and counter-revolt continued. There, perhaps the painter Courbet was the man to lead socialist artists to the promised land. Courbet was a deeply controversial figure. Slurred as a ‘socialist painter’ he said, “I accept that title with pleasure. I am not only a socialist but a Democrat and a Republican as well – in a word, a partisan of the revolution and above all a Realist … Realist means a sincere lover of the honest truth.”13 Could Courbet bear the flaming torch of socialist art? His radical “truth” was so controversial that restaurants in Berlin and Paris posted signs saying, “In this club it is forbidden to talk about the paintings of M. Courbet.”14 What were these extraordinary ideas that provoked such responses? In 1850, Courbet’s first spectacular salon success was thanks to his painting Stonebreakers, which used poor labouring peasants as models, and showed them in their poverty. Courbet wrote, “I stopped to contemplate two men who were breaking stones on the road. It is not often that one encounters the most complete image of poverty, and so, right then and there, I got the idea for a painting. I told them to come to my studio the next morning and between then and now I have painted my picture … we must drag art down from its pedestal. For too long you have been making art that is pomaded and ‘in good taste.’ For too long painters, even my contemporaries, have based their art on ideas and stereotypes.”15 To Courbet, classical art had recorded the sanctioned founding myths of official legend and glorified the gods, their divine imperial representatives, and civic authorities. Medieval Christian art had reinforced religious authority. Renaissance art had glorified the new princes of the age and their condottieri. The Romantics indulged in passion and sensuality in the form

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of Sturm und Drang for an audience of nobility and aspiring gentry. Classicists longed for a revival of antiquarian idealism. Now, Courbet and his realist followers would craft contemporary paintings of workers and the provincial bourgeoisie – images almost unprecedented in art history. Reinterpreting Hegel, Courbet wrote, “Every age should be represented only by its own artists, that is to say, by the artists who have lived in it. I hold that the artists of one century are totally incapable of representing the things of a proceeding or subsequent century, in other words of painting the past or the future. It is in this sense that I deny the possibility of historical art applied to the past. Historical art is by nature contemporary. Every age must have its artists, who give expression to it and reproduce it for the future. That would be falsifying history.”16 Courbet was an ardent anti-royalist who hated Louis-Napoleon. He wrote to a friend about his reaction to the coup d’état that put the emperor on the throne, “I went to bed and threw up for three days on end.”17 Seizing his chance to become an agent of radical change, he enthusiastically supported the Paris Commune of 1871, and was elected as a delegate, and almost immediately upon his election called for the dismantling and toppling of the huge column built in the Place Vendôme to memorialize Napoleon Bonaparte’s victory at the Battle of Austerlitz. Every year since Louis-Napoleon was elected to power in 1848, then seized the imperial throne, the column had been decorated with wreaths on Bonaparte’s birthday, and on the anniversary of his death as part of his nephew’s propaganda efforts to assert his legitimacy. Perhaps Courbet had read Karl Marx’s account of the economic circumstances of Louis-Napoleon’s coup, and wanted to fulfil the prediction which ended it, in which Marx said that the emperor’s rule would end with the toppling of Bonaparte’s statue from its summit. Built in imitation and homage to Trajan’s Column in Rome, the Vendôme column was covered with a spiral of bronze reliefs made from the melted-down metal of cannon captured in the battle telling the visual story of the campaigns. It was capped by a statue of the victorious emperor himself. When Courbet and the Communards tore it down, they bore a banner with the names of prominent realists on it as members of a “Federation of Artists,” deploying a classic tool of propaganda by making use of celebrity endorsements as testimonials in support of their authority. Courbet’s participation in the destruction of the column cost him his country and the entire catalogue of his paintings in France. When the Commune was crushed by the French army, he was ordered to pay an immense fine for the costs of re-erecting the restored column. Refusing to pay a centime, he was forced into exile in Switzerland, and his paintings seized and sold as punishment for his involvement. He died six years later,

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never again seeing his home. The re-erected column became a symbol of Parisian conservatism, and the oppressed Courbet became a hero of the socialist cause. He had embraced the artistic role prescribed by the Saint-Simonists to be the voice of social justice, but he was no critic, and as an individualist painter he could not take up the flaming torch as the critical saviour of art. He deferred that role to his acquaintance, the anarcho-socialist politician Proudhon, who met Courbet soon after he had seen printed images of Stonebreakers during his imprisonment for writing seditious articles in 1849 opposing Louis-Napoleon. Although Proudhon complained in his diary that Courbet’s paintings were “ugly, but vigorous,”18 he was impressed with his ideas, corresponded with him, and visited his studio, beginning a friendship that would last until his death in 1865. Proudhon used their correspondence as a primary resource as he produced his last book, Du Principe de l’Art et de sa Destination Sociale, written in 1864, and posthumously published. He told Courbet that he would get to know him “better than he knew himself; that I would analyze him, judge him, and reveal him to the public and to himself as a whole. This seemed to frighten him: he did not doubt that I would commit fault on fault; he wrote me long letters to enlighten me, letters which taught me very little.”19 But despite his fear, Courbet was thrilled to participate in aesthetic dialogue with the great man, and delighted that Proudhon would write about him. Courbet wrote to their mutual friend Max Bouchon, “We will have a solid treatise on modern art at last, and the direction that I suggested corresponds to the Proudhonian philosophy. Never in my life have I written so much. If you could see me, you would split your sides laughing, I am swamped with paper. Every day I write Proudhon my eight or ten pages of aesthetics, on the art that is being done, the art that I have done and wish to establish.”20 Not quite as thrilled with the literary deluge coming from Courbet, Proudhon wrote to Bouchon, “he kills me with his letters of eight pages; you know how he writes, how he argues!”21 Sadly, nearly all of the letters Courbet wrote to Proudhon are lost, presumably binned by Proudhon. A solitary survivor of the correspondence is a disappointing list of mostly political aphorisms rather than any sort of treatise on art. However, we may be sure that Proudhon incorporated some of Courbet’s ideas into Du Principe de l’Art, and that Courbet doubtlessly added some of his own commentary to the text, for Proudhon died in the middle of January 1865 without completing his work. Miserable, Courbet painted a posthumous portrait of him with his children, and wrote of his friend, “… the 19th century has just lost its guiding force and the man who embodied it. We are left without a compass, and mankind and the revolution, adrift without his

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authority, will once again fall into the hands of soldiers and barbarism.” Proudhon’s death had an immediate and visceral effect upon Courbet: “… as for me, I am in a state of mental exhaustion and discouragement that I have experienced only once in my life – on December 2” (the day of Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état).22 His sorrow was short-lived. Soon after his hero’s death, Proudhon’s heirs published Du Principe de l’Art as his posthumous testament to realism, which was tremendously successful, and went through four print runs in the first quarter of the year. If any critical saviour in France took up the blazing torch of socialist art offered by d’Izalguier, it was Proudhon, who used it in an attempt to burn down the pretensions of classicism and romanticism and to counter the disease of individualism. Courbet wrote an excited letter to his family, gushing, “I sent you the book that P-J Proudhon wrote about me. It is the most marvelous thing one could ever hope to see and it is the greatest kindness and the highest honor a man could wish for in his lifetime. Nothing like this ever happens to anyone. Such a book by such a man on one individual’s account? It is staggering! All Paris is jealous and dismayed. This will increase my enemies and make me a man without equal. What a calamity that he is dead and that he was unable to carry on the principles that he advances.”23 In Russia, Proudhon’s book was quickly translated by a cadre of sympathetic radicals and published within months of the French edition. Du Principe de l’Art was a denunciation of the romantic and classicist art which dominated the salons, and a description of Courbet’s revolutionary new kind of painting that fit perfectly with the Saint-Simonian model of art as the propaganda of the revolution. It was the first time a book had been written about art as a revolutionary tool, instead of treating it as a secondary consideration wrapped up in texts about political reform. Surprisingly, considering the fundamental importance of the book to students of Courbet, and to the socialist realist avant-garde, Du Principe de l’Art has never been published in an English translation. An excellent polemicist, but a poor aesthetician, Proudhon began the book with the reasonable Hegelian assertion that art always expressed the idealism of the era it was made in – the zeitgeist of the time. Courbet had been unjustly attacked by champions of the ideal, because his art was the perfect expression of the idealism of the new era. Egyptian art made an idealism of the typical and symbolic form, reducing all imagery to a formulaic pattern that was essentially conventional. All humans shared similar attributes, and were depicted alike, with decorative elements added to show their differences. Unlike Egyptian art, Greek sculptures of the classical period were crafted to express the ideal of their time, which was

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that the gods were truly superhumans. To express their perfection, artists selected the best nature had provided, and created refined figures with none of the flaws usually found in the human body. The art of antiquity was truly a cult of form. After antiquity, the art of the Christian church cared nothing for external idealism, and their Gothic art turned inward to express their ideal of ascetic, inner perfection, abandoning physical beauty for expressions of an exquisite spiritual state of harmony with God. But this too was supplanted in its turn by a new kind of idealism, inspired this time by the rise of humanism in the Renaissance, whose artists made a hybrid of Christian and pagan art, tolerantly combining religious thought with antique idealism. Proudhon despised this crossbred impurity, describing the Renaissance as “a general dissolution.”24 But the Reformation gave him hope, replacing the hypocritical mess of papist and pagan contradictions with a new kind of idealism based on the lives of ordinary people. What remained for art but, “vulgar secular life and its trivial occupations. No more symbols, no more gods, no more nobility, no more monasteries; in their place, industrious, educated, positive humanity.”25 This reformed art was practical, epitomized in Rembrandt, who had an extraordinary eye for the real lives of plain people. In the honest art of the Dutch Reformation, there was no religious superstition, no physical idealism based on old ideas of ancient gods, no false asceticism. Insidiously, Proudhon claimed to speak as a member of the proletariat, which privileged his critical voice above all others, claiming with astonishing arrogance that, “This multitude has the right to declare what it rejects or prefers, to signify its tastes, to impose its will on artists, without anyone, head of state or expert, being able to speak for it and act as its interpreter. It is prone to deceive itself, even in what it looks for and likes best; its taste, such as it is, often needs to be awakened and exercised; but it is the judge and pronounces supremely. It can say, and no one can answer: ‘I command you, artists, to obey. Because if your art repels my inspiration; if it attempts to impose itself upon my fancy instead of following it; if it dares to challenge my judgments; in a word, if it is not made for me, I despise it with all its wonders; I will deny it.’”26 As the self-proclaimed speaker for the proletariat, Proudhon claimed an extraordinary authority over art, yet perversely insisted that under socialist rule there would be no “great men” because of the levelling effect of the revolution.27 In this he was in agreement with Karl Marx, whose Communist Manifesto of 1848 also called for a sweeping away of bourgeois individuality.28 Like Saint-Simon and Chernyshevsky, Proudhon viewed the role of artists as servants of the proletariat, “… poets and artists are to humanity like singers to the church or drummers to a regiment. What we

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ask of them are not their personal impressions but ours; it is not for themselves that they paint, sing, or play their instruments, it is for us.”29 But, wasn’t Proudhon himself a leader of men, a great man, an unusually gifted journalist, an orator, an original theorist of anarcho-socialism? Du Principe de l’Art was an exercise in intellectual elitism speaking to a tiny fraction of the population. And he was hardly a mouthpiece of the proletariat! In the book, Proudhon repeatedly makes snobbish complaints about the inferiority of the proletariat’s taste in art, and complains about the fact – which is as relevant now as it was when the ink flowed from his pen – that a vast majority of people simply didn’t care about the academically inspired art that he enjoyed criticizing, preferring the exciting paintings of artists like Horace Vernet. Vernet’s military tableaus were expressions of a patriotic love for soldiery. He made a fortune from his paintings of dashing French soldiers caught up in action in the bloody campaigns of Italy and North Africa, and from illustrations of their lives in the countryside and barracks. But, to Proudhon, Vernet’s paintings were hypocritical lies, mis-telling stories of glory, not truthful narratives of the oppression of the Algerian colony and the extermination of its people. Why did the mass of French people love them so much? Only a hundred thousand of them cared for the works of the classicists and the romantics of the salon. Bitterly criticizing the masses for their poor taste, he wrote, “Cheap housing and portrait cards at three francs a dozen: this is what satisfies the people of Paris.” And the artists who satisfied the proletarian taste were no better, for they were mere “Entrepreneurs of imitation, of counterfeit, of pastiche, of bric-a-brac.”30 In this contemptuous assessment, Proudhon, still imagining himself as the mouthpiece of the proletariat, prefigured Max Horkheimer, Herman Broch, and Clement Greenberg in their equally patronizing early 20th century critical assessments of kitsch as the evil which was the antithesis of true art. To Proudhon, artists who wasted their time on anything other than making art with a social message were irresponsible romantics. According to him, Delacroix was a prime example of this kind of wasted talent. Instead of focusing his attention on the needs of the people, he flitted from subject to subject, making a cult of drama and energy without consistency of theme in his body of work. Proudhon detested Delacroix’s romantic individualism. When Delacroix said, “If you mean by my romanticism the free manifestation of my personal impressions ... I must admit that I have been a romantic since the age of fifteen.” Proudhon replied, “I respond to M. Delacroix, I do not care much about your personal impressions,” and went on to say that if Delacroix was hoping to impress him, he would only

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succeed through reason, and that this reason was only to be found in the ideal of the time – which was revolutionary socialism alone.31 This fanatical anti-individualism was a thread that persisted from the earliest days of socialist theory to the rise of the Soviet Union of the next century. When H. G. Wells interviewed Stalin in 1934, and commented that individualist America seemed to be treading a cautious path toward socialist reform under Roosevelt, Stalin dismissed the idea, and followed the stock Marxist line with a classic piece of Orwellian double-speak, saying, “There is no, nor should there be, irreconcilable contrast between the individual and the collective, between the interests of the individual person and the interests of the collective. There should be no such contrast, because collectivism, socialism, does not deny, but combines individual interests with the interests of the collective. Socialism cannot abstract itself from individual interests. Socialist society alone can most fully satisfy these personal interests.”32 To Stalin, being an individual required subsuming the self within the collective! And the only acceptable individualism was communist individualism! We know the tragic history of those who deviated from the uniformity of this specious assertion. Perhaps the revolutionary work of Jacques Louis David would fare better under Proudhon’s critical gaze. Colourfully, Proudhon declared that David’s Death of Marat was “… a flash of lightning in the storm of the Revolution.”33 As much as he admired this admittedly great painting of the demise of this viciously murderous ‘friend of the people,’ he was torn by the evidence of David’s hypocrisy, for this despicable courtier changed political sides as often as his socks, first painting portraits of aristocrats at the court of the king, then becoming a bloody-handed leader of the revolution of 1789, and painting his murdered compatriot Marat at the moment of his death in his bath, then becoming a protégé of the dictator Napoleon Bonaparte. Proudhon detested David’s painting of his emperor as the heroic leader calmly seated upon a rearing stallion in his Napoleon Crossing the Alps, wearing his wind-whipped red robe, towering over the mountains, whose sublime magnificence was reduced to the size of molehills, pointing out that the cowardly emperor had actually followed in the rear, perched on a surefooted donkey, wrapped in an ordinary grey blanket, wracked with worry over the bottleneck caused by a diminutive enemy fort that had blocked the arterial pass, robbing him of the element of surprise over the Austrian enemy in Italy. To Proudhon this species of imperial propaganda was malevolent. It was a lie. The irony is that he insisted that artists must always serve the proletarian cause – as propagandists. He wrote, “Poets and artists are to humanity like singers to the church or drummers to a regiment. What we

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ask of them are not their personal impressions but ours; it is not for themselves that they paint, sing, or play their instruments, it is for us.”34 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was thrown together with Delacroix, as Proudhon’s sharp pen slashed him as a plagiarist, and cut him again for debasing the image of the Virgin Mary with his iconography of her. Ingres painted Mary as a teenage girl taking her first communion, when she would in fact have been a fifty-year-old woman at the time of the last supper. Proudhon complained that the work was absurd, lewd mysticism, only “worthy of the fire.”35 Proudhon’s doctrinaire character emerged when he laid down his rules for portraiture, demanding that portraits must be as accurate as photographs, but must also express the inner life of their subjects. Photographs could only record the action of light over the course of a moment or two, but a good portrait-painter could capture his subject over the course of a long period of time. A painted portrait, therefore, was supposed to be a “better known” depiction of a man. But the painter was forbidden from either flattering or slandering his model. The image must be a truthful representation of the sitter. The same went for paintings of a scene. They, too, must be a truthful depiction, never flattering the people in them. As an example of an artist’s failure to paint honest depictions, he used Léopold Robert’s idyllic canvas, The Reapers. He admitted to having admired the painter, whose works had brought him pleasure for a long time, but now, under the spell of his newfound faith in realism, the scales had fallen from his eyes, and he realized how much he had been led astray by the idealism of the figures, who had little to do with the tired reality of peasants celebrating after a long day’s work harvesting the grain from the fields. These were “the gods of the countryside in disguise”36 not the rugged peasants of the countryside. If Robert had failed to do justice to reality, how much worse was the work of Vernet? To Proudhon, this popular art-star was “the most superficial of painters,”37 and a shame to the French people – simply mentioning his name set him off like a grumpy old man. This gripe surely must have been one of his habitual rants: “Are we a nation of artists, as we like to say, or a people of affectation and polish? With us, everything degenerates, everything collapses, we can say in unison: What music, what airs, what songs are these which, renewed each year, are the delight of the multitude! We have no national dance anymore; the minuet and other dances said to be characteristic are forgotten. The polka and the mazurka, like the contradance and the waltz, for us are nothing but a pretext for the cancan … For one hundred fifty years tragedy and comedy, from Corneille to Beaumarchais, albeit revived from the Greeks flourished in our country, regarded then as the home of literature and good taste. Then romanticism

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failed in its reform, we fell into obscene dramaturgy, into tableaux vivants, into the pornocratic literature of Mogador, of Rigolboche, etc.,38 into exhibitions of history and military developments in fifty scenes … I ask myself how the idea has never come to the government, protector of art and morality, that permits itself to censor so many things, to prohibit such spectacles. We resemble, trait for trait, the decadence of the Romans, who, disgusted by Plautus, Terence and Seneca, had no taste for anything but the butcheries of the circus! We make the measure of our architectural talent in the five-story buildings which compose the new Paris, where the population is piled up in their rooms: unsatisfactory, uniform constructions, whose prototype is the barracks, and whose masterpiece is a bed and breakfast.”39 Vernet became the target of Proudhon’s cantankerous spleen, and he ends his spitting critique with the colourful insistence that Vernet’s huge battle painting Smala should be “removed, scrubbed, scoured, then sold as caulking to the ragpicker.” 40 This raging against the decadence of French fin-de-siècle bourgeois culture is amusing, but Proudhon’s aesthetic ideas were taken seriously by proto-communist activists because of the second half of Du Principe de l’Art, which studied the works of Courbet and gave an explanation of the social purpose of his oeuvre. Proudhon began with a close critical examination of Courbet’s paintings, first describing Return from the Fair, emphasizing that Courbet made no attempt to flatter his subjects, who were taken directly from nature. The painting is a dreary affair, quickly-made, and utterly lacking the technical panache of Stonebreakers, capturing a grim traveling party of country folk on a rough rural road. Two mounted men, a father and son, follow a pair of miserable cows, separated by a third cow from a pair of dull women, perhaps a mother and daughter, trudging behind them. Trailing in the background a third man ambles apart from the leaden group. In the foreground, a surly middle-aged man follows a pig tied to a line, and smokes a curling pipe. He shoulders a pack and carries a large drab umbrella. The only light moment in the painting is that the young man flashes a flirty backward glance toward the young woman. But to Proudhon, this tediously grey picture was exemplary of the new realist art that captured the socialist ideal of the time. What a miserable world, if such lacklustre paintings were exemplars of its ideal, without imagination, mere records of the time. Proudhon confessed his own ignorance: “I don’t want to argue about nobility, or pose, or style, or gesture, or anything that constitutes the execution of a work of art which becomes the habitual object of the old criticism. I would even be quite disposed to declare that I understand absolutely nothing about these things, and that I am pleased about it.”41 At

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the beginning of the book, he admitted that he knew nothing about art and attempted to make a virtue of his ignorance. Now, he re-emphasized his lack of knowledge and revealed himself as a hypocrite, too. While simultaneously decrying the use of imagination in the artist, he almost immediately entered into an imaginative analysis of the characters and backgrounds of the people in the painting. He fancifully described their personalities and their actions before and after the moment of the image, offering a character study of each of them, and providing them with a narrative that was not defended by the image itself. He treated Courbet’s The Sleeping Spinner, Burial at Ornans, The Bathers, Priests Returning from the Conference, The Stonebreakers, and Girls of the Seine with the same kind of scrutiny. The Spinner was an honest depiction of a Frankish peasant worker, unpretentious and completely truthful to the type of country people. Any romantic or classicist artist would have made this painting an opportunity for voyeurism, he said, to have painted an erotic nymph of a girl in a state of partial undress, but Courbet painted a sturdy, solid figure, a real woman. The peasants in the Burial were treated with a similar character study, noting the artist’s pragmatic treatment of their participation – or lack of it – in the ceremonial. The painting was a tool to point out the hypocrisy of the church, the congregation’s complete lack of interest in the ritual, and their disrespect for the dead. The Bathers was an image of a half-naked, flabby-bottomed bourgeoisie, who Proudhon took delight in describing vulgarly as a heifer waiting for the abattoir.42 Here, he was less certain of the character and suggested that the image may be of a brothel madame, or a “blue-stocking” – a derogatory term used to describe bourgeois women with literary or artistic pretensions. His criticism of Courbet’s great chef-d’œuvre, Stonebreakers, was benign and straightforward. He was at his most fanciful in his commentary on the tedious, poorly composed Girls of the Seine, which was a prurient description of the two young women whose bourgeois characters and narrative he assassinated with absurd speculation. The social purpose of art, according to Proudhon, was to serve as “an idealist representation of nature and ourselves, for the physical and moral improvement of our species.”43 What should the artists’ subject be? All human life. Proudhon’s critics might complain that Courbet’s work lacked idealism, but he responded with harsh judgement against them, firing all his rhetorical guns in a devastating polemic, “What! You speak of the ideal, and your idealism, impotent to speak of nature, does not rest on the chimeras of your imagination, on the abstractions of your mind, and the impotent boilings of your heart! For, finally, your gods, your saints, your great men, all these historical characters, enchantments, dramas, allegories, romances

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and chivalries, all those, closest to reality, that you make appear in your landscapes, your seascapes, your genre paintings, what are all these, if not imagination, abstraction, chimeras, moreover, an admission of helplessness? You speak of invention, of creation, of freedom! And you have never produced anything but myth-makers, theosophers, poets, novelists, limerick writers, historiographers, as if art only existed to illustrate gossip, sagas, comedy, or history, as if the artist was incapable of thinking for himself, of choosing his types, of producing his ideas!”44 His ultimate insult for those who championed invention, creation, and freedom was taken from the mouth of Courbet, who asked, “You who claim to portray Charlemagne, Caesar, and Jesus Christ himself, would you know how to make a portrait of your father?” 45 Only accurate imitation of the subject would do for this new kind of art. But Proudhon had left a door wide open for the bohemians to contradict his theory. He wrote, “Our era, rich in police but empty of principles and morals, calm on the surface, is at bottom revolutionary. Art must be so too. All regeneration presupposes a death beforehand; all restoration a demolition.”46 This was music to the revolutionary ears of the Bolsheviks and the socialists in France. And, in a sense, he was absolutely right. It was indeed unthinkable that 19th century art could continue on its aristocratic course after the French and American revolutions had given the burgeoning middle class their newfound authority and prosperity. Naturally, the new art for the new era would reflect their values and tastes. But did the artists share Proudhon’s radical and authoritarian ideas about what the new ideal of the time was? Proudhon claimed that the new ideal was socialist, proletarian, and revolutionary, and that art and society were decadent, and would soon be overthrown by a new, ascetic, and ethical culture, but bohemians claimed art as their new religion. Their ideal was self-expression. Art was for art’s sake – not some mad utopian cause. To bohemians, financial success was a sell-out – not because they admired socialism but because money lifted bohemians into an awkward new position within the bourgeoisie. And while Proudhon admitted that a true revolution in art would require a new methodology, he conceded Courbet had done a lot to change subject matter, but little to bring radical change to technique, being a follower of the Dutch school of reformation painters like Rembrandt. Nevertheless, he thought the art and architecture of the past should be annihilated, to make possible the new, revolutionary art that would express the ideas of the present. In his Philosophy of Progress, he wrote, “I would like for our quicker regeneration, to see museums, cathedrals, palaces, salons, boudoirs, with all their ancient and modern furniture, thrown into the flames, and fifty years set aside for artists to take care of their art. With

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the past forgotten, we might achieve something.”47 Although he selfadmittedly knew nothing about art in practice, Proudhon expected this new kind of art to become a formulaic science, and wanted artists to shed their dependence upon imagination and belief in favour of reason. In his text, From the Creation of Order in Humanity, Proudhon wrote, “… we may hope to one day arrive at a theory of the beautiful, according to which painting, architecture and statuary would be treated as exact sciences, and artistic composition assimilated to the construction of a ship, the integration of a curve, a calculation of forces and resistances. Then the artist, once a man of imagination and faith, would become a man of reasoning and science, would shine in the first rank in the sphere of pure reason; his mission would be to synthesize on canvas and marble, by colour and chisel, the most diverse points of view, the elements whose determination and series are eminently transcendental: society, history, customs, laws, beliefs, relationships of the physical and moral, passions, ideas, with the creation itself for decoration and the infinite for a frame. Then we would understand that works of art, like those of nature, are all the more beautiful and more delightful when they are subject to more exact laws, to a deeper and more complicated series: when reflection and method infinitely surpass the happiest instinct, and when the moment approaches that, thanks to the theories of aesthetic synthesis and serial integration, the reasoned production of the beautiful will prevail over the marvels of spontaneous inspiration, as much as modern science prevails over ancient fables, and the philosophy of history over legend.”48 Perhaps unknowingly, while he had self-consciously laid the theoretical foundations for the avantgarde realism of Courbet, Proudhon had also described a branch of the individualist bohemian art that continually sought to reinvent its products for the emerging bourgeois market-place. This newly proposed scientific approach to art would eventually lead to the abstractions of Kandinsky and his followers, although their science was wrapped in the transcendentalism of theosophy. Doubtlessly, Proudhon did not imagine the deconstruction of art in the name of reinvention that would follow his comments at the turn of the century. His radicalism was limited to his idea of “critical art,” which made no break whatsoever with the studio techniques of the past and differed from classicism and romanticism in its content rather than its form. In fact, at the end of Du Principe de l’Art he specifically rejected such experimentation, saying that a painting made entirely of lines or of colour would be contemptibly absurd.49 However incompletely formed, this was the first intellectual step on the path that led to the excesses of individualist artists in the 20th Century.

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Thus, the seeds for confusion were sown. Using the venerable traditions of representation, the socialist realist avant-garde instructed the masses how to live the socialist life and promoted utopia. Meanwhile, an as yet unnamed bohemian and individualist avant-garde would also seek to completely reconceive art for a new age, producing works which were focused primarily upon the exploration of novelty rather than politics, and catering to the interests and desires of the new middle-class. Proto-communist writers universally positioned artists as the propagandist servants of the revolutionary proletariat, but even the early practitioners of realism were reluctant to abandon romantic notions of their own individual genius and to embrace Saint-Simonist ideas of the artist as servant to the masses. Reading about the destruction of the Vendôme column in the newspapers, and dismayed at seeing his name associated with it, the painter Jean François Millet immediately wrote several open letters denying his involvement in it, and disclaiming any endorsement of the Commune. He angrily described his feelings to Alfred Sensier: “Is not all that is going on in Paris miserable? Did you see that I was elected a member of the Federation des Artistes? What do they take me for? I have replied: ‘I do not accept the honor which has been offered me.’ What a set of wretches they all are! Courbet, of course, is their President. Our age may well be called the time of the great slaughter.”50 Millet was consistently interested in painting hard-working men and women in the French countryside, but resented being identified with the Commune. Unlike Courbet, Millet rejected the socialist name when slandered with it, writing to his friend, Sensier, “They call me a Socialist, but really, I might reply with the poor commissionnaire from Auvergne, ‘They call me a Saint-Simonist. That is not true, I do not even know what it means.’”51 In much the same way that many democratic members of the American anti-communist left would do three quarters of a century later, Millet identified himself with the aspirational working people of his country, but certainly not with revolutionary socialist philosophers like Proudhon. “That man’s doctrine … would lead to the tyranny of the few,” said a perceptive Millet, after withstanding a visit from the politician, who harangued him about the plight of the poor. "My programme is work,” he wrote, “That is the natural condition of humanity. ‘In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread,’ was written centuries ago. The destiny of man is immutable, and can never change. What each one of us has to do is to seek progress in his profession, to try and improve daily in his trade, whatever that may be, and in this way to surpass his neighbor, both in the superiority of his talent, and in the conscientiousness of his work. That is the only path for me. All else is

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a dream or a lottery.”52 This was a message of individual prowess and upward mobility, a program of professional excellence, more born of anarchic libertarian principles than of socialist egalitarianism. Saint-Simon advocated the suppression of individualism in favour of communal life. In his age, Proudhon had rejected the anarchism of his youth in favour of socialism, positioning himself as an example of a servant of the proletariat, and insisting that artists should do the same. Millet rejected that message in favour of merit. But the subtle distinction of this individualist stance was lost on his critics, who only saw imagery associated with the messages of proto-communist activism in his work. This distinction between art as propaganda in service to the masses and art as the product of individual genius was at the heart of the division that separated bourgeois bohemians from proletarian avant-gardists. Surprisingly, although he was the subject of Proudhon’s book, the radical communard Courbet was an enthusiastic supporter of egalitarianism and supported the idea of the eradication of class. But this champion of realism also firmly resisted the idea of the artist as the servant of the mass and insisted upon the importance of individual genius, saying, “The superiority of one class over the other does not exist. The only superior man is the man who is superior by virtue of his work or his actions.”53 Like Millet, this lifelong bohemian saw artists as individualists who must speak their own mind, writing in a letter, “A man who works in the arts must concede nothing to public opinion that is at odds with his own ideas. If he does, his originality does not exist. He chooses the beaten path.”54 This was directly opposed to the ideas of thinkers like Proudhon or Chernyshevsky, who both sustained the Saint-Simonian belief that artists must always work in service to the proletariat as producers of didactic material. Courbet was so insistent upon the importance of individual expression that he refused to open a teaching studio because he believed that although methodology could be taught, artists should always choose their own “… entirely individual direction, the complete freedom of his own expression in the application of the method.”55 It is ironic that the work of these individualists should become viewed as important foreign predecessors to doctrinaire Soviet socialist realism. Proudhon complained that the immoral bohemian-bourgeois partisans of art-for-art’s-sake had rejected knowledge and thought, preferring indulgent fantasy, individual genius, and imaginative inspiration. It was unreasonable. To romantic aesthetes, art had no connection to ethics, but existed by itself, free from the constraints of morality. But if art was not tied to anything, what was its purpose? To the classicists and romantics, art was an end to itself with no utilitarian function. The singular purpose of an artist was to

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excite delight, which made reality more enjoyable. Surprisingly, Proudhon abstained from arguing against the foundational stance of the romantics, lamely claiming it was self-evident that this was a poor basis for aesthetic philosophy because art had been decadent for sixty years. To Proudhon, science and law trumped sensuality. They were the sources of the ideal of the time. Art that was based upon sensuality could not possibly capture the zeitgeist. To give his proposal authority, he paraphrased Courbet’s thoughts on art-for-art’s-sake, writing, “No, it is not true that the only end of art is in pleasure, for pleasure is not an end; it is not true that there is no other end than itself, for everything is held together, everything is connected, everything is in solidarity, everything has an end in humanity and in nature: the idea of a faculty without a goal, a principle without consequence, of a cause without an effect, is as absurd as an effect without a cause. Art has for its object to guide us to the knowledge of ourselves, through the revelation of all our thoughts, even more our secrets, of all our tendencies, of our virtues, of our vices, of our foolishness, and by contributing to the development of our dignity, to the perfection of our being.”56 This sounds like the most tediously didactic form of art, yet Courbet claimed such moralizing imagery could still be beautiful and graceful. Imagination and pleasure had no importance in comparison to the true goal of art, to bring humanity to perfection.57 To emphasize his position, Proudhon gave a four-point declaration of regulations for the new school, in an extraordinary moment of supreme arrogance that revealed the totalitarian nature of his aesthetics. He declared these rules common to all of the arts: the content of the work must always be the priority ahead of the methodology; this content must be born of the artist’s truthful philosophical idea; art must be a mixture of idea and representation; and beauty was closely related to rationality.58 The priority of the new realist school, wrote Proudhon, was to present what he called “critical art” born of the new “critical idealism.” Art went beyond simple imitation of reality. Art had to be revelatory, rational, and supposedly anti-dogmatic. This new school “exhibited the highest degree of idealism.”59 Until the emergence of this realist school and critical idealism, art had declined taking its role as the educator of the people. Instead, it glorified depravity, and became “a brew of dissolution.”60 In contrast, the new genre of critical art was “the most elevated, the only admissible one.”61 Its uninformed artists must reform their own lives, by working hard, practicing modesty and sobriety, renouncing bohemian habits, and following the austere customs of the ancient Pythagoreans, who were known for their ascetic lifestyle, for living a communal life without

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money, for eating a restricted simple diet, and for focusing upon philosophical contemplation. Having reached this lofty position, art could no longer be prostituted in service of venality. And Proudhon left no doubt about the absolute separation between the new critical school and those it had superseded, saying in fine totalitarian fashion, “As for us revolutionary socialists, we say to artists as well as to litterateurs: Our ideal is the right and the truth. If you do not know how to make art with that and of that style, withdraw! We have no need of you. If you are at the service of the corrupted, the luxurious, the slackers, withdraw! We do not want your arts. If the aristocracy, the papacy and the royal majesty are indispensable to you, always withdraw! We banish your art as well as your people.”62 Art had not yet achieved its ultimate goal. Prefiguring Soviet socialist realism Proudhon thought the realist school was a precursor to a future school which would combine moral beauty with physical beauty – a new kind of ideal which he called “human beauty.”63 It would show man in his new state of being, “at once virtuous, courageous, intelligent, learned, free, and happy.”64 Whereas Courbet and his realist school portrayed man as he was, and dealt with mere mortals, the coming school would idealize man, not in the form of the gods, but in his self-realization. This new art would not emerge until society was reformed and its morals renewed.65 But young up-and-coming bohemian artists had other ideas. While recognizing the need for a new kind of art for a new time and for a new audience, they ignored Proudhon’s avant-garde school and instead enthusiastically explored their own artistic inventions, following the orbit of the bohemian moon around the bourgeois earth. Sharply responding to Proudhon’s Du Principe de l’Art et de sa Destination Sociale, the great journalist and rising star novelist Émile Zola wrote, “In a word, I am diametrically opposed to Proudhon: he wants art to be the product of the nation, I demand that it be the product of the individual.”66

Notes 1

Ed. and Trans. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet, University of Chicago Press, 1992, 107 2 Rufus W. Mathewson, The Positive Hero in Russian Literature, Northwestern University Press, 2000. 77 3 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Progress Publishers 1974. 25

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Karl Marx, Beitrage zur Gechichte der Deutschen Arbeiterbewegung # 6. 1966. In: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1978. 469 5 Frederick Engels, Fluchtlingsliteratur, in: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1978. 414. Engels referred to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. 6 Nicholas G. Chernyshevsky, The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality. In: Russian Philosophy Volume II: The Nihilists, The Populists, Critics of Religion and Culture. Quadrangle Books, 1965 https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/chernyshevsky/1853/aestheticsreality.htm 7 “Reproduire, en effet, par la peinture, la statuaire, ou de toute autre manière, un objet qui plaît, c'est en jouir de nouveau, c'est suppléer à son absence et à sa perte, c'est bien souvent l'embellir encore.” Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Du Principe de l'Art et de sa Destination Sociale, Garnier Frères, 1865. 20 8 Quoted in: Rufus W. Mathewson, The Positive Hero in Russian Literature, Northwestern University Press, 2000. 64. Original source: Nicholas G. Chernyshevsky, Review of a translation of Aristotle’s Poetics, “O Poezii, sochinenie Aristotelya” in: Estetika, ed. N. G. Bogoslovsky, 1939. 226 9 Nicholas G. Chernyshevsky, The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality. In: Russian Philosophy Volume II: The Nihilists, The Populists, Critics of Religion and Culture. Quadrangle Books, 1965 https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/chernyshevsky/1853/aestheticsreality.htm 10 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, System of Economical Contraction, 1888, In: Works of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Kindle Loc. 4018-36 11 H. T. Cheshire. The Radicals of the Sixties and Their Leaders. In: The Slavonic Review, vol. 1, no. 1, 1922, pp. 110–120 12 Sergius Bulgakov, Trans. Mrs. Pashkov. At the Feast of the Gods: Contemporary Dialogues, In: The Slavonic Review, vol. 1, no. 2, 1922, pp. 391–400 13 Ed. and Trans. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet, University of Chicago Press, 1992, 103 14 Ibid, 110 15 Ibid, 88 16 Ibid, 203 17 Ibid, 257 18 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Diaries, Carnet 9, p.69, Vol. 4, Librairie Marcel Riviere, I974, 251. Cited in: Bowness, Alan. Courbet's Proudhon. The Burlington Magazine, vol. 120, no. 900, 1978, pp. 123–130 19 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Du Principe de l'Art et de sa Destination Sociale, Garnier Freres, 1865, 280 20 Ed. and Trans. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet, University of Chicago Press, 1992, 232 21 Ibid, 233 22 Ibid, 257 23 Ibid, 266

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24 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Du Principe de l'Art et de sa Destination Sociale, Garnier

Freres, 1865, 78 25 Ibid, 84 26 Ibid, 11-12 27 Ibid, 136-137 28 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Penguin, 1967, 99 29 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Du Principe de l'Art et de sa Destination Sociale, Garnier Freres, 1865, 123 30 Ibid, 165-166 31 Ibid, 122-123 32 Joseph Stalin, H.G. Wells, Marxism Versus Liberalism. An Interview with H. G. Wells, 23 July 1934, In: Joseph Stalin, Works Volume 14, 1934 – 1940, Digital Reprints, 2006, 26-27 33 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Du Principe de l’Art et de sa Destination Sociale, Garnier Freres, 1865, 120 34 Ibid, 123 35 Ibid, 133 36 Ibid, 151 37 Ibid, 153 38 Celeste Mogador was a famous prostitute whose memoirs were published in four volumes in 1858. The sensational autobiographical Mémoires de Rigolboche were a memoir written by Amelia Marguerite Badel, the inventor of the can-can, published in 1860. Rigolboche was Badel’s stage name. 39 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Du Principe de l’Art et de sa Destination Sociale, Garnier Freres, 1865, 156 - 157 40 Ibid, 162 41 Ibid, 197 42 Ibid, 215 43 Ibid, 198 44 Ibid, 200 45 Ibid, 202 46 Ibid, 316 47 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Philosophie de Progress. In: Oeuvres Complètes de P.J. Proudhon, Volume 20, A. Lacroix, 1849, 73 48 “S’il en est ainsi, nous pouvons espérer de parvenir un jour à une théorie du beau, d'après laquelle la peinture, l’archi-tecture et la statuaire seraient traitées comme des sciences exactes, et la composition artistique assimilée à la construction d'un navire, à l’intégration d’une courbe, à un calcul de forces et de résistances. C’est alors que l’artiste, jadis homme d’imagination et de foi, devenant homme de raisonnement et de science, brillerait au premier rang dans la sphère de la raison pure; sa mission serait de synthétiser sur la toile et le marbre, par la couleur et le ciseau, les points de vue les plus divers, les éléments dont la dé-termination et la série sont éminemment transcendentales : société, histoire, mœurs, lois, croyances, rapports du physique et du moral, passions, idées, avec la création pour décor et l’infini pour cadre. Alors nous comprendrions que les œuvres de l’art, comme celles de la nature, sont d’autant plus belles et plus ravissantes qu’elles sont soumises à

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des lois plus exactes, à une sériation plus profonde et plus compliquée: que là aussi la réflexion et la méthode surpassent infiniment le plus heureux instinct, et que le moment approche où, grâce aux théories de synthèse esthétique et d'intégration sérielle, la production raisonnée du beau l’emportera sur les merveilles de l’inspiration spontanée, autant que la science moderne l’emporte sur les fables antiques, et la philosophie de l’histoire sur la légende.” Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, De la Creation de L’Ordre Dans L'humanité, ou Principes D'organisation Politique. In: Oeuvres Complètes de P.-J. Proudhon, Volume 1., A. Lacroix, 1849, 167 - 168 49 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Du Principe de l'Art et de sa Destination Sociale, Garnier Freres, 1865, 372 50 Jean François Millet, Letter to Alfred Sensier, 25th Aril, 1871 In: Julia Cartwright, Jean François Millet, his Life and Letters, S. Sonnenschein & Co. Macmillan, 1910, 326 51 Jean François Millet, Letter to Alfred Sensier, 30th May, 1863 In: Julia Cartwright, Jean François Millet, his Life and Letters, S. Sonnenschein & Co. Macmillan, 1910, 240 52 Julia Cartwright, Jean François Millet, his Life and Letters, S. Sonnenschein & Co. Macmillan, 1910, 169 53 Ed. and Trans. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet, University of Chicago Press, 1992, 230 54 Ibid, 230 55 Ibid, 204 56 Gustave Courbet, quoted in Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Du Principe de l'Art et de sa Destination Sociale, Garnier Freres, 1865, 224 - 225 57 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Du Principe de l’Art et de sa Destination Sociale, Garnier Freres, 1865, 371 58 1. That in every work of art one must in the first place consider the idea of the work itself, its practical goal, and in the second place the execution: the EFFECTS before the method; the CONTENT before the container; the THOUGHT before its realization; 2. That the artist’s idea must always be logical, rational, true, and that in this respect the work falls under philosophical criticism; but that one cannot judge the covering of the idea with certainty, because of gustibus et coloribus non disputandum; 3. That a work of art is therefore composed of IDEA and representation, the first rational, the second dependent on the taste and the ability of the artist; the first of these demonstrable, the other not demonstrable; 4. But in any case there is this in favor of the idea: that if all that is reasonable is not necessarily good in representation, nothing truly beautiful can be irrational. These are the principles of art and of the new criticism: principles which I declare common to literature, to poetry, to architecture, to music, to dance, just as much to painting and to sculpture and which govern everything here. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Du Principe de l'Art et de sa Destination Sociale, Garnier Freres, 1865, 371 59 Ibid, 294 60 Ibid, 234

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59

Ibid, 241 Ibid, 373-374 63 Ibid, 301 64 Ibid, 304 65 Ibid, 304 66 “En un mot, je suis diamétralement opposé à Proudhon: il veut que l’art soit le produit de la nation, j’exige qu’il soit le produit de l’individu.” Émile Zola, Proudhon et Courbet, In: Mes Haines, Causeries Littéraires et Artistiques, Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1893, 30 62

REJECTS

“Perhaps the Elephant Man would understand my dilemma ... it’s all a matter of face-to-face communication.”1 John Hinkley Jr.

The infamous moment at which the bohemians escaped from the customary domination of the haute-bourgeois elite and found their middleclass audience was at the Salon des Refusés of 1863. The received narrative of this famous event is that the impressionists were tossed out of the regular salon, and instead showed their work at this rebellious show, achieving the adoration of the masses, who from thenceforth welcomed their new, pretty, loose, light style of painting and showered the artists with praise, despite their initial rejection. The truth is quite different. Contrary to popular wisdom, Claude Monet, Pierre-August Renoir, Alfred Sisley and the other painters who would become famous as the great impressionists did not show any work at all at the first Salon des Refusés. Camille Pissarro did, but nobody noticed or cared about his little landscape studies. Cezanne showed a piece too, but his name didn’t even make it into the catalogue, and nobody paid any attention to his slight painting. However, the flaneur Édouard Manet caused a scandal with his three paintings, Dejeuner sur l’Herbe, Mademoiselle V. in the Costume of an Espada, and Young Man in the Costume of a Majo. But he was a bourgeois realist simultaneously following the style of and rebelling against the avantgarde emphasis of Gustave Courbet, and he was certainly not an impressionist, being far more interested in the economical work of Velasquez than in the transitory effects of light and exploiting the novel color palette emerging from France’s industrial laboratories as the exciting product of scientific experimentation. By 1863, the salon had reluctantly been showing Courbet’s paintings for years. As early as 1852, the jury included the shocking Les Baigneurs which Delacroix said revealed the painter’s “abominable vulgarity.” This painting was considered so disgraceful that a police inspector removed it from the exhibition and Emperor LouisNapoleon was said to have whacked it with his riding crop when he saw it.2 Nevertheless, Courbet had set the precedent for realist works with it and shown how rebellion against the standards of the salon could lead to a lucrative career. Apart from bourgeois realist Manet, paintings by Henri

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Fantin-Latour and his American friend Whistler also got a lot of attention from the gutter press, and approached what would later become impressionism, but they were far from iconic. What really happened in 1863 was the emergence of a bourgeois audience for popular art. The committee governing selections for the traditional salon declined several thousand paintings which had been submitted for the official exhibit. Louis-Napoleon had placed the governance of the arts in France under the control of the Ministry of the Imperial House and the Fine Arts with offices in the Louvre. This ministry was headed by the Comte Alfred Émilien O’Hara van Nieuwerkerke, who acted as a sort of minister of culture under Louis-Napoleon, and was the superintendent of the salon, with autocratic authority over crafting the rules for acceptance of work into the exhibit, including the composition of the committee. The aristocratic Nieuwerkerke, who was a decent, if conventional, monumental sculptor, was no admirer of scruffy young bohemians, and under his leadership the committee of the Beaux-Arts deliberately excluded their works from the official salon. An official representing the committee told the emperor that the flood of young artists seeking a career in art must be dammed. Preventing their success was for their own good, because too many had chosen a career in the arts for themselves and, “greater indulgence can only bring cruel and bitter disappointments for the future.” Worse, these young up-and-comers presented a threat to the nation, for “… in certain eras, these degraded beings become a serious danger to society.”3 The older generation that supported Louis-Napoleon believed these young artists presented a threat because of their poorly defined social status. As early as 1845, Leopold, the King of the Belgians, had written to Her Imperial Majesty Queen Victoria of Britain to warn her of the risks of her husband Prince Albert’s bad habits of spending too much time and energy on artists, saying, “dealings with artists, for instance, require great prudence; they are acquainted with all classes of society, and for that very reason dangerous; they are hardly ever satisfied, and when you have too much to do with them, you are sure to have des ennuis.”4 Long before the first Salon des Refusés there had been a vigorous tradition of anger directed toward the official salons of the 19th century, dating to the battles between the classicists and the romantics. In 1830 ferocious complaints had been fired at the jury for their exclusion of the romantics. Petitions demanded the abolition of the jury, and reformation. Gradually, the classicists yielded to the romantics, who were eventually accepted and became members of the Institute. In 1848, the revolutionary government ordered a free exhibition with no jury at all, which was such a

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complete disaster that reviewer Louis Auvray said one could only speak of it with disgust.5 In 1850, the jury was elected by the artists, but this still led to discontent among those who were rejected. In 1852, half of the jurors were elected by the artists, and half were appointed by the administration, but this too was unsatisfactory. In 1857, the jurors were all members of the Fine Arts Section of the Institute, but there was still no respite from the complaints of the artists who had been denied. In 1859, a mob of artists gathered beneath the windows of Nieuwerkerke’s home, shouting protests at being excluded from the salon. But in 1863, these discordant protests reached a new crescendo. This time the artists who found themselves excluded went over Nieuwerkerke’s head, writing a petition to Alexandre Florian Joseph, the Comte de Walewski, an illegitimate son of Napoleon Bonaparte who had had a distinguished career as Minister of Foreign Affairs and, after 1860, became Minister of State. Their petition, signed by 182 of France’s most important artists, surprisingly included enemies like Delacroix and his intense rival the classicist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the great history painter Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, the great romantic Eugene Isabey, and the Barbizon realist Camille Corot, complaining that artists were excluded from the salon by the old guard of traditionalists led by Nieuwerkerke. The complaint was justified. Many entries to the salon were made by artists exempted from the deliberations of the jury, who had either received an award or an honorable mention or had shown their work five times at previous salons. Their paintings were automatically accepted to the detriment of younger up-and-comers. The irritation caused by this exclusivity was compounded by the perception that the judging was haphazard. The task of the committee was an absurd burden – they had to decide the fate of 6170 works in only 90 hours – allowing a mere forty-five seconds for the scrutiny of each painting.6 Jules Valadon, a painter in his late thirties who had previously shown a canvas titled La Bohême Artiste at the salon of 1857 and was a former student of the École des Beaux-Arts, was excluded. Steaming, he vented to Auvray he had been rejected by a jury so over-burdened by its task that only four of its members had bothered to show up. Of these four, two told him their eyes were so tired they could no longer see the works they were supposed to judge.7 Only half of the works were accepted. The protest was loud enough to reach the ears of Louis-Napoleon who was sufficiently annoyed to make a visit to the salon “… without consulting anybody, without warning the administration, accompanied only by General Leboeuf, his Majesty arrived incognito at the Palais des ChampsElysees, passed rapidly through the halls of the official exhibition, and

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ordered the employees who were there to show him the paintings rejected by the jury.”8 They brought some, flapping to satisfy him. But because they were stored elsewhere in the palace it took a painful age to produce even a small number of pictures. Annoyed by the flustered excuses of a panicked representative of the committee, he demanded to see them for himself, flipping through stacked canvases to judge their quality. Unable to distinguish between the worthiness of the selected and the rejected, the emperor ordered that all should be shown. Weeks before he had called for a national election, and realizing the power of art, he doubtlessly seized this opportunity to be seen as a man of the people. Let them be the judge! A committee was quickly assembled from men among the rejected artists to organize a Salon des Refusés, against the resistance of the official salon committee who understandably felt undermined by the emperor’s command. Underhanded tactics to discredit this second salon were employed – artists were warned that to show in the exhibit meant their work would hang among the dregs of Parisian painters. Many withdrew, fearful of the negative impact such a show might have on their careers. The ad hoc committee representing the rejected artists hurriedly threw together a catalogue of the Salon des Refusés, which they sold for 75 centimes a copy at the gallery. The campaign to discredit the show successfully reduced its impact. Although there were reportedly over 4000 works rejected from the official salon,9 of which 1500 were shown in the Salon des Refusés, only 683 were listed in this catalogue.10 Even allowing that it was put together in a hurry, and contained many errors of omission and of typography, this represented roughly an 83% withdrawal from the exhibit catalogue. Valadon decided to pull out of the Salon des Refusés because he didn’t want his name to be “drowned in a mass of truly mediocre works.”11 Some doubtlessly withdrew because they feared damage to their reputations, and consequently their businesses. Some thought they would be tarred with the humiliating stain of failure of being in a show of losers, and some that they would miss out on future opportunities for advancement in the official salons, and others were doubtlessly embarrassed by the public spectacle and wanted nothing to do with it. The members of the committee were artists who had been rejected, including Antoine Chintreuil, a student of Paul Delaroche who had been encouraged by Camille Corot to paint en plein air. Jean Desbrosses, who was a mediocre landscape painter by any standards, had three paintings in the show. His brother Léopold was an equally unexciting but competent painter, engraver, and landscape painter, who was also a student of Delaroche and Corot. His pedestrian painting of a woman spinning was accepted to the official salon, but his pleasant landscape, Autumn Evening

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was inexplicably rejected. This unremittingly tedious list of committee members continued with Phillipe Félix Dupuis, who painted uninspiring portraits of his insipid bourgeois clientele; Frederick Juncker, an otherwise obscure student of Léon Cogniet, showed three pastels;12 Charles Lapostolet was an undistinguished plein air landscape painter; Charles Levé also served but, revealing the state of confusion swirling around the organization of the show, even his name did not appear in the catalogue of exhibiting artists, although his work was briefly mentioned in a lengthy review by Louis Étienne. The last member of the committee was the State Minister for the Arts and Letters, Jules Pelletier. He had recently been honored as a Commander of the Legion of Honor for his service, he was a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, occupying seat #9 since 1860, and he was presumably included to provide governmental authority to the proceedings. Caught between a rock and a hard place, and trying to avoid publicly offending the emperor, who had undermined his authority, the masterspinner Nieuwerkerke managed the debacle, saying that it was marvelous that there were so many artists who deserved a medal, and how unfortunate it was that only so many were allowed to be awarded, and how tremendous it was that France had produced so many men of genius. Less leveraged defenders of the traditional salon responded with the claim that the surfeit of inadequate submissions was surely no sign of greatness, but rather, a deadly sign of the decadence of French art. Nieuwerkerke diminished the significance of the new diversity of styles prevailing among French artists saying, “If we regret having to note that we are moving away from grand painting, there is no need to be too alarmed; if the preferences of a few are directed towards the study of the landscape, for example, their success in this flight should not worry us about the destinies of great art in France. Each epoch, in effect, obeys a particular movement, an extremely mobile pressure of mind and taste. The important thing is that, in each of the directions covered, the talent is up to the height of the attempt. Moreover, as if to be signed by Raphael or Ruysdael, Michelangelo or Clodion, a masterpiece is no less a masterpiece: because of the diversity of minds, the infinite variety of talents and original aptitudes, we understand that the greatest freedom reigns in the practice and direction of art.”13 Auvray agreed, asking why art should be thought decadent simply because more than one genre was now flourishing. But political player Nieuwerkerke was performing for the crowd and covering his true feelings, which were thoroughly hostile to the young bohemians he saw as intruders in the sacred halls of classicism. In private, he thought their new art was shameful. A few years later, in 1866, following Émile Zola’s call to arms demanding another Salon des Refusés, Cezanne’s submissions to the salon were rejected and he

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wrote a letter complaining to Nieuwerkerke. The count made no reply. Cezanne wrote again, insisting there should be a repeat of the Salon des Refusés. This letter has survived, complete with Nieuwerkerke’s scribbled note at the top of the sheet saying, “What he asks is impossible, everyone recognizes how inappropriate the exhibition of the refused was to the dignity of art, and it will not be re-established.”14 He was wrong. Official reiterations would be mounted the following year, and again a decade later. Manet, whose moment of notoriety had come, was represented by three paintings. Fantin-Latour showed two paintings, a portrait and his La Féerie, a loose, wistful painting that fully captured the light touch of impressionist style but used a classical crowd composition reminiscent of Veronese. But the painting had no specific subject and was not an illustration of any historical event. It was an imaginative fantasy, art for the sake of art. It was an unusually soft and colorful piece for Fantin-Latour, who was more accustomed to a style somewhere between classicism and the harder-edged new style of realism. Between stylistic worlds, it seemed appropriate that he showed works in both the regular salon and the Salon des Refusés. His refused La Féerie took a beating from critic Desnoyers, who said, “It is a heap, a fruit salad, a plateful of scrambled colors, the palette has yet to be made which could take the colour for making this painting.”15 Étienne reviewed it as a wonder of colour, but “cowardly in form,”16 charges that would become familiar complaints levelled against the rising impressionists. Pissarro, another student of Corot, exhibited three paintings, Paysage, and Village, both pretty little plein air sketches of farm buildings set in the French countryside, and a piece titled Etude. Pissarro’s work had been accepted to the official salon of 1859, but in 1863, it was rejected. Preferring to be seen by the public than not to be seen at all, he permitted his work to be shown in the Salon des Refusés. None of the critics paid any attention to him at all. The first to do so was Zola, three years later, when he wrote, “M. Pissarro is unknown, and doubtless no one will mention him. Be informed that no one likes you here, that they feel your painting is too bare, too dark … An austere, solemn way of painting, an extreme concern for truth and justice, a fierce, intense will. You are enormously awkward, sir – you are an artist I like.”17 This began a series of staunch attacks on the failure of the salon to accept the new work of the younger generation of realists. Whistler’s heavily textured, but oddly soft-edged and beautifully light Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl was exhibited at the Salon des Refusés and attracted much attention. It was hung in front of an opening through which all visitors to the exhibit had to pass and was unmissable. Philip Hamerton reviewed the event for Fine Arts Quarterly, and wrote, “I watched several parties, to see the impression the “Woman in White” made

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on them. They all stopped instantly, struck with amazement. This for two or three seconds; then they always looked at each other and laughed.”18 But even the stir that Whistler’s painting caused was thoroughly upstaged by the scandal of Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’Herbe. Étienne complained that the idea behind Manet’s painting was incomprehensible, and suggested that the two “dandies” beside the nondescript nude prostitute were virginal college students preparing to become men. Completely misunderstanding, he said that if the canvas was a rude joke, it was unworthy of being exhibited.19 But Étienne’s caustic commentary on Manet only lasted a couple of paragraphs, while his narrative of the emperor’s formation of the Salon des Refusés was worth an entire chapter of his pamphlet, which ran for over 70 pages. In another salon brochure, Desnoyers wrote a short passage about Manet, commenting on the mockery the painter had received from the crowd, and the “deep disturbance” his three paintings brought to the “arrested ideas” of the jury, but he was far more interested in noting that Manet had captured the spirit of Velasquez and Goya than in describing the impact of the painting upon the public.20 Courcy Mennith didn’t bother to refer to Manet by name in his account, simply dismissing as a daub what he described as a poorly executed painting of a naked woman with her hair twisted like snakes, seated between two dressed men.21 Auvray wrote about the implications of the new Salon des Refusés at great length, but refused to describe any of the paintings in the exhibit and didn’t bother mentioning Manet. Auvray misunderstood how deeply the independence brought about by the new bourgeois age would change the cultural landscape. He hoped for a return to great history painting. However, he perceptively recognized the move toward individualism, toward the idea of artistic genius, and away from the system that produced the great hegemonic schools of art in the past. The artists took a beating from the more conservative press for their presumption. Auvray wrote, “The noise made by the refused artists and the decision of the emperor in their favor suggested that the jury had been more severe this year than at previous exhibitions. This is an error that will be wiped away by a simple visit to the rooms of the refused, because, we confess, never, not ever, could we have believed in the unspeakable things that one dared to present to a jury of an exhibition of the fine arts of Paris!” And if the works he saw were shameful, he was even more disgusted by the artists’ behavior, saying, “Painters, sculptors, architects compose a race of the most zealous solicitors, the most scrounging, the most servile of all, also almost always the most demanding and the most thankless.”22 LouisNapoleon showed his support by letting it be known that he had purchased several of their pieces. The bourgeois emperor endorsed bohemianbourgeois art.

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Although recalling his youthful memories twenty years later in l’Oeuvre, Zola beautifully described Lantier (who you’ll remember was a combination of Manet and Cezanne), and Sandoz (himself) going to the event. Nostalgically, Zola wrote, “And after having crossed the garden, the two young men went up to the Salon des Refusés. It had been very well installed, the accepted paintings could not have been more richly lodged: high hangings of old tapestries at the doors, picture-railings dressed with green serge, red velvet benches, screens of white linen under the bays of skylights; and, in the series of rooms, the first impression was the same, the same gold of the frames, the same lively marks on the canvases. But a particular gaiety reigned there, a youthful glow, which one did not clearly get at first. The crowd, already dense, increased from minute to minute, because the official salon was being deserted, as people came running, whipped with curiosity, bitten by the desire to judge the judges, amused from their first step over the threshold by the certainty that they would see extremely amusing things. It was very hot, a fine dust rose from the floor, it would probably choke someone by about four o'clock. “Damn!” Sandoz said, using his elbows, “it's not going to be easy to maneuver in there and find your picture.” He hastened, in a fever of fraternity. That day he lived only for the work and the glory of his old comrade. “Leave it!” exclaimed Claude, "we will arrive in good time. My painting will not fly away!” And he, on the contrary, affected not to hurry, despite the irresistible desire he had to run. He raised his head to look around. Soon, in the loud noise of the crowd that stunned him, he distinguished light laughter, still restrained, muffled by the rolling of feet and the noise of conversations. In front of some paintings, visitors were joking. This worried him, for at the heart of his revolutionary rudeness he had the credulity and sensibility of a woman, always expecting martyrdom, always bleeding, always stupefied at being rebuffed and mocked. He murmured, “They are gay here!” “Mother of God! They certainly are,” Sandoz remarked, “look at these outrageous bitches.” But at that moment, as they lingered in the first room, Fagerolles (Gervais), without seeing them, bumped into them. He jumped, doubtlessly upset by the encounter, but he recovered immediately, very friendly.

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“Hey! I was thinking of you. I have been here for an hour.” “Where did they stick Claude’s painting?” Sandoz asked. Fagerolles, who had just spent twenty minutes in front of it, studying it and studying the impression it made on the public, replied without hesitation: “I don’t know. Do you want to go and look for it together?”23 And Zola’s bohemians recognized these self-satisfied mockers of the new painting as the same people who found pleasure in pouring contempt upon brave new efforts in music. They were the same smug sensationseekers who whistled at Wagner, these zaftig bourgeois.24 And if the crowd left much to be desired, so did the show itself which was a mélange of the year’s painting. Most of the pedestrian display deserved to be excluded from the official salon. Zola leaves no doubt about which works he thought were the ones worth looking at, saying, “Along the walls there was a mixture of the best and the worst, all genres mixed together, the dotards of the historical school jostling the young fools of realism, simpletons kept in the pile with the swaggerers of originality, a dead Jezebel that seemed to have rotted in the bottom of the basement of the School of Fine Arts, near the Lady in White, a very curious vision from a great artist's eye, a huge Shepherd regarding the sea, a fable, opposite a small canvas of Spaniards playing tennis, a burst of light of a splendid intensity. Nothing was missing among the execrable, neither military paintings of lead soldiers, nor pallid antiquity, nor the middle-ages scored with bitumen.” Zola continued with the military metaphor we are familiar with from Saint-Simon, “But, from this incoherent ensemble, especially from the landscapes, which were almost all of a sincere and fair note, and the portraits too, most of them very interestingly made, there rose a good scent of youth, bravery and passion. If there were fewer bad canvases at the official salon, the average there was certainly more banal and mediocre. Here it felt like being in a battle, and a gay battle, dressed with energy, at the first light of dawn, when the bugles sound, when one marches to the enemy with the certainty of beating him before sunset. Claude, exhilarated by this spirit of struggle, became animated, angry, and now listened to the laughter of the public, with a provocative air, as if he had heard bullets whistle. Discreet at the entrance, the laughs sounded louder the more he advanced. In the third room already, the women no longer smothered them under their handkerchiefs, the men clutched their bellies in order to relieve themselves better. It was the contagious hilarity of a crowd gathered to

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amuse themselves, excited little by little, bursting about a nothing, enlivened as much by beautiful things as by the detestable.”25 The bohemians were taken aback by the scenes of hilarity, but they sensed that there was a flavor of glory in the air, and Zola’s character Jory, in reality the cynical journalist Alexis, was certain of victory. Like Murger, he clearly understood that the bohemians who found their publicity represented the new order. Today’s joke would be tomorrow’s sensation. Zola wrote, “Jory led the way, followed by the band. It was necessary to shove through the door of the last room to enter. But Claude, still behind, still heard rising laughter, a growing clamor, the rolling of a tide that was going full swing. And, as he entered the room at last, he beheld an enormous mass, a swarming, disorderly wave which crashed before his painting. All the laughter swelled there, flared up there, lead to there. His painting was the cause of all the laughter. See? repeated Jory, triumphantly, here is a success! Gagniere, intimidated, as ashamed as if he had been slapped himself, murmured, “If this is success, I would prefer something else better!” “Are you stupid?” Jory replied in an outburst of passionate conviction. “That’s success! What does it matter if they laugh! We are launched, tomorrow all the newspapers will talk about us.” Sandoz, with his voice strangled with pain, could only let out one word – “Cretins!”26 Despite Sandoz’s horror, Lantier and his circle of friends had indeed found their place in the history of art, and even while weathering the shame of the crowd’s laughter, Lantier knew it, too. But before they could enjoy the glory that the future would bring, first the bohemians had to endure the ridicule of the crowd. Zola’s account does not capture the suggestive naughtiness of Manet’s work at the Salon des Refusés, which would create endless gossip. Dejeuner sur l’Herbe, which was originally titled Le Bain, caused a sensation because of the juxtaposition of a naked woman with two clothed men, which openly addressed human sexuality and frank desire in the setting of an art gallery. Nudes, even erotic nudes, were not an unusual subject for the classicists and romantics, whose work was in the official salon, but Manet’s painting presented contemporary bourgeois people misbehaving in the comfortably bourgeois setting of one of Louis-Napoleon’s newly landscaped Parisian parks. The composition of the figures was directly copied from Raphael’s Judgement of Paris. Classical connoisseurs would certainly have been

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aware of the allusion to the Greek myth of Paris, who impressed the gods with his impartiality, and was chosen to judge between the beauty of Aphrodite, Hera and Athena for the prize of a golden apple. Paris couldn’t decide which of them was most beautiful, so they stripped for him so he could appreciate them in their nudity. Presented with three gorgeous naked goddesses, Paris still found it hard to decide, so they offered him bribes, and in the end, he picked Aphrodite, who offered him possession of the stunning mortal, Helen of Sparta. Aphrodite took her apple, Paris took Helen home to Troy, and when the Greeks attacked the city to retrieve her, the Trojan War began. Now, the ‘bourgeois emperor’ Louis-Napoleon had told the people of the city of Paris that they would be the judges of the work of their artists – Manet captured the zeitgeist of the time perfectly. For Manet to paint the erotic adventures of real people rather than hiding them in the costumes of antiquity was novel, naughty, and quite risqué. A probable prostitute graphically posed in a public park had grabbed the place of a goddess, chosen by Paris as the most beautiful of females. The galloping outrage triggered by the painting was spurred by the situation in the city, where prostitution had been legalized, and as much as thirteen percent of the population was on the game.27 Manet actually exhibited three paintings in the historic event, and the erotic frisson the ensemble brought to the excitable audience doubtlessly helped add to the scandal. Beside Dejeuner sur l’Herbe, he also showed Mademoiselle V. in the Costume of an Espada, a full-length portrait of his model Victorine Meurent, who was very recognizably the same woman who posed naked in the foreground with the two men in Dejeuner sur l’Herbe. But in Mademoiselle V., cross-dressing Victorine was clothed in the male costume of a bullfighter, a traditional masculine role. Emphasizing her transvestitism, the third painting by Manet was his Young Man in the Costume of a Majo, a portrait of his younger brother, Gustave, wearing exactly the same costume. Gustave was also very recognizably the same man sitting beside Victorine in Dejeuner sur l’Herbe, which only served to emphasize further impropriety. Although this was a time of political censorship, in which every print, article, and book had to be submitted to the Dépôt Légal for approval, the emperor was a known philanderer with multiple mistresses, and had legalized prostitution. Moreover, photographic pornography was wildly popular and sold well in the streets and brasseries of pedestrian Paris. Manet brought down the pretensions of the salon to the level of the boulevards. The salaciously saucy implications of the three paintings together were shocking, clearly undermining the conventional

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sexual stereotypes of the older generation, but accurately represented the openness of young bohemia. This was the third time Manet had submitted work to the official salon. In 1859, he offered The Absinthe Drinker for the jury’s consideration and was brusquely rejected. The painting was a roughly rendered image of an unsavory fellow wrapped in a dark overcoat and topped with a stovepipe hat, braced against a shadowy wall beside a glass of green absinthe on a stone shelf. An empty bottle lay at his feet. His costume was unmistakably modern, and the plastered figure resembled Manet himself – comparisons can quickly be made to a portrait of him made by his friend Fantin-Latour. Like Dejeuner sur l’Herbe, the painting not only committed the sin of bringing the drunken habits of the disreputable lower classes into the salon as its impressively inappropriate subject, but it also lacked the masterly technique of the classicists. Bohemian Charles Baudelaire had anticipated the moment in an influential essay he published that year, The Painter of Modern Life. In it, he described the laziness of classicists who painted everything in the fashions of the past and failed to depict the appearance of real people in the bourgeois present, and ignored the fleeting beauty that lay hidden behind their novel appearance.28 In 1861, Manet had another go, this time with a dull portrait of his grim-looking parents, and a painting of a fashionable Spanish guitarist. Théophile Gautier saw The Spanish Singer and commented upon it favorably in his review, guaranteeing the attention of the crowds, despite its roughly painted finish. Most of the bohemians in Zola’s fictionalized account were exquisitely embarrassed by the mirth of the bourgeoisie, who immensely enjoyed the Salon des Refusés of 1863. Forgetting his allegiance, and overcome by a moment of spite, Fagerolle even told Lantier he was “stupid” for painting Plein Air (standing in for Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’Herbe). But crammed among the crowd, and completely anonymous, Lantier, beautifully captured by Zola in the moments of his confusion amid the derision of the multitude, while stung by their laughter, felt the growing knowledge of his own success. He recognized the Salon des Refusés as an important moment in the struggle of the bohemians for recognition, fighting the good fight against the old ideas of classicism, despite the amusement of the ignorant throng. This truly was a watershed moment, the dawn of a new era, and Fagerolles grasped the importance of the salon as the moment that painting had turned from classicism and romanticism to a new era, in which the bourgeois-bohemians painted images of modern life in all its novel decadence, elegance, spirituality, poverty, and wealth. Zola described Lantier’s reply to Fagerolles, “Claude, silently, looking away from the crowd, looked at him. He had not weakened, pale only under the laughter,

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his lips agitated with a slight nervous tic: no one knew who he was, it was his work that was mocked, not him. Then, for a moment, he took a look at his painting, and walked from it to the other paintings in the room, slowly. And within the disaster of his illusions, in the livid pain of his pride, a breath of courage, a draft of health and innocence, came to him from all those gay, brave paintings, mounting an assault upon the formulaic ancients with such a disorderly passion. He was consoled and strengthened, without remorse, without contrition, pushed, on the contrary, to offend the public even more. Admittedly, there was much clumsiness there, many childish efforts, but what a pretty general tone, what a burst of light it brought, a light silvergray, thin, diffused light brightened by all the dancing reflections of the open air! It was like a window suddenly opened upon the old cuisine of bitumen, stewed in the reduced juices of tradition, and the sun was coming in, and the walls were laughing on that morning of spring! The clear note of his painting, the blueness that was mocked, burst out from the others. Was it not the awaited dawn, a new day for art? He saw a critic who stopped without laughing, famous painters, surprised, with grave looks, old Malgras, very dirty, going from painting to painting with his fine connoisseur’s pout, stopping dead in front of his, immobile, absorbed. So, he turned to Fagerolles, and astonished him with this belated reply: “Stupid is as stupid does, my dear, and I believe that I will remain stupid ... Good for you, even if you are a devil!” Immediately, Fagerolles slapped him on the shoulder as a joking comrade would, and Claude let himself be taken by the arm by Sandoz. Finally, they took him away, the whole band left the Salon des Refusés…”29 The Salon des Refusés of 1863 was not so much a dramatic coup for impressionism as it was the launching of the career of the new enfant terrible Manet, born in ridicule. As important as it was to Manet’s career, it was far more significant as a landmark in the launching of a new kind of exhibit. The authority to assess the worthiness of works of art was taken away from juries chosen from the elite art establishment and the artists themselves, and given to the people.30 This transfer of authority was an acknowledgement of the growing power of popular taste, and of the strength of popular culture, and of the buying power of the growing middle class, who now had the leisure time and wealth to enjoy art and music. Who would buy the paintings exhibited by the new, young artists? It was the bourgeoisie. Who told them about the art they should pay attention to? The journalists of the popular press, who gave them the latest scandals, the latest horrors, the latest reviews of books, theatre, art, and music. Thanks to the emperor, the judgement of art at the salons was no longer in the hands of the haute-bourgeois, or the aristocracy, or even the artists.

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Now art was subject to the judgement of the people of Paris, who would offer a golden apple as a prize to the artists who won their favor. And this was the golden apple of capitalist success.

Notes 1

Peter Ford, Michael Howell, The True History of the Elephant Man, Allison & Busby, 2011, i 2 Ross King, The Judgement of Paris, Walker Publishing Company, 2006, 22 3 “Ensuite le nombre des gens se destinant aux arts est devenu si considérable ces dernières années, que le jury a pensé qu’il était temps de mettre une digue devant tant d’individualités, vraiment recommandables du reste, auxquelles une plus grande indulgence ne peut apporterque des déceptions cruelles et amères pour l’avenir. Qu'à de certaines époques, ces êtres déclassés devenaient un danger sérieux pour la société.” Louis Étienne, Le Jury et les Exposants: Salon des Refusés, E. Dentu, 1863, 7-8 4 Ed. Arthur Benson & Viscount Esher, The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 2, 1884 - 1853, Longman’s, Green and Company, 1907, 54 5 “Le gouvernement de 1848 a voulu donner satisfaction aux voeux de la majorité des artistes en faisant une exposition libre où tous les ouvrages présentés ont été admis sans être soumis à l’examen d’un jury, et cette exposition a laissé un si triste souvenir, qu’on n’en parle qu’avec dégoût, et que les récompenses obtenues à ce Salon sont considérées comme nulles dans plus d’une administration.” Louis Auvray, Exposition des Beaux-arts: Salon de 1863. Bureaux de la Revue Artistique, 1863, 12 6 Ibid, 53 7 “Deux membres du Jury m’ont dit que parfois ils avaient la vue tellement fatiguée qu’ils n’y voyaient plus.” Ibid, 8 8 “A chaque exposition, mômes douleurs et mêmes plaintes parmi les exclus. Mais cette fois, le nombre et la légitimité des récriminations furent tels, que l’Empereur s’en émut; et, sans consulter personne, sans faire avertir l’administration, accompagnée seulement du général Leboeuf, Sa Majesté arriva incognito au palais des Champs-Elysées, passa rapidement dans les salles de l’exposition officielle, et ordonna aux employés qui se trouvaient là do lui montrer les tableaux refusés par le jury. On lui en apporta plusieurs qu’on allait chercher assez loin, dit la chronique; et comme l’Empereur ne se trouvait pas édifié complètement, il s’approcha de toiles retournées qui étaient près de lui, et de sa propre main en mit au jour quelques-unes, qu’il jugea tout aussi bonnes que celles qu’il venait de voir dans les salles officielles.” Louis Étienne, Le Jury et les Exposants: Salon des Refusés, E. Dentu, 1863, 6 9 Albert Boime, The Salon des Refusés and the Evolution of Modern Art, In: Art Quarterly, Spring, 1970, 413

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Catalogue des Ouvrages de Peinture, Sculpture, Gravure, Lithographie et Architecture: Refusés par le Jury de 1863 et Exposés, par Décision de S.M. l’Empereur au Salon Annexe, Palais Des Champs-Elysées, le 15 Mai 1863. Les Beaux-Arts, Revue de l’Art Ancien et Moderne, 1863. 11 “…dans une masse d’oeuvres vraiment médiocres.” Louis Auvray, Exposition des Beaux-arts: Salon de 1863. Bureaux de la Revue Artistique, 1863, 8 12 Juncker showed Souvenir Fraternel, Groupe de Flear, and the ambitiously named Le Dernier Mot du Réalisme, (The Last Word of Realism). The painting was an allegorical still life of an open copy of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, open to the end of the chapter about Waterloo, in which the terribly wounded officer Pontmercy is dragged from a pile of the French dead by the thieving soldier Thénardier, who steals his watch and purse. The words “The guard dies and does not surrender” were painted onto the side of the table, alluding to the famous words attributed to the French General Pierre Cambronne, when he was defeated at Waterloo and offered a chance to give up. (He is supposed to have simply said “merde” instead.) Les Miserables was painted leaning against the spines of several other volumes including Edmund Burke’s Treatise on the Sublime and a Dictionary of Synonyms with a few scattered vine leaves on the table-top before them. 13 “Si nous regrettons d’avoir à constater que l’on s’éloigne de la grande peinture, il n’y a cependant pas lieu d’en être trop alarmé; si les préférences de quelques-uns se portent vers l’étude du paysage, par exemple, leurs succès dans cette vole ne doivent pas nous inquiéter sur les destinées du grand art en France. Chaque époque, en effet, obéit à un mouvement particulier, à une pression extrêmement mobile de l’esprit et du goût. L’important, c’est que, dans chacune des directions parcourues, le talent soit à la hauteur de la tentative. D’ailleurs, comme pour être signé de Raphaël on de Ruysdaël, de Michel-Ange ou de Clodion, un chef-d’oeuvre n’en est pas moins un chef-d'oeuvre: en raison de la diversité des esprits, de la variété infinie des talents et des aptitudes originelles, nous comprenons que la plus grande liberté règne dans la pratique et la direction de l’art.” Louis Auvray, Exposition des Beaux-arts: Salon de 1863. Bureaux de la Revue Artistique, 1863, 131 14 Paul Cezanne, Letter to Count de Nieuwerkerke, 19 April 1866. In: Ed. Alex Danchev, The Letters of Paul Cezanne, The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2013, 121 15 Fernand Desnoyers, Salon des refuses. La peinture en 1863, Azur Dutil, 42 16 Louis Étienne, Le Jury et les Exposants: Salon des Refusés, E. Dentu, 1863, 34 17 Lionello Venturi, Les Archives de l’Impressionnisme, Durand-Ruel, 1939, vol. 1, 25 18 James McNeill Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, Putnam, 1904, 80 19 Louis Étienne, Le Jury et les Exposants: Salon des Refusés, E. Dentu, 1863, 30 20 Fernand Desnoyers, Salon des refuses. La peinture en 1863, Azur Dutil, 42 21 Courcy Mennith, Ed. Jules Gay, Le Salon des refusés et le jury – Réflexions de Courcy Mennith, Jules Gay, 1863, 11 22 “Les peintres, les sculpteurs, les architectes composent une race de solliciteurs la plus empressée, la plus quémandeuse, la plus servile de toutes, aussi et presque toujours la plus exigeante et la plus ingrate.”

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Louis Auvray, Exposition des Beaux-arts: Salon de 1863. Bureaux de la Revue Artistique, 1863, 16 23 Et les deux jeunes gens, après avoir traversé le jardin, montèrent au Salon des Refusés. On l’avait fort bien installé, les tableaux reçus n’étaient pas logés plus richement: hautes tentures de vieilles tapisseries aux portes, cimaises garnies de serge verte, banquettes de velours rouge, écrans de toile blanche sous les baies vitrées des plafonds; et, dans l’enfilade des salles, le premier aspect était le même, le même or des cadres, les mêmes taches vives des toiles. Mais une gaieté particulière y régnait, un éclat de jeunesse, dont on ne se rendait pas nettement compte d’abord. La foule, déjà compacte, augmentait de minute en minute, car on désertait le Salon officiel, on accourait, fouetté de curiosité, piqué du désir de juger les juges, amusé enfin dès le seuil par la certitude qu’on allait voir des choses extrêmement plaisantes. Il faisait très chaud, une poussière fine montait du plancher, on étoufferait sûrement vers quatre heures. — Fichtre ! dit Sandoz en jouant des coudes, ça ne va pas être commode de manoeuvrer là dedans et de trouver ton tableau. Il se hâtait, dans une fièvre de fraternité. Ce jour-là, il ne vivait que pour l’oeuvre et la gloire de son vieux camarade. — Laisse donc! S’écria Claude, nous arriverons bien. Il ne s’envolera pas, mon tableau ! Et lui, au contraire, affecta de ne pas se presser, malgré l’irrésistible envie qu’il avait de courir. Il levait la tête, regardait. Bientôt, dans la voix haute de la foule qui l’avait étourdi, il distingua des rires légers, contenus encore, que couvraient le roulement des pieds et le bruit des conversations. Devant certaines toiles, des visiteurs plaisantaient. Gela l’inquiéta, car il était d'une crédulité et d’une sensibilité de femme, au milieu de ses rudesses révolutionnaires, s’attendant toujours au martyre, et toujours saignant, toujours stupéfait d'être repoussé et raillé. Il murmura : — Ils sont gais, ici! — Dame ! C’est qu’il y a de quoi, fit remarquer Sandoz. Regarde donc ces rosses extravagantes. Mais, à ce moment, comme ils s’attardaient dans la première salle, Fagerolles, sans les voir, tomba sur eux. Il eut un sursaut, contrarié sans doute de la rencontre. Du reste, il se remit tout de suite, très aimable. — Tiens! je songeais à vous. Je suis là depuis une heure. — Où ont-ils donc fourré le tableau de Claude? demanda Sandoz. Fagerolles, qui venait de rester vingt minutes planté devant ce tableau, l’étudiant et étudiant l’impression du public, répondit sans une hésitation: — Je ne sais pas. Nous allons le chercher ensemble, voulez-vous? Émile Zola, l’Oeuvre, Chartentier, 1886, 152 - 154 24 “Et ils sifflent Wagner, ce sont les mêmes, je les reconnais... Tenez! ce gros, làbas...” “And they whistle at Wagner, they're the same, I recognize them ... Look at that fat one, over there...” Ibid, 165 25 “Mais, de cet ensemble incohérent, des paysages surtout, presque tous d’une note sincère et juste, des portraits encore, la plupart très intéressants de facture, il sortait une bonne odeur de jeunesse, de bravoure et de passion. S’il y avait moins de

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mauvaises toiles au Salon officiel, la moyenne y était à coup sûr plus banale et plus médiocre. On se sentait là dans une bataille, et une bataille gaie, livrée de verve, quand le petit jour naît, que les clairons sonnent, que l’on marche à l'ennemi avec la certitude de le battre avant le coucher du soleil. Claude, ragaillardi par ce souffle de lutte, s'animait, se fâchait, écoutait maintenant monter les rires du public, l’air provocant, comme s’il eût entendu siffler des balles. Discrets à l'entrée, les rires sonnaient plus haut, à mesure qu’il avançait. Dans la troisième salle déjà, les femmes ne les étouffaient plus sous leurs mouchoirs, les hommes tendaient le ventre, afin de se soulager mieux. C’était l’hilarité contagieuse d’une foule venue pour s’amuser, s’excitant peu à peu, éclatant à propos d’un rien, égayée autant par les belles choses que par les détestables.” Ibid, 159 26 “Jory prit la tête, suivi de la bande. Il fallut faire le coup de poing à la porte de la dernière salle, pour entrer. Mais Claude, resté en arrière, entendait toujours monter les rires, une clameur grandissante, le roulement d’une marée qui allait battre son plein. Et, comme il pénétrait enfin dans la salle, il vit une masse énorme, grouillante, confuse, en tas, qui s’écrasait devant son tableau. Tous les rires s’enflaient, s’épanouissaient, aboutissaient là. C’était de son tableau qu’on riait. — Hein? répéta Jory, triompbant, en voilà un succès! Gagnière, intimidé, honteux comme si on l'eût giflé lui-même, murmura : — Trop de succès ... J’aimerais mieux autre chose. — Es-tu bête! reprit Jory dans un élan de conviction exaltée. C’est le succès, ça... Qu’est-ce que ça fiche qu’ils rient! Nous voilà lancés, demain tous les journaux parleront de nous. — Crétins! lâcha seulement Sandoz, la voix étranglée de douleur.” Ibid, 160 - 161 27 Ross King, The Judgement of Paris, Walker Publishing Company, 2006, pp. 7980 28 Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres Completes de Charles Baudelaire, Quelques-Uns de Mes Contemporains, l’Art Romantique, Louis Conard, pp. 66-67 29 “Claude, en silence, détournant les yeux de la foule, le regarda. Il n’avait point faibli, pâle seulement sous les rires, les lèvres agitées d’un léger tic nerveux: personne ne le connaissait, son oeuvre seule était souffletée. Puis, il reporta un instant les regards sur le tableau, parcourut de là les autres toiles de la salle, lentement. Et, dans le désastre de ses illusions, dans la douleur vive de son orgueil, un souffle de courage, une bouffée de santé et d’enfance, lui vinrent de toute cette peinture si gaiement brave, montant à l’assaut de l’antique routine, avec une passion si désordonnée. Il en était consolé et raffermi, sans remords, sans contrition, poussé au contraire à heurter le public davantage. Certes, il y avait là bien des maladresses, bien des efforts puérils, mais quel joli ton général, quel coup de lumière apporté, une lumière gris d’argent, fine, diffuse, égayée de tous les reflets dansants du plein air! C’était comme une fenêtre brusquement ouverte dans la vieille cuisine au bitume, dans les jus recuits de la tradition, et le soleil entrait, et les murs riaient de cette matinée de printemps! La note claire de son tableau, ce bleuissement dont on se moquait, éclatait parmi les autres. N’était-ce pas l’aube attendue, un jour nouveau qui se levait pour l’art? Il aperçut un critique qui s’arrêtait sans rire, des peintres célèbres, surpris, la mine grave, le père Malgras, très sale, allant de tableau en tableau avec sa moue de fin dégustateur, tombant en

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arrêt devant le sien, immobile, absorbé. Alors, il se retourna vers Fagerolles, il l’étonna par cette réponse tardive: — On est bête comme on peut, mon cher, et il est à croire que je resterai bête ... Tant mieux pour toi, si tu es un malin ! Tout de suite, Fagerolles lui tapa sur l’épaule, en camarade qui plaisante, et Claude se laissa prendre le bras par Sandoz. On l’emmenait enfin, la bande entière quitta le Salon des Refusés…” Émile Zola, l’Oeuvre, Chartentier, 1886, 166 - 167 30 Albert Boime, The Salon des Refusés and the Evolution of Modern Art, In: Art Quarterly, Spring, 1970

INDIVIDUALS AND ANARCHISTS

“Anarchy, to be short, is but the laissez-faire of the economists, pushed to its logical result. It requires no one to work who would rather be idle. It forbids no man to hoard who wants to – if he can stand guard over his own treasure, or get someone else at his own cost, to do so for him … We have heard of free trade, free religion, free rum, free love. Anarchy is free everything.”1 C.L. James, Anarchy, A Tract for the Times

The salon of 1864 was cast as a response to the previous year’s debacle. The new jury allowed fully two thirds of the works that were entered into the official exhibit, including pieces by Manet and Corot. They made sure that paintings by the most prominent artists of the first Salon des Refusés were exhibited in good locations in the official Salon. This year a second Salon des Refusés was held for works that were judged too weak to be allowed into the main event, deliberately exhibiting indisputably lame paintings to undermine any claim the rejected artists might have to represent a worthy alternative to officially sanctioned art. Only 382 paintings were exhibited. Manet’s weak offering was his Incident in a Bull Ring, which he disliked so much himself that he chopped it into pieces after the exhibit closed. Even Gautier wrote a severe condemnation of it in his review, surprising Manet, who had hoped for his support. His Dead Christ with Angels also took a thorough beating in the press. The state’s purchases revealed the caution of the establishment – most of the works acquired for the official collection were conventional figurative history paintings, painted in the classical manner, with the exception of some small, highly finished landscapes. Many had a religious theme. Nieuwerkerke’s strategy of presenting a deliberately feeble Salon des Refusés in 1864 worked, making it superfluous, and in 1866, no attempt was made to mount an alternative to the main salon, despite Zola’s impassioned calls for one. There would not be another Salon des Refusés for nearly a decade, when a third and final event was held in 1873. By then, the third republic had been installed and the bourgeois-bohemians had learned to take full advantage of the new free market economy. In 1865, a new selection committee was assembled, led by president Tony Robert-Fleury, a young history painter and director of the École des

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Beaux-Arts. This time Nieuwerkerke appointed the veteran journalist and thorough bohemian Gautier, who he hoped would provide prophylaxis for the committee against the complaints of young artists excluded from the show. Gautier, who loved new and interesting pieces of work, and had been a champion of romanticism, was appointed as vice president under RobertFleury. Gautier had a mixed record of appreciation for Manet’s work and was famous as a champion of art-for-art’s-sake, the doctrine of true aesthetes. To Gautier, “… an artist is above all a man, and can reflect in his work … loves, hates, passions, beliefs and prejudices of his day, it is with the understanding that art, which is sacred, will always be for him the goal and not the means. Anything done for any reason other than to satisfy the eternal rules of the beautiful can have no value for the future.”2 Such a doctrine could only respect the individual while detesting the programmatic collectivism of Proudhon’s realists. The elected members of the committee included Alexandre Cabanel, the painter of erotic neo-classical nudes; Isidore-Jean-Augustin Pils, professor at the École des Beaux-Arts; joined by his colleague at the school, Jean-Léon Gérôme, the famed orientalist; Camille Corot, landscape painter and champion of plein air, who struggled for years to get his own works accepted by the salon committee and now found himself in a position to influence the course of art history; Alexandre Bida, an orientalist and former student of the great hero of the romantics, Eugène Delacroix, no stranger to the difficulties of breaking into the closed elite of the salon; Eugène Fromentin, landscape painter and orientalist, also deeply influenced by Delacroix; François-Louis Français, another of Corot’s students and a respected landscape painter; although he was elderly, orientalist Adrien Dauzats was bohemian to the bone and raised in the theatre by his setpainting father. Nieuwerkerke also appointed André Maison and Frédéric Reiset, a conservator of the Musées Impériaux, and the great history painter Ernest Meissonier, who was added as a substitute. With this mixture of individualists, orientalists, and landscape painters, the new jury was less oriented to neo-classicism than its predecessors, and the character of the salon changed. There was still a large showing of erotic nudes hiding in classical myth, and many religious and history paintings of battle scenes dominated the livret, yet the young landscape painters Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Berthe Morisot found a receptive welcome. Gustave Moreau submitted his Jason and Le Jeune Homme et la Mort, and two of Gustave Doré’s paintings, Une Gitane Espagnole and L’Ange de Tobie, were accepted. Two seascapes by Manet’s near namesake Monet were accepted, The Mouth of the Seine at Honfleur and The Point de la Hève at Low Tide, both

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painted in a style easily mistaken for Manet’s rough, simplified work. Monet was still a Montmartre art student, only twenty-four years old. The gaunt bohemian Renoir’s Portrait de M. W.S (Monsieur William Sisley) and Soirée d'été were accepted,3 marking his second showing at the salon – his first was in 1864 with Esmeralda Dansant avec Sa Chevre which he destroyed. Morisot’s still life and a study were accepted, and she went on to successfully exhibit her works in a string of salons. The Sisley portrait was conventional, if sketchy, and showed little indication of the lightness of palette and bourgeois subject matter of the Impressionist work these artists would create after the approaching collapse of Louis-Napoleon’s tyranny. Corot’s position on the committee ensured that his student, Pissarro (his name spelled correctly this year), was able to show two en plein air landscapes, Chennevières, au Bord de la Marne, and Le Bôrd de l’Eau. The repeated success of the painters who would become known as the Impressionists gave the lie to the received narrative that their determination to mount their own shows came as a reaction to rejection. Manet submitted his Jésus Insulté par les Soldats, an imitation of the central Christ figure in Anthony van Dyck’s Le Couronnement D’Épines, and Ecce Homo. Manet continued knocking off the work of past masters for his compositions and exploiting shock – nearly a century later Damien Hirst would follow a similar path, and played a similarly unashamed part in the drama that unfolded in the press, who knew a good scandal when they saw one. Manet also submitted his soon to be notorious Olympia, another painting of his favorite model, Victorine Meurent, the same young woman who had posed for Dejeuner sur l’Herbe, again cast as a naked prostitute. This time milky Meurent displayed herself naked except for a black choker ribbon tied around her neck. She lay upon a white-sheeted divan, attended by a black maid bearing a suitor’s white bouquet, as an arch-backed black pussycat perched at her pale feet. A tidal wave of laughter and criticism surged over Manet, for all the same reasons that had cascaded over him two years earlier for his Dejeuner sur l’Herbe, but now he faced moral opprobrium at an even higher level of intensity, thanks to the additional accusation that the whore Meurent was masturbating. This was a hypocritical complaint, coming from the classicists, who doubtlessly admired Titian’s Venus of Urbino, which Manet had blatantly imitated. Titian’s Venus was far more explicitly erotic than Manet’s Olympia, with her fingers dipping between her legs, while Manet’s prostitute merely covered her crotch with her hand. But Titian’s Venus was a synthetically smooth goddess wrapped in the cloak of classicism, while Manet’s cosplay Olympia was a roughly painted picture of a professional bohemian model playing the part of a baud. The newly elected jury, which

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was well attuned to the benefits of using scandal for publicity, accepted the obviously outrageous painting into their salon, perhaps anticipating the huge crowds it would attract. Gautier fully understood the value of a good scandal, having cut his artistic reputation long ago on Hugo’s Hernani. He knew the explosive reaction the painting would cause, if not the magnitude of its detonation. The reviewers tore at the bait. Félix Jahyer said, “I cannot take seriously the impersonations of this painter. He had hitherto been the apostle of the ugly, of the repulsive. I hoped that the ridicule of serious people would discourage him from taking this path, which is so contrary to art. Far from it.” The innovative sketchiness of Manet’s work was “not original, but simply burlesque.” Jahyer singled out Olympia for special criticism, saying, “No other painting, in the 2,500 exhibits, demands such a sharp response … The first painting was ugly, this one is no less, but it is, moreover, indecent. It seems to me that it could have been lodged in some corner, at a height inaccessible to the eye, where some modest studies by conscientious laborers are plunged. Everyone would have won: first the public and then Mr. Manet himself, who would have understood, perhaps, that in no manner should he be counted on.” 4 Both Monet and Manet were perceived as disciples of Gustave Courbet, not as leaders of a new Impressionist school. Humiliated in 1863 by the rejection of his painting of drunken priests, this year Courbet submitted his safe, but politically charged posthumous portrait of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and his children in the garden, and a realist landscape painting of a river emerging from a gorge in Ornans, now known as Le Ruisseau du Puits Hoir. One anonymous reviewer of the Salon of 1865 said, “As for Mr. Courbet, with his Proudhon family, and the pure realists, or rather the eccentrics of which he seems the leader, better ignore them.”5 And he kept his word, not touching upon the work of any realist associated with the notorious painter. Jahyer saved special contempt for Courbet and the painters he perceived as his followers, “I must speak of M. Courbet only to clarify the state of nullity which he has been in for several years, by departing from sane principles and of wanting to impose them on the public. And he had talent! What will it be like for Manet, Fantin-Latour, Whistler and others, who have no talent at all and who still believe they are artists today!”6 Some critics were less compelled to join the hounds in the howling journalistic pack. Reviewer Louis Gallet gave Manet’s paintings a brief mention, saying they were “exhilarating exhibitions,”7 and thought Monet was “a young realist promising a lot,” whose seascapes bore “the imprint of a strong hand, careless of the pretty, very much preoccupied with the correctness of the effect.”8 Gallet especially admired the paintings shown

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by Gustave Moreau and Gustave Doré, who were breaking new symbolist ground. But Gallet was young and uninfluential, and his quiet voice was too slight to be heard above the hysterical cacophony of criticism about Olympia. Zola claimed that Courbet had joined the bourgeois enemy, and accused him of taking bribes of awards and medals in return for disowning his followers. Dripping sarcasm, Zola said Proudhon’s book must have given this “poor, dear master” an “indigestion of democracy.” Courbet should give up on moralizing and socialism and be content with being the premier painter of the era. Courbet had cruelly turned on his former student ErnestPaul Brigot and told him that he understood nothing of his philosophy. Zola was being a little unfair to Courbet, whose hilariously rude painting of drunken priests, Return from the Conference, had been banned from the official salon and the Salon des Refusés in 1863 because it offended the church – which was back in favor with Louis-Napoleon’s Second Empire. But, Zola despised Courbet’s champion Proudhon. Ten years earlier, Zola’s acidic essay Proudhon and Courbet took issue with the authoritarian socialist ideas proposed in Proudhon’s realist manifesto, which the bourgeois-bohemian Zola found utterly repulsive. Although called a realist, and famous for his carefully described scenes of real life, drawn from thorough note-taking made during his anthropological explorations of the Parisian streets, Zola was a deeply imaginative writer. He understood the work of the new artists, knew that Proudhon had described only a minutely narrow slice of their vitality, and recognized his restrictive attempt to enforce a regulated life. And while a realist in the sense that he was a keen and accurate reporter of detail, Zola’s novels were neither didactic sermons nor theoretical ethnographic examinations. But they were rich narratives of the lives of his convincingly imagined characters set within lush word-paintings of the layered environments of 19th century democratic France. In his sharp critique of Du Principe de l’Art et de sa Destination Sociale, Zola was quick to recognize the nasty totalitarianism of Proudhon’s thought, sarcastically telling him that it would be more sincere and more reasonable simply to kill the artists rather than to force them to fit into the egalitarian smoothing of humankind that he had proposed. The artists, he said, “… are peculiar people who do not believe in equality, who possess the strange mania of having a heart, who sometimes push nastiness to the point of genius. They are going to agitate your people, disrupt your communal intentions; they will resist you and be nothing but themselves.”9 Contemptuously, he recommended changing the title of Proudhon’s book

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from The Principle of Art and its Social Purpose to The Death of Art and its Social Uselessness.10 He imagined Proudhon standing like St. Peter at the gates of his utopian city, assigning each soul seeking entrance with a number for a name and a job. This was a dream of a terrible utilitarian future. These frightening images of communist anonymity and the functional disposal of humanity previsioned the Marxist atrocities of Stalin’s Soviet Union, of Mao’s China, of Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Zola was scornful of Proudhon’s disciplinarian attack on artists who failed to rally to the socialist cause. Proudhon demanded the banishment of artists who would not bow to the revolutionary socialist ideal. Zola defended artists for their individuality, their unaffected sincerity, and their self-sacrifice. He wrote, “I think I can answer you, in the name of artists and writers, of those who sense the beat of their heart and their thoughts within themselves: “To us, our ideal is our loves and our emotions, our tears and our smiles. We want no more of you than you want of us. Your community and your equality sicken us, we make style and art with our body and soul, we are lovers of life, every day we give you a little of our existence. We are in nobody’s service, and we refuse to enter into yours. We report only to ourselves, we obey only our own nature; we are good or bad, leaving you the right to listen to us or to block your ears. You proscribe us and our works, you say. Try, and you will feel such a great emptiness in yourself, that you will weep with shame and misery.”11 Here was the fundamental difference between the utopian, socialist avant-gardism of the acolytes of Saint-Simon, Rodrigues, Chernyshevsky, and Proudhon, and Zola’s anarchic bourgeois-bohemians. Both the avantgardists and the bourgeois bohemians recognized the need for a new art for a new time. The former placed artists in service to the state and prioritized the use of art as political propaganda. The latter cherished the artist’s individuality. Being bohemian did not preclude artists from being experimenters in alternative lifestyles, including communal living and adopting radical political stances, but making socialist propaganda was by no means their singular focus. Testifying to the lack of political commitment of the bohemians in the days of the Commune, Karl Marx complained of “… the exodus from Paris of the high Bonapartist and capitalist Bohème,” and was contemptuous of bohemian affectations of proletarianism.12 The most important characteristic of the bohemians was to assert themselves as artistic individuals, and individualism was the antithesis of socialism. When Zola chided Proudhon that artists were “… peculiar people who do not believe in equality,” he meant they were individualists, and he was raising the battle standard of one of the great themes of bourgeois liberal capitalism.

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John Stuart Mill was the most famous champion of the individual, publishing his popular On Liberty in 1859, when Zola was 19 years old and fully engaged in the bohemian life with his Batignolles friends. Mill systematically defended individualism and its implications. Free speech was essential for liberty to exist, and the consequences of limiting it were lethal. However, indiscriminately acting upon one’s opinions must be limited in order to prevent harm to others. “No one pretends that actions should be as free as opinions,”13 he said, describing the boundaries of acceptable individualism. It was a natural part of human nature to be inventive rather than to be the slave of custom. Freedom of choice was the consequence of exercising perception, judgement, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and moral preference, whereas blindly following custom was the equivalent to mental stagnation, making use of no other faculty “than the apelike one of imitation.” The independent thinker was a more complete person. “He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide firmness and self-control to hold on to his deliberate decision.”14 This was a new kind of ideal man, whose quality could be measured not only by his actions, but also by the manner in which he took them, for while desires and impulses were human, they must be balanced with a strong conscience capable of controlling their powerful energy. Such a person possessed energetic character, which society should allow for its own benefit, for without individuals who had the strength of will to defy customary behavior, positive improvements could not be made. An over-regulated society which crushed individualism also crushed inventiveness. Mill defended individualism with a remarkable clarity that made his work famous. He had formidable critics. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about individualism in his book about the French Revolution and his observations on democracy in America, arguing that individualism would encourage citizens to withdraw from participation in society, which would in turn allow the state to stifle the vigor of its people with excessive regulation. Like Tocqueville, Edmund Burke worried that the rule of a homogeneous revolutionary mass governed by an untested theory of individual rights would lead to anarchy, which would only be controlled by despotic rule. Mill guarded against selfish abuses of freedom by insisting that individualism must be limited by the law – actions which caused harm to the life, liberty and property of others must be prevented by the state. Thus, a huge range of free thought and action was left unrestrained. A decade before the publication of On Liberty, the French economist Frédéric Bastiat declared that individualism, “a new word,” was “the

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driving force of the bourgeoisie,” and the leading principle of their reign,15 and warned of its danger to French religion, politics, and industry. As the authority of aristocracy led to oppression through stifling personalities, so, the authority of individualists would lead to oppression through anarchy. Only true fraternity could give birth to freedom, but true fraternity could not be legislated into existence. It must be freely given. To Bastiat, Voltaire’s insistence on independent freedom of thought led to moral anarchy; Charles Montesquieu’s individualist political thought led to a bourgeois oligarchy founded upon property ownership; Turgot’s individualist liberal economics created competition between the rich and the poor which could only benefit the wealthiest.16 Yet, despite his vigorous critique of individualism, which he equated to egoism, Bastiat insisted that the role of government was limited to the protection of the rights of the individual, and nothing else, and moreover, that self-interest was an indisputable and essential part of human nature. He said, “We cannot, therefore, doubt that personal interest is the great resort of humanity. It must be clearly understood that here this word is the expression of an incontestable, universal fact, a consequence of the organization of man, and not as a critical judgment, as the word egoism would be.”17 Bastiat accurately identified the truth that people who were not proportionally rewarded for their labour would not balance their loss through an unearned philanthropic spirit of self-sacrifice, they would simply put down their tools. Naïve socialism failed to recognize that egoistic individualism was an eternal vice of mankind and would always exceed man’s will to be philanthropic. Emperor Louis-Napoleon encouraged economic freedom, and after his fall and the failure of the commune the triumphant and deeply bourgeois Third Republic liberated the laissez-faire free market. For artists, a consequence of the free market was that innovation and novelty were principles of the production of works of art, just as they were to any other product of bourgeois capitalism. The individual self was equally concerned with being unusual, a new person, standing apart from the crowd. These ideas percolated among the bohemians, who interpreted them as an invitation to separate from the bourgeoisie, who they regarded as mediocre and tedious, ruled by fear, and failing to experience life in its full sensual form. The bohemians’ eccentric clothing and hair, their flouting of social conventions, and their romantic determination to produce the art that would reveal their own genius reflected the idea of individualism. This drive to individual success was the essence of the bourgeois-bohemian artistic revolution that would thrive spectacularly in the late 19th century, hibernate during the world wars, and awake again during the long period of intense cold war tension in the 20th century.

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Proudhon prayed to be rid of artistic geniuses, especially religious artists. He wrote, “Would to God that Luther had exterminated the Raphaels, the Michelangelos and all their emulators, all those ornamentors of palaces and churches!”18 Theorizing about an imaginary utopia which completely ignored human nature, he had failed to understand the importance of individualism to the new bourgeois culture of the postrevolutionary West, in which each person could pursue greatness – not necessarily to achieve it – but at least to have had a chance. He admired the art of the Middle Ages and the art of the Greeks because these were the periods in which individuality was suppressed in favor of a collective artistic expression of the dominant ideal of the period. Zola pointed out the weakness of Proudhon’s insistence that art must serve as a means of indoctrination, reminding his readers that humanity would be just as wicked regardless of ten years of instructional paintings to guide it, and that even if Proudhon’s followers were able to create a school of painters to produce such works, they would never find one to equal Courbet.19 In contrast to Proudhon’s monotone utopia, Zola insisted that each artist must add his own voice and his own melodies to humanity’s song, “to live, to make art greater, to add new chefs d’oeuvres to old chefs d’oeuvres, to do the work of a creator, to give us one of the undiscovered aspects of beauty,”20 although this insistence upon individualism meant there would be no schools of art. Schools of art implied stagnation, the duplication of methodology, and the repetition of ideas that led to nowhere but a dull state of boredom. Proudhon asserted the artist must be inferior to the masses; Zola insisted the artist act as an individual expressing passion for the masses. “For me – and I want to hope, for many people – on the contrary, a work of art is a personality, an individuality.”21 Art was a combination of two elements: the real element of nature, and the individual element, which was man, in his infinite variety of minds and works. Without individual temperaments, all paintings would simply be photographs.”22 “What I am looking for above all in a painting is a man and not a painting,” Zola said.23 One might expect Zola to have been the champion of art-for-art’s sake, but he was not – he was the defender of individualism in all its artistic forms. In fact, he defended Courbet’s realism, and regretted that the painter had made himself subservient to Proudhon’s straight-jacketing of art as the slave of the utopian state, and correctly saw Courbet as an individualist who had been co-opted by a politician. This is an issue at the heart of the avant-garde – for all the protestations of people like Proudhon, Saint-Simon, and Chernyshevsky that all art should be propaganda, it was not. Avant-garde propaganda had only ever been a small subset of a far broader spectrum of

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bourgeois-bohemian ideas which were founded upon individualism, pursuing all sorts of modes of enquiry into what the art of the capitalist, liberal democratic era might be. Zola’s championing of the individualist artist was a continuation of the ideas of the romantics who demanded entrance into the salon and prevailed earlier in the century. The romantics felt theirs was a new era, a new renaissance led by giants. The classical idealists of the École des BeauxArts sought the perfect form and rejected anything that did not lead to the ideal. The romantics recognized just how much of the world was left out by academic idealization. Victor Hugo’s preface to his play Oliver Cromwell was like a biblical text to many young bohemians. In it, Hugo, the literary hero of the romantics and one of the acknowledged giants of the new bourgeois-bohemian age, made the case for making use of the ugly things in the world, and for describing the grotesque, precisely because the world was not ideal, and because these other subjects were equally worthy of examination. The star-struck aspiring critic and poet Théophile Gautier was so overwhelmed by his hero when he was invited to visit the great man in the aftermath of the opening of Hernani, that he found himself unable even to approach his front door, and although urged on by his friends, he only succeeded in knocking, weak-kneed, on his third attempt at approaching the master’s home, and then, when Hugo stood before him at the opened entrance “in a blaze of light, like Phoebus and Apollo issuing from the gates of dawn,”24 Gautier was speechless. He almost fainted. In the preface, Hugo wrote that ideal beauty was a pure form, but that it offered only a limited and solitary view of the world, while the grotesque came in many forms, and presented itself in innumerable shapes, and most important, provided an interesting and useful backdrop to the simplicity of beauty. “Is it not because the modern imagination does not fear to picture the ghastly forms of vampires, ghouls, snake-charmers and jinns prowling about in cemeteries, that it is able to endow its fairy creations with that incorporeal form, that purity of essence, of which the pagan nymphs fall so far short?”25 He points out that the ethereal beauty of the sculptures of Jean Goujon, whose delicate Romanesque figures are now treasured in the Louvre, were renowned for their remarkable vitality precisely because they stood in the context of the crude works of the Middle Ages. Goujon’s gorgeous figures are astonishingly elegant in comparison to the rough work of other sculptors of the 16th century. Hugo continued, although the grotesque reappeared and may even dominate art as a reaction when excessive attention was paid to beauty and ugliness was excluded, in the end, beauty always asserted its dominance

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over the grotesque. Hugo’s point was that for beauty to be truly beautiful, it needed ugliness as a contrast – without darkness there was no light. Written in 1827, during the last years of the Bourbon restoration, three years before the fall of the regime of Charles X in the July Revolution, Hugo wrote passionately, like a rebel, equally as zealous as any Proudhon or Saint-Simon. But his goals were quite different. “Let us speak out boldly. The time has come to do it, and it would be strange indeed, if at this time liberty, like the light, should extend everywhere, except to the one place where liberty is more logically a native production than anywhere else in the world, the domain of thought. Let us take the hammer to their theories and systems and treatises. Let us tear down the old stucco-work which conceals the facade of art! There are no rules or models, or rather there are no other rules than the general laws of nature, which extend over the whole domain of art, and the special laws which, in every composition, result from the conditions peculiar to each subject.”26 He attacked the notion of art imitating nature on the simple grounds that art could never truly duplicate reality. Art could only produce an imitation of it – not the thing itself. Complaining of contemporary conventions in playwriting, which he said were, “Borrowed ideas decked out in second-hand finery,” he insisted on a renewed interest in nature and truth, which had been lost to “false art, false style and false poetry.”27 This was not to say that verse should be abandoned, for that would be to deny a form of beauty, of which Hugo was absolutely in favor, but this was a beauty of a different species, one founded on the honest observations and upon the inspiration of the individual artists who would be the heroes of Hugo’s revolution. “There is but one weight which can turn the scale in the balance of art, and that is genius,”28 he wrote. The individualist was the romantic champion of the bourgeoisbohemian artistic revolution. Zola liked the anarchy individualism brought to art. Although he was a consistent champion of the working class, he never wavered in his powerful support of individualism and coupled it with a remarkable prescience. In Mes Haines (My Hatreds), he wrote, “I have little concern for beauty or perfection. I scorn the grandeur of the past; I am concerned only with life, with confrontation, with ardor. I am comfortable with my generation. It seems to me that the artist cannot wish for a different milieu, a different era. Masters and schools no longer exist. We live in an age of anarchy and each one of us is a rebel who thinks for himself, who creates and fights for himself. The hour is breathless and full of anxiety; we are waiting for those who will strike the most vigorously and the most accurately, whose fists will be powerful enough to still the other’s mouths; and each new fighter will harbor a vague hope of being tomorrow’s dictator, a tyrant. And then, what

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vast horizons! How strongly we feel the truths of the future fermenting within us! If we stammer, it is because we have too many things to say. We are on the threshold of a century of science and truth, and we totter momentarily, like drunken men, when faced by the blinding light rising before us. But we are working, we are preparing the task of our sons, we are at the hour of demolition in which plaster dust fills the air and ruins fall crashing. Tomorrow the edifice will be rebuilt.”29 Zola repeatedly claimed that he loved the anarchic state of culture after the bourgeois revolution, which was the natural state of capitalist art. Like Baudelaire, Zola recognized that art in the bourgeois state would always be at the mercy of the capitalist marketplace, which was a chaotic tumble, and he knew there would be casualties. He wrote, “As for me, I like our anarchy, the overturn of our art movements, because I take great joy in watching the battle of minds, in witnessing individual efforts, in studying one by one all of these battlers, the minor as well as the great ones. But one dies quickly in this atmosphere; the field of battle is unhealthy and authors are slain by their works.”30 Zola was incredibly perceptive. Although cautious of the dangers to individuals caught up in the struggle for artistic success, he knew that this dark side was essential to the brightly shining life of the thriving art culture that the bourgeois supremacy brought, and relished the fertile vigor of struggle between the new, young artists, for it was this struggle for individual greatness that brought new ideas and images and texts to enjoy. There was no ruling art hegemony. No uniformity dominated style for centuries at a time. Only disorder, which allowed for the most individualistic search for success. “We are in the midst of anarchy, and for me, this anarchy is a curious and interesting spectacle,” he wrote. “Certainly, I regret the absence of the great man, the dictator, but I take pleasure in witnessing the spectacle of all these kings warring against each other, of this kind of Republic in which every citizen’s master of his own feverish, raging life. Our epoch’s persistent, continuous birth-giving is not admired enough; each day is marked by a new effort, by a new creation. The artists lock themselves away, each one in his corner, and seem to work separately on the chefs’ d’oeuvre which will decide the next school. There is no school; each one can and wants to become the master. Therefore, shed no tears for our age, for the destiny of the arts; we are witnessing a profoundly human labor, the struggle of diverse faculties, the laborious confinements of a time which carries in it a great and beautiful future. Our part, the anarchy, the struggle of talents, is doubtless the faithful expression of our society; we are ill with industry and science, ill with progress; we live feverishly in order to prepare a stable life for our sons; we are searching; every day we make new tries,

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we are creating piece by piece a New World. Our art has to resemble us; struggling to renew ourselves, living amidst the disorder inherent in any reconstruction in order to find repose one day in a profound peace and beauty. Wait for the great man of the future who will utter the word we are vainly seeking; but while waiting, do not disdain too much the workers of today who are sweating blood, and who furnish us the magnificent spectacle of a society in the act of giving birth.”31 Zola’s genius was to enjoy the chaos, to identify and describe the people who lived and flourished in it, and to skewer those who failed to find their role in the anarchy of individuals. In 1863, Manet and Whistler had largely gone undefended, and in 1866, Zola was one of the few writers to comment at any length defending Manet’s paintings, vigorously protesting his virtues in the first of a series of articles he wrote for a scandal sheet called L’Événement attacking the salon. In the first article, titled Le Jury, dated April 27th, he attacked the members of the governing jury who had accepted or denied the artworks to the salon. He complained it was appointed by artists who had no need of it, because they were already given a pass from judgement, having previously exhibited or been awarded a medal. The newcomers, who had most need of a friendly judge, had no such privilege, and could not penetrate the predetermined cliques that formed each year to guard the salon’s walls from upstart intruders. Just that year, he had heard a rumor that, before the election, a list of the proposed jurors had been printed and circulated around the ateliers, and the people on this list had been voted in, in its entirety. To Zola, this was a mockery of justice. The jurors “… amputate art and present only its mutilated corpse to the masses.”32 Their judging could only be inconsistent. Although works by Manet and by Courbet’s student Brigot had been declined in 1866, they had both been accepted in previous years, and Zola was certain that their recent work was their best. At least the spectacle of the Salon and the machinations of the jury were entertaining, but Zola begged for the support of the art community to call for the reestablishment of the Salon des Refusés. He wrote, “It is evident that the artists shown to the door of the Salon are nothing but the famous painters of tomorrow … serious fellows whose only crime is to think unlike their colleagues.”33 There were so many paintings of female nudes in the official salon of 1863 that Gautier described it as the “Salon of Venuses.” Many of them were simply soft porn justified by the invisible veil of neo-classicism, following decades of precedents. Perhaps the most popular was Alexandre Cabanel’s Birth of Venus, a pastel-colored painting of an improbable erotic nude floating upon a breaking wave, attended by some pretty silly flying cherubs who tumbled about her. It was so famous that he painted three

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versions, cashing in on popular taste. Cabanel was one of the most recognized painters in the world, and his womanizing admirer, the emperor, thought this was one of the greatest paintings ever made. Louis-Napoleon bought it and hired Cabanel to paint his portrait. Contradicting the emperor’s taste, Zola said he disliked Cabanel’s “talcum powder” and preferred the “harsh and healthy scents of true nature.”34 Having attracted the attention of the mighty with his spleen in the first two articles, Zola reserved some serious venom for works like Birth of Venus in Le Moment Artistique, the third of the attack articles he directed against the salon, in which he wrote, “I have never seen such a mass of mediocrities. There are two thousand pictures, and there are not ten men. Of these two thousand canvases, twelve or fifteen speak to you in human language; the others are content with the nonsense of perfumers. Am I too severe? But, I only say aloud what others think in a whisper.” The works he saw were “all tinsel and tissue paper.” Confronting the artists, he said, “you paint grotesque puppets that are no more indecent and no more alive than girls’ pink-skinned dolls.” 35 He also pointed out that Brigot, refused from previous salons, had used a fake name and had two paintings accepted into this one. Apart from being a voice in the wilderness, what distinguished Zola from other critics was that he didn’t limit his comments to complaints about the salon, but also explained his philosophical position, which sounded extraordinarily contemporary. To Zola, art was a human secretion, a physical function which changed according to climate and customs. In this, Zola echoed Proudhon’s discussion of the changing ideal of each era – and affirmed the art of the past could not be the art of the present. But unlike Proudhon, Zola mocked the idea of absolute universal truth, picturesquely saying that humans made a new truth every morning for their use in the evening. Artists must abandon themselves to their nature and speak their own living language, not attempt to speak dead ones. To imitate the art of the past was to be a childish tracer of old hands, and in the present, art was in service to wealth, to the bourgeoisie – “We are civilized, we have our bedrooms and living rooms; whitewash is good for the little people, but you need paintings on the walls of the rich.”36 A fourth article was entirely dedicated to Manet, who had nothing in the show of 1866. Zola comforted the artist, who had again become the center of a nexus of scorn, with the knowledge that being set aside by the members of the committee merely emphasized how very different his work was to the sentimental fluff being shown, which was full of “banal and impudent works spread out, showing their misery and foolishness.”37 Continuing his scathingly critical attack on the salon, Zola explained why he defended

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Manet with such conviction – it was because he despised “those boudoir paintings, these colored images, these miserable canvases in which I find nothing alive.”38 The failure of Manet’s colleagues to defend him was contemptible. Manet was destined for greatness, unlike the salon artists who produced work that would soon be forgotten and lose its value. Zola pulled no punches when he fired at these painters, “You know what effect Mr. Manet’s paintings produce at the Salon. They simply blow holes in the wall. All around them the sweets of fashionable art confectioners, sugar candy trees and pie crust houses, the good men in gingerbread and the good women made of vanilla cream are displayed. The bon-bon shop becomes pinker and softer, and the artist’s living canvases seem to take on a certain bitterness in the middle of this river of milk.”39 And just in case that wasn’t clear enough an attack on the saccharine conventionality of the Salon establishment, he concluded, “I have tried to restore Mr. Manet to the place which belongs to him, one of the greats. One may laugh at this author as one laughs at the painter. One day, we will both be avenged. There is an eternal truth which supports me in criticism: it is that individual characters enliven and dominate the ages. It is impossible – impossible, you understand – that Mr. Manet does not have his day of triumph, and that he does not crush the timid mediocrities which surround him. Those who must tremble are the artisans, the men who have stolen a semblance of originality from the masters of the past; it is those who scribe trees and characters, who do not know what they are or what they are laughing at. These will be the dead of tomorrow; there are some who have already been dead for ten years when they are buried, and who stay alive by shouting that the dignity of art is offended if a living canvas is introduced into this great mass grave of the Salon.”40 In his attack article, Les Réalistes du Salon, Zola mounted another literary assault against the salon painters of 1866 whose works had been described as ‘realist’ by other critics. He did this to emphasize his position as the defender of individualism rather than as the defender of any particular school, a position which he viewed as repugnant. Schools inevitably led to tedious imitation. “I am from my own party,” he wrote, “from the party of life and truth, that’s all. I have some resemblance to Diogenes, who was looking for a man; In art, I also seek men, new and powerful temperaments. I do not care about realism, in the sense that this word represents nothing precise to me.”41 For artists to capture his admiration, he demanded strength and an independent spirit, but he recognized that to match the times, in which reductive science was focused on exact studies of things and facts, the artistic trend was toward realism, in which painters attempted to render things as they really appeared rather than as they might be if they were

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idealized. Nevertheless, Zola “looked for men not mannequins, men of flesh and bones, confessing themselves to us, and not liars who only have noise in their bellies.”42 Personality was the scarecrow of the age. The masses feared individuals who did not blend in, and mocked them, lacking the education to recognize their genius. Of these realists whose work had been accepted into the Salon, Zola only had praise for one such individual, Monet, whose painting of Camille impressed him greatly. Zola felt the depth of the painting, in which Camille steps away from the viewer, pulling the train of her striped satin dress behind her, which Monet had rendered with a great sense of her movement into the picture plane. It was “an open window to nature.” The dress was “supple and solid … it speaks loudly about who this woman is. This is no doll’s dress, one of those muslin chiffons with which one dresses dreams; it is good silk, which would be too heavy for the whipped cream of M. Dubuffe.”43 But other realists took a beating from Zola’s words, which struck at their formulaic works like bare-knuckled fists. Théodule Ribot, already a popular genre painter of kitchen objects, made a picture of young Jesus at the temple with the rabbis. Cruelly, Zola said he added nothing to art and was a useless personality, a “contraband individuality.” His painting had no blood, no life, and “… the heads of this child and these men are hollow; there is not a bone in their flabby, puffy flesh.” Ferdinand Roybet’s painting of a fool at the court of Henry III had been praised before the opening of the salon as an exemplary piece of realism, but Zola asked why people had recommended it to him, writing, “It is just because the figures are vulgar, isn’t it, that you want to me to take this picture for realist work? I call a work that lives real, a work whose characters can move and speak. Here I see nothing but dead creatures, totally pale and completely dissolved.”44 Merely examining crudity was not something that impressed Zola. Artists who used a rough painterly technique, coupled with a sentimental vision of the proletariat from a bourgeois point of view, exploiting the lives of what Marx called the “dangerous class” of impoverished and addicted people, would find no support from him. Zola crossed the line with these articles, fearlessly but perhaps ingenuously attacking the emperor, the powerful salon committee, the artists, the audience, and the critics. Was there anyone of influence left in the Parisian art world who escaped his attention? Was there anyone else he could anger? Like Manet, he was in search of scandal and appreciated the value of shocking the public. Zola finished The Realists with a proud note

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that his defense of Manet had borne fruit – his resignation had been demanded, and the editor of L’Événement had been obliged to fire him.45 Cabanel’s well-painted but modestly-sized portrait of Louis-Napoleon had been prominently displayed at the salon of 1865, revealing the emperor as a goateed and balding gentleman with a carefully waxed moustache, welldressed in a black morning suit, standing in a richly decorated hall. His beautiful ermine-trimmed red robe, and the imperial crown and scepter were arranged as set-dressing beside him on a table draped in a red cloth trimmed with luxuriously wide golden embroidery and tassels, reminding viewers that although he was bourgeoisie, and one of them, he wielded imperial power. Despite the luxurious finery, one can’t help feeling that this slightly dumpy, pompous fellow looked a bit silly wrapped up in his regal fur. Without the red cordon of the Légion-d’Honneur slashing across his torso, he looked more like a successful and self-important shop keeper than a noble ruler. The portrait gave no impression whatsoever of the subject being capable of fulfilling his reputation as an extravagant philanderer. Four genre paintings were chosen as its neighbors: a conventional Flagellation of Christ by Theodore Tchoumakoff; a devotional Mary at the Foot of the Cross by Victor Zier, and two scenes from the French countryside – one of cattle on a country lane in Normandy by Émile van Marcke, and a riverside landscape by Gustave Castan. They were cleverly chosen as propaganda to bolster the emperor’s image as a devout Christian, divinely ordained by God to be the beneficial ruler of the pleasant and bountiful French land. But Louis Napoleon’s reign would soon be over, and the balance of forces that maintained the salon, pitting the aristocratic classicism of the Empire against the youthful rebellion of the shocking bohemians could not hold. After his ignominious defeat and capture by the Prussians at the Battle of Sedan in 1870, the bourgeois emperor fled to exile in England, where he died three years later. In Paris, the communards rebelled and seized control of the city, establishing a socialist regime which would provide a revolutionary example to be followed by the Bolsheviks in 1917. The Commune survived for a brief few months (with Courbet’s enthusiastic participation) until it was soundly thrashed by the French army, and after its destruction, the Third Republic was established as a temporary government, with high expectations that a new royal regime should soon be installed. This never happened, and the Third Republic would rule over France until the Nazi invasion seventy years later. Already rubbing shoulders with the aristocratic class since the first revolution, now the bourgeoisie was firmly in charge, and they enjoyed their authority. With this new bourgeois authority and the final decline of the aristocratic hegemony, the bohemians felt empowered to exhibit their own work directly to the public. Now the

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Impressionists would hold their own exhibits, relying on the precedents of the three Salon des Refusés and of Courbet’s and Manet’s solo showings to give them the notoriety they needed, throwing the judgment of their work open to the public. Their work was not offered to the eyes of an elitist audience of the mighty at the salon, but for the benefit of the Parisian middle-class art market, and for the international bourgeois audience who were drawn to the great city of light and its decadent pleasures. Although a veteran of teasing the bourgeoisie for press attention, but not anticipating the wild storm of opprobrium that would pour over him because of his Olympia, Manet prepared for the 1865 Salon in much the same way that 21st century artists exploit the crowds attending big art fairs, by mounting off-campus side-shows, luring art-lovers who travel to the main event. Knowing his name would attract a crowd, Manet organized an exhibit of his work at the Gallerie Martinet, showing eight paintings: a horse race, a dismally amateurish seascape with sailboats, and some still life paintings of fruit and fish which he had made during a recent trip to the seaside. These were safely generic paintings, albeit painted in his signature flat, loose style. He cut the dead matador from the failed Incident in a Bull Ring and restretched it as an individual work. Clearly, Manet was hoping to make some money by exploiting the huge crowds. Courbet had done precisely the same thing a decade earlier, having put together a large solo exhibit of his work as early as 1855, while the Paris World Fair was open to the public. Eleven of his paintings had been accepted to the Universal Exposition, which was held in a pavilion on Avenue Montaigne, but Courbet wanted to be sure more of his paintings were seen by the vast numbers of tourists who were expected to attend the Fair. Over five million visited the Exposition. An enthusiastic selfpromoter, he set up a ‘Pavilion of Realism’ close to the Champs-Elysées, displaying forty of his paintings, including his spectacular and subversive L’Atelier du Peintre, which included a portrait of Louis-Napoleon seated among the dogs on the left side of the huge canvas. He repeated the venture in 1867 on an even grander scale, showing an impressive one hundred and ten paintings, three drawings and two sculptures, bragging in the catalogue that this accounted for barely a quarter of this prolific painter’s works, which were scattered throughout the museums of the principal cities of France.46 The young Impressionists paid attention and, disappointed by the lackluster reception their work received at the salons, started putting their own independent shows together soon after the fall of Louis-Napoleon. These shows marked the birth of a new kind of art market, set outside of government control. Responding to the free market economy, they were the first group shows mounted outside the official salons. Between 1874 and

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1886, the Impressionists mounted eight exhibits with various configurations of participants. In 1884, the Société des Artistes Indépendants (Society of Independent Artists) was formed and organized a huge exhibit following the pattern of the salon, but with no official oversight or governmental control. Zola survived the Prussian bombardments of Paris at his home in the Batignolles, watching and listening nervously as shells tore through the sky above him. He only left the city when the communards threatened to take him as a hostage. He wrote to Cezanne at the dawn of the Third Republic in 1871, “Paris is reborn. As I’ve often told you, our reign has begun!”47

Notes 1 C.L. James, Anarchy, A Tract for the Times, Eau Claire, 1886, 29-30. Cited in: Brigitte Anne Koenig, American Anarchism: The Politics of Gender, Culture, and Community from Haymarket to the First World War. U.C. Berkeley, 2000, xiii 2 Théophile Gautier, L’Art Moderne, Michel Lévy, 1856, 151. Cited in: Richard B. Grant, Théophile Gautier, Twayne, 1975, 48 3 Sadly, Soirée d'été is lost. 4 Félix Jahyer, Salon de 1865: Étude sur les Beaux-Arts, Dentu, 1865, pp. 23-26 5 “Quant à M. Courbet, avec sa Famille Proudhon, et aux réalistes purs, ou plutôt aux excentriques dont il semble le chef de file , mieux vaut les ignorer.” Anon. Le Salon de 1865, L. Perrin, 1865, 26 6 “Je ne dois parler de M. Courbet que pour constater l’état de nullité où il est arrivé depuis plusieurs années, à force de s’écarter des sains principes et de vouloir en imposer au public. Et dire qu’il a eu du talent! Que sera-ce donc de MM. Manet, Fantin-Latour, Whistler et consorts, qui n’en ont point du tout et qui persistent à se croire des artistes dès aujourd’hui!” Félix Jahyer, Salon de 1865: Étude sur les Beaux-Arts, Dentu, 1865, 146 7 Louis Gallet, Salon de 1865, Le Bailly, 1865, 36 8 Ibid, 23 9 Émile Zola, Trans: Palomba Paves-Yashinsky and Jack Paves-Yashinsky, My Hatreds / Mes Haines, Studies in French Literature Vol. 12. Edwin Mellen Press, 1991, 10 10 Émile Zola, Mes Haines, Causeries littéraires et artistiques, Mon Salon, 1866, Bibliotheque Charpentier, 1893, 40 11 “Et moi, je crois pouvoir vous répondre, au nom des artistes et des littérateurs, de ceux qui sentent en eux battre leur coeur et monter leurs pensées : “Notre idéal, à nous, ce sont nos amours et nos émotions, nos pleurs et nos sourires. Nous ne voulons pas plus de vous que vous ne voulez de nous. Votre communauté et votre égalité nous écoeurent. Nous faisons du style et de l’art avec notre chair et notre âme; nous sommes amants de la vie, nous vous donnons chaque jour un peu de notre existence. Nous ne sommes au service de personne, et nous refusons d’entrer au vôtre. Nous ne relevons que de nous, nous n’obéissons qu’à notre nature ; nous sommes bons ou mauvais, vous laissant le droit de nous écouter ou de vous boucher

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les oreilles. Vous nous proscrivez, nous et nos oeuvres, dites-vous. Essayez, et vous sentirez en vous un si grand vide, que vous pleurerez de honte et de misère." Émile Zola, Proudhon et Courbet, in: Mes Haines, Causeries littéraires et artistiques, Mon Salon, 1866, Bibliotheque Charpentier, 1893, 27 12 Cited in: Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris, Johns Hopkins, 1986, 185 13 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, John Parker and Sons, 1859, 100 14 Ibid, 34 15 Frédéric Bastiat, Ed. Jacques de Guenin, Trans. Jane Willems and Michel Willems, The Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat. Vol. 2: The Law, The State, and Other Political Writings, 1843-1850, 82 https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/2450#Bastiat_1573-02_591 16 As an 18th century precursor to the bohemians, the youthful Voltaire pretended to his father that he was working as an assistant to a notary when in fact he occupied himself with writing poetry. When his father discovered this deception, he sent him off to provincial Normandy to study law, doubtlessly cutting off his hair, making him shave, and compelling him to wear a white cravat! 17 “Nous ne pouvons donc pas douter que l’Intérêt personnel ne soit le grand ressort de l’humanité. Il doit être bien entendu que ce mot est ici l’expression d’un fait universel, incontestable, résultant de l’organisation de l’homme, et non point un jugement critique, comme serait le mot égoïsme.” Claude-Frédéric Bastiat, Oeuvres Complètes De Frédéric Bastiat. Tome Sixième, Harmonies Économiques, Guillamin et Co. Libraires, 1864, 52-53 18 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Du Principe de l'Art et de sa Destination Sociale, Garnier Freres, 1865, 354 19 Émile Zola, Trans: Palomba Paves-Yashinsky and Jack Paves-Yashinsky, My Hatreds / Mes Haines, Studies in French Literature Vol. 12. Edwin Mellen Press, 1991, 17 &20 20 Ibid, 141 21 “Pour moi, – pour beaucoup de gens, je veux l’espérer,– une oeuvre d’art est, au contraire, une personnalité, une individualité.” Émile Zola, Mes Haines, Causeries littéraires et artistiques, Mon Salon, 1866, Bibliotheque Charpentier, 1893, 280 22 “L’élément individuel, au contraire, l’homme, est variable à l’infini: autant d’oeuvres et autant d’esprits différents; si le tempérament n’existait pas, tous les tableaux deiraient-être forcément de simples photographies.” Ibid, 281 23 “Ce que je cherche avant tout dans un tableau, c’est un homme et non pas un tableau.” Ibid, 281 24 Théophile Gautier, Ed. & Trans. F. C. de Sumichrast, A History of Romanticism, The Progress of French Poetry, In: The Works of Théophile Gautier, Volume Sixteen, George D. Sproul, 1908, 25 25 Victor Hugo, Trans. I. G. Burnham, Oliver Cromwell, George Barrie and Son, 1895, 15 26 Ibid, 26 27 Ibid, 30 28 Ibid, 32

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Émile Zola, Trans: Palomba Paves-Yashinsky and Jack Paves-Yashinsky, My Hatreds / Mes Haines, Studies in French Literature Vol. 12. Edwin Mellen Press, 1991, xiii 30 Ibid, 352 31 Ibid, 142 32 “De leur autorité toute-puissante, ils ne montrent que le tiers, que le quart de la vérité; ils amputent l’art et n’en présentent à la foule que le cadavre mutilé.” Émile Zola, Mes Haines, Causeries littéraires et artistiques, Mon Salon, 1866, Bibliotheque Charpentier, 1893, 268 33 “Il est évident que les artistes mis à la porte du Salon ne sont encore que les peintres célèbres de demain, et je ne pourrais donner ici que des noms inconnus de mes lecteurs. Je me plains justement de ces étranges jugements qui condamnent à l'obscurité, pendant de longues années, des garçons sérieux ayant le seul tort de ne pas penser comme leurs confrères.” Ibid, 273 34 “Je déclare que je fais peu de cas de toute la poudre de riz de M. Cabanel et que je préfère les senteurs âpres et saines de la nature vraie.” Ibid, 274 35 “Jamais je n’ai vu un tel amas de médiocrités. Il y a là deux mille tableaux, et il n’y a pas dix hommes. Sur ces deux mille toiles, douze ou quinze vous parlent un langage humain; les autres vous content des niaiseries de parfumeurs. Suis-je trop sévère? Je ne fais pourtant que dire tout haut ce que les autres pensent tout bas.” Ibid, 283 36 “Notre époque est celle-ci. Nous sommes civilisés, nous avons des boudoirs et des salons ; le badigeon est bon pour les petites gens, il faut des peintures sur les murs des riches.“ Ibid, 284 37 “…toutes ces oeuvres banales et impudentes qui s’étalent, montrant leur misère et leur sottise.” Ibid, 291 38 “…toutes ces peintures de boudoir, de ces images coloriées, de ces misérables toiles où je ne trouve rien de vivant.” Ibid, 288 39 “Vous savez quel effet produisent les toiles de M. Manet au Salon. Elles crèvent le mur, tout simplement. Tout autour d’elles s'étalent les douceurs des confiseurs artistiques à la mode, les arbres en sucre candi et les maisons en croûte de pâté, les bons hommes en pain d’épices et les bonnes femmes faites de crème à la vanille. La boutique de bonbons devient plus rose et plus douce, et les toiles vivantes de l’artiste semblent prendre une certaine amertume au milieu de ce fleuve de lait.” Ibid, 295 - 296 40 “J’ai tâché de rendre à M. Manet la place qui lui appartient, une des premières. On rira peut-être du panégyriste comme on a ri du peintre. Un jour, nous serons vengés tous deux. Il y a une vérité éternelle qui me soutient en critique: c’est que les temperaments seuls vivent et dominent les âges. Il est impossible, — impossible, entendez-vous, — que M. Manet n’ait pas son jour de triomphe, et qu’il n’écrase pas les médiocrités timides qui l’entourent. Ceux qui doivent trembler, ce sont les faiseurs, les hommes qui ont volé un semblant d’originalité aux maîtres du passé; ce sont ceux qui calligraphient des arbres et des personnages, qui ne savent ni ce qu’ils sont ni ce que sont ceux dont ils rient. Ceux-là seront les morts de demain; il y en a qui sont morts depuis dix ans, lorsqu’on les enterre, et qui se survivent en

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criant qu’on offense la dignité de l’art si l’on introduit une toile vivante dans cette grande fosse commune du Salon.” Ibid, 297 41 “Je suis de mon parti, du parti de la vie et de la vérité, voilà tout. J’ai quelque ressemblance avec Diogène, qui cherchait un homme; moi, en art, je cherche aussi des hommes, des tempéraments nouveaux et puissants. Je me moque du réalisme, en ce sens que ce mot ne représente rien de bien précis pour moi.” Ibid, 299 42 Ibid, 300 43 Ibid, 302 44 Ibid, 302 45 Ibid, 307 46 N/A, Exposition des oeuvres de M. G. Courbet. Rond-Point du Pont de l’Alma (Champs-Elysées), A.E. Rochette, 1867 47 Émile Zola, Letter to Paul Cezanne, 4 July 1871, In: Ed. Alex Danchev, The Letters of Paul Cezanne, The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2013, 143

SOCIALIST REALISM

“There was the same hearty cheering as before, and the mugs were emptied to the dregs. But as the animals outside gazed at the scene, it seemed to them that some strange thing was happening. What was it that had altered in the faces of the pigs? Clover’s old dim eyes flitted from one face to another. Some of them had five chins, some had four, some had three. But what was it that seemed to be melting and changing? Then, the applause having come to an end, the company took up their cards and continued the game that had been interrupted, and the animals crept silently away.”1 George Orwell, Animal Farm

The pejorative sense of the word ‘bourgeois’ was acquired when Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels used it to describe the upper middle class as the enemy of the working class in their Communist Manifesto of 1848. PierreJacques Proudhon, Marx, Engels, and their socialist cohorts claimed to speak for the proletariat, which Marx predicted would rise up to overthrow the bourgeoisie, and they produced volumes of political agitation to popularize their cause. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels complained that the bourgeoisie – the people who controlled the means of production and exploited the labour of the proletariat for their own benefit – had been responsible for ending feudal relations, for destroying religious fervour, for establishing free-trade, and blamed it for stripping away the veil religion and politics had cast over the relationship between the workers and the aristocracy.2 The speed of industrial progress, and the development of new means of production swept away all the old feudal relationships that held society together and replaced them with naked exploitation. This bourgeois exploitation was at the root of globalization, in “a universal interdependence of nations,” in which nationalism and national identity became increasingly difficult to maintain as all nations became bourgeois.3 As the bourgeois state grew, so did the proletariat in its service, who were enslaved by machines, by overseers, and especially oppressed by bourgeois industrialist manufacturers. Populations were concentrated in the cities, rescuing “a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.”4 Rapid technological advancement meant that the lives of the proletariat were vulnerable, but as the proletarian mass grew, it gained strength and organized itself in trade unions, which improved wages, quality

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of life, working conditions, and shortened work hours. This was the constant proletarian conflict with its bourgeois rulers. This was the ‘class struggle.’ Because of bourgeois exploitation, members of the proletariat lacked property, lacked traditional marriage values, lacked a national identity, law, morality, and religion. Eventually, a communist revolution would come when the proletarian workers of the world would unite in armed resistance against the oppression of the bourgeois capitalists. The lower middle class of small shopkeepers and small manufacturers, peasants and craftsmen also struggled against the bourgeoisie in order to avoid being sucked down into the working class. A ‘dangerous class’ of the lowest level of society, made up of people rejected by the proletariat, might also participate in revolution, but were prone to bribery by reactionaries. This inevitable, violent, proletarian revolution would come because the bourgeoisie was incapable of taking care of the working class and ensuring they lived a good life. Instead, the bourgeoisie encouraged the pauperism of the working class and therefore deserved to be overthrown, with political power taken by the proletariat, represented by the communists. The stated intention and fundamental ruling principle of communist theory was the “abolition of private property.”5 Marx tied together the notion of individualism with property ownership, claiming, “Capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.”6 Because private property must be eliminated, so must bourgeois individuality, independence, and freedom. Proudhon famously said, “property is theft.” Marx wanted to do away with it completely. It was not only property that was to be abolished. The family itself was a bourgeois institution which would surely vanish as capitalism was destroyed. Women were tools of production exploited by bourgeois men. Marx claimed that bourgeois marriage was “in reality a system of wives in common,” in which married men vied to seduce each other’s spouses, and that this hypocritical system must be replaced with what he opaquely called “an openly legalized community of women.”7 Education must be rescued from the grip of the ruling class and removed from the home. Under communism, states would disappear, and the rule of the proletariat would eradicate nationalist conflict. Marx’s blueprint for the success of the proletariat in the class struggle was: 1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

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4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. 5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. 7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. 8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country. 10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.8 Marx recognized the development of the new class of the petit bourgeois, but believed that this lower middle class, which he saw “fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie”9 would completely disappear. He complained that in Germany, a bourgeois socialism had developed whose proponents wanted “all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom.”10 These bourgeois socialists wanted to eliminate the oppression of the proletariat by turning them into a burgeoning middle-class. He expected a bourgeois revolution to overthrow the German aristocracy, but thought that this would soon be followed by a proletarian revolution, installing a communist government. Marx ended the Communist Manifesto with the infamous lines, “Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!”11 However, Marx had recognized the fatal flaw at the heart of the communist revolutionary plan – that the petit bourgeoisie would gradually co-opt the proletariat and remove their sense of oppression by adopting them into the expanding middle-class. The 19th century intellectuals of this new middle class were happy that they had managed to find prosperity enough to purchase their own homes, to live a modest but relatively secure life, and to enjoy the pleasures of it. They saw little to gain from radical political agitation, and felt no need for yet another violent revolution. It was far easier and more enjoyable to participate in the sensual pleasures that came as a reward for their affluence. This swelling class of consumers had no desire to see a communist

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revolution that would take away their prosperity and reduce them to the poverty of the poorer industrial proletariat – they wanted to enjoy their prosperity. Cognizant that the industrial revolution had indeed ushered in a new age, they saw a new kind of art that suited it, and it certainly was not the realist, didactic art of proto-communism. The new middle class wanted art they could enjoy, that enriched their lives, and reflected their tastes. The rise of the bourgeoisie emphasized the importance of individuality – commercial success depended on individual will – and the romantic painters, led by Eugène Delacroix, provided the bourgeoisie with paintings that catered to their newly found selfhood. Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog perfectly captured this new bourgeois selfconsciousness in the figure of a young man looking over the foggily uncertain world, full of the spirit of youthful energy, brimming with authority over nature, self-control, and confidence. But these romantics were still well within the boundaries of the academy in matters of technique. Their paintings were in the same style, made by artists who had gone through the same training as the classicists. There was no stylistic gulf between Ingres and Delacroix – Delacroix’s brush was more vigorous, more dynamic, less smoothly finished, and perhaps his subjects departed from the classical canon, but the methodology was fundamentally the same. Was this really an expression of the brave new world of the bourgeoisie? Yes, absolutely, for those who aspired to the status of the aristocracy, but not for those who felt more keenly and painfully the novelty of the bourgeois ascendency, or their own sense of individuality. Some artists were determined to throw off the trappings of the feudal culture completely. It was in revolutionary Russia that the division between the Saint-Simonist avant-garde and a new, individualist genus of avant-garde became most clearly delineated. The role of the critical art-Christ was still waiting to be claimed, and in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution in 1917, Lenin and his comrades thrust the torch of the socialist saviour of art firmly into the dead hands of Nicholai Chernyshevsky. The split between the avant-garde and the individualists implied by Proudhon deeply divided artists as the revolutionaries battled for control of the arts. The first group was made up of Chernyshevsky’s admirers. He developed the idea of Saint-Simon’s avant-garde into a powerful aesthetic that would dominate Soviet art until the fall of the Berlin Wall – the avant-garde of political art promoting the collective. The aesthetics of the second group, the bourgeois-bohemians, who were to be completely crushed in the Soviet Union, were crafted by artists who believed that the revolution required them to conceive completely new ways of making art, disposing of the old ideas of the

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aristocracy and replacing them with new formalist abstraction. This naïve second group had no intention of working in service of the people, for its artists were thorough individualists, and their ideas were more closely in tune with the ideas of art-for-art’s-sake than with those of Saint-Simon. They were revolutionary in that they recognized a need for new art for a new era, but theirs was a revolution for the bourgeoisie, not for the proletariat. Marx had written that in a communist, proletarian revolution, private property, bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom would all be abolished.12 Furthermore, because individuality was tied to capital, “it must be swept out of the way and made impossible.”13 There would be no individualism in Soviet art. The process of eliminating the formalist, bourgeois-bohemian artists from Soviet life was slow, and socialist realism only solidified as authoritarian dogma upon the ascendancy of Stalin as Party Secretary after the death of Lenin in 1924. The individualists had been strong during the “red terror” of Lenin’s administration. Immediately after the revolution, its leaders exploited the disordered society and found their way into positions of authority as the banner wavers of the new order. Following Proudhon’s thought that the art of the old era must be thrown into the flames and replaced, during the 1920s, they presented paintings and sculptures to the newly established state based on the idea that the revolution should completely reject traditional styles and create a new kind of art for the new society they were building. Artists like Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin produced works attempting to separate themselves from the past. Malevich’s paintings were simple colorful abstractions that made no attempt to represent reality in any way. He was most famous for his 1915 painting Black Square, which was exactly what its title described. To his discredit, a close examination of the piece discovered that he had written a puerile racist insult over one of his bright canvases before painting it over in nihilistic black, reading, “negroes fighting in a dark cave.” His own uncertainty about the direction of his art was clear – of his un-painting, Malevich said, “I could not sleep or eat, and tried to understand what I had done - but I could not.”14 His destructive impulse was rooted in the big nihilistic ‘No’ of the desire to erase the past, and the reinvention of civilization envisioned by the revolutionaries. But this was the man whose manifesto claimed the supremacy of sensation in art, hardly the words of a champion of the proletariat. Malevich roundly condemned the academic schools, which he said, “teach dead, not living, painting,” and denounced the followers of Chernyshevsky and Proudhon, passionately claiming that the artist’s imitation of nature was primitive and not merely a creative copying of what

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he saw. “The realists, in transferring living things onto the canvas, deprive their life of movement.” The academies were torture-chambers, and artists should be free creators, liberated from vulgar subject matter. Academic realists were “the last descendants of the savage,” going about “in the worn-out robes of the past.” In contrast, real artists should be a channel for intuition. Malevich’s Suprematist Manifesto, published in 1916, ended with a bombastic pronouncement of his own genius, an extraordinary declaration of radical individuality. “I say to all,” he wrote, “abandon love, abandon aestheticism, abandon the baggage of wisdom, for in the new culture, your wisdom is ridiculous and insignificant. I have untied the knots of wisdom and liberated the consciousness of colour! Hurry up and shed the hardened skin of centuries, so that you can catch up with us more easily. I have overcome the impossible and made gulfs with my breath.” This was the word of a man who imagined himself an artistic hero. Malevich was an extravagantly narcissistic individualist – and he was at the dark centre of the formalist bourgeois-bohemian community in Russia. He openly claimed his individualism as anarchism. In the March 1918 issue of the anarchist revolutionary daily newspaper Anarkhiia, he wrote, “We are revealing new pages of art in anarchy’s new dawns … The ensign of anarchy is the ensign of our “ego,” and our spirit, like a free wind, will make our creative work flutter in the broad spaces of the soul. You who are bold and young … Wash off the touch of dominating authorities. And, clean, meet, and build the world in awareness of your day.”15 And although Malevich clearly admired the futurists, writing, “whoever has not trod the path of Futurism as the exponent of modern life, is condemned to crawl forever among the ancient graves and feed on the crusts of the past,” he still claimed that his Suprematism was more advanced, and even more modern than its futurist precedent. The degree of his radical break with the past could be measured by the extent of his rejection of the slightest suggestion of conservatism in the futurist manifestos. Formed in Italy, the futurists were led by Marinetti, who associated with a Fourierist commune in his youth, and later wrote The Fascist Manifesto. But when Filippo Marinetti wrote his Futurist Manifesto, his dreams of fascist Italy were yet to come, and he wrote with the enthusiasm of youth, fixated upon an anti-paternalism which desired the destruction of all things old, coupled with an enthusiasm for novelty. His manifestos were excited anti-conservative screeds, the Oedipal protestations of an adolescent enthused with power, violence, and speed. He loved the idea of war, of virility, of action, and claimed to hate women: “We want to glorify war – the only cure for the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and

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contempt for woman. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.”16 This was an aggressive manifesto ideal for teenage cyber-punks, written long before they had sprung from the imaginations of sci-fi novelists and cartoonists – for wanton destroyers of culture – who sought to replace it with technological mechanical novelty, and rapid change, with an impulsive, endlessly progressive agenda in which people were secondary to power. What Malevich read in Marinetti as revolutionary zeal was in fact a selfindulgent enthusiasm for youth power. Exciting, seductive, and wholly impractical, this endless innovation could not possibly square with the service demanded by the socialist state seeking control and stability. The anarchic individualism of the bourgeois-bohemian formalists had to be disposed of. Lenin had been deeply impressed by the lifestyles of the characters within Chernyshevsky’s novel, claiming that he would not have become a revolutionary had he not read it, saying, “Before my acquaintance with the works of Marx, Engels, and Plekhanov, only Chernyshevsky had a major influence on me, an overwhelming influence.”17 In the summer after his brother was executed for plotting to murder the Czar, Lenin read What is to be Done five times, and he too adopted the lifestyle of Rakhmetov, living a life of austerity and preparing for revolution. Lenin’s literary admiration was sincere, too. In 1902, he paid homage to Chernyshevsky by borrowing the title of his hero’s book for the first of his own political writings, describing the need for the establishment of a political party to assert revolutionary ideas among the proletariat. Chernyshevsky’s influence upon early Russian communists was so deep that Simon Karlinsky, a modern authority on pre-revolutionary Russia, described him as “the true father of Bolshevism,” and said that his philosophical writings were the foundation for “the revolutionary style, the ethics, and the aesthetics of both Russian Marxism and Russian anarchism.” Karlinsky placed the responsibility for the “simplistically utilitarian” art of Soviet states firmly upon Chernyshevsky’s shoulders.18 Naturally, the White Russian intellectuals who opposed the revolution derided Chernyshevsky’s aesthetics. A caustic Vladimir Nabokov thought his aesthetic theory was so poorly conceived that he wrote, “One can safely assume that during those minutes when he was glued to the shop windows, his disingenuous masters dissertation, ‘The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality,’ was composed in its entirety (it is no wonder that he subsequently wrote it right down, straight from the shoulder, in three nights, but it is more of a wonder how, even after a wait of six years, he nonetheless received a master’s degree for it).”19

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Nabokov’s novel The Gift included a chapter-length critical biography of Chernyshevsky, painting a picture of a man with a limited imagination, and no idea of the breadth of art’s capabilities. Written in the run-up to the Second World War, it was first published in serial form in Sovremennye Zapiski (Contemporary Papers), a journal produced for the emigrant Russian community. Afraid of upsetting its readership, the journal’s editors censored Nabokov’s chapter on Chernyshevsky, and the entire book was first published in Russian in 1952, as the winter of the Cold War fell upon Europe. Successfully promoted as a critique of the retrogressive tendencies of Soviet artistic life, it was eventually published in English in 1962, reinforcing divisive and stereotypical criticisms of Russian socialist realism. Describing the influence of What is to be Done, Nabokov’s biographer Brian Boyd laid the responsibility for the price of oppression paid by artists living under communist censorship firmly upon Chernyshevsky. Boyd described him as “an appalling writer and a muddled thinker.”20 But despite the derision of Western intellectuals, Chernyshevsky had an extraordinarily influential effect upon the course of Russian literature in the 19th century. His ideas scribed the limits of Russian artistic freedom for decades. Communist Russian political leaders embraced his ideas about art as their aesthetic guide and enforced them in the state galleries and academies. Their zeal for putting art into the service of the revolution had predictable consequences – their single-minded focus upon art as the vehicle for propaganda led to an aesthetic regime more oppressive than that which had preceded the revolution, and was an integral part of the broader system of Stalinist tyranny. Subjugating the service of man to dogmatic party ideology was merely a substitution of one top-down hierarchy for another. Soon after the revolution, in April of 1919, Lenin announced his Plan for Monumental Propaganda, calling for the demolition of Tsarist sculptures and their replacement with monuments to the great men of October. Anatoly Lunacharsky told a meeting of artists and sculptors that Lenin wanted Moscow decorated with statues of revolutionaries and socialist heroes to provide loci for propaganda.21 A list of people who were considered to be either remarkable leaders of the revolution or precursors to it was compiled by committee and approved by Lenin, and a competition was mounted to select the artists who would design and build the works. Vladimir Tatlin, who would become famous among artists in the West for his design for his unbuilt Monument to the Third International, was among the organizers of the project, revealing the authority of the formalists in the early years of the revolution. Full-sized temporary maquettes of these proposed monuments were constructed of plaster or clay. Public opinion was to play a fundamental role

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before the works could be cast in permanent bronze or sculpted in stone.22 The formalists were encouraged during the early years of the revolution because they shared the idea of producing new art for a new era, and some of the monuments produced for Lenin’s plan were renderings of the heroes of the revolution, with blocked in bodies, crudely formed features and abstracted geometric forms for plinths, but these constructivist efforts were not successful in the court of public opinion. Boris Korolyov, an important revolutionary sculptor employed in Lenin’s plan, pushed his luck too hard, not anticipating the distaste for radical art among the proletariat. He built a full-size maquette of a futurist/cubist monument to Mikhail Bakunin, the anarchist philosopher. The sculpture was remarkable for its ugliness, even within the realms of formalism, which had already taken a stance against conventional beauty. The subject’s sad, poorly-crafted face was smeared into the crude shoulders of an abstracted body composed of elongated shards and roughly-shaped polyhedrons that appeared to have been plastered together, all points and hard edges, with textured surfaces that aggressively cut into the space around the form – the public detested the maquette so thoroughly that within weeks of its erection, it was destroyed with little complaint. Perhaps this incident gave Lenin pause for thought in his initial support of all kinds of new art, and caused him to realize that bourgeois-bohemian inventions did not share the same goals as the true socialist avant-garde. It may have inspired him to reflect upon the aesthetic needs of the proletariat rather than the needs of an elite group of artists. In October 1920, he instructed Nikolai Bukharin, who was to speak about culture to the first congress of the proletkults, that proletarian culture was communism, and therefore it was the responsibility of the party to take a leadership role in its direction. In December, the Central Committee published an open letter declaring that the works of the formalists were “absurd, perverted tastes.”23 But it was not until the weeks after the eighth AKhRR (The Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia) exhibit in 1926 that the conflict between the individualist formalists and the Saint-Simonist avant-garde painters who would become known as socialist realists came to a head. This was a huge show exhibiting works of art by nearly three hundred artist members of AKhRR from across the Soviet Union. Founded in 1922, AKhRR would become the core of the Union of Artists of the USSR which dominated the socialist realist aesthetics of the communist block until the 1970s. The critical commentary that followed in the wake of the exhibit reveals the fault lines that had been developing in the Russian art world since the end of the Great War. Lunacharsky, Commissar for Enlightenment, an old Bolshevik known for his poetry and plays, provided a moderate speech at

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the opening ceremony that offered a compromise between ‘form’ and ‘content.’ These were dangerous buzz-words at the time – individualists like Malevich favoured the exploration of the form of a work of art as a more important priority to the progressive artist than its content. Lunacharsky was explicitly clear in previous statements that he supported realism, pointing out that the proletariat lacked the benefit of living through the development of bourgeois art. Consequently, they were not prepared for the art of the individualist formalists. Therefore, because the Bolshevik government represented the proletariat, not the individual, the state must support SaintSimonist avant-garde realism. Like Lenin, despite his own conservative tastes, Lunacharsky had hitherto tolerated the formalists in his political addresses. However, lurking among Lunacharsky’s apparently benign comments was a pointed remark that state-supported art should always provide “a heartfelt lesson in what our union is,” emphasizing the importance of the ideas expressed in works of art.24 This is an easily missed phrase that we may now read as an early indication of the official direction that Soviet art would take for more than half a century. As the head of Soviet censorship, Lunacharsky’s opinion on aesthetics was to become increasingly authoritative. He was followed to the podium by the less diplomatic president of the Academy of Artistic Sciences, Aleksandr Bogdanov, who opposed private, formalist, individualist art appreciated by an artistic elite with readily understood representational art that was enjoyed by the proletarian masses. These were fighting words; this was naked aggression. The formalists quickly fired back, criticizing the representational art in the exhibit, which they viewed as a reactionary continuation of the art endorsed by the Tsar. They pointed to the need for a new kind of art that would break with the past. A literary squabble broke out – on one side, the bohemian formalists, who had dominated aesthetics after the revolution by maintaining a steady grip upon their control of publishing, museums, and art schools, championing the individuality of artists as creators of work that broke away from the past, now finding themselves criticized as the servants of the bourgeoisie, decadent and out of touch with the proletariat. On the other side, the realist painters and sculptors of AKhRR saw themselves as exemplary figures who provided quality, skill, and responsibility in their truthful depictions of life in the republics. Formalists said that photographers could make a record of the activities of workers throughout the union with greater realism than any painter, and that painting therefore needed to be reinvented. Much mudslinging ensued. AKhRR’s realist painters were “simple-minded incompetents” and “good-for-nothings.” But formalists suffered from “mental disease”25 and were told, “Whoever is not a realist is complete shit …”26 Finally, AKhRR flexed its increasingly strong

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political muscles and simply declared the debate over, claiming the revolutionary high ground by pointing to their own service to the tastes of the Soviet proletariat in their millions as an indication of the righteousness of their position. AKhRR had the support of Lenin, whose personal tastes in art were quite conservative and believed that the revolution should make use of the art of the past as it built its own art in the socialist present. And, in 1923, even the evolving Leon Trotsky had written, “The proletariat is in need of artistic food and education, but that does not mean to say that the proletariat is mere clay which artists, those that have gone and those that are still to come, can fashion in their own image and in their own likeness. Though the proletariat is spiritually, and therefore, artistically, very sensitive, it is uneducated aesthetically. It is hardly reasonable to think that it can simply begin at the point where the bourgeois intelligentsia left off on the eve of the catastrophe.”27 Art critic Abram Efros wrote a manifesto for a new classicism that described the reasoning behind the abandonment of the bohemian formalists in favor of the realists, “It is true that we are striking the same chords, but we are singing different songs. Left classicism has gone beyond the destructive methods of the first revolutionary period, and from it has carefully taken over a new content for the old form of classical tradition. The inherited estate has been rejuvenated by the lightly moving futurist rhythms, by the weighty masses of cubism, and by the fiery glance of expressionistic objectlessness. But futurism, cubism and expressionism are no longer the standard, but merely a material of style. On the threshold of our epoch a classical art again stands, and attracts every man of good will into its harmonious realm.”28 Figurative art was reinvigorated, and oppressive policies were enacted against all other kinds of art, except traditional folk arts. Signalling the state’s official approval of realism, in 1928, the Soviet Union celebrated the centennial of Chernyshevsky’s birth with a mass of publications extolling his visionary virtue. Proletarian art, incorporating the indigenous art of the many republics, was intertwined with and supported by collectivization between 1928 and 1932. Much art was produced including different ethnic costumes and artifacts of various peoples of the Union. In October 1932, Stalin was invited to a party at Gorky’s apartment. The two men bantered about what to call the new art of the Soviet Union. The term ‘socialist realism’ came up, and Stalin seized it.29 The Central Committee decree, On Artistic and Literary Unions, declared that socialist realism was the official doctrine of the Soviet Union and non-doctrinaire and formalist, bourgeois arts were illegal. Art organizations were liquidated and replaced by a monolithic Artists’ Union, and all art groups were ordered to have a faction of devoted

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Communists taking leadership positions. Formalist artists were now officially traitors to the revolution and were imprisoned, exiled to the gulags, or killed. Now outlawed, individualist art was forced deeply underground. By 1934, opposition to the individualists included a powerful voice from the grave. Before his death, the revered Lenin, whose embalmed body had now lain for a decade like a medieval saint elevated in an impressive mausoleum in Red Square, had spoken to the German communist Clara Zetkin about his ideas on art. Her memoir of their conversations was now published as a popular pamphlet titled Reminiscences of Lenin. In it, Lenin revealed his initial understanding of the turmoil surrounding the exploration of the radical ideas of both the Saint-Simonian avant-garde and the individualist formalists in their efforts to create an art for the new Russia. He expressed his intention that the state should guide the shaping of art to suit the proletariat, and his distaste for the unfettered iconoclasm of people like the Constructivist Alexei Gan, who condemned all art as prerevolutionary. Gan was executed as a counter-revolutionary in 1942. “The awakening, the activity of forces which will create a new art and culture in Soviet Russia,” he said, “is good, very good. The stormy rate of this development is understandable and useful. We must and shall make up for what has been neglected for centuries. The chaotic ferment, the feverish search for new solutions and new watchwords, the ‘Hosanna’ for certain artistic and spiritual tendencies to-day, the ‘crucify them’ to-morrow! – all that is unavoidable. “The revolution is liberating all the forces which have been held back, and is driving them up from the depths to the surface. Let us take an example. Think of the pressure exercised on the development of our painting, sculpture and architecture by the fashions and moods of the tsarist court, as well as by the taste, the fancies of the aristocrats and bourgeoisie. In a society based on private property in which the artist produces goods for the market, he needs buyers. Our revolution has lifted the pressure of this most prosaic state of affairs from the artists. It has made the Soviet State their protector and patron. Every artist, and everybody who wishes to, can claim the right to create freely according to his ideal, whether it turn out good or not. And so, you have the ferment, the experiment, the chaos. “But of course, we are Communists. We must not put our hands in our pockets and let chaos ferment as it pleases. We must consciously try to guide this development, to form and determine its results. In that we are still lacking, greatly lacking. It seems to me that we, too, have our Dr. Karlstadt. We are much too much iconoclasts: We must retain the beautiful, take it as an example, hold on to it, even though it is ‘old.’ Why turn away from real beauty, and discard it for good and all as a starting point for further

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development, just because it is ‘old’? Why worship the new as the god to be obeyed, just because it is ‘the new’? That is nonsense, sheer nonsense. There is a great deal of conventional art hypocrisy in it, too, and respect for the art fashions of the West. Of course, unconscious! We are good revolutionaries, but we feel obliged to point out that we stand at the ‘height of contemporary culture.’ I have the courage to show myself a barbarian: I cannot value the works of expressionism, futurism, cubism, and other isms as the highest expressions of artistic genius. I don’t understand them. They give me no pleasure. “Art belongs to the people. It must have its deepest roots in the broad mass of workers. It must be understood and loved by them. It must be rooted in and grow with their feelings, thoughts, and desires. It must arouse and develop the artist in them. Are we to give cake and sugar to a minority when the mass of workers and peasants still lack black bread? I mean that, not, as you might think, only in the literal sense of the word, but also figuratively. We must keep the workers and peasants always before our eyes. We must learn to reckon and to manage for them. Even in the sphere of art and culture.”30 Lenin’s words are similar to those of his hero Chernyshevsky, who had written in 1853, “Let art be content with its fine and lofty mission of being a substitute for reality in the event of its absence, and of being a manual of life for man.”31 And these pronouncements from the dead lips of the venerated heroes of the revolution were promptly echoed and embellished by prominent Bolshevik leaders like Karl Radek, who made an important speech to the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 that cemented socialist realism as the dominant aesthetic of all arts within the Union. Radek said, “Realism means the portrayal of this reality in all its basic connections. Realism means giving a picture not only of the decay of capitalism, and the disappearance of its culture, but also of the birth of that class, of that force, which is capable of creating a new society and a new culture. Realism does not mean the embellishment or arbitrary selection of revolutionary phenomena; it means the reflection of reality as it is, in all its complexity, in all its contrariety, and not only capitalist reality, but also that other, new reality – the reality of socialism … There is no such thing as static realism, no such thing as realism which portrays only what is … socialist realism means not only knowing reality as it is but knowing whether it is moving …”32 In 1937, the German writer Kurt London wrote a book titled Seven Soviet Arts, describing the conditions he observed in the Stalinist state. Writing for a Western audience, the author ridiculed Radek’s speech as a “pompous utterance.” London suggested Radek made simplistic utterances

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about Soviet realism, but Radek was actually at pains to describe the difficulties and contradictions of building the new socialist culture, and said that an artist who attempted to describe the birth of socialism “as an idyll” could not be a realist. To Radek, the allegory of Socialist Realist paintings and sculptures should always be based on reality – on the real experiences faced in the struggle to assert socialism – not as propaganda in its negative aspects, but as selective descriptions of archetypal events showing the positive sides of the red victory. While the Nazis at this time denied that their idealized, utopian art had anything to do with realism, which they believed was too limited to provide a full image of the range of their subjects, Radek considered realism essential as a pathway to the truth. Both Nazis and communists dissembled, only allowing artists to express the perceived truth of their party’s doctrines. To Radek, the heroic struggles that had been made to establish international socialism against the forces of capitalism were appropriate subjects for a socialist realist. In his comments after the discussion that followed his speech, Radek was specific about the goals of socialist realism, which he viewed in a similar fashion to Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, thinking of art with a propagandist’s concern for providing the proletariat with persuasive ideals, saying, “We do not photograph life. In the totality of phenomena, we seek out the main phenomenon. Giving everything without discrimination is not realism. That would be the most vulgar kind of naturalism. We should select phenomena. Realism means that we make a selection from the point of view of what is essential, from the point of view of guiding principles. And as for what is essential – the very name of socialist realism tells us this. Select all phenomena which show how the system of capitalism is being smashed, how socialism is growing, not embellishing socialism but showing that it is growing in battle, in hard toil, in sweat. Show how it is growing in deeds, in human beings. Do not represent each and every capitalist as he has been represented by ‘agitprop’ brigades. No, show the typical in the individual. Do this, basing yourself on the criterions of the laws of historical development. That is what socialist realism means.”33 His arguments proved ineffectual in the long run, as imagery soon diverged from Chernyshevsky’s doctrines toward the pompous propaganda that London decried. Now the paintings and sculptures that had glorified the Tsars, which Lenin had torn down, were replaced with paintings and sculptures of the glorious revolutionary leaders. An ironic Russian joke doing the rounds during the Cold War asked, “What’s the definition of Socialist Realism? Portraits of political leaders – in a style the people can understand.”

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During the late 1930s under Stalin, the party went through a fraught period of self-purification and supported and encouraged optimistic socialist realism as the singular form of art in the Soviet Union, violently suppressing any who dared to challenge it as the official art of the regime. Many formalists fled from Moscow. Wassily Kandinsky ran to Germany and taught at the Bauhaus until Hitler suppressed the school, then escaped to France, where he became a citizen in 1939, then died in 1944. Marc Chagall left Russia for good in 1923 and fled to Paris, was rescued by Varian Fry and took refuge in the United States after the Nazi invasion. Tatlin moved into set design and died in obscurity. The anarchist Malevich abandoned Moscow for Vitebsk, where he served three months in prison after being accused of espionage, and was restricted in the kind of art he could produce. Many of those who did not escape were either shot or imprisoned if they failed to renounce individualist formalism and embrace socialist realism. After World War II, the Russian Academy and other party-funded art schools cemented socialist realism as the art of the communist block by providing exceptional training for three generations of artists who traveled across the globe to learn their craft.34 Dead in the Soviet Union after 1934, crushed by the Nazis in Germany in the same year, and oppressed in France after Hitler’s invasion in 1940, individualist bourgeois-bohemian art would survive and thrive in New York as a new species of an American kind of avant-garde, where the financial support of members of the wealthy and idealistic limousine-socialist hautebourgeoisie, and President Franklin Roosevelt’s progressive government would help it to flourish as the antithesis of communist and Nazi art. But first, America would take one of the greatest wrong turns in art history.

Notes 1

George Orwell, Animal Farm, Mariner Books, 2009, 42 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Penguin, 1967, 82 3 Ibid, 84 4 Ibid, 84 5 Ibid, 97 6 Ibid, 98 7 Ibid, 101 8 Ibid, 104-105 9 Ibid, 108 10 Ibid, 113 11 Ibid, 120-121 12 Ibid, 98 13 Ibid, 99 2

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Kultura TV, ɉɨɞ “ɑɟɪɧɵɦ ɤɜɚɞɪɚɬɨɦ” ɭɱɟɧɵɟ ɨɛɧɚɪɭɠɢɥɢ ɰɜɟɬɧɨɟ ɢɡɨɛɪɚɠɟɧɢɟ, broadcast 11th November 2015 http://tvkultura.ru/article/show/article_id/144351/ 15 Allan Antliff, Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007, 83 16 Filippo Marinetti, Manifesto of Futurism, in: Umbro Apollonio, Ed. Documents of 20th Century Art: Futurist Manifestos. Trans. Robert Brain, R.W. Flint, J.C. Higgitt, and Caroline Tisdall, Viking Press, 1973. 19-24. First published in February 1909 on the front page of Le Figaro. 17 N. Valentinov, Vstrechi s Leninym (Encounters with Lenin) New York: Chekhov Publishing House, 1953, 106 www.marxist.com/lenin-his-youth-and-his-formation.htm#sdfootnote5sym 18 Simon Karlinsky, The True Father of Bolshevism, in: Saturday Review, September 4, 1976 19 Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift. Putnam’s, 1963. 235 - 236 20 Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, Princeton University Press, 1993. 23 21 Christina Lodder, Lenin’s Plan for Monumental Propaganda, in: Ed. Matthew Bown, Brandon Taylor, Art of the Soviets: Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in a One-Party State, Manchester University Press, 1993, 19 22 Vladimir Tatlin, Sophia Dymshits-Tolstaia, and John Bowlt. “Memorandum from the Visual Arts Section of the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment to the Soviet of People’s Commissars: Project for the Organization of Competitions for Monuments to Distinguished Persons (1918)”. Design Issues 1 (2). The MIT Press, 1984, 70 - 74. 23 Matthew Cullerne, Art Under Stalin, Holmes and Meier, 1991, 27 24 Quoted in: Brandon Taylor, On AKhRR, in: Matthew Cullerne Bown and Brandon Taylor, Art of the Soviets: Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in a One-Party State. Manchester University Press, 1993, 63 25 Brandon Taylor, On AKhRR, in: Matthew Cullerne Bown and Brandon Taylor, Art of the Soviets: Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in a One-Party State. Manchester University Press, 1993, 65 26 Matthew Cullerne, Art Under Stalin, Holmes and Meier, 1991, 93 27 Leon Trotsky, Art and Revolution, Pathfinder, 1970, 62 28 Abram Efros quoted in: René Fülöp-Miller, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism, Chiswick Press, 1927, 107 29 Matthew Cullerne, Art Under Stalin, Holmes and Meier, 1991, 89 30 Clara Zetkin, Reminiscences of Lenin, International Publishers, 1934 https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1924/reminiscences-of-lenin.htm 31 Nicholas G. Chernyshevsky, The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality (Written: 1853) In: Russian Philosophy Volume II: The Nihilists, The Populists, Critics of Religion and Culture, Quadrangle Books, 1965 32 Speech by Karl Radek delivered in August 1934 to the Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934, quoted in: Kurt London, Seven Soviet Arts, Greenwood Press, 1970, 152

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Speech by Karl Radek in: Lawrence & Wishart, Gorky, Radek, Bukharin, Zhdanov and others, Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934, 1977, pp. 73–182. Online Version: Marxists Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2004. https://www.marxists.org/archive/radek/1934/sovietwritercongress.htm 34 Matthew Cullerne Bown and Brandon Taylor, Art of the Soviets: Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in a One-Party State. Manchester University Press, 1993, 3

THE FISHER KING

“Only through the wise use of propaganda will our government, considered as the continuous administrative organ of the people, be able to maintain that intimate relationship with the public which is necessary in a democracy.”1 Edward Bernays, Propaganda

The American public relations business boomed after World War I. During the war, the Creel Committee, led by journalists George Creel and Carl Byoir, made spectacularly successful use of patriotic propaganda to sell American participation in the fighting to the public. At home, the government raised a fortune in liberty loan drives, using a massive poster and advertising campaign, enlisting movie stars to sell the bonds to an eager public. The Red Cross gathered millions of dollars using carefully planned marketing endorsed by President Wilson. Using an unprecedented bombardment of posters, brochures, movies, magazine and newspaper advertising, banners, billboards, and public speakers, in two years it managed to boost its membership to an astonishing 20 million Americans, each paying a dollar subscription. Red Cross fund drives raised a further $250 million. After the armistice, big businesses recognized the financial successes of wartime propaganda and jumped to hire marketing firms to increase their profits. Politicians were quick to follow suit. Even the skeptical Herbert Hoover found his way into the presidency thanks to his use of the public relations program he built in the Commerce Department while working as its secretary. The successful propagandist was a background man who gave advice on government policy. In addition to having influence and prestige among those who actually made policy decisions, the effective propagandist had his roots in journalism, with a knack for writing a good story that resonated with the public.2 Roosevelt’s right hand man Louis Howe, who guided him to election in 1932, fit the picture perfectly. Howe never thought to collect any records of his own life for posterity, thinking only of how Roosevelt would appear to history.3 He was shabby and dishevelled, and chain-smoked constantly, despite suffering from the asthma which would eventually kill him. He was “the merest wisp of a man, with a ghastly complexion.”4 When Eleanor Roosevelt met him while on the campaign trail, she thought he was

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quite repulsive, and complained about the stink of his cigarettes and the snowstorm of ashes that covered his clothes. The son of a newspaper owner, Howe had literally grown up in the propaganda business. He adored his candidate, to the extent that when Roosevelt was first paralyzed with polio, Howe left his wife so that he could be constantly at his side, changing the bedpans and cleaning him during his suffering. The Roosevelts made their daughter vacate her bedroom so he could always be close to his candidate, in whose destiny as President he never lost faith. As Roosevelt’s propagandist, Howe crafted his official letters, wrote bulk mailings, and forged the president’s signature on each one. He produced photographs that cast Roosevelt in a flattering light, wrote press releases with clever and carefully thought-out headlines for lazy editors to use to top their columns, and had tens of thousands of handbills printed. It was Howe who got Roosevelt elected as a man of the people in the senate campaign of 1912 by concentrating on rural voters, even though his candidate was in bed suffering from typhoid.5 It was Howe who arranged for Roosevelt to fly across the country to address the Democratic Convention when he was nominated to be the candidate for the Presidency in 1932, when flying was still a dramatic new mode of transportation, casting Roosevelt into the newspaper spotlight as an exciting man of action, confident in his use of new American technology. This was the first time a candidate addressed the convention immediately after receiving the nomination. He was presented as a dynamic and up-to-the-minute candidate who understood the modern world and was ready to engage it. In addition to guiding Roosevelt to the presidency, Howe became Eleanor’s closest advisor and showed her how to use events to cast herself in a positive light, working with her in the manner of a theatre director, training her to be an effective public speaker.6 Another seasoned journalist, the political publicist Charles Michelson, worked closely with Howe and helped bring the Democrats to victory in the 1932 elections. Michelson had been a war reporter for Hearst newspapers in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, some of which he spent in his office fabricating stories written as if he were on a cruiser close to the action. “It was a shameless bit of faking, but all the newspapers were doing it,” he said, excusing himself.7 To Michelson such deceits, and the practice of spreading lies about his enemies to discredit them were merely the useful tools of effective propaganda, and encouraging doubt was absolutely essential, “… it is of greater value to stir up doubts among those who get their political food from hostile newspapers than to present the propaganda to people who are, theoretically at least, already convinced. That is really

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the basis of political philosophy from a publicity man viewpoint.”8 The Chicago Tribune branded him “Charlie the Smear” and published a cartoon of him collecting buckets of shit from a cesspool of filth and clutching a list of those he intended to smear with it. Like Howe, Michelson kept in the background to do his work, gaining a reputation as a despicable muckraker. Roosevelt trusted the two men implicitly, understanding that their work needed instantaneous reactions which could not wait for approval that might slow them down and miss hard-press deadlines. They transformed political propaganda during the election campaign by producing “an uninterrupted stream” of press releases, transcripts of speeches, and other materials criticizing President Hoover and undermining the public’s faith in him.9 Michelson described his ghost work as Roosevelt’s propagandist, “writing speeches, getting out pamphlets, inciting eminent citizens to make statements in our favor, circulating cartoons and editorials, supervising the output of the various divisions of the headquarters force, and keeping the newspapers supplied with articles, with names attached of such importance that they could not afford to omit them.”10 He wrote so many speeches for Democratic officeholders that the New York Journal published a cartoon of him with scripts literally flying from his desk, and weary anthropomorphic microphones begging for a rest from their hard work. Michelson tied President Hoover’s name to poverty by repeatedly calling the vast encampments of shacks built by homeless Americans put out of work by the great depression “Hoovervilles.” He described the newspapers spread out by indigents to keep warm as “Hoover blankets.” In the face of such attacks from Howe and Michelson, at the end of 1929 President Hoover set up a committee to help with his efforts to deal with public perceptions of the government’s handling of unemployment in the midst of the crash. Headed by Colonel Arthur Woods, who had formerly served as a propaganda officer in the War Department under Creel, the new committee only had two other members. Both were propagandists. They were Edward Bernays, the so-called ‘father of propaganda’ who worked for Woods during the Great War, and Lillian Gilbreth, the clever pioneer of the field of organizational psychology. In their first meeting, Woods asked his colleagues to consider what this committee on unemployment should be called. Immediately spinning the most positive outlook possible, Bernays suggested using ‘The President’s Emergency Committee for Employment,’ reasoning that associating the committee with the symbol of the presidential office implied Hoover was making a personal and deep commitment to solving the problems of the collapse of the economy. ‘Emergency’ implied the nation’s woes were a temporary problem. Using the word ‘employment’ rather than ‘unemployment’ implied a positive outlook toward a good

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outcome. The president’s establishment of the committee made it appear that he was involved in doing something concrete about the great depression. He was not. Bernays said, “It was really a public relations committee.”11 However grandiose its name, it had no power to assign funds, or to provide aid, or to make any material difference whatsoever to the people who were suffering the consequences of the economic catastrophe. Disastrously, Hoover rejected Woods’ proposals to provide government relief to the people by building freeways, public works, or making federal loans to the states. He believed relief was an issue to be picked up by local government, charities, and enlightened industrialists. This left Woods’ committee the unenviable task of trying to fix the problems of the depression with only the power of propaganda. They made valiant efforts, promoting low interest loans to help the unemployed, running a publicity campaign to encourage employers to pitch in by reducing daily and weekly work schedules, shortening shifts, and studying their workforce to see how they could save money with a minimum of layoffs. They promoted community gardens, and in an attempt to stimulate local economies, they tried to persuade home-owners that now was the time to do some remodeling. They encouraged young people to go back to school so they would not join the ranks of the unemployed, and they appealed to business leaders for ideas.12 Billboards carried slogans encouraging people to spend more money to revive the economy. Optimistically toned newsreels played in movie theatres across the country encouraging people to part with their cash. In one reel, Glendon Allvine of Fox Movietone News proclaimed, “Prosperity is largely a state of mind.” But the situation was far more dire than they imagined. Even the irrepressible Bernays knew it was impossible to pull the country from depression by publicity alone. “Our self-delusion was unlimited,” he said, describing the radio campaign carried out by Woods to encourage Americans to extend the hand of the good neighbor to help each other through these dark days.13 Such propaganda played badly to the despairing mothers and fathers of impoverished American families. How could they possibly spend more money when they had none? How could neighbours help each other when they were broke, or even starving? In March 1930, more than four million Americans were out of work. Incredibly, in one year that number doubled. After a year of failing to persuade Hoover to provide financial federal relief, Woods resigned, disgusted. A disappointed Bernays believed the committee served Hoover well by engineering the appearance that the government was taking action without really doing anything very much, but the lesson from the affair was that propaganda was most effective when it supported action. Roosevelt understood.

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Because of his relationship with Howe and Michelson, Roosevelt was very comfortable with publicity men and understood their techniques. He was on excellent terms with Byoir during the three years in which the two men worked together to raise money for Warm Springs, a spa resort for people with polio where Roosevelt had taken the waters. He was so impressed that he bought the property. Byoir thought a great way to raise money for it would be to hold dances, publicizing them by telling people that they danced so that children with polio might, one day, walk again. He persuaded Roosevelt to allow him to hold them all over the country on his birthday – thus getting the power of an unusual presidential endorsement behind the charitable effort. The National Birthday Balls raised millions of dollars toward research and treatment at Warm Springs.14 Having found his way to office thanks to the use of cleverly crafted publicity guided by Howe and Michelson, Roosevelt understood what Hitler and Stalin had done with their efforts to identify uniquely German, or uniquely Russian, art that bolstered the ideology of their respective political systems, and he was keenly aware that America was far behind in the propaganda war that existed long before actual war began. His response was to do his homework, to get familiar with the new ideas about propaganda that had been published in a slew of books describing the new field. Michelson and Howe must have read Bernays’ popular Crystallizing Public Opinion and Propaganda. Bernays worked for Creel’s Committee on Public Information during the war, creating propaganda about America’s efforts and muddying Germany’s name. After the war, he became an authority on using propaganda to sell products at home. Another popular source for knowledge about effective propaganda was Harold Lasswell’s Propaganda Technique in the World War, which described the Creel Committee’s remarkable success influencing public opinion and the methods it used. Bernays was highly critical of the techniques employed by contemporary politicians, complaining that they were “archaic and ineffectual.”15 He urged American political leaders to make expert use of propaganda to be effective leaders. Parts of Propaganda read as though they were memoranda of advice to Roosevelt. “One reason, perhaps, why the politician today is slow to take up methods which are a commonplace in business life is that he has such ready entry to the media of communication on which his power depends. The newspaperman looks to him for news. And by his power of giving or withholding information the politician can often effectively censor political news. But being dependent, every day of the year and for year after year, upon certain politicians for news, the newspaper reporters are obliged to work in harmony with their news sources. The political leader must be a creator of circumstances, not only a creature of mechanical process of

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stereotyping and rubber stamping.”16 Roosevelt played this role to the full, presenting himself as a dynamic, affable leader, a man of the people, cheerfully working to fix the broken country. Newspapermen loved the stories he created. He was a man of action. Bernays also advised a state in which propaganda was an integral part of government itself. Public opinion was shaped by the dispersal of information using all the means of publicity at the government’s disposal. Within a democracy, propaganda was not an insidious, corrupt tool of deception, but an honourable tool for dispersing the truth. He continued, “Is this government by propaganda? Call it, if you prefer, government by education. But education, in the academic sense of the word, is not sufficient. It must be enlightened expert propaganda through the creation of circumstances, through the high-spotting of significant events, and the dramatization of important issues. The statesman of the future will thus be enabled to focus the public mind on crucial points of policy and regiment a vast, heterogeneous mass of voters to clear understanding and intelligent action.” 17 But was there a difference between education and propaganda? If there was, Harwood Childs, a national authority on propaganda and Professor of Politics at Princeton University, struggled to find it in 1940, concluding his lengthy Introduction to Public Opinion with the subtle distinction that while propaganda as a whole was an attempt to influence people’s minds, education was a type of propaganda that attempted to convince people that they should make up their own minds.18 Seven years earlier, Roosevelt already thoroughly understood the use and purpose of propaganda in shaping America. German propaganda had grown in effectiveness and authority because it had been absolutely necessary for the successful rise and triumph of the burgeoning Nazi party; Bolshevik propaganda dominated Russia for the same reason. Being well-established, and far from revolutionary, the American government of the early 1930s had no need to focus on expressing its nature by making direct appeals to its own people. But now, because of the success of Nazi and Bolshevik domestic and foreign propaganda influencing American radicals who sought to overthrow the established capitalist order, Roosevelt recognized the need for America to respond by developing its own domestic propaganda to counter the pernicious influence of her enemies who sought to destabilize democracy. With Roosevelt’s election, the ambivalent attitude of American intellectuals and leaders toward propaganda arrived at a formative moment, in which the shaping of the nation’s public image, both at home and abroad, would become a matter of policy at the highest levels of government.

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By the time he entered office, Roosevelt was an enthusiast for both domestic propaganda and domestic espionage, precipitating and endorsing the FBI’s efforts to promote itself as a popular national defence against gangsters and the sinister activities of communist and German agents, who lurked among decent Americans to plot the overthrow of democracy. He had had two first-hand experiences of the lethal effects of domestic sedition and terrorism inspired by anti-capitalist propaganda, which surely shaped his later embrace of the darker side of domestic investigative techniques and his understanding of the propaganda of deeds as a tool of total war against the enemies of his country. The first was in 1919 while he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, living across the street from the new Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. One quiet evening in June, Roosevelt parked his car in his garage and entered his home. Mere minutes later, a young man wearing a brand-new black Derby that matched his dark pinstriped suit, and a smartly starched collar and tie, strode along the sidewalk toward the Palmer house. In one hand, he carried a suitcase. In the other, he clutched a stack of printed flyers. As Roosevelt made himself at home, the young man, whose name was Carlo Valdinoci, turned up the pathway leading to Palmer’s front door opposite Roosevelt’s house. Valdinoci was a member of the Galleanist anarchist group that was dedicated to using bombs as propaganda to draw attention to their cause, which was to overthrow the capitalist government. The young revolutionary could not have known that inside his suitcase the acid-release trigger mechanism that was pushed into the centre of nitroglycerin-soaked sawdust packed into a box had dissolved too fast. As he trod onto the heavy stone steps before the door, the leaking acid triggered the bomb. A devastating explosion blew Valdinoci to pieces, splattering his butchered limbs across the front gardens of the upmarket street, splintering the wood and smashing the glass of nearby houses, raining his blood over their tidy lawns and gardens. His spine crashed through the window of a neighbour’s house. Roosevelt rushed over to the battered façade of Palmers’ house to help, finding the bewildered Attorney General standing among the wreckage, unscathed by the explosion, having gone upstairs with his family fifteen minutes earlier. The two men found pieces of the body of the immigrant attacker and his leaflets strewn among the scattered leaves and branches of the broken trees. Roosevelt noticed Palmer was so shocked that he reverted to using “thee” and “thou” when he spoke, returning to the traditional language of his Quaker youth.19 Valdinoci’s skull was never found, leading to macabre speculation that he had tripped and fallen onto the suitcase, blowing his head to pieces. The New York Times quickly blamed the attack

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on “European Reds” and reported that a delivery boy found Valdinoci’s wallet the morning after the outrage, with a picture of his nine-year-old son tucked into an inner pocket.20 Roosevelt and Palmer gathered the blood-stained fliers that lay scattered around the yard and read the bomber’s inflammatory words. The flier provides a sense of the revolutionary dedication of the fanatical anarchist enemies of American democracy and was published in full in the Times. “PLAIN WORDS.” “The powers that be make no secret of their will to stop here in America the worldwide spread of revolution. The powers that be must reckon that they will have to accept the fight they have provoked. “A time will come when the social question’s solution can be delayed no longer; class war is on, and cannot cease but with a complete victory for the international proletariat. “The challenge is an old one, O ‘democratic’ lords of the autocratic republic. We have been dreaming of freedom, we have talked of liberty, we have aspired to a better world, and you have jailed us, you clubbed us, you deported us, you murdered us whenever you could. “Now that the great war, waged to replenish your purses and build a pedestal to your saints, is over, nothing better can you do to protect your stolen millions, and your usurped fame, than to direct all the power of your murderous institutions you created for your exclusive defense, against the working multitudes rising to a more human conception of life. “The jails, the dungeons you reared to bury all protesting voices, are now replenished with languishing conscientious workers, and never satisfied, you increase their number every day. “It is history of yesterday that your gunmen were shooting and murdering unarmed masses by the wholesale; it has been the history of every day in your regime; and now all prospects are even worse. “Do you expect us to sit down and cry? We accept your challenge, and mean to stick to our war duties. We know that all you do is for your defense as a class. We know also that the proletariat has the same right to protect itself. Since their press has been suffocated, their mouths muzzled, we mean to speak for them the voice of dynamite, through the mouths of guns. “Do not say we are acting cowardly because we keep in hiding; do not say it is abominable; it is war, class war, and you were the first to wage it under cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws, behind the guns of your bone-headed slaves.

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“No liberty do you accept but yours; the working people also have a right to freedom and their rights. Our own rights we have set our minds to protect at any price. “We are not many, perhaps more than you dream of, though, but are all determined to fight to the last, till not a moan remains buried in your bastilles, till not a hostage of the working class is left to the tortures of your police system, and will never rest till your fall is complete, and the laboring masses have taken possession of all that rightly belongs to them. “There will have to be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder; we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to be rid of your tyrannical institutions. “We are ready to do anything and everything to suppress the capitalist class; just as you are doing anything and everything to suppress the proletarian revolution. “Our mutual position is pretty clear. What has been done by us so far is only a warning that there are friends of popular liberties still living. Only now are we getting into the fight; and you will have a chance to see what liberty-loving people can do. “Do now seek to believe that we are the Germans or the devil’s paid agents: you know well we are class conscious men, with strong determination and no vulgar liability. And never hope that your cops and your hounds will ever succeed in ridding the country of the anarchistic germ that pulses in our veins. We know how to stand with you and know how to take care of ourselves. “Beside you will never get all of us xxx and we multiply nowadays. Just wait and resign yourselves to your fate, since privilege and riches have long turned your heads. “Long live social revolution! Down with tyranny! “THE ANARCHIST FIGHTERS”21 Already in possession of a keen sense of public image, Roosevelt responded nonchalantly to journalists’ questions about “Bolshevik activities” in a newspaper report made a few days after the outrage, saying, “I’m not afraid of bomb-throwers, although only the other evening all the doors and windows in my Washington home were blown out. I feel sorry for them. The way to stop it is to have the people of the country get together and know one another. By means of this loose thinking can be eliminated. Instead of falling the other side of the dead line, they will begin to realize what it means to belong to the brotherhood of American citizenry.”22 Already, Roosevelt was thinking about how to shape the American mind. He went no further to

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explain what he meant by “eliminated,” or “the dead line,” but his antipathy for anti-American terrorism, coupled with his bravery, made excellent reading for a nervous public stirred up by Wilson’s propaganda machine. Thirteen years later, shortly after Roosevelt was elected President in November 1932, he had a second, equally intense experience of domestic terrorism when, on February 15th 1933, an anti-capitalist Italian immigrant named Giuseppe Zangara, emptied a five-round revolver at him while he was speaking from his car to a crowd in Miami, Florida. Although Zangara fired all five of his bullets and managed to hit six people close to the President-elect, his aim was deflected from Roosevelt by a brave bystander, Thomas Armour, a carpenter who brought his son to the rally so that he would one day be able to tell his own children that he had seen the President.23 Armour saw the gun in Zangara’s hand, felt the first bullet fly, and grabbed the assassin’s forearm, and fought to prevent him from killing the President, forcing his arm upward. But Zangara’s wrist was still free, and he twisted the weapon downward, squeezing the trigger, desperately hoping to hit his target. The Mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak, was among the assassin’s victims, all standing close by the President. One of Zangara’s bullets barely missed Roosevelt, hitting Cermak in the ribs, then tearing into his lung, immediately collapsing it and passing through the lobe to nick his upper intestine. Unknown to his doctors, this small intestinal injury would kill him within a month of the event, causing the septicaemia that led to his death on March 6th. Cermak’s death meant Zangara would be tried and executed for murder. Asked in the court why he tried to kill the President, the smiling assassin, who spoke only broken English, explained in half-formed sentences with a heavy Calabrian accent, “I want just the President. Do not want nobody else. I am sorry I shot somebody else. I want to shoot the president because capitalists is because I am sick. I am ready to die. No use living. When I am living I try to kill president because capitalists kill me. Take all my life away. I am no good.”24 Although he was cast as a species of mental defective, and his role as a revolutionary was played down, Zangara repeatedly blamed capitalists for exploiting the poor, and said he would kill kings and presidents if he could to bring down the capitalist system. He laughed at the threat of the electric chair. In his memoir, hurriedly written on three notepads while waiting for death in his cell, Zangara’s final paragraph read, “What we ought to do is to kill all of the capitalists, burn all of the money and form a civil society of communism. I have nothing more to say. Tomorrow I go to the electric chair to die but I am not afraid. I go contented because I go for my idea. I salute all the poor of the world. Arrivaderci, Zangara Giuseppe.”25 Held in the

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Death House at Raiford Prison for only ten days after the sentence was passed, Zangara went to his doom denouncing capitalism to the end. His last words were, “Lousy, dirty capitalist! Viva Italia! Viva Camorra! Goodbye all poor people everywhere! Push the button. Go on and push the button.”26 Roosevelt behaved admirably throughout the dramatic episode. Although bullets tore into the bodies of people directly beside him, and the dark energy of fear surged through the crowd, he remained unflappable and bold. His secret servicemen worked to get him out of harm’s way as quickly as possible, but twice Roosevelt ordered his driver to stop his car to pick up the wounded, and then the President-elect cradled Cermak’s head as they sped to the hospital, talking to him calmly throughout the interminable journey. In an apocryphal newspaper account that helped to establish Roosevelt as a martyr saved from death, Cermak was supposed to have said, “I’m glad it was me, not you”. It didn’t matter that the story wasn’t true, for now in the eyes of the American people, Roosevelt was a leader worth dying for. He visited the victims at the hospital, and the next day he returned to speak with everyone and check on their welfare. The press reported on his actions in detail, and the American people were impressed with his calm demeanor and his role as a concerned caregiver to the victims of the attack. In terms of domestic propaganda, it was a magnificent beginning to the growth of the new President’s public image as the martyr-saviour of the beleaguered country. He was the fisher king. Although he conducted himself well on both occasions, and especially benefitted from newspaper accounts of Zangara’s attempt to kill him, the assassins had made a powerful impression upon the new President, who would subsequently be protected by enormous numbers of secret service and police whenever he appeared in public. The attacks were the embodiment of the propaganda of deeds described by anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, designed to inspire the public to support the anti-capitalist cause. But, just as Lasswell said, instead of inspiring fear, they inspired a determination in their victims to resist the terrorist threat.27 Roosevelt’s propagandists used the events as their own propaganda tools, using the action to show the President as a symbol of American valour, embodying calmness in the face of evil, and showing steadfast resistance to the forces of evil. While Roosevelt learned how to run America with his own propaganda, he stood solidly behind the FBI’s efforts to investigate America’s internal enemies even when they made use of questionable tactics in their efforts to undermine communist subversion. His personal experiences of domestic terrorism meant he was perfectly comfortable accepting the necessity for the greyer areas of investigation, and he was quick to expand his intelligence

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gathering organizations. In June 1933, Roosevelt issued an executive order creating the Division of Investigation, which combined the Prohibition Bureau, the Bureau of Identification, and the Bureau of Investigation. The ambitious young J. Edgar Hoover quickly took control of the new organization, which changed its name to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in July 1935.28 This established a theme that would continue throughout Roosevelt’s presidency. In a meeting with Hoover August 24th, 1936, he instructed the director to expand the Bureau’s investigations into “subversive activities in the United States, particularly Fascism and Communism,” so he could form, “a broad picture of the general movement and its activities as may affect the economic and political life of the country as a whole.”29 Hoover immediately did so, magnifying the FBI’s infiltration of labour organizations and subversives to an enormous scale, pushing the President’s mandate as far as he could. The President understood that the law would be stretched and later, in November 1940, he admitted he had done so to the Press Corp at a White House conference, “… off the record, just for guidance, you might say. There is an awful lot of stuff, I think – an awful lot of stuff that comes in from time to time about communist activities or about the belief that certain individuals might sabotage something the government is doing, information which is not sufficient in a court of law to warrant a conviction, but where there might be a danger. There is always a very, very close line where you have people who are suspected, as to what you can do about it; whether you should keep them on under surveillance or discharge them right away – that is in those cases where you can’t get a conviction under existing law.” “… Just what is a communist? Well, there are probably some people in this room that have signed communist nominating petitions – I should not be a bit surprised. Does that make you a communist?” “There have been a number of cases, as you know, where people are not only suspected of subversive activities but where we have probably got an open-and-shut case on them. All right. Now, it may be advisable not to arrest them but to leave them right there, because by watching them we may get information from watching them as to connections with other people. It is a matter for discussion; it is a matter for law-enforcing agents of the government. Of course, if we try all these cases out loud, we automatically do a great deal of harm to proper law enforcement. In some cases, it is a good thing to try out loud, but not in all.”30 In June, Roosevelt sent a note to Hoover commending the director and thanking him, “for the many interesting and valuable reports you have made to me regarding the last few months.” Hoover purred, replying that

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this “was one of the most inspiring messages which I have ever been privileged to receive.”31 In addition to cementing a cordial relationship with Hoover and his underhanded investigative techniques, the Palmer bomb and the Zangara assassination attempt taught Roosevelt just how effective stories could be when the press wrote them for the masses. Like Hitler and Stalin, Roosevelt would become mythologized in a cloud of propaganda as a man of action. Although Zangara’s deed appears to have been entirely self-motivated, the President’s responses to it and the way it was described in the press were clearly manipulated to fit the image of Roosevelt he and his press managers wanted the public to perceive. As Bernays said, “The public actions of America’s chief executive are, if one chooses to put it that way, stagemanaged.”32 Roosevelt immediately transformed the style of the White House’s handling of the press. On the fourth day of his presidency, he held a conference and outlined the way things were going to be taken care of from then on. Like President Hoover, he would meet with the press twice a week. Like Hoover, his comments in these conferences were “on background,” which meant the journalists were not to quote him directly unless they got permission. If he gave information that was “off the record” it was not to be used at all. So far, this pattern fit the mould of how Hoover handled the press corps, but Roosevelt’s attitude to them could not have been more of a contrast. Under Hoover, journalists had been forced to rely upon White House handouts which gave little information of any consequence, giving them the impression that they were being used solely for the President’s benefit. Hoover never answered questions from the press. Although he had been keenly aware that using propaganda was a new reality for American government, he had always been defensive and controlling about his own role within it, primly reminding the audience assembled at the Gridiron club dinner in 1929, “Ours is a government by opinion and the press is the most important part of that process. I have approached this very large side of government – that is, its relations with the press – in a desire to cooperate. I realize the importance for as much prompt, accurate, authoritative information as can be given to the public that it may have the foundation upon which to build opinions.”33 His distant attitude pervaded press briefings. Hoover made reluctant efforts to cater to journalists, but he was always withdrawn from them, petulantly complaining that they distorted what he had to say. In their twice weekly conferences, he scolded them for attributing information that had been given to them on background as the authoritative word of the White House.34 He performed as a distant figure, separated from the people, and superior to them.

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During Roosevelt’s campaign for the presidency, Hoover’s nemesis Charles Michelson used this defensiveness against him, continually pointing out his inability to deal with the Congress with any authority, distributing cartoons of the Republican elephant in tears or whining and describing the President’s sulkiness and uncertainty. Michelson’s relentless campaign to unceasingly point out the incumbent’s weaknesses was such a nuisance to Hoover that Scribner’s magazine described him as “Hoover’s gadfly.” The Republicans became defensive, swatting at the fly with complaints that the Democrats were deliberately undermining the country’s faith in its chief executive. Senator Pat Harrison described the Grand Old Party’s efforts to re-elect Hoover as “the whimpering campaign.”35 If Hoover came off as cold, defensive, and authoritarian, Roosevelt’s performance couldn’t have been warmer. Like an actor playing a part, he presented himself to the journalists as he wanted the American public to see him, affable, avuncular, and in charge. He was friendly, casting himself as a kindly, reliable professor. The reporters loved it – suddenly they were chums with the President himself, who seemed to be very willing to answer their questions. This was unprecedented – and the press responded enthusiastically. Perhaps this was because the economic situation was so obviously dire that even the most hard-bitten cynics among them recognized that this was a man who just might make a difference, who just might be able to lead America out of the disastrous situation she was in. And Roosevelt was all charm. He took care to get to know the names of the members of the press corps, he made sure he was well prepared for their questions, gave them little titbits that they could use to spice up their stories and make better sales.36 He loved to talk, becoming famous for making rambling but amusing diversions, but he was careful not to give away information that might be detrimental to achieving his goals. In the face of the national crisis, he gave smiles and reassurance to the people that everything was going to be all right in the end. Adding to this open style of government he broadcast his “fireside chats” over the syndicated radio, speaking directly to the American people in their living rooms, cementing his position as one of America’s most trusted presidents, persuading the people to return their money to the banks, and to “fear nothing but fear itself.” Roosevelt’s embrace of propaganda, espionage, and domestic intelligence was quickly underway when he entered the White House in 1932. How did the arts fit into the equation of mastering public opinion? The new president had observed the effectiveness of Nazi and Bolshevik domestic propaganda and wanted to use his own to unify the American people. He understood how propaganda had been essential to the Nazis and

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the Bolsheviks in their efforts to persuade their respective peoples of the need for their revolutions, and as Hitler said, it was an integral part of their respective state’s apparatus. Propaganda posters, art, music, theatrical spectacles, and architecture were all seamlessly incorporated into the nationalist political identities of both Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia, set in place before and during their recent revolutions. America’s revolution had taken place a century and a half ago, long before the techniques of industrial mass-communication had been understood and fully integrated. Modern cultural propaganda ran in the totalitarian blood of Nazis and communists, and described exactly what their countries stood for in simple terms, deliberately crafted to appeal to the proletariat. Describing the liberal democracy of America through the arts was not so simple. What defined American culture? This was a question that would preoccupy American propagandists for the duration of the twentieth century. How could statesponsored American art express the nation’s understanding of itself? The totalitarian art of Nazis and communists continually expressed expectations of conformity and uniformity within the state, whereas America’s culture had been founded upon individual liberty from state authority. American art must differ from that of its enemies. If the American arts embodied the notions of free speech and tolerance expressed in the constitution, which defined American exceptionalism, how would its government support it without endorsing a point of view, without resembling the alien totalitarian systems that had so successfully made the arts their servants, but had gained the enmity of the American people? At first, the Federal Art Projects appeared to be the ideal vehicle for answering these questions. With them America would be able to create images of herself, and the programs would also provide relief for hungry artists, who were now elevated from being mere craftsmen, hobbyists, and dilettantes to being respected shapers of the country’s self-image. Roosevelt created federal arts agencies with the specific purpose of identifying and disseminating American art, extending images of patriotic zeal across the land and simultaneously relieving the tribulation experienced throughout the country as the Great Depression brought millions of its people to destitution. But much of the imagery of American New Deal mural paintings closely resembled the Socialist Realism of the Soviet Union, wellentrenched by 1932. Why were self-avowedly American paintings so similar to work produced within a totalitarian culture? Answers to this difficult question can be found by examining the public image of the Presidency. Depression era America was a mess. Historians describing Roosevelt’s work to fix the basket case of the American economy erroneously give the

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impression that he came into office with a fully formed set of ideas carefully designed to address the problems of the depression. He had no such thing. The persuasive writer Stuart Chase was the author of a book titled The New Deal which gave Roosevelt’s iconic strategy its name – if anyone could define the new government’s policies it was him. But even to Chase, the New Deal “… was a volunteer fire brigade with brooms, shovels, bath towels, dead cats, second hand mops or anything handy with which to beat out the fire. The fire was got under control but not put out. The only revolutionary concept in the New Deal was the repudiation of the idea that the misery of the unemployed is due to their own improvidence.”37 Elmer Davis, who would be in charge of America’s propaganda as director of the United States Office of War Information in 1941, said the President’s approach to New Deal ideas was to act like a farmer who took a boatful of puppies out to the centre of a lake, threw them all overboard, and gathered up the ones that managed to swim to shore.38 Strength and action were everything to world leaders in the 1920s – the theme was repeated everywhere. Many Americans believed their country needed a dictator to lead them out of the problems of the depression. In Barrons magazine, Walter Lippmann told his readers, “… a mild species of dictatorship will help us over the roughest spots in the road ahead.”39 When the propagandist H.G. Wells interviewed Stalin in summer of 1934, he told the Russian premiere he shared much in common with Roosevelt, and the ideas of the New Deal were socialist.40 Wells told Stalin, “At the present time there are only two persons to whose opinion, to whose every word, millions are listening: you, and Roosevelt. Others may preach as much as they like; what they say will never be printed or heeded.”41 Writing about meeting with Roosevelt, Wells said, “Franklin Roosevelt has got nearer to the effect of a divinity floating in a cloud a little off the earth, than any one of his predecessors.”42 Many Americans saw Mussolini as a popular leader and man of action; newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst was wellknown as an admirer of “Il Duce.” As late as winter of 1938, The New York Times carried a lengthy and flattering profile piece about the Italian dictator, describing him in glowing terms as a dynamic leader who enjoyed making anonymous motorcycle rides, loved his children, was a pretty good swordsman, and rode cavalry horses every summer morning. The article compared his family’s movie-watching habits with the Roosevelts’ homely delight in evening projector shows at the White House.43 Even though Hitler was less readily accepted in the aftermath of the deluge of anti-German propaganda during and immediately after the Great War, during the late 1920s and early 1930s, many Americans thought he was an admirable leader doing the right thing for his country. America’s

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greatest industrialist Henry Ford financed Hitler in the 1920s and traveled to Germany to visit in 1938. The All-American flying hero Charles Lindbergh made a trip across the Atlantic to meet Hermann Göring and was allowed to test-fly the latest Luftwaffe bomber. Ford and Lindbergh were both awarded a German medal for their accomplishments, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle. While America’s leaders and heroes were intrigued by dictatorship, the public could identify themselves with the German and Italian people by watching newsreel films of enthusiastic working class Germans saluting Hitler, or the Italian masses saluting Mussolini, all with their right arms stretched out before them, just as millions of Americans did when saluting their own flag. Americans would have found the salute perfectly familiar, for two generations had grown up saluting the Stars and Stripes with their right arm raised toward the flag with a downturned palm, as they recited the Pledge of Allegiance in the ceremony and gesture authored in 1892 by Francis Bellamy. By act of congress, the salute was replaced by the handover-heart gesture in 1942, in response to Germany’s declaration of war in the previous year. Charles Lindbergh was photographed while giving the pledge of allegiance to the American flag using the old salute with his arm extended, and the picture was published with the flag cropped out to create the impression he was a Nazi sympathizer. Russia’s 1917 revolution had been accepted by many Americans as an idealistic and effective response to the economic catastrophe that might be worth imitating in the States. By the early thirties, Stalin was already beginning to give cause for doubt, although his determined decisions to turn Russia into an industrial state were presented as the necessary remedy for the problems of the time. Held up for comparison against this powerful leader, Roosevelt needed to establish his authority as the singular American who could match or outstrip him. It was the closest America has ever come to dictatorship. Mussolini fan William Randolph Hearst encouraged Roosevelt to take authoritative power. Hearst was a major supporter of Roosevelt’s campaign with money and publicity. He sent Roosevelt a draft for a movie script he financed titled Gabriel Over the White House immediately after Roosevelt came to office in 1933. The plot described an imaginary lacklustre President who was visited by an angel. Inspired and transformed into a strong leader by this divine intervention, he took on dictatorial powers to save America from the depression and became loved by his grateful people. Fascist in its politics, the movie presented a version of America in which lining up enemies of the state against a wall and shooting them was presented as a necessary evil if the country was to be saved. Although intensely busy in

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the first weeks of his Presidency, Roosevelt managed to find time writing changes to the script and praised it in his correspondence with Hearst, and when it was completed, he enjoyed it so much that he watched it several times. Avowed communist Frida Kahlo went to see the film while Diego Rivera was busy painting at the Rockefeller Center and described it in a letter to Clifford White as “rotten propaganda.”44 Gabriel over the White House was a remarkable piece of entertaining propaganda describing an America that almost happened. And it was not the only fictional foretelling of Roosevelt’s policies hinting how close America came to dictatorship. Roosevelt’s propagandist Michelson credited some of the architecture of the New Deal to a novel by Colonel Edward House.45 House was one of the first members of the inner circle Roosevelt visited after his nomination for the Presidency – he was an old colleague, having served alongside Roosevelt as advisor to Woodrow Wilson. In House’s political fantasy, prosaically titled, “Philip Dru: Administrator,” the eponymous hero took benign dictatorial control over the American government in order to save it from plutocracy. This fictional dictator ordered an eight-hour working day, the right to collective union bargaining, the reformation of the Supreme Court, the introduction of old age pensions, and compulsory retirement at 70 years old. In his book, House described the gentle dictator making radio broadcasts of fireside talks to address the people, the strategy which made Roosevelt famous. Dictatorship tempted Roosevelt. Chase’s “A New Deal” described a temporary and benign dictatorship as an option to save America, proposing, “a temporary, compromise dictatorship forced by the present crisis, in which certain bankers and business men combine with government officials and a labor leader or two, to set up a steering committee whose watchword will be “normalcy” at the earliest possible moment” and pointing out the paradox within the idea – that the dictator must be “a paradoxical king who must dethrone himself to hold his throne.” Chase concluded that, “It does not make sense, and neither, I am afraid, will this dictatorship.”46 Nevertheless, Roosevelt was tempted enough to include some alarming language assuming an unusually strong declaration of authority in a draft of his first radio speech after his inauguration, addressing members of the American Legion of veterans on March 6th, 1933. These words were deleted from the speech. “As your new commander-in-chief under the oath to which you are still bound, I reserve to myself the right to command you in any phase of the situation which now confronts us.”47 In a popular sycophantic biography of Roosevelt titled The Defining Moment, Jonathan Alter described the new President’s decision not to recruit the veterans of the American Legion as the hinge upon which

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America’s present-day prosperity turned. But this was a minor drama played backstage in comparison to the President’s spectacular inaugural speech, when he made a clear assertion of his willingness to assume wartime executive powers to combat the civil crisis of the depression should congress fail to immediately pass the measures proposed to it, saying “… it is to be hoped that the normal balance of executive and legislative authority may be wholly adequate to meet the unprecedented task before us. But it may be that an unprecedented demand and need for undelayed action may call for temporary departure from that normal balance of public procedure ... in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis – broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”48 A suggestive sentence dropped from an address to the veterans was superficial in comparison to the weight of this terrifying declaration made before the entire American people. Many Americans seemed to go along cheerfully with Roosevelt’s step to the brink of dictatorship. On Inauguration Day, the New York Herald-Tribune’s headline blared its support, “For Dictatorship If Necessary.”49 But American democracy was built on strong foundations, and thanks to Congress, willing to act fast under difficult circumstances, Roosevelt rejected the allure of authoritarian power in favour of continuing the great American experiment with liberal democracy. Although Roosevelt ultimately rejected the dictatorial model executed by the men of action ruling Europe, he watched carefully as they developed policies which appeared to effectively galvanize their countries. Propaganda was one of their principal tools, and Roosevelt would imitate the manipulative schemes of German and Russian tyrants in his own efforts to unite his fractured country. Propaganda shaped his approach to the arts.

Notes 1

Edward Bernays, Propaganda, Liveright Publishing Corporation 1928, Kindle Loc. 113 2 Harold Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in the World War, Peter Smith, 1927, 2833 3 Lela Mae Stiles, The Man Behind Roosevelt, the Story of Louis McHenry Howe, The World Publishing Company, 1954, 156 4 Charles Michelson, The Ghost Talks, Putnam’s 1944, 37 5 Julie M. Fenster, FDR’s Shadow. Louis Howe, the Force that Shaped Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Palgrave MacMillan, 2009, pp.93-96

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Julie M. Fenster, FDR’s Shadow. Louis Howe, the Force that Shaped Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Palgrave MacMillan, 2009, 174 7 Charles Michelson, The Ghost Talks, Putnam’s 1944, 90 8 Ibid, 216 9 Scott Cutlip, The Unseen Power, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994, 525 10 Charles Michelson, The Ghost Talks, Putnam’s 1944, 38 11 Edward Bernays, Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of a Public Relations Counsel, Simon and Schuster, 1965, 466 12 Ibid, 468 13 Ibid, 471 14 Scott Cutlip, The Unseen Power, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994, 553-562 15 Edward Bernays, Propaganda, Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1928, Kindle Loc. 1276-80 16 Ibid, Kindle Loc. 105 17 Ibid, Kindle Loc. 1527-31 18 Harwood Childs, Introduction to Public Opinion, John Wiley and Sons, 1940, pp86-88 19 Cameron McWhirter, Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America. Henry Holt and Company, 2011, 55 20 European Reds May Have Set Bombs; French Wallet Found At Palmer’s, New York Times, Jun 6, 1919, 1 21 Palmer And Family Safe: On Second Floor When Explosion Wrecked Lower Part of House, New York Times, Jun 3, 1919, 1 22 Anonymous, Troy Entertains Sec’y Roosevelt. The Troy Record, Evening edition, Saturday 7th June 1919 23 To Armour’s chagrin, credit for grabbing the assassin’s arm and deflecting his aim was given to Lillian Cross, a diminutive housewife who had been standing on the chair beside Zangara and shaken the bench when he fired the first shot. Cross was nominated for a Congressional Medal of Honor, Armour got nothing. 24 Blaise Picchi, The Five Weeks of Giuseppe Zangara, the Man Who Would Assassinate FDR, Academy Chicago, 1998, 117 25 Ibid, 256 26 The Camorra is a criminal fraternal organization with roots in Naples, Italy. Ibid, 223-224 27 “… the effects of overt acts of this kind can be judged by the influence of such propaganda. On the whole, its chief result was to stiffen the determination of the people to defend themselves.” Harold Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in the World War, Peter Smith, 1927, 199 28 Charles M. Douglas, J. Edgar Hoover and the Anti-Interventionists, Ohio State University, 2007, 26 29 Kenneth O’Reilly, A New Deal for the FBI: The Roosevelt Administration, Crime Control, and National Security, In: The Journal of American History, Vol. 69, No. 3 (Dec., 1982), pp. 638-658 30 Franklin D. Roosevelt, comments at a press conference, November 26, 1940. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15904

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Charles M. Douglas, J. Edgar Hoover and the Anti-Interventionists, Ohio State University, 2007, 55 32 Edward Bernays, Propaganda, Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1928, 110 33 Herbert Hoover, Address to the Gridiron Club., April 13, 1929. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=22064. 34 eg: Herbert Hoover, The President’s News Conference, September 13, 1929. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=21919. 35 Charles Michelson, The Ghost Talks, Putnam’s 1944, 33 36 For an excellent account of the impact of FDR’s performance with the White House press corps, read Jonathan Altar, The Defining Moment, Simon and Schuster, 2006, pp. 253-271 37 Stuart Chase, The Road We Are Traveling 1914-1942. Guidelines to America’s Future. Twentieth Century Fund, 1942, 45 38 Jonathan Altar, The Defining Moment, Simon and Schuster, 2006, 273 39 Semi-Dictator? In: Barron's, Vol. 13, No. 7, Feb. 13, 1933, 12 Cited in: Robert L. McConnell, The Genesis and Ideology of “Gabriel over the White House”, In: Cinema Journal, Vol. 15, No. 2, American Film History, University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies, Spring, 1976, pp. 7-26 40 “The effect of the ideas of Roosevelt’s “New Deal” is most powerful, and in my opinion they are socialist ideas.” Wells’ comment in: Joseph Stalin, H.G. Wells, Marxism Versus Liberalism. An Interview with H. G. Wells, 23 July 1934, In: Joseph Stalin, Works Volume 14, 1934 – 1940, Digital Reprints, 2006, 24 41 Joseph Stalin, H.G. Wells, Marxism Versus Liberalism. An Interview with H. G. Wells, 23 July 1934, In: Joseph Stalin, Works Volume 14, 1934 – 1940, Digital Reprints, 2006, 43 42 H.G. Wells, The New America: The New World, Cresset, 1935, 50 43 Edwin Ware Hullinger, Around The Clock With A Strenuous Dictator, New York Times, 9th Oct 1938, 135 44 Frida Kahlo, Letter to Clifford White, Julian Baker Archive, 4th November, 1933 45 Charles Michelson, The Ghost Talks, Putnam’s 1944, 187 46 Stuart Chase, A New Deal, The Macmillan Company, 1932, 172 47 Anonymous, Draft for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speech to the American Legion, March 5, 1933 (speech file 611), Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum archive. The Master Speech Files, 1898, 1910-1945, Series 2. Washington, D.C., 5th March, 1933 48 Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inaugural Address (speech file 610), March 4, 1933. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum archive. The Master Speech Files, 1898, 1910-1945, Series 2. Washington, D.C., 4th March, 1933 49 Anonymous, For Dictatorship If Necessary. New York Herald-Tribune, 5th March, 1933, 1

PLUMBER’S WAGES

“Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes, the bear, well, he eats you.”1 Ethan and Joel Coen, The Big Lebowski

As the nation struggled to know itself, Roosevelt led his New Dealers into a decade of effort to rescue America. What did this mean for art? The Russians appeared to be transforming their country using the socialist realist avant-garde as a propaganda tool to persuade their people of the necessity for hard work, self-sacrifice, and patriotic idealism. Surely this would work just as well in the United States as she strove to pull herself out of the Great Depression. The New Deal attempted to resolve the problems of mass-unemployment by building a new American infrastructure under the Works Progress Administration. Over twenty percent of the American workforce was idle in the worst years of the Depression. The government spent astonishing sums of money on roads, library buildings, swimming pools, parks, and meeting halls across the nation, employing some eight million people.2 As part of this gigantic government scheme to revive the economy, four art programs evolved that would have an enormous impact on the cultural life of the nation. Olin Dows, a former administrator of the Treasury Relief Art Project, wrote a memoir about his experiences, in which he gave a description of these four programs so succinct that it has become the standard source for describing them. “1. The first was called the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), a crash relief program administered without a strict relief test in the Treasury Department. It lasted six months from December 1933 to June 1934, employed about 3700 artists, and cost about $1,312,000. 2. The Section of Painting and Sculpture, later called the Section of Fine Arts, was the second program, also administered by the Treasury department. It obtained paintings and sculptures to decorate new federal buildings, largely post offices and court houses, by anonymous competitions. Inaugurated in October, 1934, it faded away in 1943. It awarded about 1400 contracts and cost about $2,571,000. 3.The Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP) financed in July, 1935, by an allocation of funds from the WPA to the Treasury for the decoration of federal buildings, was administered by the section according to the same

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relief rules as was the WPA. It employed about 446 persons, 75% of whom were on relief. It cost about $833,784 and was discontinued in 1939. 4. The Works Project Administration’s Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP), A large relief program devoted to the plastic arts, was part of a wider program called Federal Project No. 1, which included drama, music, and writing. It started in August 1935, was administered according to the relief rules of the WPA, lasted until June 1943, and cost about $35,000,000. Slightly over 5000 persons were employed at its peak.”3 The idea of creating government relief programs for artists was first raised in 1933 when George Biddle proposed to Roosevelt that he and a team of painters should create a mural to decorate the new Justice Department building then being erected in Washington. While boarding at Groton, Biddle and Roosevelt had become old schoolboy friends. Both were considered underweight, and had to visit the infirmary to eat milk and crackers during morning recess. Later, Biddle studied and travelled through Mexico with the famed communist artist Diego Rivera, and wanted to continue his mentor’s work blending political activism with public art. In an interview recording his memories of the events that led to the creation of the Federal Art Projects, Biddle described writing to the President, “suggesting a mural program comparable with what Rivera had done in Mexico, in which I said, ‘You could get artists to work at plumbers’ wages to carry out the ideals of your social revolution.’”4 Biddle’s letter was explicitly left, tying the idea of the nascent mural project to the Mexican muralists and equating the communist Mexican revolution to Roosevelt’s social agenda. A transcript of the letter, dated May 9th 1933, survives in the Smithsonian’s archive, which reads: “There is a matter which I have long considered and which someday might interest your administration. The Mexican artists have produced the greatest national school of painting since the Italian Renaissance. Diego Riviera tells me that it was only possible because Obregon allowed Mexican artists to work at plumbers’ wages in order to express on the walls of the government’s buildings the social ideals of the Mexican revolution. The younger artists of America are conscious as they have never been of the social revolution that our country and civilization are going through, and they would be very eager to express these ideas in a permanent art form if they were given the government’s co-operation. They would be contributing to and expressing in living monuments these social ideals that you are struggling to achieve. And I am convinced that our mural arts, with a little impetus, can soon result for the first time in our history, in a vital national expression.”5

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Roosevelt immediately recognized the idea as a weapon to deploy in response to Russia and Germany’s effective use of the arts as propaganda, by showing that the United States government promoted a similarly vibrant, exciting cultural life, while simultaneously providing relief for the unemployed. Better yet, this would be home-grown art made by American artists. He quickly wrote back to Biddle, instructing him to meet with the Assistant Secretary of State, Lawrence Robert, who was in charge of Public Buildings. By June 3rd, Robert wrote to Biddle and arranged to meet him in Washington within a couple of weeks. By the time Biddle travelled to the meeting, Public Works Administrator Harold Ickes had already agreed that there was no real difference between unemployed artists or unemployed plumbers, and set aside a little more than a million dollars to initiate the program. Would this puppy swim to shore? The White House door opened to Biddle with ease, not only because he knew Roosevelt at Groton, but also because his younger brother Francis was close to the President. A year later, Roosevelt would choose Francis to become chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, starting a glittering career in the Federal Government. In 1939, Roosevelt would nominate Francis as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. In January 1940, Francis would become the United States Solicitor General. In 1941, he accepted a position in Roosevelt’s Cabinet as Attorney General of the United States (while serving in this capacity, he delivered the notorious ‘Biddle List’ of banned subversive organizations funded by the American communist party). Francis’ name is liberally scattered throughout George’s diary, and we can be sure that George regularly solicited his advice on dealing with the President and the politics of establishing the Public Works of Art Project back in the heady days of 1933. George Biddle gave a revealing account of his privileged social life in America’s roaring twenties in his memoir, An American Artist’s Story, describing booze-soaked parties with some of the brightest progressive minds of the time. He enjoyed powerful friends and influential colleagues: “At Croton cocktail parties, our minds heated by the final yield of bootleg gin, we discussed economics, socialism, communism, the profit system and technocracy – never at the same parties – with Floyd Dell, Max Eastman, Bill Hodson, Stanley Izaacs, Bill Gropper, Bob Minor, Stuart Chase, Henry T. Hunt and Jerome Frank. Veblen and Howard Scott were the heroes of the day. ‘Engineers and the Price System’ had been reprinted and was selling like hot cakes. One read Tugwell’s ‘Industrial Discipline’, Chase’s ‘A New Deal’, and Roosevelt’s ‘On Our Way.’”6

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If a man can be judged by the quality of the friends he keeps, Biddle was a radical. His friends’ lives are a series of brief narratives of the evolution of pre-war communist fellow-travelers as they turned into post-war anticommunists. Communism seemed like an appealing alternative to the perceived failure of capitalism in the great depression – until the harsh realities of Stalin’s alliance with Hitler, and the oppression of his people became clear, many Americans believed that the United States might have a better future in the arms of International Communism. First on Biddle’s list, the author Floyd Dell was editor of the communist magazine, The Masses, which was described in 1917 as ‘treasonable material’ by the U.S. government. He was indicted and tried, and the publication suppressed. Undaunted, Dell immediately became editor of The Liberator, published in 1918, which again was quickly suppressed, and again he was prosecuted. Both court cases failed with hung juries, although Dell was lucky to escape a lynching at the hands of an anti-communist mob.7 Unable to make a living as an editor or writer during the Depression, he became a Works Project administrator and wrote the Final Report on the WPA Program. After the war, he would join the United States Information Service, which was a ‘cultural arm’ of the United States Information Agency, the ‘white’ propaganda agency which had grown out of Roosevelt’s Office of War Information. Next came Max Eastman, who had also been an editor of The Masses, and was the founding editor of The Liberator. He stood trial with his friend, Dell. Eastman’s communist idealism fell apart after he spent nearly two years in Russia on a fact-finding trip while Stalin and Leon Trotsky fought for supremacy. Eastman became friends with Trotsky, publishing English translations of his work. After Stalin’s agents murdered Trotsky in Mexico in 1940, Eastman became thoroughly disillusioned with communist Russia, and became editor of the bourgeois propaganda flagship Reader’s Digest and regularly wrote anti-communist editorials. He became a supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s zealous campaigns to root out communism, and in 1955 he published Reflections on the Failure of Socialism. William ‘Bill’ Hodson was deeply involved in American social welfare during the 1920s, holding numerous administrative positions. While serving as President of the National Conference of Social Work between 1924 and 1926, he wrote a famous open letter to President Hoover calling for the government to provide relief for unemployed and impoverished Americans.8 He died in 1943 on his way to Africa while working for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, which was funded by the U.S. government in collaboration with the Rockefeller Foundation to provide help for displaced people.

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Because of Stanley Isaacs’ progressive concern for social justice, Terry Ruderman titled his biography of the politician, The Conscience of New York. Known as a crusader against racism, he was elected five times to the New York City Council. Although he was a Republican, Isaacs was famous for his defense of his publicist, a dedicated communist, who he refused to fire for his political beliefs. The subsequent outcry in the press cost him his position as Manhattan’s Borough President. Biddle’s friend Bill Gropper was a radical artist who was hired by Max Eastman to contribute cartoons to The Liberator – he was its art editor from 1922 – 1924. A committed communist, he was a founder member of the John Reed Club. He continued creating art for socialist and communist magazines throughout the twenties. He went on a ‘useful idiots’ trip to Russia in 1925, where he briefly worked for the Soviet propaganda newspaper Pravda. He returned to Russia in 1927 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the revolution. During the Depression, Gropper found work with the Treasury Relief Art Project painting murals in post offices in Freeport, New York, Long Island, and Detroit. In 1937, he won a U.S. Treasury Art Project competition to paint a mural Construction of a Dam for the U.S. Department of the Interior building. It was good to be friends with George Biddle. In 1953, he was blacklisted by the McCarthy hearings when he refused to testify. Bob Minor was a communist cartoonist who drew for numerous socialist magazines including The Masses and The Liberator. During the First World War, he had been foreign correspondent for The New York Call, which sent him to Russia, where he met Lenin in 1918, and wrote English language anti-war propaganda to be distributed among soldiers. In 1919, he was imprisoned for agitating among French railway workers and was only released thanks to the efforts of his well-connected family back at home. As soon as he returned to the U.S., he joined the American Communist Party, and became American representative to the Executive Committee of the Communist International, and attended the third World Congress of the Comintern, where he met Lenin for a second time. Minor was a life-long communist, and would only avoid being hauled before the McCarthy hearings because he was bedridden during the last years of his life, dying in 1952. Next on the list, Stuart Chase was one of the most influential authors on economics in America. He had an extraordinary talent for making complex economic theory simple, and wrote A New Deal, which became a template for Roosevelt’s efforts to bring America out of the clutches of the Depression, and gave his policies their name. In his book, Chase declared that there were only three choices for the future of America. The first choice,

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he wrote, “… is the wild and stormy road of violent revolution.”9 Chase saw the value of making a sudden and destructive break with the past and thought the Russians had been right to follow this path. With startlingly credulous naïveté, he wrote that after a red American revolution, “Money making as a career would no more occur to a respectable young man than burglary, forgery or embezzlement,” and the radical changes of revolution would be a “cleansing, wholesome innovation.”10 Despite favouring the outcomes and praising the Russians, Chase reluctantly rejected this first option on economic terms, realizing that America had already travelled too far down the path of building infrastructure, and lacked a proletariat with the discipline to make such a radical change. He wrote, “a highly industrialized society cannot accept the offer; not without an iron revolutionary discipline, a technical ability to halt the wheels and start them almost immediately again. The discipline is not in the American tradition; it will take decades to develop it, while a half-baked revolution will leave no America to go anywhere at all. The few survivors must retreat to handicraft and barter.”11 Nevertheless, the last words of A New Deal were "Why should Russians have all the fun of remaking a world?”12 The second choice was “… the stern, steel-walled road of a commercial dictatorship, with political democracy swept down a gully and constitutional guarantees rolled flat.” 13 This, too, was rejected, because Chase couldn’t imagine strong-willed American businessmen bowing to the collectivism necessary to regulate the economy, because they had no “class solidarity, none of the cement of an aristocratic tradition, no sense of state, no experience in overhead economic control.”14 He could not imagine the individualism of the American people being crushed into the service of the state. The third option, the only remaining choice for the country, was “… the road of change within the broad outlines of the law and of the American tradition, with many a zooming curve but safely banked.”15 This proposed “the drastic and progressive revision of the economic structure avoiding an utter break with the past. It must entail collectivism pushed at last to control from the top, but control over landmarks with which we are reasonably familiar. It may entail a temporary dictatorship; I do not know. But it will not tear up customs, traditions and behavior patterns to any such extent as promised by either the red or black dictatorships.”16 This third option was the manifesto of the New Deal, followed by Roosevelt. Chase traveled to the Soviet Union in 1927 and gave his name to a ‘useful idiots’ book, describing successes in agriculture and social policy titled Soviet Russia in the Second Decade.

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Henry T. Hunt was the reforming mayor of Cincinnati, served in the Great War as a major, then became a lawyer serving on union committees and later becoming the Public Works Administration’s chief legal counsel. Bringing Biddle’s list of friends to an end, Jerome Frank was a New Deal lawyer who wrote a famous book Law and the Modern Mind, describing how the law should be used as a tool for social improvement, not as a conservative structure for preserving societal norms. This, then, was the character of George Biddle’s intellectual and social life. Although surrounded by communist friends and fellow travellers, Biddle was not a member of the Communist Party, but like many Americans in the Depression, he was keen to see progressive social change lead his country out of the desperate straits she was in.17 An intense dissatisfaction with western civilization preoccupied the minds of its intellectuals after the First World War. Convinced by the need to reinvent the West, many flocked to the Communist Party in the 1930s, seeing in Stalin a figurehead they could trust, seeing in the communist state an establishment they could serve, and seeing in Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto texts they could believe. While sympathetic to the social forces that drove many of his friends into the arms of ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin, Biddle hesitated to fully commit to Marxism, writing in a 1934 article for Scribner’s, “… communism offers the artist an ideal or faith, the expression of which will bring him again from the periphery to the core of life; and until the artist returns to the core of life, we will never have a vital national art. This does not mean, however, that communism is the ultimate haven for the artist. Human truths and values must always be of general interest. Particular religions or political creeds serve their purpose and die. How can an artist evaluate or criticize freely if he signs up to or takes orders from a party?”18 Even so, because of Biddle’s openly socialist views, the birth of the art project was plagued by political pitfalls. Roosevelt passed the idea of a government sponsored mural program on to the Commission of Fine Arts for approval. Displaying spectacular naïveté, Biddle wrote a memo addressed to government officials extolling the virtues of his project, using partisan language to align it with the social idealism he saw behind Roosevelt’s administration, saying that he needed three things in order for the project to succeed, including, “social-minded artists of the first rank, representing the modern movement,” who would “express the social ideals of the government and people” with “complete freedom,” establishing “a vital national school of mural art” that would “set forth the social and economic ideas for which the present administration is fighting.”19

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The Commission, unimpressed with an art project which had at its foundation such clearly stated partisan and even revolutionary motives, wrote a scathing response to the President criticizing both the ability of the painters and their political sympathies, alluding to Biddle’s involvement with the communist Diego Rivera. Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads mural at Radio City, which included a portrait of Lenin, had just been destroyed amid angry protests and uproar among New York’s more radically-minded artists spurred on by the militant Artists Union. Coincidentally, Nelson Rockefeller’s workers had thrust their chisels into Rivera’s offensive mural to tear it from the wall on the same weekend Biddle wrote his initial letter to the President. While the battle between the defenders and attackers of the imagery that caused the ruck seethed within newspaper columns and angry demonstrations, Rivera’s mural was damned as communist propaganda. But, Biddle “ardently espoused” the Mexican artist’s cause. He made no secret of his friendship with the other two members of the great trio of Mexican revolutionary muralists – David Siqueiros and José Orozco – both enthusiastic communists. Should Roosevelt’s government be involved in promoting a dubiously political artist associated with such anti-capitalist revolutionaries and their artwork? Biddle’s application to paint the walls in the Department of Justice was denied.20 Perhaps realizing he had made a foolish error distributing his memo, Biddle did not send it to Roosevelt. Somehow, White House staff intercepted a copy, and the President angrily wrote to Biddle, “You talked of Rivera and ‘social ideals’ and ‘the Mexican Revolution.’ You stuck out your neck. I can’t have a lot of young enthusiasts painting Lenin’s head on the Justice Building. They all think you’re communists. Remember my position. Please. I wash my hands. But here’s the dirt. Now it’s up to you.”21 With the black cloud of the President’s anger hovering over him, Biddle felt certain his proposal had drowned, but Robert reassured him that he would continue to push things through regardless of the Commission’s objections. By November 5th, Robert established a committee to organize the program and asked an artist-banker lobbyist named Edward ‘Ned’ Bruce to be his unofficial art advisor. Three days later Biddle and Bruce had a meeting with Ickes, the Secretary of the Interior, hoping to convince him to support the project with money allocated from Federal building project budgets. By emphasizing the position of American artists as workers like any other, who would earn the same daily wage as any other working man employed by the relief program, they won his approval, and by the 9th, the proposal was fully organized, the committee’s objections to its political nature had been smoothed over, and Bruce was appointed as Secretary of the Treasury’s Public Works of Art Project – privately, he said he was the

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‘goat’ and hoped he could find someone to replace him within six months. The course of American art was changed. But what ideological direction would it take? The new head of the Public Works of Art Project was an excellent painter. Bruce was a banker who quit finance and became a full-time artist. Before the Depression, he made his living selling canvases of rural Italy that were also influenced by his extensive collection of Chinese art, selling out his first two solo shows, and establishing him as a serious American artist. His work was progressive painting that pushed forward modern ideas without abandoning either traditional technique or the skilful crafting of beautiful imagery. But after the stock market crashed in 1929, Bruce found that, despite his impressive reputation, his art was no longer in demand, and by 1932, he had returned to business, becoming a Washington lobbyist, working on a bill for Philippine independence. He was “a huge, roundshouldered mountain of man who gives an impression of power and vitality as endless as Niagara Falls. All his life has been on a grand scale. His language is superlative, and often needs censoring. His weight is Rabelaisian on occasion. He is inclined to be brusque if he doesn’t agree with a caller, and insults people who are bad mannered ...”22 With his goodnatured charm, he made influential connections with administration officials, and worked as an advisor to the Treasury on the silver exchange, participating in the London Economic Conference. Because of this diverse background, which had given Bruce a good understanding of the secrets of the art world, a highly developed business sense, and knowledge of the government’s inner workings, he was appointed as Robert’s unofficial art advisor, with the actual management of the Public Works of Art Project. Bruce quickly established a committee providing him with the authority he needed, including Eleanor Roosevelt. From its inception, Mrs. Roosevelt publicly defended the project, viewing it as a cultural landmark of historic significance. Responding to its critics in a speech before the American Federation of Artists that was published in the widely read American Magazine of Art in September 1934, she said, “if we gain nothing else from these years of hard times, if we really have gained the acceptance of the fact that the Government has an interest in the development of artistic expression, no matter how that expression comes, and if we have been able to widen – even make a beginning in widening – the interest of the people as a whole in art, we have reaped a really golden harvest out of what many of us feel have been barren years. I hope that as we come out of the barren years, those of us who can will give all the impetus possible to keeping up this interest of the Government, and of the people in art as a whole.”23

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Like Biddle, Bruce had been committed to the idea of the formation of distinctively American art for several years, but unlike his passionately modernist colleagues, he viewed Paris’ bohemian artists like Picasso and Matisse with antipathy. In 1934, the Los Angeles Times published a feature story on him in its Art and Artists section. In it, he made outspoken public comments resisting European modernism and predicting a new renaissance of neo-classical American art. He said, “When it comes to contemporary art, I am firmly convinced that the next renaissance is coming in America. We are now being swamped by a so-called modern art. What we are getting is the tag end of a worn-out movement. Europe is through with it and the forward movement there is return to classical realism.” He continued, “This modern art is foreign to our real tastes. We don’t like it and only take it because we are told it is the proper thing to do. It is subjective and decadent and this country is objective and full of vitality and vigor.”24 But if Bruce disliked the Parisian radical modernists, he equally didn’t want to revive the clichés of academic art. According to George Biddle’s self-serving diary, at a meeting between Bruce and Frederic Delano, who was Roosevelt’s uncle and the chairman of the Treasury’s Advisory Committee on Fine Arts, Bruce said disparagingly that he wanted to “get rid of the sort of academic art that paints a lot of semi-nude ladies, draped in cheesecloth with a ribbon under their chin, holding scales in one hand and a lamp in the other.”25 There is good reason to doubt he said any such thing, for Biddle wrote almost exactly the same words in an article he published in Scribner’s in June of 1934 – and it seems likely he put his own words into Bruce’s mouth.26 However, perhaps the sentiments he expressed were true to what Bruce thought. Biddle was an unreliable witness. Now, Bruce found himself at the helm of an initiative that had the potential to lead to the promised renaissance he hoped for. He was right – an American art renaissance would be inseminated into every region of the nation – but it would not be the renaissance Bruce wanted and hoped for. Admiral Christian Peoples, Director of Procurement, explained the situation carefully to its participants in the project’s first bulletin, saying, “The section of painting and sculpture hopes that in employing the vital talents of this country, faith in the country and a renewed sense of its glorious possibilities will be awakened both in the artists and in their audiences, and that through this the section will do its full share in the development of the arts and the spiritual life of the United States of America.”27 To participate patriotically in the project was a religious calling. Bruce was a political creature, and something of an opportunist, but he believed wholeheartedly in his government’s endorsement of John Dewey’s

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progressive egalitarian line that art should be for the people of the United States, and freed from its ‘ivory tower.’ Getting art out of its ivory tower would be a repeated goal of Federal Art Projects officials and artists in their accounts of their work.28 In the American 1930s, ‘the ivory tower’ had not yet become a derogatory euphemism for the University – it was still frequently used as a metaphor for withdrawal from political engagement, especially against fascism, and as such, it was favoured in the language of those of a progressive persuasion.29 The phrase had become popular after the publication in 1911 of an English translation of the French continental philosopher Henri Bergson’s Laughter, in which the thinker said, “Each member (of society) must be ever attentive to his social surroundings; he must model himself on his environment; in short, he must avoid shutting himself up in his own peculiar character as a philosopher in his ivory tower.”30 Although Bruce longed for an American art that would emulate the best of classical realism, he was a man of egalitarian principles, and claimed that he would prefer to see one picture in a post office to a hundred in a gallery. In an early speech he said, “I want to see the artist in this country of ours to cease to be a retainer of a wealthy client, but a useful citizen taking his place as one who has a job to do and service to render. I want to take the snobbery out of art and make it a part of the daily food of the average citizen.”31 As soon as he began his work with the Treasury Project, Bruce deployed ideas that would subsidize working artists. He called his committee’s first meeting on December 8th, 1933. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Lawrence W. Robert, Jr., asked Frederic Delano, Charles Moore, Rexford Tugwell, Harry L. Hopkins, and Henry T. Hunt to serve on the Advisory Committee to the Treasury on Fine Arts, and brought in the First Lady and “an impressive list of the directors of America’s foremost museums.”32 While Eleanor Roosevelt sat knitting and occasionally throwing out a comment or observation, Bruce outlined the straightforward intentions of the public works project: to commission murals that would take artists off direct relief and provide a minimum wage for short term employment during the winter of 1933 – 1934. Bruce wanted to immediately introduce the committee to the public as an active and dynamic force. To set the tone, he persuaded the representatives of the museums to commit to purchasing only the works of living artists throughout the years of the Depression.33 Between 1922 and 1932, gifts totalling $193 million were made in charitable donations to U.S. museums and galleries, but only a tiny fraction of this money benefitted any living artists. The vast majority of it went toward purchasing European works of art.34 If the museums would only commit to purchasing the works

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of living Americans, then all this money would flow back into the American economy. Thus, financially supporting American artists became the patriotic duty of the rich. The committee agreed, and Biddle wrote a persuasive letter for them to send to other American museums throughout the country. Next, the committee quickly put together an administrative hierarchy for the new scheme, to be known as the Public Works of Art Project, and called upon prominent people in the country to form sixteen regional subcommittees, which quickly set about employing clerks and accountants. Within four days, the first artists were hired. They began producing government sponsored art at unprecedented speed. The project had two goals. The first was to put American artists to work in their own communities, getting them out of the isolation of their ivory towers. The second was to make art a popular movement that was socially relevant, describing “the American scene.” Decisive action gave the program an air of success, and made American art appear dynamic and vigorous. As early as March 11th of the following year, Juliana Force would be able to report to The New York Times that, in the New York region alone, as many as 722 artists had worked for the project, and produced 1,977 works, and an exhibit would soon be mounted to display some of them. She claimed the pioneering project advanced the public’s understanding of art by ten years.35 On December 11th, the committee published a press release about the establishment of the project. The following day, The New York Times ran a story naming Mrs. Roosevelt as its sponsor. Their journalists were quick to contact major organizations of artists for comment. If the committee expected to hear enthusiastic voices of support in response to their announcement of employment for artists, they couldn’t have been more wrong. Bruce hoped to establish committees that would not be perceived as partisan, writing to one of the organizing chairs, the modernist literati Margaret Anderson, “The problem is to select for this committee a group of people of such authority and catholic taste as will minimize opposition and also prevent the idea that it is being run for the benefit of any clique.”36 But the New York committee embodied precisely what he hoped to avoid. The members of the New York committee had impressive credentials, but representatives of traditional art were entirely excluded. Alfred H. Barr Jr. was the young director of the Museum of Modern Art, which had a deep interest in promoting the art of the Paris School, and his protégé Edward M. Warburg was a member of MoMA’s board of trustees. Bryson Burroughs was the curator of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with a reputation for being an enthusiastic collector of modern American art, Cezanne, and the Impressionists. William Henry Fox was the director of the

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Brooklyn Museum who had recently expanded its collections to include contemporary avant-garde American art. It would be hard to find a person or gallery more dedicated to the pursuit of contemporary individualist, bohemian-bourgeois art than Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney (Gertrude Vanderbilt), the eponymous founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art, which opened two years earlier. The Whitney Museum had held its Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting earlier in 1933, and had just closed its Twentieth Century New York in Paintings and Prints when the committee first met. It had also just opened its Exhibition of Contemporary American Sculpture, Watercolors, and Prints, and was in the midst of preparing a show titled Abstract Painting in America. Before opening her Museum of American Art, Whitney wrote an unpublished manuscript titled The Importance of America’s Art to America, describing her intentions and hopes for the new institution, “I plan that it shall demonstrate that out of our gropings, our foreign influences, there emerges a distinctive American quality, a national flavor growing with our life – a part of ourselves as a nation that can no longer afford to be ignored.”37 Lloyd Goodrich, who was described by the Times only as “an art writer,” was actually closely affiliated with the director of the Whitney Museum, Juliana Force. Within two years of the meeting, he would become the Whitney Museum’s Research Curator, subsequently its Assistant Director, and in 1958, its Director. James Rosenberg, a lawyer who was described only as an “art connoisseur,” was in fact the founder of The New Gallery – he was a passionate modernist gallery owner positioned firmly at the heart of New York avant-garde art. As early as 1923, Rosenberg published a catalogue of all the paintings his gallery had sold, opening its preface with a defense of modern art, saying, “The New Gallery has been frankly an experiment to ascertain whether there is a public ready to take an interest in contemporary pictures which are something more than slick and servile patterns of the past … Ever since the great Armory show of 1913, the pathfinders, the searchers, the blazers of the way, have had an audience, small though it is, and it is primarily for this audience that this little book has been prepared.”38 The committee was an elite collective. They were powerful proponents of individualist, bohemian-bourgeois art, under the authority of the President of the United States. The art organizations that had not been consulted or included in the decision-making process responded with fury, beginning a relentless storm of criticism in the newspapers, demonstrations, and protests that would dog the government’s art projects throughout their brief history. On the 13th, The Times published a follow-up article with a header and sub-header, “Art Conservatives Attack CWA Plan: Heavy Modernist Majority on Committee

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to Aid Painters Stirs Bitter Row Here,” which summarized their angry objections to the new program. The Times solicited dissenting comments from the leaders of prominent art organizations. Harry Watrous, President of the National Academy of Design, was outspoken in his criticism, “Such governmental action as placing the administration of an important appropriation into the hands of one specific art group lends an atmosphere of exploitation of so-called ‘modern’ art to the project.” George Brown, of the Allied Artists of America, bitterly complained, “It is almost unbelievable that such a wonderful thing for American art and artists could be so badly mishandled by government officials. What right have our officials to deliver tax payers’ money into the hands of one art faction representing a very small percentage of those artists professionally engaged?” It was a reasonable point, but they failed to understand that the government was seizing art as a tool of propaganda. Bruce tried to brush the complaints off as a tempest in a teapot, but dramatic protests rapidly followed almost from the moment of the committee’s announcement of the Public Works of Art Project. Force’s committee sent out letters to major artists’ organizations inviting them to submit lists of artists in need of relief, but neglected to include a newly established Unemployed Artists Group from New York (it would soon evolve into the communist-influenced Artists Union, led by the Marxist Stuart Davis). The Group sent a list of jobless artists anyway, only for most of their members to be ignored by the regional committee of the Public Works of Art Project. A hilariously hypocritical Forbes Watson, a wellknown art critic who had been hired as the technical director of the Public Works of Art Project in New York, claimed, “We are not showing any favoritism to any school. The artist employed may be the rankest academician or an outright radical.”39 The treachery of adjectives. By December 28th, 1933, The New York Times reported 150 disgruntled artists were complaining that modernist promoters Juliana Force and Gertrude Whitney were “playing favorites” in selecting those who would be employed by the New York District, choosing artists whose work they already knew, and some artists who had not registered for the program at all.40 The newspapers enjoyed publishing scandalous stories about two wellknown and prosperous artists, the communist sympathizer John Sloan and William Zorach, who had been signed up to the Project despite their own admissions that they had no need of the paltry $38.25 a week they were paid. (The average monthly income in 1930 was $1,368.) As soon as the scandal appeared in print, the two artists resigned from the project. Force brushed aside the Unemployed Artists Group’s accusations of favoritism with characteristic spikiness, telling The Times there were jobs for 600 artists,

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who had to be “best fitted to carry out definite art projects”41 – and as much as she would like to, she simply couldn’t employ everyone. The Public Works of Art Project had intended to seek out quality first. At its beginning, Bruce made clear that this was an opportunity to advance American art, not merely a program to provide sustenance for impoverished workers during the winter. But in their haste to make an immediate impact, the Public Works of Art Project’s regional committees had accepted the applications of almost anyone who signed up and claimed to be an artist. After two months of demonstrations and protests in New York, the regional committee wearied of relief taking precedence over quality, and on February 13th, 1934, Alfred Barr wrote to Juliana Force stating his point of view. Frustrated that the committee had been so concerned with relief for artists in general during the winter, instead of seeking out artists of the best quality, Barr now proposed that the quota of artists should be cut by more than half. He wasn’t entirely ruthless about the welfare of these second-rate artists, proposing that those who didn’t make the grade should be employed by a separate organization concerned purely with relief. He also wanted the organizing committees to be professional, not amateur, because he wanted to see the quality of the work produced by the program improved, and pointed out to Force that she couldn’t possibly continue working for the Public Works of Art Project while also administering the Whitney Museum. Of course, Barr provided a list of the artists he considered top-drawer.42 If the committee had sought to defend itself against accusations of favouritism at its inception, now it wasted no such effort. The New York Committee immediately adopted Barr’s proposals and crafted a memo repeating his ideas, recommending that people who worked in the artistic field who were not particularly talented should be employed by a new government agency in “renovating public buildings, cleaning and restoring monuments and paintings, teaching, lecturing, etc.” By moving the “untalented” artists into this new agency, the Public Works of Art Project would be free to take care of “a considerable number of artists of first-class ability, who in normal times were able to make a good living by their art, who have had to resort to other means of making a livelihood such as teaching. Under our previous regulations, we have been unable to employ them because of this fact.”43 It was the end of the pretence that art was for everyone. It was the embrace of a modernist elite. Who were these first-class artists? The list reads like a who’s-who of Whitney Studio club members and Juliana Force’s bohemian-bourgeois protégés. Classical academicians were nowhere to be found. Six of the names on the list were “among her closest friends and advisors in the early days” of the Whitney Studio Club.44 The Whitney Museum had always

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championed American social realist art, and boasted that, “Aside from a few conspicuous omissions, such as the Stieglitz group, the club ultimately included most of the leading artists outside the academic fold, and some within it. It was at the club that a large proportion of the rising generation of American artists in the decade of the 1920s first exhibited and sold their work.”45 Of the sixteen muralists on Barr’s list, twelve were awarded Treasury projects. At least nine of the thirty easel painters on Barr’s list were encouraged to apply and snapped up mural commissions in government buildings. This was an art world coup d’état, with the bohemian-bourgeoisie seizing the palace. The situation became ugly. Hate mail directed at Force arrived at the Whitney Museum. A rumour spread that a rich collector planned to rent the museum for a social event, and on a given signal, have their guests kick holes through the canvases.46 Disgruntled artists who had been rejected wrote angry letters to newspapers. Artist John Sloan, who was art editor of the socialist rag, The Masses, between 1912 and 1916, tried to dismiss the protests, telling Time Magazine all the complaints were of no importance – merely the result of throwing corn into the chicken coop – but, already angered by the destruction of Rivera’s Rockefeller Centre mural, and complaining they had been deliberately ignored by Force’s elitist New York Committee, the Unemployed Artists Group organized a protest march that led to the Whitney museum’s doors. The Group targeted the museum because Force’s office was there, because Gertrude Whitney also served on the committee, and because it was well-known as an important centre for bohemian-bourgeois modernism. Frightened guards at the museum called police when the crowd threatened to breach the building. Three squad cars arrived. Baton-swinging officers pushed back the protesters. A demonstrator was injured. Force ordered a guard to announce the museum was closed, but she would speak with a small delegation of five. This clutch of protestors was briskly escorted into the museum. They gave her a list of demands. She insisted she could do nothing to help. She was simply following her instructions from Washington. Demands must be made on paper.47 The Unemployed Artists Group’s representatives quickly sent her a rudely worded telegram. “WE PROTEST AGAINST YOUR CALLING RIOT SQUAD AND POLICE BRUTALITY DISPLAYED WHEN ARTISTS DELEGATION WISHED TO SEE YOU AS GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL. WE PROTEST AGAINST CALLOUS DISREGARD FOR HUNDREDS OF DESTITUTE ARTISTS DROPPED. WE DEMAND REINSTATEMENT OF ARTISTS DROPPED DEMAND REFUND OF PAY LOST DURING PERIOD OF

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UNEMPLOYMENT DEMAND CONTINUATION ALL PROJECTS DEMAND EMPLOYMENT FOR ALL ARTISTS”48

CWA

Not accustomed to dealing with an angry crowd, the aristocratic Mrs. Force curtly responded that she passed on the telegram to the proper authorities. The New York City Journal reported that Force blamed communist agitators for the closure.49 She was right. The Artists Union was a vehicle for communism, run by an avowed Marxist. By March 27th, Force announced to the press that the Whitney Museum was closing down a month and a half earlier than planned, because the demonstrations about the Public Works of Art Project in front of the building were causing serious concern for the safety of the art within.50 Her press release claimed that the cuts had been made on orders from Washington. The Museum would remain closed until the first days of October. The story was exaggerated as it spread. Two weeks later in Los Angeles, Saturday Night reported there had nearly been a riot. Threats to blow up the museum had been made.51 In June, George Biddle wrote an article for Scribner’s defending the Public Works of Art Project from accusations of communist infiltration and sympathies, claiming the innocence of the administration and blaming the strikes and protests on radical agitators: “It was to be expected that such a policy should be sabotaged by the Communists, even by Communist artists on the government payroll. The more an intelligent administration does for destitute men, the less chance is there to engender class hatred and foment class warfare.”52 Now firmly on board with the New Deal’s embrace of anti-communism, throughout the next few years Biddle wrote many articles staunchly defending the Federal Art Projects against its critics. But complaints that the Project had produced an excessive number of left-leaning social realist paintings were justified. Bruce insisted that the American Scene was to be the subject of the work produced under the project. In his Scribner’s article, George Biddle described the Project administration’s preference for modernist realism, echoing the words he put into Ned Bruce’s mouth in his diary, crudely dismissing neo-classicism: “The subject matter of these various regional mural projects becomes a loose graphic survey of the contemporary American scene. No more Greek ladies, with cheese cloth bound about their nipples, cluttered up with scales, lambs, sheaves of wheat. No more Hellenic nudes representing the spirit of American Motherhood, Purity, Democracy and the Pioneer Spirit.” Unlike Bruce, Biddle made no mention of a revival of classical realism. Biddle compiled a list of some of the subjects of the murals, which read like a catalogue of socialist realist paintings produced in the U.S.S.R. in the same period, replacing the Russian names and places with American ones:

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“… the basic industries of Texas; development of education in Texas; food resources, giving the different elements that go into the cultivation and marketing of food; clothing and shelter; the modern treatment of the stage; primitive art contrasted with modern art; education and agriculture; the Uncle Remus cycle; the industries of New Haven; Charles Goodyear and rubber, Chauncey Jerome and clocks, Brewster and carriages, Thomas Sanford and the match; industrial production, food production and agriculture: the city life resulting from both; recreational life, indoors and out-of-doors; pictorial records of public works and civilian conservation camps, such as Boulder Dam and reforestation.”53 These were the subjects that found favor as part of the American Scene pushed forward by the Public Works of Art Project administration. Other subjects were forbidden. Washington warned the regional committee chairs, “any artist who paints a nude for the Public Works of Art Project should have his head examined.”54 Assistant Director Edward Rowan said artists who insisted on painting foreign subjects “had better be dropped and an opportunity given to the man or woman with enough imagination and vision to use the beauty and possibility for aesthetic expression in the subject matter of his own country.”55 Disingenuously, Bruce claimed the artists would be given complete freedom in their work. They were invited to make suggestions about the subject matter of Public Works of Art Projects in the Bulletin, but in classic Orwellian fashion, this invitation was immediately followed with precise directions about which subjects were preferred. For example, when artists applied to paint murals in the Washington Post Office, the Treasury’s official bulletin delivered a list of ‘recommended’ subjects, including scenes from American history, the history of the U.S. Postal Service, the latest methods of delivery, and colonization. At the top of the page, there was a list of ‘recommended’ qualities the committee was to look for, including: speed, security, endurance, courage, honesty, responsibility, intelligence, courtesy, reliability, and accuracy. The artists employed on these projects were far from free. They were guided propagandists.56 Some regional directors interpreted the federal administration’s emphasis upon the American Scene as a denial of imaginative works. Goddesses, blind justice, and ancient history were out. Abstraction was almost completely ignored. Thus, during this last hurrah of American representational art, an army of mediocre but hungry artists produced an enormous amount of work in the brief six months of the Program’s existence, but using imaginations castrated by the limitations imposed upon them by the regional committees, which were in turn strictly controlled by the Washington committee and its administration. The artists were pushed

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into producing social realist propaganda paintings that promoted a vision of New Deal America to ease and encourage a population that was alarmed by the apparent failure of capitalism. Images of a hard-working, successful America, a strong nation of strong people united in building their country through industry, farming, and taming the wilderness, would be painted onto the walls of Federal buildings throughout the country. At the conclusion of the project, an exhibit of the easel paintings and sculptures the artists of the Public Works of Art Projects had produced was arranged at the Corcoran Gallery. The Roosevelts attended the opening, and Eleanor purchased several of the paintings, including an abstraction of a skyscraper. The primitive aesthetic preferences of the organization were plainly visible in the works, which were almost entirely modernist. The Literary Digest pointed out the repetitive social realist bias: “Nearly all the artists are thoroughgoing realists. In the case of the painters, at any rate, the technique is modern. Yet there is hardly a truly original piece in this show. There is much imitation.”57 It had been an extraordinary winter for American art. In New York alone, the federal government paid for nearly two thousand works of art, including thirteen murals, hundreds of oil paintings, prints and drawings, and 140 sculptures. By June of 1934, a brief six months after its inception, the Public Works of Art Project officially came to an end. Despite the controversies that attended the program, both the Treasury and Roosevelt’s administration viewed it as such as success that two more projects were organized to follow it and continue its work. In October 1934, Bruce was named as the Chief of the Section of Painting and Sculpture, later called the Section of Fine Arts, responsible for decorating post offices and court houses with murals. Bruce wanted artists to work under the Works Progress Administration, which was set up to provide relief for unemployed Americans, and enlisted Eleanor Roosevelt to persuade the President. On June 25th 1935, FDR signed an executive order creating the Federal One Programs of the Works Progress Administration, which included the Federal Writers Project, the Federal Theater Project, and the Federal Art Project. But Bruce’s star was fading. He suffered a debilitating stroke. Struggling with paralysis and slurring, he selflessly began work on the Treasury Relief Art Project, a small agency with an incongruous acronym, designed to free excellent unemployed artists from the fetters of the Depression. Bruce’s Public Works of Art Project had been assailed by accusations that it allowed communists to openly express anti-American sentiments, now his health was ruined, and Roosevelt was already focused on brighter luminaries at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) as his new standard-bearers. Roosevelt

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gave charge of the Federal Art Projects to the sturdy Icelander Holger Cahill, a MoMA curator and experienced collector of American art for Abby Rockefeller. The Federal Art Project would eclipse the others in scale and influence, introducing and spreading an enthusiasm for American modern art throughout the Republic, and positioning Dewey’s idea of “art for everyone” as Federal policy. According to Biddle, Cahill said, “there is no artist in America on relief that I cannot effectively use to make America a more wonderful country to live in.” This egalitarian principle stood in sharp contrast to what the quality-minded Bruce had intended, to “see that only the finest artists are used in America to decorate federal buildings.”58 In contrast, Cahill said the Federal Arts Projects would “bridge the gap between the American public and the American artist” and “widen the usefulness of art for the American millions,” most importantly making it possible for all Americans “to participate in the experience of art.”59 On July 9th 1936, Biddle went to visit Roosevelt, swimming with him for thirty minutes or so and chatting about the President’s speeches and Biddle’s work. Roosevelt was keen to bring loan exhibits to small town America, and to pursue the idea of traveling shows. Biddle talked about the difference between Bruce’s Treasury Section and Holger Cahill’s Federal Art Projects – the former employing “the foremost American artists,” and the latter making “… use of any artist on relief to add to the cultural inheritance of the nation,” and suggested that the projects should be united under Bruce to put an end to the jealousy that had arisen between the participants in the programs.60 Roosevelt ignored his proposal, for he had already set his new plans for the Federal Art Projects in motion. On September 26th, 1936, Biddle wrote in his diary that Bruce looked sick and tired. In fact, he was terribly ill. Roosevelt treated him like a beloved old horse and retired him to the back forty, allowing him to continue with his Treasury Section art projects using the one percent of federal building budgets that was allocated toward decoration. Cahill’s Federal Art Projects – intended for more general relief for anyone wielding a paintbrush – were more closely in line with Roosevelt’s strategy to identify and promote a distinctively egalitarian American art. With Bruce out to pasture, Cahill’s Federal Art Projects were to dominate American art until they were interrupted by the first skirmishes of the Second World War. Bruce died on January 27th, 1943. Treasury Section funding ended on June 30th of the same year. Without its champion, it faded into history.

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Notes 1

Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, The Big Lebowski. Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2005 2 Franklin D. Roosevelt, Letter to the Federal Works Administrator Discontinuing the W.P.A., December 4, 1942. Online: Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=16210 3 This description takes various forms with differing figures depending on where one reads it. The figures and language in Dow’s own account seem likely to be the most trustworthy. Olin Dow, The New Deal’s Treasury Art Programs: A Memoir. In: Francis O’Connor, The New Deal Art Projects, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1972, 12 4 Oral history interview with George Biddle, 1963, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Biddle tape #2, p. 100, pdf 130 http://www.aaa.si.edu/files/resources/OHProgram/PDF/biddle63.pdf 5 George Biddle diary transcript, 1933-1941, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 13 http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/viewer/george-biddle-diary-transcript14231/39183 6 George Biddle, An American Artist’s Story, Boston Little, Brown and Company, 1939, 261 7 John E. Dell, Floyd Dell, Twayne, 1971 8 William Hodson to President Herbert Hoover, An Open Letter to the President on Federal Relief Appropriations, 10.13.1931. Reprinted in: Senate Select Committee on Unemployment Insurance, Unemployment Insurance Hearings on Senate Resolution 483. 72nd Congress, 1st Session, 1931, pp. 231-234 9 Stuart Chase, A New Deal, The Macmillan Company, 1932, 154 10 Ibid, 163 11 Ibid, 165-166 12 Ibid, 252 13 Ibid, 154 14 Ibid, 169 15 Ibid, 154 16 Ibid, 173 17 Biddle dismissed allegations that he was a communist in his autobiography, but admitted to affection for Socialist idealism; quoting Lenin’s maxims in a defence of free schooling, free drinking water and free parks. He claimed instead to be a democrat who hoped for a social democracy in America, modelling his ideas upon the work of progressive economist Stuart Chase, whose book A New Deal had powerfully influenced Roosevelt in his efforts to jump start the American economy. George Biddle, An American Artist’s Story, Boston Little, Brown and Company, 1939, 310 18 George Biddle, An Art Renascence (sic) Under Federal Patronage, Scribner’s, June 1934, 428

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George Biddle, An American Artist’s Story, Boston Little, Brown and Company, 1939, 270-271 20 Charles Moore, Commission of Fine Arts, Letter to the President, 28th July, 1933. Archives of American Art, Microfilm roll #2396, Whitney Museum of Art, Juliana Force, Smithsonian Institute 21 Letter from Franklin Roosevelt to George Biddle quoted in: George Biddle, An American Artist’s Story, Boston Little, Brown and Company, 1939, 274 22 Maxine Davis, American Renaissance, In: The America Issue, September 1940, 129 23 Eleanor Roosevelt, The New Governmental Interest in the Arts: A Speech before the twenty-Fifth Annual Convention of the American Federation of Artists. In: American Magazine of Art 27, September 1934, 47 24 Sees Chance for Medicis, Art and Artists, Los Angeles Times, Sunday Morning Edition, Part 3, April 12th 1931, 14 25George Biddle diary transcript, 1933-1941, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 15 http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/viewer/george-biddle-diary-transcript14231/39183 26 George Biddle, An Art Renascence Under Federal Patronage, Scribner’s, June 1934, 431 27 Bulletin, Section of Painting and Sculpture #1, Treasury Department, 1933, 5 28 For example, references to art escaping the ivory tower in accounts in Francis O’Conner (Ed.), Art for the Millions, New York Graphic Society, 1973, 144, 157, 247, 250 etc 29 Steven Shapin, The Ivory Tower: the history of a figure of speech and its cultural uses. In: BJHS, 45(1): 1–27, British Society for the History of Science, March 2012 30 Henri Bergson, Trans: Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. Laughter: an Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, Macmillan, 1921, 135 31 Edward Bruce, Fellow Artists, Archives of American Art D89: 57 – 64. In: Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left. Yale 2002, 81 32 Martin R. Kalfatovic, The New Deal Fine Arts Projects : a Bibliography, 19331992, The Scarecrow Press, 1994, xxiii 33 Several days later Biddle recorded in his diary a copy of a letter he had drafted urging American museums across the country to agree to the proposal. Leon Krull, Chair of the Society of Painters, Sculptors and Gravers; Juliana Force, of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Fiske Kimball, of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Homer St. Gaudens, of the Carnegie Art Institute; Francis Taylor, of the Worcester Art Museum; C. Power Minnegerode, of the Corcoran Gallery; Duncan Phillips of the Phillips Memorial Museum; Ellsworth Woodward of the Tulane Art Museum; Alfred Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern Art (who had been accompanied at the meeting by his protégé, the wealthy young socialite Edward W. W. Warburg, who would be a MoMA trustee from 1932 to 1958); William Milliken of the Cleveland Museum of Art and Meyric Rogers of the St. Louis Art Museum all signed. George Biddle diary transcript, 1933-1941, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 17, 22.

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http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/viewer/george-biddle-diary-transcript14231/39183 34 William Zorach, quoted in First American Artists’ Congress, American Artists’ Congress Against War and Fascism, New York, 1936, 59 35 10-Year Gain In Art Under CWA Is Seen, New York Times, Mar 11, 1934, N1 36 Edward Bruce, Letter to Margaret Anderson, 14th November 1933, Archives of American Art, Microfilm roll #2396, Whitney Museum of Art, Juliana Force, Smithsonian Institute 37 Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, The Importance of America’s Art to America, Box 26, Folder 19, 19 http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container/viewer/Writings-on-Art-568300 38 James N. Rosenberg, New pictures and the New Gallery 1923, New Gallery, 1923, 1 39 Universal Service, Hungry Artists get Tolerance on CWA Works, Washington post, 27th December 1933 40 Jobless Artists Protest PWA Methods, Charging Favoritism in Selections Here. New York Times, Dec 28, 1933, 2 41 Decries Art Job Row, New York Times, 29th Dec, 1933, 2 42 Alfred Barr, Letter to Juliana Force, 13th February 1934, Archives of American Art Roll 2396 Whitney Museum of American Art, Juliana Force 43 Recommendation of the New York Committee of the PWAP, 19th February 1934, Archives of American Art Roll 2396 Whitney Museum of American Art, Juliana Force 44 Juliana Force and American Art, A Memorial Exhibition, September 24 – October 30, 1949, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1949, 15 45 Ibid, 19 46 Art Forum, Vol. 1. No. 3. April 1934, 2 47 Juliana Force, Letter to Edward Bruce, 18th March, 1934, Archives of American Art Roll 2396 Whitney Museum of American Art, Juliana Force 48 Artists Union telegram to Mrs. Force, Whitney Museum. 17th March, 1934, Archives of American Art Roll 2396 Whitney Museum of American Art, Juliana Force 49 Museum Head Attacks Reds, New York City Journal, 27th March 1934, np 50 eg Whitney Art Museum Closed, New York City Sun, 24th March 1934, np 51 Saturday Night, 14th April 1934, np 52 George Biddle, An Art Renascence Under Federal Patronage, Scribner’s, June 1934, 430 53 Ibid, 431 54 Quoted in: Richard D. McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists, Princeton University Press, 1973, 23 55 Ibid, 23 56 Bulletin, Section of Painting and Sculpture #2, Treasury Department, 1933, pp.78 57 Uncle Sam Becomes an Art Patron, The Literary Digest, May 12, 1934, 42 58 George Biddle & Harlan B Phillips, Tape Recorded Interview With Mr George Biddle Interviewed By Dr Harlan B Phillips, Archives of American Art, #3, 74

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http://www.aaa.si.edu/files/resources/OHProgram/PDF/biddle63.pdf 59 Holger Cahill, American Resources in the Arts, in: Francis O’Conner (Ed.), Art for the Millions, New York Graphic Society, 1973, 43 60 George Biddle diary transcript, 1933-1941, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, pp. 48-53 http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/viewer/george-biddle-diary-transcript14231/39183 From its inception, the Section had been geared toward providing work to artists who were already successful and established. Treasury Section artists were regarded with some jealousy by WPA artists because the former were chosen for their established reputations – there were complaints of favouritism, but in his memoir Olin Dows would only admit to one instance, and that was the placement of Biddle and his friends at the Department of Justice in the earliest days of the scheme. However, although more than 200 competitions were held as a democratic way of choosing some of the projects that would be funded, the Section awarded more than 1,300 commissions, and decisions regarding the artists and the projects were more often than not made by the Section’s staff. Olin Dows said, “The only time where our decisions might have been considered tainted by favoritism were those first assignments of spaces in the Justice Department building, namely, who should do the staircase and the library.” “… But thereafter, as the momentum developed, the impersonality of the device of anonymous competitions took over.” Oral history interview with Olin Dows, 1963 Oct. 31, 69. Also see: Martin R. Kalfatovic, The New Deal Fine Arts Projects : a Bibliography, 1933-1992, The Scarecrow Press, 1994, xxvii

MISCARRIAGE

“The Soviet press relates with satisfaction how a little boy in the Moscow Zoo, receiving to his question, “Whose is that elephant?” the answer: “The state’s”, made the immediate inference: “That means it’s a little bit mine too.” However, if the elephant were actually divided, the precious tusks would fall to the chosen, a few would regale themselves with elephantine hams, and the majority would get along with hooves and guts.”1 Leon Trotsky

The patrician Roosevelt viewed his role in much the same way that other great aristocratic philanthropists had before him, with a paternal approach that gave him distance from the arguments that buffeted the programs he embraced. By being aloof from the projects, but encouraging his administrators to enact his policies, he was able to take credit for shaping the higher ideals of American culture while avoiding participation in trivial disagreements about what form those ideals might take. But because Federal Project Number One was funded by the Emergency Relief Appropriations Acts, not by statute, Roosevelt was firmly in charge of its direction. His ideas about forming the circumstances for American art to flourish were stamped upon the organization, the artists, and their work by his intermediary Harry Hopkins, who reported directly to the President. Roosevelt had studied the Russians and the Germans. Art could be weaponized. Art was propaganda. The first three of the New Deal art projects were administered by Ned Bruce through the Treasury Department, but the fourth, by far the most extensive of them, was part of a special program known as Federal Project Number One, which fell under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. Federal Project Number One was specifically focused on the arts, with an allocation of $27 million to hire artists, musicians, and writers. It was divided into five separate areas: a Federal Art Project, a Federal Music Project, a Federal Theatre Project, a Federal Writers Project, and a Historical Records Survey. Over time the Federal Art Project employed 10,000 mural painters, easel painters, designers, craftsmen, and art teachers who created a tremendous amount of government-sponsored art in the prewar period. Its Index of American Design project documented American folk art in an immense catalogue of meticulously rendered watercolours.

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Hopkins appointed Holger Cahill of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to lead the Federal Art Project, while his rival Bruce worked to provide financial support for artists under the Treasury’s programs. Answering the question of how to define American art fell in large part to Cahill in his role as Director. Cahill was an enthusiast for collecting American folk traditions and amateurish paintings, and a devoted admirer of John Dewey’s philosophy. He made a lifelong career of art. Born in Iceland, he had been brought to North Dakota as a baby by his impoverished family. Abandoned as a child by his father and estranged from his mother, Cahill was taken in by members of a farming collective in Winnipeg. Despite this tough childhood, he made his way into writing, first as a journalist, then producing publicity for Newark Museum. Marketing was in his blood. In 1920, Cahill organized a group exhibit of a mixture of modernist and conservative paintings, and sculptures by members of the Society of Independent Artists at the Newark Museum. In 1930, having noticed that American bohemians collected ‘primitive’ American paintings and admired them, he organized an exhibit of folk-art claiming, “The artists collected this work, not because they considered it quaint, or curious, or naïve, but because of its genuine art quality, and because they saw in it a kinship with their own work.”2 A productive relationship between the MoMA and the Federal Art Project was guaranteed, for Cahill’s relationship with the museum was very comfortable. In 1932, he stepped in at MoMA to cover for director Alfred Barr during his sabbatical year, and organized American-themed exhibits, including: American Sources of Modern Art, American Folk Art: Art of the Common Man in America, and American Painting and Sculpture 1862– 1932. Cahill’s relationship with the Rockefeller family, founders of the museum, was cosy. He spent February 1935 scouring antique shops and purchasing American folk art around Williamsburg for Abby Rockefeller, who was an enthusiastic collector of both modernist and folk art. He organized an exhibit there of the items he found and placed into her collection.3 He spent much of the remainder of the year cataloguing and exhibiting the purchases he made, editing a book on American art, and then took on his new responsibilities as director of the Federal Art Project. In 1938, Cahill married MoMA curator Dorothy Miller. Dewey had a profound influence over Cahill, and thus over the project. To Cahill, Dewey’s ideas were sensible, unpretentious, practical, and fundamentally American. In October 1939, he served as keynote speaker for a celebration of Dewey’s eightieth birthday, and described the importance of the thinker. He portrayed Dewey as one of two aesthetic pillars that

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supported the Federal Arts Program, saying, “Government support of art has become well-nigh universal. The United States Government’s effort, however, has differed considerably from other art programs, both in extent and significance. At its very beginning, it received the impetus of two powerful forces, which helped to establish its character. One of these is the Mexican mural program of which we have spoken. The other is the philosophy of John Dewey.”4 While recognizing the immense financial support of the government, Cahill identified Dewey as the most important philosophical influence on American art. Cahill continued, “John Dewey and his pupils and followers … thought and activity have been of the greatest significance in the organization of contemporary art programs which are stimulating the development of American art resources and making these resources available to wide publics. Among these is the WPA/FAP.”5 Cahill laid the entire Federal Arts Project at Dewey’s feet, citing his influence upon the Index of American Design, and most importantly upon the Community Art Center Program,6 which ultimately established almost a hundred Art Centers around the United States, each geared to Dewey’s ideas about the importance of art as experience in the development of the human mind. In the popular press, the Works Progress Administration art projects were “… a sort of cultural explosion.”7 Dewey’s philosophy was sympathetic enough to Marx that in 1936, the communist New Masses magazine was happy to endorse his book Liberalism and Social Action as the work of a fellow traveller, saying, “John Dewey can serve most usefully and appropriately in any true liberalradical united front in America.”8 In his account of life in Russia, Dewey quoted Lenin, who had emphasized that Soviet education had a purely political function, saying that the purpose of schools was to indoctrinate the young and to construct communist society. Dewey’s experiences of visiting showcase schools and institutions where communist education reforms were being applied to their fullest extent convinced him that, “The Russian educational situation is enough to convert one to the idea that only in a society based upon the co-operative principle can the ideals of educational reformers be adequately carried into operation.”9 This eyebrow-raising statement clarifies the position of communist fellow-traveler education reformers who had fallen under Dewey’s spell in the United States, and explains the fundamentally socialist character of the art centers that were constructed and underwritten by Cahill’s Federal Art Projects under their influence – a relationship emphasized by Cahill himself. Contemporary conservative critics of the Works Progress Administration were accurate in their assessment and critique of the projects as fundamentally partisan.

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Dewey was deeply sympathetic to the communist experiment as he had seen it in Soviet Russia, and his zealous followers were ardent supporters of the left, eschewing art that did not fit into the mould of avant-garde social realism. Roosevelt gave Cahill his whole-hearted support. Cahill said, “… the one thing I can say for Roosevelt above everything, that during the seven and a half years that I ran that project it was attacked by everybody under the sun. There was a dead cat coming through the window every few minutes. And never once in that whole period of seven and a half years did I have a word of criticism come from the White House, either from the president or from Mrs. Roosevelt.”10 Cahill’s Federal Art Projects would carry the torch of socialist realism, primitivism, and the proletarian ideas of John Dewey to the furthest borders of the States, spreading the gospel of social democracy, embraced by the American aristocracy. Two of Dewey’s principal themes are repeated again and again in documents written by Federal Art Projects artists describing their work in the program. First was a powerful socialist theme of egalitarian anti-elitism, found scattered throughout memoirs about the Federal Art Projects – that art must become open to all Americans, so that the artist would be, “no longer an exotic, but an individual functioning freely within a society that has a place for him, no longer in an ivory tower, but in contact with his time and his people.”11 Before the Depression, American art practice had mostly been confined to the great cities, where an elite group of painters and sculptors catered to the desires of the wealthy, who commissioned history paintings, portraits and landscapes, monuments and busts, but little else. Now, thanks to Federal Art Project programs, art was to be for all citizens throughout the nation – echoing Saint-Simon, Proudhon, and Chernyshevsky. American art was to be proletarian. The second principal theme also followed Dewey’s philosophy, but differed in its focus. It was a patriotic theme – the art of the Federal Art Project was to be uniquely American. Its artists were to be Americans, producing art about America, for an American audience, based on American philosophy. The projects promoted American identity by providing arts education, works of art, and exhibit spaces. The artists were employed to produce state-funded propaganda. And produce they did! Despite the poverty of the country as a whole, this was a golden age for American social realist artists given the mission of painting ‘the American Scene.’ In the eight years of the Federal Art Project’s existence, its artists gave the nation two and a half thousand murals, nearly eighteen thousand sculptures, over a hundred thousand easel paintings, a quarter of a million prints, and two million posters.12 And this

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outpouring of art was distributed throughout the country among Federal government buildings, schools, and libraries. In addition to providing employment for American artists, the Project ensured the successful spread of new ideas about modernist art, employing predominantly social realist and modern artists. It established community art centres and museum extensions, offering classes on art technique to children and adults, and providing lectures on American art to local communities – some six million Americans visited a range of art education programs at the art centres.13 The decisive emphasis upon American art was taken very seriously, even when international diplomatic embarrassment was at stake. During preparations for the Fascist Venice Biennale of 1934, its director insisted on including in the American exhibit a glamorous painting by Polish artist Tade Styka of the movie star Marion Davis. Juliana Force was in charge of the American Pavilion and demanded its immediate removal, threatening to withdraw all of the paintings from the show, because the Biennale had made an agreement that the Whitney Museum had exclusive control of the exhibit, which would show only the work of American artists loaned from its collection.14 She won the standoff. The Polish painting was moved to a different location, and the show went on. After 1933, American artists would benefit from the government’s financial largesse first as the U.S. attempted to address the problems of mass unemployment caused by the Depression, and then during and after the Second World War, as the government made extensive use of individualist avant-garde artists and intellectuals to counter the prolific and effective cultural propaganda spread by the U.S.S.R. and Nazi Germany. The Depression brought an enforced leveling to the social scene by eradicating fortunes and bringing the American population together in classless unemployment. Now, the idea that art was no longer for an educated and wealthy elite, but for and by the American people, was disseminated throughout government agencies through their journals and bulletins. The public was informed of the successes of the Federal Art Project programs through articles distributed in supportive magazines and newspapers. George Biddle wrote articles about the Treasury’s Public Works of Art Project for Scribner’s, Harpers, and the Atlantic Monthly. Cahill had been a prolific magazine journalist writing about American art long before he assumed the role of directing the Federal Art Project, and continued to write, producing numerous articles in art journals and magazines about the work he was doing for the government. Readers learned about the progress of the government’s art programs in diverse and obscure journals covering fields that were only tangentially related to art. For example, middle class professionals, who were keen to keep up with developments in social

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welfare, were fed information about the projects in Survey Graphic Magazine of Social Interpretation, which convinced them of the success of the Public Works of Art Project in employing thousands of artists who allegedly “worked with complete freedom” in the production of work about “the American scene” on behalf of the American public.15 The administrative breadth and scale of the programs, especially the Federal Art Project, made it easy to spread the idea that the new American art was by the people and for the people across the country through government channels – public librarians were informed through their association bulletin that, “The museum, as a public institution, has accomplished little in breaking the fallacy born of the industrial era, the fallacy that art speaks to a very limited number and that the ability to appreciate beauty and to share in the experience of art is the exclusive birthright of the few.” 16 The language of this official bulletin paraphrased Dewey’s comments in the first chapter of Art as Experience, that museums were nationalistic shrines designed to maintain the capitalist status quo. Now, art was for the people. Librarians were warned to expect crowds of people with a new interest in modern art and to support the new community art centres by providing books that would expand the knowledge of an artoriented public because, “increasingly, the Federal Art Project, through its lectures, its arts and crafts courses, its exhibitions at the centers, will be sending larger and larger numbers of readers to the public libraries, eager to enlarge, through books, their newly discovered horizons.”17 These “newly discovered horizons” were founded in the progressive, socialist ideas of Dewey, encouraged by the Federal Arts Project administration as part of their desire to engineer a uniquely American art. It shouldn’t be any great surprise that progressive political idealism was inherent to the Public Works of Art Project from its inception. After all, the Works Progress Administration only changed its name to the Work Projects Administration in 1939, amid an onslaught of truthful accusations that it followed a political agenda. A spectre of political criticism haunted it because of the foundational progressive leanings of the Projects’ administrators and the political agenda expressed in many of the murals. Defensive internal pronouncements were designed as countermeasures to protect the program from appearing to endorse progressive politics. But it was very difficult to claim that either of the two pillars of the art programs, the Mexican muralists or Dewey, were anything but focused upon radical idealism, and in the muralists’ case, overt communist revolution. The problem of the communist affiliation of artists employed by the New Deal would cast a shadow over the programs. Republicans found the programs an easy target because socialist politics lay so deeply within their roots,

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despite the administration’s efforts to distance themselves from political sympathies. The truth is that from its beginning, many of the artists employed by the Federal Art Project felt strong agreement with the idealistic cause of communism. Many were members of the fellow-travelling Artists’ Union or the explicitly communist American Artists’ Congress. Roosevelt’s presidency was defined by his role as the saviour of America from the downfall of capitalism. The New Dealers involved in the art programs were idealists – not all of them were full-on communists, but certainly they were deeply influenced by the ideas of Dewey, and by reports from Russia about the ideal revolutionary life. It was not until the HitlerStalin pact was made that the American limousine-left abandoned Stalinist communism. In his speech at Dewey’s eightieth birthday party, Cahill used disturbingly Orwellian language to describe the freedom from censorship enjoyed by Federal Art Project artists, and the difference between American art and that of her totalitarian enemies. He quoted George Biddle, who said this was “the first time in history that many thousands of artists are working completely without censorship, without even the indirect censorship of the art dealer or collector.”18 The claim that Federal Art Project artists worked with complete individual liberty was at the heart of weaponizing American art as propaganda, opposing it to fascist doctrines. But, in the very public world of the American muralist, the subject matter of this much-vaunted ‘complete freedom’ was largely limited to the production of social realist images of the life of the American people, filtered by all the left’s prejudices and scruples. Sketches for murals were first submitted to the Federal Art Project administration and then passed on for approval by the head of the organization occupying the building the mural was planned for, sometimes by committee, with all the political pitfalls such bureaucratic processes included, and the participants in the process were carefully guided by newsletters which gave explicitly loaded directions about what the government was interested in paying for. The language echoed Trotsky’s dubious injunction over Soviet art in 1924, when he described the relationship between the state and all its artists and genres. He wrote, “If the revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant. But for this very reason, it must define the limits of its activity clearly. For a more precise expression

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of my meaning, I will say: we ought to have a watchful revolutionary censorship, and a broad and flexible policy in the field of art, free from petty partisan maliciousness.”19 This was a step into totalitarianism. Trotsky dressed a pig’s ear as a silk purse. He repeated the injunction even more clearly in 1937, saying that the state intended, “while holding over them all the categorical criterion, for the revolution or against the revolution, to give them complete freedom in the sphere of artistic self-determination.”20 In other words, artists were completely free to paint anything they wanted, as long as they never criticized the revolution. This was tyranny crafted in doublethink, no freedom at all. The protests that dogged the art relief projects from their birth persisted throughout their existence and pointed to the political affiliation of the project’s administrators and the hypocrisy of their progressive stance despite the supposed neutrality of their position as a government agency. In 1936, in Los Angeles, the famed muralist Hugo Ballin submitted seven studies for a post office mural competition and added a hoax parody of Works Progress Administration work, reminiscent of the subject matter of the communist refugee German artist George Grosz, then a darling of leftwing radical bohemians: “a purposely vulgar concoction depicting a ’49 bar room full of absurdities and lewdness and trimmed with a ridiculous jibe at wealth.”21 The sketch was a caricature of miners and gamblers drinking and “lollygagging” with girls in a bar. One man fingered a girl’s crotch. One was about to stab another in the back. Still another held a gun ready to put a bullet in his own head, while more miners working with gold pans were watched by a wealthy couple at a table, which was covered by a cloth decorated with a pawnbroker’s sign. As their butler served a roast turkey, a cat sat comfortably on a cushion, lit by candles set onto an erotically designed candelabra. A solitary black man begged for alms. Of the eight sketches Ballin submitted, of course the relief committee approved this ironic pastiche of an anti-capitalist piece of work, and asked him to begin work immediately. The publicity-loving Ballin was delighted that he had caught out the treasury with his hoax, and replied immediately, saying, “he would not think of accepting taxpayers’ money for painting on a post-office wall a mess of cooked up vulgarity the principal features of which were heavy drinking, suicide, knifing, the grossest sort of lovemaking and absurd satire of the rich.”22 His next letter was to the Los Angeles Times art correspondent Arthur Millier to tell him about the hoax. Millier, who had served on the Los Angeles region Public Works of Art Project committee in 1934, wrote about the affair in his Art and Artists article: “There may be a fair explanation for this obvious mischoice. But until there is, the natural conclusion is that

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anything looking like radical propaganda gets a friendly eye at the capital. I dislike hoaxing, but Ballin was fully justified in refusing to ruin his reputation by painting such an unpalatable mess on any federal wall.”23 Such episodes did little for the public image of the projects, which had the shadow of socialist propaganda cast over them from their inception. The Federal Art Project especially emphasized mural paintings because they so admirably filled the government’s policy that the artwork its artists produced should be made for the public. Murals were ideal because they could fill large walls in public buildings and were semi-permanent features. An unpublished internal report made for Congress about the success of the Federal Art Project described how, “the economic Depression and the consequent birth of the WPA/FAP has done more in five years for mural painting, and more for the closer understanding between the American artist and his public through the medium of the mural than any individual efforts could have accomplished during a much longer period.”24 The chorus sung by Roosevelt and the American art czars Alfred Barr, George Biddle, Holger Cahill, and Ned Bruce was that they wanted to create the circumstances for a truly American art to come to fruition after a century of painting and sculpture that was indebted to European art, a century which had seen America’s finest artists head East for academies across the ocean – Sargent, Cassat, Copley, West – all setting their ex-patriot examples for future generations to follow. In the desperate climate of the Great Depression, the czars seized their chance to turn their hope for a truly American art into reality. But what kind of American art? At first, they believed that avant-garde social realism was where the future lay. But how could this revolutionary political art truly be American? The avant-gardist Ashcan School of so-called realists offered a patronizing view of the lives of working-class people who were portrayed as being under the grind of near-constant misery, oppressed by jaded fat-cat capitalists, and living in utter poverty and degradation. This was far from the truth. Yes – terrible poverty oppressed the world, but within the bleakness of the Depression, the American people remained strong. This was a decade of pioneers, of strong individualists, who were still busy settling California and the West. This was a decade of the evolution of new and truly American music – jazz and the blues, of Amelia Earhart, and remarkable technological innovations. The realism of the Ashcan School, and a huge proportion of social realist murals created during the New Deal, offered a miserable version of reality that completely failed to describe the love, or joy, or pleasure that was still to be found despite the difficulty of living in tough times. These paintings were representative of only a very limited view of reality, inspired by a narrow set of patronizing socialist ideas

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from a privileged coterie of aristocratic East-coast private-school educated men and financiers. And the source of this kind of social realism could hardly claim to be American, being inspired by the French realist painter Courbet, who was the prototypical artist for the Yankee czars of the New Deal art programs, and the communist philosophers and politicians PierreJoseph Proudhon, Henri de Saint-Simon, Nicolai Chernyshevsky, Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, whose extravagant anti-individualism belied the principles at the heart of the American constitution. It is easy to criticize Soviet-style socialist realist murals and easel paintings for being blatant propaganda. But, when we turn that same critical gaze upon the paintings produced for the New Deal, it is inescapable that many of them were kin to the Russian works in their inspiration and imagery. Although America was presented to the world as the home of free and uncensored art, the vast majority of the products of the government’s art programs were equally as didactic and idealized as the communists. Here, strong American farmers tilled the beautiful American land, and square-jawed American workers built gleaming American power plants, and burly American frontiersmen tamed the sublime American wilderness, and heroic American mailmen galloped from hostile Indians. The American scene was uncomfortably similar to the Russian scene. Cowboys rode in the place of Cossacks. In 1935, the great American painter Thomas Hart Benton went on a tour of the Mid-West and parts of the South. A scant two years had passed since the Public Works of Art Project set off an explosion of mural painting in federal buildings all over the United States. Benton was most impressed with the growth of interest in art that swept across the nation, describing an immense swell of enthusiastic crowds attending his lectures when he returned to New York. But he was concerned about the direction young mural artists were taking, noting the influence of communist propaganda, and especially pointing at Diego Rivera as one of their chief influences. Wisely, he noted the differences between straight-up doctrinal communist imagery and the socialist-leaning art of the Mid-West. But even though these were paintings made by reformers who were not necessarily orthodox communists, the art was socialist propaganda. Clearly impressed with the egalitarian message of Dewey’s famous book, but resisting its socialist message, Benton said, “I believe that the communistic idea of art as propaganda leads to the death of art because it denies experience, and experience is the only thing that changes form.”25 It was precisely the overt association of American scene realism with socialist propaganda and its similarity to the socialist realism of communist Russia that would eventually ring the closing bell for American representational art at the beginning of

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the Second World War in 1939. How could this be American art if it so closely resembled communist art, the art of her mortal enemies? Russia evolved into a clear and present danger to American freedom. But the idealistic proposal that American art should be promoted among all Americans had become de facto government policy, and the successful use of art as an effective propaganda tool had been thoroughly understood by those people working within the overlap between the government and the socialist art scene. The policy of using art as a propaganda tool would continue, but its style would change. There was little interest in the abstract art of individualists in the Federal Art Project, which made more use of the political social realist avant-garde instead. Lee Krasner complained there was almost no mural work for abstract painters.26 But Stuart Davis, Chris Francis, Joseph Stella, Ilya Bolotowsky, and other abstract muralists did find it, and exploited these unprecedented opportunities to develop the very large-scale abstract paintings that were to cement the place of their novel work as uniquely American. The Federal Art Project supervisor Burgoyne Diller was a rare exception to the rule of social realist favouritism. Diller deliberately sought out abstract artists to work with architect William Lescaze, who had been commissioned to build a massive housing project in Brooklyn known as The Ten Eyck Houses, covering twelve city blocks. Keeping their affection for abstraction undercover by calling the murals they commissioned ‘decorative,’ Diller and Lescaze recruited Davis and other early abstract painters to render murals for basement meeting rooms. Willem de Kooning was among the few abstract artists who found a friend in them. Holger Cahill did include works by de Kooning, Bolotowsky, Gorky, and a handful of other Federal Art Project abstractionists in MoMA’s watershed New Horizons in American Art exhibit in 1936. But his fundamental focus was clearly directed at bringing the social realist and modernist art of the American scene to the people. Davis, who was the influential leader of the Communist Artists Union, which had many members in Federal Art Project programs, viewed the administration’s policy of artistic freedom as an endorsement for bringing “the most advanced European art into the cultural environment of the American artists and public.”27 In his writings about the Work Projects Administration, Davis made strident pronouncements about the association of abstract art with the progressive political spirit, and demanded a permanent Bureau of Fine Arts that would ensure the dominance of “modern realism, abstract art, and social comment” in American art.28 Here we see the beginning of the blurring of the term ‘avant-garde’ in a new context – the term shifting from its original use to describe art that was

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explicitly propaganda for communist ideology, to a new use describing art which was more truthfully American individualist and radically bohemian. But the Artists Union he headed staunchly asserted that all art should be political and proletarian, faithfully following the Stalinist line. The Union paid little attention to artists whose work was non-objective. Cubist and abstract artists were not encouraged, for their individualist work served the bourgeoisie.29 Although generally interested in social realism, the projects provided some abstract artists with the minimal financial support they needed. Roosevelt’s hope that the relief programs would create an American alternative to Nazi and communist art did not work effectively. However, the seeds for the new individualist avant-garde were sown within its soil. In an oral history interview, administrator Dorothy Miller described how important the relief money was to the artists, “The WPA really saved art in this country. It started, you see, in August 1935. Suddenly all these artists who could qualify as professional artists were on relief. And it was a magnificent thing. Also, what I saw happen very definitely – we all saw it – was that the artists, just dozens of them, who had real talent and would have gone under were allowed to work for that little salary and develop. And they were not stopped from doing experimental work. For instance, [Jackson] Pollock didn’t show up to get his paycheck for a certain period. Burgoyne Diller, who was a supervisor, went to see him and said, ‘What the hell is the matter?’ And Pollock said, ‘Oh, well, the Project can’t use this work. I'm in a bog. I can't do anything.’ And Diller said, ‘That's okay. You're on the Project. Go on.’ That happened with so many of those people: they were allowed to go on even though it was experimental and not yet any good. But look what it resulted in. And they wouldn’t have survived, I’m sure, if they hadn’t had that steady little income. They would have just done something else.”30 The Federal Art Project was tremendously successful in the sense that it produced an enormous amount of wall paintings in a very short amount of time, and gave work to hundreds of artists who would otherwise have been unemployed. Federal Art Project mural painter Philip Evergood expressed his gratitude, saying, “Today throughout the length and breadth of our country we see new and virile mural talents coming to the fore. Our young artists never would have had the opportunity, on such a large scale, to embellish the walls of public buildings had not the government supplied a living wage to them and the public institutions supplied the bare walls and the cost of materials.”31 The opening of art to and for the people generated a huge amount of interest. The public, whose taxes funded the programs, were enthusiastic

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consumers of Federal Art Projects propaganda when it seemed to come to them for nothing, and they enjoyed the art education the government provided, and even contributed their small change towards the costs of the art centres. On the eve of his beloved program’s reorganization in 1939, Cahill reported income of half a million dollars in contributions from ordinary people. But the U.S. government, “our greatest arts patron”32 picked up the lion’s share of the tab, paying out thirty-five million dollars for the Federal Art Projects in their brief lifetime of the program. This expense came when the federal minimum wage was a mere twenty-five cents an hour. The storm was gathering in Europe, and Roosevelt knew America must be realistic about its involvement in the global conflict. With the possibility of American involvement becoming increasingly likely, Roosevelt’s opponents had little patience for federal involvement in art that looked like it promoted communism. At the end of December 1938, Harry Hopkins resigned from his position as head of the Work Projects Administration, and was replaced with an engineer, Colonel Francis Harrington, who refocused the attention of the program on building military infrastructure. With the reorganization of the executive branch of the government occupying Roosevelt’s attention, in 1939, the President sensibly ordered a reconstruction of the Work Projects Administration and placed control of the art programs into the hands of the States, where they languished. They were dissolved completely a few years later when America finally joined her Allies in their struggle against the Nazis, and solved her problem with unemployment with the need for swift military expansion. By 1943, the arts projects were completely eliminated, and closed down so quickly that many of the records of the enormous effort were not properly archived, and much of the documentation of the projects was lost, making any assessment of their accomplishments impossible. The art was irrelevant. Some of the canvases were sold as surplus for pipe insulation. By 1939, what Roosevelt needed from art had transformed. He was persuaded that America was better served by art that contrasted with that of its enemies. The war in Europe had begun and Stalin had made his fateful alliance with Hitler against Poland. The fantasy that socialism might save America was over. Now, Roosevelt needed to get America ready to fight, and he already knew that his efforts to help unemployed Americans find themselves in social realist art would have to be abandoned. American art had to be different from that of the Nazis and the communists. If Germany and Russia restricted the freedom of their artists by limiting them to the production of proletarian art based on the uniformity of their people, America had to present itself as the home of individualism and freedom,

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where artists were encouraged to work without governmental intervention. Now, Roosevelt needed full-scale propaganda designed for total war. America’s fear of the infectious ideas of Russia’s revolutionary system had been established long before the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe, and was galvanized by news of Stalin’s betrayal of the revolution in 1939. The exciting utopian shine of the proletarian revolution had begun to tarnish after it became clear that Stalin’s authoritarian government was murdering and exiling its dissidents, and eventually even the most idealistic of Western intellectuals found it difficult to excuse its shortcomings, turning from Stalin’s brutality in the Soviet Union to a Western version of anticommunist but left-wing idealism. Although throughout the 20th century, the American government’s officials stated cultural policy was to have no policy at all in matters of style or content, after 1939 its de facto financial actions powerfully supported radically individualist art in opposition to the representational art of her enemies. 1930s social realism would be the last hurrah for American representational art for almost a century. Its traditions had already been stifled in the embrace of young idealist artists who had led a transformation in the style of representational art from the traditional, illusionistic, Eurocentric, academic works favored by wealthy collectors, to a new kind of realism that was intended to stimulate social transformation – to educate the viewing public about the reality of the social conditions of the world. The academic painters of old Europe had been concerned with using a range of technical skills to create imagery that tricked the eye into believing that there was depth beyond the surface of the canvas, catering to the class of wealthy people who could afford the luxury of expensive art. Social realists were concerned with making imagery that presented the world without illusion, making no use of perspective or reductions of scale to create depth, flattening their pictures and describing the practical and political problems faced by ordinary people in their experience of life. Their didactic approach to painting alienated a large proportion of the public who didn’t agree with the socialist sentiments expressed by the artists, and representational art became politicized, damned either for being old-fashioned and conservative by one side, or damned again for being socialist on the other. The products of the Federal Art Project were too similar in style and too sympathetic in their political orientation to the communist cause, and a new brand of art was about to be sold to the world as a sign of the freedom and liberty to be found in a unique American culture. It was harvest time for the individualist avant-garde.

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Notes 1

Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, Faber and Faber, 1937, 227 Holger Cahill, Folk Art: Its Place in the American Tradition, Parnassus, March 1932, pp. 1-4. In: Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art, M.I.T. press, 2002, 196 3 Holger Cahill, Letter to Mary Rockefeller, Holger Cahill Papers, Finding Aid, Correspondence Files Frames 824-834, Reel 5285, Smithsonian Archives of American Art http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container/viewer/correspondence-183186 4 Holger Cahill, American Resources in the Arts, in: Francis O’Conner (Ed.), Art for the Millions, New York Graphic Society, 1973, 38 5 Ibid, 33-34 6 Ibid, 42 7 Archibald MacLeish, Unemployed Arts: WPA’s Four Arts Projects: Their Origins, Their Operation, Fortune, May 1937 pp. 108-17ff. 8 Corliss Lamont, John Dewey, Marxism and the United Front (Review of Liberalism and Social Action, by John Dewey), The New Masses, March 3, 1936, 22 9 John Dewey, Impressions of Soviet Russia and the revolutionary world MexicoChina-Turkey, The New Republic, 1929, 86 10 John Morse and Peter Pollack, An Interview of Holger Cahill Conducted 1960 April 12-15, by John Morse and Peter Pollack, for the Archives of American Art. http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-holger-cahill11990 11 Thaddeus Clapp, Art Within Reach, in: Francis O’Conner (Ed.), Art for the Millions, New York Graphic Society, 1973, 206 12 Francis O’Conner (Ed.), Art for the Millions, New York Graphic Society, 1973, 305 13 Holger Cahill, American Resources in the Arts, in: Francis O’Conner (Ed.), Art for the Millions, New York Graphic Society, 1973, 41 14 Art Row Stirs Ire Of Museum. Los Angeles Times, Jul 3, 1934, 12 15 Florence Loeb Kellogg, Art Becomes Public Works, In: Survey Graphic, Vol. 23, No. 6, June, 1934, 279 http://newdeal.feri.org/survey/34279.htm 16 Thomas C. Parker, Federally Sponsored Community Art Centers (abridged) Bulletin of the American Library Association, Vol. 32, No. 11 (Oct. 15, 1938), 807 http://newdeal.feri.org/ala/al38807.htm 17 Ibid, 807 18 Holger Cahill, American Resources in the Arts, in: Francis O’Conner (Ed.), Art for the Millions, New York Graphic Society, 1973, 41 19 Leon Trotsky, Art and Revolution, Pathfinder, 1970, 61-62 20 Ibid, 102 21 Arthur Millier, Brush Strokes, (Art and Artists), Los Angeles Times, Jan 5, 1936, Part 3, 7 2

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Arthur Millier, Ballin Again in Art Hoax. In: Los Angeles Times Jan 02 1936, Part 2., 1, 3 https://ezproxy.callutheran.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1645 18674?accountid=9839 23 Arthur Millier, Brush Strokes, (Art and Artists), Los Angeles Times, Jan 5, 1936, Part 3., 7 24 Philip Evergood, Concerning Mural Painting, in: Francis O’Conner (Ed.), Art for the Millions, New York Graphic Society, 1973, 49 25 Radical Art Trend Seen in Midwest: Benton, Mural Painter, Finds Rejection Of Communist Symbolism, New York Times, 8th Feb 1935, 23 26 Lee Krasner interviewed in: Artists at Work: A Film on the New Deal Art Projects, Segment One, 17:14 / 34:43, New Deal Films, 1982 27 Stuart Davis, Abstract Painting Today, in: Francis O’Conner (Ed.), Art for the Millions, New York Graphic Society, 1973, 121 28 Ibid, 122 29 Nevertheless, in New York, abstract artist Lee Krasner was heavily involved in organizing its picket lines and demonstrations, insisting on extensions of the Work Projects Administration’s art programs and the rights of working artists, and claimed to have been in “practically every jail in New York City”. Krasner interviewed in: Artists at Work: A Film on the New Deal Art Projects, Segment One, 24:35 / 34:43, New Deal Films, 1982 30 Oral history interview with Dorothy C. Miller. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. May 26, 1970 & Sept. 28, 1971, 13 31 Philip Evergood, Concerning Mural Painting, in: Francis O’Conner (Ed.), Art for the Millions, New York Graphic Society, 1973, 49 32 Holger Cahill, American Resources in the Arts, in: Francis O’Conner (Ed.), Art for the Millions, New York Graphic Society, 1973, 35

MAN AT THE CROSSROADS

“The social development of our time is a continuous, accelerated march towards collectivization, and for this reason the necessity for mural painting, the character of which is essentially collective, becomes ever more urgent.”1 Diego Rivera and Bertram D. Wolfe, Portrait of America

Diego Rivera, who Holger Cahill described as one of the two pillars of the Public Works of Art Project, colorfully explained why he chose to paint representational imagery rather than abstraction to a Time Magazine journalist: “‘You know,’ he said, ‘the highest pitch of French cuisine is canard faisandé – duck that has been hung a long time, so you can smell the bouquet. Very enjoyable to the educated nose. But if you offer it to the workers they will throw the rotten duck out, unless they throw it in your face. Now the kitchen of the high bourgeoisie will make the proletarian vomit, and the paintings of the high bourgeoisie will make him vomit too – though this is nothing against the duck, or against modern art.’ Nowadays, the only paintings in Rivera’s studio besides his own are out-&-out abstractions by Russian Vassily Kandinsky and Switzerland’s Paul Klee. ‘I like them,’ says Rivera, ‘because I have an educated nose. But I don’t confuse myself and my friends and the art critics with the millions. I myself have always wanted to paint for the millions – and so I stick to my idea of a clear, firm, simple and precise art that everyone can understand.’”2 This was a foody echo of the language of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, of Nicolai Chernyshevsky, of the Saint-Simonists, of Lenin, describing the representational art of propaganda produced in service of the proletariat, while reserving the cream of individualist art, soon to become the U.S. ‘avant-garde,’ for the initiated elite. Proudhon tore at the poor taste of the Parisian proletariat – Rivera implied that representational art was inferior art, manufactured for the workers. Individualist modern art was made by and for the bourgeoisie, not for the manipulated masses. Art created for them was low grade, inferior quality. How could ignorant people possibly understand the complexities of abstraction? Although Rivera believed that radically individualist art was superior, he made truly avant-garde representational art as Marxist marketing. This was the cynical second pillar of the Federal Art Project.

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A giant of an artist, and a giant of a man, Rivera was over six feet tall and seriously overweight, towering over his delicate wife, Frida Kahlo. The newspapers called him “the gargantuan.” And if Rivera was physically impressive, his extravagant stories made him even larger than life, for he loved to see what he could get away with when telling tall tales. His autobiography, My Art, My Life, which was edited by journalist Gladys March from interviews with Rivera between 1944 and 1957, read like a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, full of extravagant but almost believable magical realism. In an early chapter, Rivera described how he developed a taste for human flesh while studying anatomy as a student in 1904. Basing his experiment in cannibalism upon the story of a French furrier who had fed his cats the meat of their own species in order to make their coats softer, richer, and healthier, Rivera claimed that he and his fellow anatomists took advantage of their access to human cadavers, and began eating the meat to see if it would make them healthier, like the Frenchman’s cats. He soon developed a taste for eating the breasts and legs of young women, but best of all, he “relished women’s brains in vinaigrette.”3 Other fantasies in Rivera’s book included his epic journey from Mexico to Spain, surviving a hurricane, and single-handedly saving the ship he traveled in. Contemptuous of the tempest, he and two sea captains ate vast meals, smoked cigars, and drank heroically while the dining room steward waded with his trousers rolled up to his knees through the seawater that broke in huge waves across the decks and flooded through the doors as he served them enormous breakfasts that lasted so long that they turned into lunches.4 He claimed that in Spain the great master Joaquín Sorolla had admired his work and held his hands in admiration, telling the young Rivera that he would have a great future and would make far more money than he had ever seen.5 When he returned to Mexico from his European sea voyage, Rivera described falling dangerously ill, drifting in and out of a coma, saved only by his adored Tarascan foster mother, a shaman named Antonia, who magically anticipated his return and walked to his parents’ home from the distant Sierra mountains to greet him, and then nursed him back to health, feeding him and dressing him daily, and sealing her place as his spiritual mother by performing a ritual over an egg hidden between her breasts, giving it to Rivera to eat, then burning the shell in a small fire, while singing ancient native lays.6 Amazingly, in Germany, he had seen an opportunity to assassinate Hitler but failed to seize his moment to change world history.7 In Moscow, he met Stalin and was awed by the parades celebrating the tenth anniversary of the revolution. His attraction to Kahlo was so strong that when they walked the dark streets of Coyoacán, each time they stopped beneath a streetlight to kiss, the lamp uncannily winked out then came back

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on, a magical feat that they repeated under the lights of his studio when they returned home.8 He put Don Quixote to shame. He was such a legend among artists that, when he came to the United States, he received as many as fifteen to twenty letters a day from people all over the world who wanted to work for him for nothing save the experience of helping the master in his painting, and learning the secretive mysteries of buon fresco.9 He was so charismatic that even a British Lord, Jack Hastings, the communist ‘Red Earl’ of Huntingdon, made the pilgrimage to Mexico to assist him – and became close friends with Rivera and the eccentric and delightful Kahlo. Rivera was the most prominent of the famed triumvirate of Mexican revolutionary muralists in the United States (Rivera, David Siqueiros, and José Orozco). He was a Mexican Communist member until his friendship with Trotsky led to his expulsion from the party after the rise of Stalin. The Riveras were so close to Trotsky that Diego persuaded the Mexican president to grant him political asylum, and they provided the fugitive revolutionary leader with a refuge. Entering exile, Trotsky lived in Kahlo’s villa in Coyoacán and had a brief affair with her, leading to a row with Rivera. Rivera’s colleague Siqueiros despised Trotsky and brought a gang of assassins to his new sanctuary, armed with machine guns. They failed to kill him, but soon a Russian agent ended Trotsky’s life with an icepick shoved into the back of his head. Later, Rivera tried to make peace with Moscow. He applied to rejoin the Communist Party five times, finally being re-admitted in 1954, only after he turned Frida Kahlo’s funeral into a communist parade, with her body lying in state draped in the red flag of the Soviet Union. Rivera began mural painting in Mexico after his return from a long trip to Europe in which he became good friends with Piet Mondrian, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, and the left-bank bohemians of the early 20th century. In Paris, he threw himself into cubism, and became one of its earliest adherents, if not one of its principal players. Its compositional strategies appear in his American mural works, where the picture plane is divided by irrational structures, defying the logic of perspective, and incorporating multiple viewpoints. But this was a short-lived period of bohemian pleasure for Rivera. He was soon tired of the petty squabbling and jealousies of the Parisian art scene, and besides, he had heard that Álvaro Obregón was about to be elected President of Mexico, and was going to appoint José Vasconcelos as Minister of Education, a position he would hold from 1921 – 1924. Vasconcelos, a writer of theosophy-influenced aesthetics, was ready to establish an astonishing revival of mural painting throughout Mexico. Rivera was ready, too. He took a trip to Italy to learn

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how to paint fresco, funded by a grant from Vasconcelos, then returned to Mexico. After a six-month period of uncertainty, in which Rivera worked at a series of odd jobs, Vasconcelos arranged a trip to Yucatán to witness the ruins of Uxmal and Chichen Itza, to immerse him and other artists into true Mexican culture. It was Rivera’s baptism into la raza cósmica. Rivera and Vasconcelos talked for hours. When the party returned to Mexico City, Vasconcelos gave Rivera the wall of an auditorium to paint – his first mural, The Creation, at the Anfiteatro Bolivar in the National Preparatory School – which would occupy him throughout 1922. The encaustic mural was an attempt to capture the theosophical and Pythagorean symbolism which appealed to Vasconcelos. Rivera set out to please his patron. Nevertheless, the work contained many of the elements that would appear repeatedly in his later paintings which were not made for Vasconcelos. Rivera was sincere in his embrace of theosophical imagery. Whether The Creation was a deliberate piece of flattery or not, Vasconcelos was impressed, and in 1923, Rivera was allowed to begin work on the huge project of painting the walls of the new Ministry of Education building in true fresco. This was a four-year campaign which would see him become a true master of fresco painting and a Mexican celebrity. It was an extraordinary achievement that would attract the attention of artists from all over the world. Many were also charmed by the political stance Rivera had taken as the champion of Mexican communism, for the imagery of his murals was extravagantly Marxist, and it was during this period that Rivera joined the fledging Mexican Communist Party as member #922. He was soon elected to the executive committee. As Rivera picked up more mural commissions and his fame spread, artists came to help him with his work, keen to learn his ancient techniques and to participate in the communist cause. Among them were key players in the future dramas that would help shape American art, including an Englishman named Clifford Wight, who would become Rivera’s principal assistant. One of Rivera’s friends from Paris, the American Ralph Stackpole, traveled to Mexico City to learn fresco with him and helped to arrange two commissions in San Francisco. Puzzlingly for this champion of Marxism, the first was for Timothy Pflueger, who was the architect for the new San Francisco Stock Exchange building. Stackpole was carving gigantic Deco figures to adorn the exterior of the luxurious building, and showed Pflueger photographs of Rivera’s spectacular paintings, convincing him to set aside objections about the suitability of hiring the world’s foremost communist mural painter to decorate the stairway of this shrine to capitalism. Pflueger was won over by

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the quality of Rivera’s work. Rivera was delighted. The Stock Exchange commission was by far the biggest financial commitment to his work he had ever seen, having worked on his walls in Mexico for the same rate as a labouring plasterer. The second commission was for a smaller work in the California School of Fine Arts. Rivera began to make arrangements to travel to California. Although there was some objection to him being allowed into the country, being a notorious anti-capitalist who had derided famous American captains of industry in his communist mural Wall Street Banquet, including a portrait of Henry Ford, whose son Edsel would soon become his patron. William Gerstle, who ran the San Francisco Art Association and paid for the California School of Arts commission, asked Senator James Phelan and Dwight Morrow, Ambassador to Mexico, for help. Morrow had commissioned Rivera to paint the ambassador’s palace at Cuernavaca in 1929 as a piece of cultural diplomacy to create better relations between America and Mexico. Rivera got his visa. At the Stock Exchange, red Rivera painted the American tennis star Helen Wills Moody as an allegorical figure for the plenty of California. While Rivera painted inside, Wight helped Stackpole produce the huge sculptures outside the building, and contributed a stone corner piece of the helmeted heads of some football players, who looked remarkably like Mayan warriors. Next, Rivera painted Wight, Stackpole, and Hastings into his School of Arts mural, titled The Making of a Fresco. Some writers said Wight and Hastings appeared in it twice, Wight sharpening a chisel on the left side, and also stretching a line at top right. Lord Hastings, who became close friends with Rivera, was at the top left holding a plumb line, and again directly below in the centre panel with his palm against the wall, holding the ends of both lines stretching down from above. In 1931, Rivera was installed in Abby Rockefeller’s fledgling Museum of Modern Art for his monograph exhibit, taking up residency in a makeshift studio in the building, producing five ‘portable murals,’ each weighing more than 300 pounds. Abby was close friends with William Valentiner, the director of the Detroit Institute of Art, who was her mentor in modern art, having travelled through Germany and Austria on an art tour with her in 1924. It was Valentiner who encouraged Abby to collect German expressionist art and to establish MoMA.10 Now, he hired Rivera to paint murals at the Institute. Late in December of 1932, MoMA opened the show of Rivera’s heavy, but moveable frescos. Cold and miserable in the winter, Rivera and Kahlo both caught the flu and rested in New York City through

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the Spring, causing Valentiner a great deal of anxiety as he waited for the master to begin work in Detroit. Wight left Rivera in New York and traveled to Detroit on March 5th, 1932, to prepare the walls of a decorative courtyard in the Institute of the Arts, arriving just in time for the Ford Hunger March, a huge demonstration held on March 7th to protest the poverty of laid-off workers and to demand relief. The march ended in chaos at Ford’s Rouge plant when police and Ford company security guards aimed water cannons at the angry crowds, and then trained their guns upon them, shooting and killing five workers and wounding twenty. Five days after the slaughter, a massive funeral was held, and sixty thousand workers joined the biggest communist demonstration in the history of the United States, and the vast crowd roared the Internationale. The city shook.11 An active communist, Wight can only have been both shocked and inspired. Nevertheless, within three weeks of his arrival, he gave a diplomatic interview to a Detroit newspaper describing what working with Rivera was like, but conspicuously making no mention of either his or the artist’s political sympathies. After all, it was a captain of American capitalism, and an enemy of the marchers, Edsel Ford, who footed the bill for the year-long project.12 A month after Wight’s arrival, Rivera and Kahlo traveled by train to the Michigan Central Depot. They were met by Valentiner, the Mexican consul Ignacio Batiza, and Wight and his wife, Jean. A photographer shot the historic moment, capturing a cheerful Rivera shaking the hand of a relieved looking Valentiner, while a smiling Wight looked on, hat in hand, standing beside an affectionate Kahlo. While Rivera was attacking the first strokes of his murals, far away in Philadelphia, a sixteen-year-old boy named Pablo Davis clambered up into the open door of an empty box car, joining half a dozen men hopping a ride on a freight train. He had saved sixty cents for the sleepless journey, kept clutched in his pocket, fearful of being robbed of even these few coins. Davis was already a committed communist and a union activist. Aged fourteen, he served a three-month stretch of a six-month sentence for his involvement in a violent strike at the mine where he worked. In the Philadelphia Enquirer, he read about Rivera, his socialist principles, and his epic paintings, and now, although he was violating his probation, he was determined to meet the painter and see these great frescos that embodied the ideas he had been imprisoned for. After two days rumbling across the landscape of the American Depression in a hobo boxcar, the train pulled to a halt in the silent yards outside Detroit. Slipping past the notoriously violent railway watchmen, Davis doggedly trudged through the lonely streets to the Art Institute and pounded on the cold bronze doors. Inside,

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Rivera painted, perched high upon the scaffold. A vigilant guard shooed the teenager away from the doors, and Davis sat alone and depressed on the chilly stone stairs at the entrance to the grand building. Fortunately for Davis, at that moment, Kahlo appeared like a vision with a basket on her arm, bringing Rivera his lunch. Taking pity on the hungry kid slouched on the steps, she asked what he was doing. He shared the story of his quest, and Kahlo invited him in to meet his idol, leading him through the marble halls to the plaster and high scaffold of the garden courtyard where the murals were taking shape. She called Rivera from his work to eat, and Davis’ huge hero clambered down to the ground. Realizing the boy was hungry, Rivera broke bread with him, flattered by his crusading determination, and sympathetic to his story of union activism and persecution. On his vagabond journey to his master, Davis had carefully guarded five pages of his sketches – images of the aftermath of an explosion in a mine, of a girl who had died from tuberculosis, and character studies of miners. He thrust this little collection into Rivera’s hands, who promptly shared them with Kahlo, and to Davis’ joy, they admired his work and asked him to take tea. The three chatted about his adventures, about socialism and art, and later, while Rivera worked, Davis sketched. That evening, Rivera brought Davis back to the apartment, where Kahlo had prepared a dinner, and, unwilling to turn him out into the cold, invited him to sleep the night. Davis stayed with them for a short time, but was forced to return to Philadelphia to comply with the conditions of his probation and attend school. Impressed, Rivera invited him to return to help with the murals.13 In his account of living with the Riveras in Detroit, Davis gave up a secret that he had kept to himself for three quarters of a century. Although Rivera had not made a public statement about the Hunger March shootings, Davis reported that they were a daily topic of heated conversation in the apartment. Shortly after the second Hunger March was held June 5th, 1932, the tension of manifest oppression grinding against the workers’ financial needs would cause Rivera to snap. Kahlo and Rivera had a huge row, and Rivera stormed out of the apartment, furiously angry. Crossing the street to the Institute, he strode into the courtyard, grabbed a sledgehammer and began swinging at the plaster on the north wall, smashing his mural to pieces. While Rivera raged at the wall in a fit of destruction, Edsel Ford came running into the courtyard with a museum employee, and Rivera turned on them, shouting that they were “murderers of the working class.” The millionaire captain of industry Ford fell to his knees and begged Rivera to stop wrecking the work because he shared his socialist sympathies, asking why Rivera thought he and

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Valentiner hired him to paint the murals if not precisely to encourage a socialist revolution in Detroit?14 This revelation calmed Rivera, and the mural was saved. Although Davis’ memoir was based on the reminiscences of a ninetyone-year-old man, recalling events that happened when he was sixteen, the story presents Ford and his mother Clara as sympathizers with the socialist cause. Davis declared that Rivera was hired to promote the utopian ideas that they hoped would transform America. Of course, it could be that Davis was exaggerating Ford’s reaction, or that Ford was lying to Rivera in order to save the mural. Although the idea of Edsel Ford as a socialist activist seems extraordinarily unlikely, the account must be properly placed in the context of the America of 1932, when it seemed possible to many that capitalism had utterly failed, while the revolutionary state in Russia seemed to be flourishing. President Hoover’s banking reforms had been a complete failure, and thousands of banks were shutting down under the pressure of huge runs on their reserves as the people completely lost faith in them. Many Americans believed that communism offered an answer to their problems. Perhaps a form of socialism really was a better alternative for an America ravaged by the collapse of the stock market. The Dust Bowl had driven countless farmers and their families from their homes into desperate unemployment, and the situation in the cities was just as bad. Although, in the 1910s, Henry Ford’s company had been famous for paying five dollars a day to workers who came to Detroit, very high wages for the time, by 1932, a third of the population of Motor City was unemployed, with no hope of relief. Even the mighty Ford-owned Guardian bank had closed its doors, despite being financed by Edsel Ford himself and housed in the First National and Guardian National building, the most spectacular skyscraper in Detroit’s skyline, known as ‘the cathedral of finance.’ What better place to promote socialism than Detroit? There, even workers fortunate enough to have a job suffered under appalling conditions, doing repetitive assembly line labour, tedious and dangerous tasks on machines that could crush limbs, paid little, and forbidden from talking to each other. Scholars have often wondered about the glaring contradictions of an ardent communist like Rivera being the artist of choice of the figureheads of finance in the United States. Revolutionary Rivera was commissioned to paint at temples of capitalism: the San Francisco Stock Exchange club by Pflueger; the Detroit Institute of Art by Edsel Ford; and the Rockefeller Center by Nelson Rockefeller. Rockefeller enthusiastically wrote to Wight, saying, “I can’t tell you how pleased we all are that Rivera is going to do the art panel for the entrance to the #1 building at Rockefeller Center. I feel this is perhaps the most important place in the development and that he is,

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without question, the man to do it.”15 This strange contradiction can only be explained by the contrast between the apparent apocalyptic failure of capitalism and the apparent success of Soviet communism, which was so strong that even wealthy Americans truly believed that dramatic change was necessary to save the country. Roosevelt was swept to power because of this revolutionary mood, with his progressive promises to help the working class and to build a new America. Limousine socialists like Edsel Ford and his mother Clara, Nelson Rockefeller and his mother Abby, Alfred Barnes, John Dewey, President Roosevelt and his New Dealers were all members of the American aristocratic class that saw the necessity for dramatic change. However, this commitment, or at the least, this resignation to coming left-wing social change would never extend to a full commitment to communism. The Rockefeller family’s reaction to Rivera’s addition of a portrait of Lenin at the Rockefeller Center would soon reveal the foolish danger of this position. Perhaps this enthusiasm for social reform among America’s ruling class was inherently self-protection – it was better to give away a percentage of their wealth to provide comfort to the proletariat than to see revolutionaries take it all. When Rivera was painting the Rockefeller Center mural, Nelson liked to climb the scaffold, and often sat with him for hours, talking while he painted. Asked one night at dinner about these lofty conversations, Rivera told his friends that Nelson said, “I’m of the last generation in which a great fortune will be in the hands of a single family.”16 But this must be taken with a pinch of salt and a drop of vinaigrette, like everything Rivera said. He was such a profligate exaggerator of the truth that it is impossible to trust his running accounts of events. Facts were starting lines for sprinting lies. In 1936, Trotsky, who many had expected to be Lenin’s heir, described such lip-service to the revolution as “an international school which might be described as Bolshevism for the Cultured Bourgeoisie, or more concisely, Socialism for the Radical Tourists.”17 In H.G. Wells’ famous interview with Joseph Stalin in 1934, the Soviet dictator said he believed the embrace of socialist ideas by capitalists was doomed to fail – the only way socialism could lead to utopia was through violent revolution. Hardcore Stalinist communists viewed Rivera’s acceptance of the commissions offered to him by American industrialists with sceptical sidelong glances, because he was consorting with the capitalist enemy. In Mexico, Rivera helped build a new cultural milieu for the postrevolutionary country, painting socialist murals for Vasconcelos that incorporated native Mexican imagery within them as a dominant theme. Aztec gods and costumes were liberally scattered throughout these

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paintings, and he repeatedly combined colonial imagery with native themes, establishing the idea of a Mexico saved by its revolutionary mestizo people, led by Emiliano Zapata. He had said the only true art was native art. Now, in the United States, how would he express himself? Industry was the religion and duty of all good citizens of the United States. This was the America of which President Calvin Coolidge said, “The man who builds a factory builds a temple; the man who works there worships there, and to each is due, not scorn and blame, but reverence and praise.” Coolidge’s propagandist Bruce Barton commented, “If anyone has uttered sounder doctrine for these troubled days in more effective language than that, I have not seen the utterance.”18 To Coolidge, “the chief business of the American people is business.”19 In New York to paint his portable murals for MoMA, and already planning for the masterpiece he would soon paint at the Detroit Institute, Rivera had watched countless new skyscrapers being built, cutting the city’s iconic new skyline. He painted watercolours of workers bending their backs to operate machines and use their hands to shape the new landscapes of the great city. To his biographer, Bertram Wolfe, Rivera said, “Your engineers are your greatest artists. These highways are the most beautiful things I have seen in your beautiful country. In all the constructions of man’s past – pyramids, Roman roads and aqueducts, cathedrals and palaces, there is nothing to equal these. Out of them and the machine will issue the style of tomorrow … The best modern architects of our time are finding their aesthetic and functional inspiration in North American industrial constructions, machine designs and engineering, the greatest expressions of the artistic genius of the New World.”20 The idea of painting this uniquely American transformation of the landscape, to capture this energetic new culture in painted plaster, now took hold of Rivera’s fantastic imagination. Excited by the prospect, he envisioned himself at the van of a great new hybrid art, propelling forward Vasconcelos’ ideas of la raza cósmica (the cosmic race) which described a superior mestizo people created from a mixture of all races of humanity in an alchemical crucible of man. Echoing Vasconcelos, he said, “I have always maintained that art in America, if some day it can be said to come into being, will be the product of a fusion between the marvelous indigenous art which derives from the immemorial depths of time in the center and south of the continent … and that of the industrial worker of the north.”21 Once in Detroit, Rivera focused entirely upon the industrial processes of the great car-making city, with its extraordinary range of manufacturing procedures, all leading to the production of the motorcar, from the most basic acquisition of raw materials to the last finishing touches of trim and

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detail. The great industrial innovator Henry Ford owned mines and smelting plants where ores were melded into steel; he owned titanic machines installed in factories where thick and gigantic, red hot sheets of plate metal rolled through vast presses and hammers, dwarfing the workers who tended them; he owned vast halls equipped with endless conveyor belts producing the parts needed for the engines, chassis, wheels, and seats, where thousands of men laboured on the assembly lines. For three months, Rivera studied it all, making countless sketches that he merged together in extraordinary panels that managed to show the interconnection of the various procedures of the factories in the production line, impressed by the factories, but disturbed by the way the exploited industrial workers were subsumed by the great machines. The magnificent Detroit Industry Murals were Rivera’s greatest work in the United States. Painted on each wall of an Italianate courtyard complete with a decorative fountain, the murals captured man’s role labouring within the industrial processes of the Ford Motor Company, transforming the mineral gifts of the earth. On the east wall, facing the entrance to the courtyard, the space was mostly occupied with an entryway to a staircase, but here he painted an image that was key to understanding the fresco. At the top was a long panel of an embryo held within the embrace of tree roots, embedded within the fossil-strewn mineral deposits of the earth. In the corner panels, earthy primitive female figures sat with the produce of the land in their laps, one with wheat and corn, and the other with apples. Two smaller panels held corn, gourds, and fruit. On the south wall, the long frieze of mineral deposits continued, with a band of white plates giving way to a sedimentary layer with embedded fossils of fishbones and seashells, while crystals proliferated in the corners. Above the mineral panel two mysterious, taciturn female nudes, one Caucasian, one Asian, held offerings of the earth in their upturned palms. Between them, the iconic native fists of the resurrected rasa punched through a mountain of chunky ochre. In a square panel at the top left, a man worked at a refrigerator in a laboratory, while a gaggle of uniformed women laboured with heads downturned toward tables, gathered about a bald male administrator, who reached for an accountant’s mechanical calculator. A male worker hauled on a huge wrench to loosen a bolt tightened onto a machine. In the opposite corner, two men co-operated to move a giant lever – here, Rivera used a double image of the men at the moments of the maximum and minimum height of their action. Behind them, men peered at dials in a control room, others huddled over equipment, while a man with a shovel struck at a box. In the foreground, a masked worker used a long tool above smoking buckets. But it is the big image beneath the mineral strip that

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commands the most attention. Here, Rivera crafted a tour de force of compositional skill in what must be the greatest mural painting on America soil, combining all the lessons he had learned from the cubists in Paris with the esoteric nativism he had absorbed from Vasconcelos, with his deep interest in his Mexican heritage, and with his intense study of Ford’s industrial landscape. Rivera compared the complex series of industrial processes he had seen in Detroit’s factories with the image of the Aztec goddess of the earth, Coatlicue, who gave as much as she destroyed. He transformed an obsolete stamping press into an anthropomorphic version of her. The industrial complex became the process that simultaneously exploited and fed the goddess, mining the minerals needed to create airplanes, medicines, motors, and market produce, and offering workers as human sacrifices. Coatlicue was capitalism embodied, worshipped, served, feared, and fed at the expense of the workers. This stamping press dominated the right-hand side of the wall, with snaking conveyors twisting around it. In the bottom right corner, Rivera painted portraits of Edsel Ford and Valentiner. On the other side of the chaotic but controlled scene, there was an overwhelmingly complex sequence of workers humping metal car parts fed to them upon mechanized tracks. A crowd of spectators watched them labour. Masked workers ground and shaped steel, while others muscled a heavy chassis onto a platform. A receding row of steering wheels led the viewer to the distant and tiny form of a little car, almost lost in the hubbub, which was the product of all this frenzied work. Ford’s famous maxim was that his customers could have their car in any colour they liked, as long as it was black. Rivera’s car was Marxist – the only color he wanted was red. Beneath this fabulous fresco, there were six small green-framed panels of monochrome grey scenes of workers in the factories, probably painted by Davis. Workers toiled on tractors in the fields and carried boxes on their shoulders, hunched in a sawmill, listening to an instructor demonstrating some of the finer points of building an engine. A solitary figure worked a huge generator, sheets of steel were forged, and characterless workers marched in a sad file across a footbridge. This frieze of the life of workers continued on the opposite wall. On the west wall, broken by the entrance to the courtyard from the street foyer, Rivera painted a high fresco in three panels, crafted as if the decorative architecture of the wall framed a window to another world, filled with imagery of airplanes and engines, with pilots wearing oxygen masks preparing to board their flying machines, and workers labouring on the engines of the aircraft. A compass arrow indicated that the wall was aligned south-south-west, and a star separated a divided human head – neatly

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bisected – one half a skull, and the other half a face, another reference to the Aztec goddess Coatlicue as the source of life and death. Instead of continuing the long mineral underworld around the entire space, Rivera painted an image of men working on shores divided by an ocean. On the left side of the water, industrial workers toiled in a factory, while on the right, they carved spiral grooves into the bark of rubber trees. In the sea, huge cargo ships spanned the horizon, and while men in motorboats set sail from the east, fish swam toward them from the west. A bird flew among sunflowers in a small panel on the left of the wall, and an eagle startled a dove on the right. Two tall panels guarded the entrance. On the left, a burly worker sat before a composition of boilers and pipes, while at right, a remarkable industrial machine provided a backdrop to a suited administrator working at his desk. The north wall was another masterpiece of fresco-painting. The mineral frieze continued, with a section of red cut rubies, a volcanic fissure cutting through the sediment, and a mass of salt. Above it, Rivera reprised the brown fists of la rasa clawing through the earth, which he had painted on the opposite side of the courtyard, but here the mountain was of a yellow sandstone, and the two naked female figures reclining on either side were a red native, and a black African. These two completed the four racial ‘trunks’ that were destined to mix and create a fifth race combining, “the Black, the Indian, the Mongol, and the White.” America was home to all four of these races, and needed to combine them all to engineer a utopian future race. This concept was taken directly from Rivera’s patron Vasconcelos’ 1925 essay, La Raza Cosmica, which predicted boldly the coming triumph of the superior universal race, in which he wrote, “The white race has brought the world to a state in which all human types and cultures will be able to fuse with each other. The civilization developed and organized in our times by the whites has set the moral and material basis for the union of all men into a fifth universal race, the fruit of all the previous ones and amelioration of everything past.”22 It was the destiny of this fifth mestizo race to be the final form of humanity. Helmeted men in gas masks worked in a nerve agent laboratory in the small panel at top left, arming bombs, contrasting with a doctor who inoculated a Christ-like child held in the arms of a virginal nurse at top right. Behind them, scientists developed more medical treatments. In two small panels above decorative niches, Rivera copied microscopic images of bacteria. Again, it was the big central panel that deserved accolades. A brilliant piece of work, it was a scene of extraordinary labour, with an army of workers

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machining car parts for installation, and toiling over the assembly line, which receded into the distance. Here, Davis painted grey panels of the faceless workers clocking in, a furnace crucible pouring molten metal, two industrial factories, expendable wage-slaves dwarfed by oppressive engines, and hunched men eating a lackluster lunch, surrounded by the machinery they served. Rivera’s frescos became more politically radical as he gained confidence, and although the official account of the Detroit Art Institute’s mural described his love affair with the impressive machinery and overwhelming power of the Ford industrial system as his principal inspiration, it was hard to ignore the blank-faced and impassive anonymity of the workers. While these men strained their bodies to move heavy engine blocks piled onto a cart, they were watched by hawkish supervisors who peered at them suspiciously. Despite the conflict between Rivera’s financial gain and the mystically egalitarian principles of his racial creed, the communist message of the murals was clear. Esoteric theory aside, Rivera’s lifelong commitment to socialist doctrines of one form or another was indubitable. In Detroit, he combined classic socialist imagery of the proletariat with Vasconcelos’ hermetic race theories to form his own utopian fantasy for the future – but clearly revolutionary communism was the path that would achieve it. It is technically challenging to create a chromatic red in true fresco, a medium which tends to mute the colour palette. Davis recalled Rivera singing while he re-painted the flames of the furnace on the north wall with bright red casein to make the blaze appear hotter and more vibrant, booming out the lyric of the communist anthem, the Internationale, in Spanish, while Davis sang along in English.23 Whatever his audience’s opinion of Rivera’s politics may have been, these were exceptional paintings, and provided a perfect combination of primitivism, radical avant-gardism, and social realism in a single location. Mystical imagery aside, Rivera’s work was exemplary of what Holger Cahill wanted his Public Works of Art Project artists to produce. While Rivera had been in New York creating the murals for the MoMA show, Abby Rockefeller and her son, Nelson, had invited him to return to paint a mural at the Rockefeller Center in New York after he finished the project in Detroit. He enthusiastically embraced the prospect, which had the ambitious watershed of a title, “Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future.” Now, working in Detroit, he produced sketches for a new, dramatic composition and a written description of the mural, contrasting two powerfully opposing themes in contemporary society: communism and capitalism. Creating the

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spectacular imagery of the faceless Detroit workers inspired him to push his proletarian ideas still further. Later, Rivera wrote, “It was the problem of painting a fresco that would be useful to the working people of New York, since the producers have enriched the financiers who ‘own’ the building; and in all justice, it is to the working people of the city and of the world that Rockefeller Center really belongs. Thus, I considered that the only correct painting to be made in the building must be an exact and concrete expression of the situation of society under capitalism at the present time, and an indication of the road that man must follow in order to liquidate hunger, oppression, disorder and war. Such a painting would continue to have esthetic and social value – and still greater historical value – when the building eventually passed from the hands of its temporary capitalist owners into those of the free commonwealth of all society.”24 Nelson and Abby approved the sketch and description, neatly typed by Wight, and became regular visitors to the RCA site when Rivera began work in March 1933. The Rockefellers persuaded the management of the Center that Rivera would be an excellent choice for one of three vast murals in the gleaming lobby. Although John D. was neither a fan of Rivera, nor his politics, nor of modern art in general, he thought Rivera’s fame would be a draw to the new building – and he needed to attract all the attention he could get while trying to rent out office space during the worst economic depression in history. The stock version of the events that swirled about Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads is a tale of Nelson and John D. as reactionary capitalist overlords appalled by the inclusion of a rabid communist in the mural they commissioned, responding to the despicable actions of their unfaithful minion by destroying the offense. But deeper currents directed the flow of the story. Wight kept a copy of Rivera’s plan for the mural. It was a detailed description, in two and a half pages of closely typed English, couched firmly in communist terms. Rivera’s proposal read, “On the side where Brangwyn is to depict the development of the Ethical Relations of Mankind, my painting will show as the culmination of this evolution, human intelligence in possession of the Forces of Nature, expressed by the lightning striking off the hand of Jupiter and being transformed into useful electricity that helps to cure man’s ills, unites men through Radio and Television and furnishes them with Light and Motive Power. Below, the Man of Science presents the scale of Natural Evolution, the understanding of which replaces the Superstitions of the past. This is the frontier of Ethical Evolution. “On the side where Sert is to represent the development of the Technical Power of Man, my panel will show the Workers arriving at a true understanding of their rights regarding the means of production, which has

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resulted in the planning of the liquidation of Tyranny, personified by a crumbling statue of Caesar whose head has fallen to the ground. It will also show the Workers of the City and the Country inheriting the Earth. This is expressed by placing the hands of the producers in the gesture of possession over a map of the world resting on sheaves of wheat supported by a dynamo, expressive of Agricultural Production supported by Machinery and Scientific Technique – the result of the evolution of the methods of production. This is the Frontier of Material Development. “The main plastic function of the central panel is to express the axis of the building, its loftiness, and the ascending echelon of its lateral masses. For this, colour will be employed in the center of the composition merging laterally with the general clair-obscure. “In the center, the telescope brings to the vision and understanding of man, the most distant celestial bodies. The microscope makes visible and comprehensible to man infinitesimal living organisms, connecting atoms, and cells with the astral system. Exactly in the median line, the cosmic energy received by two antenna is conducted to the machinery controlled by the worker, where it is transformed into productive energy. “The Worker gives his right hand to the peasant who questions him, and with his left hand, takes the hand of the sick and wounded soldier, the victim of War, leading him to the New Road. On the right of the central group, the Mothers, and on the left, the Teachers, watching over the development of the New Generation, which is protected by the work of the Scientists. Above, on the right, the Cinematograph shows a group of young women in the enjoyment of health – Sports, and on the left, it shows a group of unemployed workmen in the bread-line. Above this group, the Television gives an image of War, as in the case of unemployment, the result of the evolution of Technical Power unaccompanied by a corresponding Ethical Development. On the opposite side, above the representation of the joys derived from Sports, the same Television brings the image of a Popular Movement the result of high aspirations created by Ethical Development but unsuccessful without an accompanying parallel material development of Technical Power and Industrial Organization, either already existing or created by the movement itself. “In the center, Man is expressed in his triple aspect, the peasant who develops from the Earth the products which are the origin and base of all the riches of Mankind, the Worker of the Cities who transforms and distributes the raw materials given by the Earth, and the Soldier who, under the Ethical Force that produces martyrs in religions and wars, represents Sacrifice. Man, represented by these three figures, looks with uncertainty but with hope towards a future, more complete balance between the

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Technical and Ethical development of Mankind necessary to a New, more humane and Logical Order.”25 The Rockefellers unquestionably knew this was going to be a communist mural from the beginning. But Rivera’s assistant Lucienne Bloch described the signing of the agreement: “This was all pure socialism, but the strangest part was the way it was accepted by the employer. Raymond Hood discussed the project with Rivera, at the Detroit Art Institute in January 1933, when the painter had finished this sketch; the assistants, Flores, Halberstadt and Dimitroff were nearby. Hood asked Diego if he had the sketch. Rivera opened a portfolio and presented the drawing to him. The architect glanced at it, then signed it. Rivera asked, ‘Do you have the contract?’ When Hood handed it to him, the artist turned to the last page and signed it. ‘You better have your lawyer see it,’ said Hood. Diego replied, ‘You signed my sketch without looking it over. You trust me, I trust you!’”26 Wight reported to his friend Stackpole in a letter dated December 2nd, 1932, “I was afraid that [Rivera’s] sketches would not be approved by the Rockefellers, but Mrs. J. D. Jr. said that he didn’t give Communism enough importance and asked him to include a portrait of Lenin.”27 In February, Rivera travelled from Detroit to New York to visit the RCA building so he would have a clear idea of how his mural would work within the space. Challenged by the sharp modernist verticals of the huge hall, on his return he redesigned his sketch with a more fluid, elliptical composition that would be more effective. Bloch, who became the clandestine photographer of the RCA project, kept a diary. She said Rivera was desperate to return to the Mexican Communist Party after being expelled in 1929 for consorting with antiSoviet thinkers. To curry favour with them, Rivera wanted to create a mural that was explicitly communist to show that he was a true revolutionary. Bloch, corroborating Wight’s account of Abby’s political sympathies, if not her direct request to Rivera, wrote on April 8th, “I enlarged the entire north and south walls. Diego plans to paint them before the planks are taken down to the next level. He has painted the telescope section and still controls his colors. But today he sure loosened up! He’s on the right side of the wall painting Communism, with women in kerchiefs singing, and red flags all over – and they’re RED. The subject is “May Day Demonstration.” He’s working from his little Moscow sketchbook, which is full of drawings of a May Day at Lenin’s tomb. He had been permitted to add “a slight amount of color” towards the center of the mural, but with the booklet reminding him of the time when he sketched this from life, he forgot all restraints. I expect some commotion about this new turn, but Frieda tells me that Mrs.

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Rockefeller visited him and climbed the scaffold to watch him work and said that it was the finest part of the mural yet. (I think later on she bought this little sketchbook from Rivera.) When I showed surprise, Frieda told me that Mrs. R. has a radical taste. She even wanted Diego to paint a copy of his fresco from Mexico showing the millionaires, John D., Morgan and Ford sitting at a table, looking at the ticker tape, holding champagne glasses, except John D. with his glass of milk! He would have loved to do that. It’s right down his alley, but there is no doubt he was afraid the C. P. would pounce on him again for being a renegade and flirting with the capitalists. My reaction is that Mrs. R. has a fantastic sense of humor.”28 An unpleasant surprise greeted Nelson on the morning of April 24th, when he awoke to read an article in The World Telegram with the headline, “Rivera Perpetuates Scenes of Communist Activity for R.C.A. Walls – And Rockefeller Foots Bill,” criticizing the mural as leftist propaganda.29 A few days later, encouraged by Abby, under pressure from communist visitors to the jobsite, and recalling media reactions to his socialist work in Detroit that had gained him much notoriety, on April 28th, Rivera, in love with being at the centre of scandalous lore, painted the head of Lenin into Man at the Crossroads. Immediately after seeing the portrait, Nelson wrote a polite, but firm letter to Rivera directing him to remove the face of the revolutionary and replace it with an everyman. Rivera refused. He fired back that he would rather see the whole mural destroyed than alter it. Ironically, the RCA building was opened to new tenants on May 1st – Mayday, the great communist holiday. Crowds gathered in the lobby to see the face of Lenin in the instantly notorious but unfinished mural. Nelson came under pressure from his father John D. and the building planners, who wanted to rent the building without disagreeable crowds of artists and communists hanging about. Within two weeks of the appearance of the portrait of Lenin, Rockefeller Center rentals manager Hugh Robertson strode into the lobby with twelve armed guards. One of them ordered Rivera down from the scaffolding, where he was busy with his brushes. Robertson brusquely handed Rivera a check for $14,000, paying him in full for the mural, and told him to leave the building at once. Rivera announced to his assistants that they must stop working. The guards escorted Rivera out and hustled his assistants to put down their tools. Bloch secretly snapped photographs of the unfinished fresco which are now the only record of its existence. Rivera described the scene: “Before I left the building an hour later, the carpenters had already covered the mural, as though they feared that the entire city, with its banks and stock exchanges, its great buildings and millionaire residences, would be

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destroyed utterly by the mere presence of an image of Vladimir Ilyitch…”30 Bloch dashed upstairs and frantically scraped at the whitewash covering the windows of the incomplete building, spelling out a message to the world, “Workers Unite,” and “Help! Protect Rivera M …” but the guards dragged her away before she was able to complete the word “Murals,” and expelled her from the building.31 A newspaper frenzy began. What would Rivera do now? To make a statement responding to the newspaper publicity about his dismissal from the Rockefeller Center, Rivera spent the remainder of his time in New York before his U.S. visa expired painting at the International School of Workers, the Rand School, and the New Workers School, where he was able to include portraits of Lenin and other communist icons without fear of censorship, in some extraordinary panels describing the American class war, crowded with figures illustrating the American revolutionary proletarian struggle. When these projects were finished, he returned to Mexico to work unfettered on government-funded projects. Late in the evening on February 10th, 1934, trucks pulled up outside the Rockefeller Center and a platoon of workers erected a new scaffold in front of Man at the Crossroads. The mural had been languishing under shrouds of stretched canvas which concealed the dangerous face of Lenin from the sensitive eyes of delicate New Yorkers. Now, under the steel chisels of Rockefeller’s iconoclasts, the tough but inflexible layers of plaster that had been so carefully laid by Rivera’s skilled assistants were smashed into pieces and tumbled to the ground below. Working into the small hours of the morning of February 11th, the mural was reduced to dust and scattered fragments, piled into oil drums, loaded into trucks, and trashed. By chance, Bloch and her boyfriend Stephen Dimitroff, who had also been one of Rivera’s assistants, walked to the Rockefeller Center that day after watching a matinee double bill, and found a dozen oil drums clustered next to the locked entrance filled with shards of broken plaster. Shocked, they picked up some of the fragments and recognized their master’s brushstrokes. Immediately, they hurried to a telephone to call the press and to reach Rivera in Mexico.32 Commuters arriving at the building for work on Monday morning were greeted by the smell of fresh plaster and a tabula rasa rising above them where the great mural had once stood. From Mexico, Rivera sent a cable to his biographer Bertram D. Wolfe at the New Workers School, saying, “In destroying my paintings, the Rockefellers have committed an act of cultural vandalism. There ought to be, there will yet be, a justice that prevents the assassination of human creation as of human character. The Rockefellers demonstrate that the system they represent is the enemy of human culture, as it is of the further

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advance of science and the productive powers of mankind. My case, which is more than personal, I leave in the hands of the American masses. They will yet take over industry and public buildings and guarantee the further development of man’s productive and creative powers.”33 If Rockefeller had been more attentive to the deal, and Rivera had not felt that he had complete artistic freedom, perhaps the destruction of the mural could have been averted. The understanding between Rivera and the Rockefellers’ representative, based on a handshake, was carelessly casual. Like Edsel Ford in Detroit, the Rockefellers of New York were not simply ruthless arch-capitalist exploiters of the workers; in fact, whether inspired by fear or good intentions, like many progressive American aristocrats, they sympathized with the plight of the workers, and supported Roosevelt and the New Deal. Nevertheless, Nelson was maligned in some narratives as the wanton and philistine destroyer of a masterpiece. In fact, the destruction of the mural was not executed lightly – in 1939, Time magazine recalled, “At first, he was strong for showing the mural, sins and all, at the Museum of Modern Art. Then, he came around to his father’s view that the less said and seen, the better.”34 At MoMA, the mural’s political implications would neither impact the rental value of the museum, nor irritate the sensitivities of any tenants, but this was never carried out. The real reason the fresco was destroyed was a three-quarter inch design flaw. Rivera said America was “a country where buildings didn’t last long,”35 so, while creating his frescos at MoMA, he and Wight contrived an ingenious strategy for preserving them even if the buildings they decorated had to be demolished. Wight’s detailed description of their methods has been preserved in the archives of the Detroit Institute of Arts. Once the original plaster of the site’s walls had been removed, a metal framework was built upon the wall to support a galvanized metal mesh, creating a one-inch space between the fresco and the wall itself that meant the murals were suspended by a metal frame, but not physically bonded to it. This meant the plaster could later, if absolutely necessary, be cut into sections and fairly easily removed. Next, three layers of brown plaster were laid onto the mesh. The first layer was mixed with coconut fibre and left to dry with a roughly textured surface; the second layer of plaster was mixed with hair and finished a little smoother; the third layer was brown plaster alone. A smooth and fine fourth coat of white plaster with a slightly textured surface was made ready to take the crucial, extremely smooth fifth coat, the intonaco, which was prepared with so fine a surface that it resembled marble. It was into this fifth layer of damp plaster that the master would paint, using only very finely ground

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pigments mixed with distilled water to create his imagery. As the plaster dried, a chemical reaction between the lime in it and the pigments upon it transformed the surface, so that the colors were incorporated into the now rock-like surface of the wall, becoming one of the most durable of all painted surfaces. By the time Rivera’s plaster crew got to Detroit, their preparation of the walls he was going to paint had become a wellchoreographed routine. This clever method of building Rivera’s murals to stand alone was not followed in the Rockefeller Center. There, that crucial initial metal framework, specifically designed to leave space between the original wall so that the mural could be removed, if necessary, was omitted. In Wight’s correspondence with A. W. Butt of the Rockefeller Center, he clearly described the method that Rivera expected to be used for his mural in New York, but the specifications the architects at the Center gave him allowed for a depth of only three-quarters of an inch for all five layers of plaster, meaning that the first layer of brown plaster and coconut fibre had to be applied directly onto the wall of the building without any space behind it. Wight’s letter to Butt, dated January 12th, 1933, described the change quite clearly: “As you state in your letter of the third, the ¾ inch allowance for plastering on the terra cotta wall will not permit of the use of metal furring and so it will be impossible to furr-out the wall for the fresco so as to leave an air space between the fresco and the wall. This being the case, the scratch coat will have to be applied directly to the terra cotta wall. Metal lath should be applied to the wall to hold the scratch coat. The scratch and brown coats and the metal lath should conform to the specifications already submitted.”36 It was now impossible to separate the two surfaces from each other. The only way to remove the plaster carrying Rivera’s fresco from the original wall was by destroying it. It was a three-quarter inch disaster. One of the labourers who demolished the fresco happened to meet Rivera’s plasterer Stephen Dimitroff after the iconoclasm was complete, and asked, “What did you put in the plaster to make it so tough? We had a helluva time chopping that wall!”37 In the end, the Rockefellers suffered a temporary public embarrassment for the perception they had funded a communist mural, which they quickly assuaged by turning their attention to a patriotic endorsement of American art by American artists at MoMA, while Rivera gained a great deal of notoriety in the press, and was now able to cast himself as a true communist activist, and reestablish his commitment to the party. But Rivera paid a serious financial price for his icon of Lenin. By refusing to get Nelson and Abby out of their family bind by simply chipping the head of Lenin from

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the fresco and repainting it with a less controversial figure, he lost the support of the American circle of rich investors who had funded his murals throughout the United States. Rivera was outed in the American press as a radical communist, and because of the Radio City scandal he would enjoy no more hobnobbing with the American social elite; no more lucrative commissions would come to him from MoMA; and the commission to paint a mural titled Forge and Foundry for General Motors in Chicago for the Century of Progress Exposition evaporated like a chimera. MoMA would not grant Rivera a solo show again until 2011, long after the deaths of all the key players in the drama.

Notes 1

Diego Rivera and Bertram D. Wolfe, Portrait of America, Covici Friede, 1934, 11 Art: The Long Voyage Home, Time Magazine, Art: The Long Voyage Home April 4th, 1949 3 Diego Rivera and Gladys March, Diego Rivera, My Art, My Life, Dover, 1991, 20 - 21 4 Ibid, 57 5 Ibid, 30 6 Ibid, 46 7 Ibid, 87 8 Ibid, 106 9 Linda Bank Downs, Diego Rivera, The Detroit Industry Murals, Detroit Institute of Arts & Norton, 1999, 51 10 Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr and the intellectual origins of the Museum of Modern Art, M.I.T. press, 2002, 194 11 Linda Bank Downs, Diego Rivera, The Detroit Industry Murals, Detroit Institute of Arts & Norton, 1999, 31 12 Rivera’s Aid Reaches City, clipping from an unnamed newspaper, March 21st 1932, Clifford Wight Collection relating to Diego Rivera, (Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries), Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution 13 Pablo S. Davis, Jean M. Wharton, The Sixth Layer: My Account of Working with Diego Rivera on his Masterpiece, the Detroit Industry Mural. Wayne State University Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, July 2007, pp. 74-76 14 Ibid, 37-38 15 Nelson Rockefeller, Letter to Clifford Wight, 23rd September 1932, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, Ralph Stackpole papers, ca. 1920-1980. BANC MSS 82/161c Box 1 16 Edward Lanin, The New Deal Mural Projects, in: Ed. Francis V. O’Connor, The New Deal Art Projects, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1972, 82 17 Leon Trotsky, Trans. Max Eastman, The Revolution Betrayed, Dover, 2004, 2 2

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Bruce Barton, The Silent Man on Beacon Hill. An Appreciation of Calvin Coolidge, In: Woman’s Home Companion, March 1920 19 Calvin Coolidge, Speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, D.C., January 17, 1925, The American Presidency Project website. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-american-societynewspaper-editors-washington-dc 20 Bertram D. Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, Stein and Day, 1963, 277 21 Diego Rivera and Bertram D. Wolfe, Portrait of America, Covici Friede, 1934, 19 22 José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race, Johns Hokins University Press, 1997, 9 23 Pablo S. Davis, Jean M. Wharton, The Sixth Layer: My Account of Working with Diego Rivera on his Masterpiece, the Detroit Industry Mural. Wayne State University Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, July 2007, 57 24 Diego Rivera and Bertram D. Wolfe, Portrait of America, Covici Friede, 1934, 23 - 24 25 Diego Rivera, Subject Matter Of The Proposed Mural Decorations By Diego Rivera For The Radio Corporation Of America Building In The Rockefeller Center, New York, in the Clifford Wight Collection relating to Diego Rivera, (Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries), Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Microfilm reel 4573 26 Lucienne Bloch, On Location with Diego Rivera, In: Art in America, 74, February, 1986 27 Clifford Wight, Letter to Ralph Stackpole, 2nd December 1932, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, Ralph Stackpole papers, ca. 1920-1980. BANC MSS 82/161 c Box 1 28 Lucienne Bloch, On Location with Diego Rivera, In: Art in America, 74, February, 1986, 114 - 116 29 Joseph Lilly, Rivera Perpetuates Scenes Of Communist Activity For R.C.A. Walls – And Rockefeller Foots Bill. The World Telegram, April 24th, 1933 30 Diego Rivera and Bertram D. Wolfe, Portrait of America, Covici Friede, 1934, 27 31 N/A, Art: Rockefellers v. Rivera, Time Magazine, Vol. 21, No. 21, Monday, May 22nd, 1933 32 Lucienne Bloch, On Location with Diego Rivera, In: Art in America, 74, February, 1986, 114 - 116 33 Rivera RCA Mural Is Cut From Wall, New York Times, 13th February, 1934, 21 34 Time Magazine, Art: Beautiful Doings, Monday, May 22, 1939 35 Bertram D. Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, 354 36 Clifford Wight, Letter to A. W. Butt, 12th January 1933, Clifford Wight Collection relating to Diego Rivera, (Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries), Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Microfilm reel 4573 37 Lucienne Bloch, On Location with Diego Rivera, In: Art in America, 74, February, 1986, 114 - 116

RED RIGHT HAND

“When there is an invisible elephant in the room, one is from time to time bound to trip over a trunk.”1 Karen Joy Fowler

While Diego Rivera painted the Rockefeller Center fresco, he sent Clifford Wight to Chicago to make advance preparations for the Forge and Foundry project. With its cancellation, Wight was suddenly unemployed, and travelled to San Francisco to re-join his friend Ralph Stackpole, who had originated a treasury-funded project to paint murals in the newly-erected Coit Tower overlooking the bay. Wight would play a central role in the scandalous story of the murals at the tower, at the heart of another disastrous humiliation for the government’s art projects, once again linking the Public Works of Art Project to international communism. Attracted to the prospect of a steady pay-check from the Public Works of Art Project, Stackpole and Bernard Zackheim recruited their friends from the faculty of the California School of Fine Arts, and a mixture of past and present students. There was an enclave of trained fresco painters associated with the school, because Ray Boynton had been teaching mural painting there for a decade, and expertise in the difficult craft of fresco plastering and painting was hard to find in the United States. The group quickly won the commission and worked together to complete the three and a half thousand square feet of murals inside the tower. Of the twenty-five muralists employed at Coit Tower, ten had worked with Rivera or studied his methods by watching him at work in Mexico. Fifteen were connected to the California School of Fine Arts, including Wight, who had taught sculpture there in the summer of 1931.2 Curiously, although Stackpole was a prominent figure in the group of artists who painted the tower, he argued against its construction when it was first proposed. He wrote to his comrade Wight, saying, “They are going to put a tower, 185 feet high, on Telegraph Hill. Arthur Brown is the architect. We fought it for months and the whole city was stirred up about it, but Mr. Fleischhacker finally put it through the supervisors, and the art commission passed it five to four. I’ve made a lot of enemies; I hope some good ones.”3 Any newfound enemies he might have made were neither ferocious nor powerful enough to prevent him from being one of the most prominent

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artists in San Francisco. Stackpole would go on to create much of the iconic art deco sculpture that would give the city its unique character, including an enormous eighty-foot statue, Pacifica, that would dominate the entrance to the 1939 World’s Fair on Treasure Island in the bay, and the magnificent sculptures that still decorate the front of the old San Francisco stock exchange. The structure of Coit Tower was quickly completed, and it took its place dominating the South Bay skyline. Critics derided it for its resemblance to a fire hose nozzle, but the architects vigorously denied being inspired by such a prosaic thing. By late January 1934, the interior walls were prepared to take the fifth layer of plaster into which the fresco would be painted. Propagandists from the Public Works of Art Project made sure the press knew how harmoniously the artists were working together, contrasting this happy group of Californians with the aggressive and argumentative New Yorkers, who seemed to be ready and willing to fight about anything, and had quickly developed a reputation for being spiteful. While Rivera painted in the United States, his right-hand man had been an ex-patriot English sculptor named Clifford Weight. Weight was quite an adventurer. Originally from Swindon, a shabby railway town in the south of England, when he was twenty years old, he left his homeland to join his brother’s family in Canada. They had emigrated from England two years earlier, in 1915. During the First World War, Weight served as a Canadian Mounted Police Officer, and then enlisted in the Canadian Overseas Expeditionary Force, under the false name of Bert West. As West, he served in the European theatre until 1919, removing unexploded bombs. He told Maxine Albro about this dangerous assignment while working with her in San Francisco, a story which must have made an impression, as she recalled it clearly in an interview made many years later: “Clifford Wight, during the war, was among the group of men that rounded up the old bombs and took them out to a place and set them off and it was a very, very dangerous job, but he enjoyed it and laughed about it. He told us about it one time when we saw him. He told us about going into restaurants with his crew with bombs on their trucks, unexploded bombs on their trucks and they would stop out in front of a restaurant and run in – some little hole in the wall or some place like that and go in to get a cup of coffee or something. The people would just scatter and crowd in the back part and give those fellas their seats and serve them quickly. So, the waitresses would begin running with cups of coffee and feed them as fast as they could, so they would get out. I think that Clifford always enjoyed doing something that would cause a stir. He was kind of that type.”4

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Weight traveled to Mexico sometime between 1922 and 1927 to meet and work with Rivera, and became his assistant. Both were fluent in French – Rivera from his years in Paris and his close friendship with Picasso and other leaders of radical bohemia, and Weight from his years in Canada and France during and after the Great War. The two men communicated easily. An able administrator, Weight quickly won Rivera’s trust, and the artist painted him in one of his frescos at the Secretariat of Education. While he was in Mexico, Weight changed his name to ‘Wight’ in a bid to avoid social embarrassment – in Mexican Spanish, the English word ‘Weight’ sounds similar to the colloquial expression, ‘güey,’ pronounced ‘hway,’ like ‘weight’ without the consonant ‘t’ at the end – which was used in the same spirit that Americans would use the then derogatory term ‘dude.’ ‘Güey,’ was derived from a Spanish word meaning ‘ox.’ ‘Wight’ doesn’t have the same pronunciation at all. It seems likely that Clifford made the change to avoid dealing with giggles when he was introduced to people while he lived south of the border. Wight’s stepson, Julian Baker, claimed that his stepfather’s later trouble with the American government came in part because he was working under this pseudonym. Stackpole had been a dear friend of Rivera’s since his days in Paris, and met fellow-communist Wight while working together on the master’s murals in Mexico, and the two became comrades during the long shifts that Rivera insisted upon. Doubtlessly, the gregarious and charming Stackpole introduced Wight to his circle of Californian friends, who deployed to Mexico to assist Rivera, or to study fresco painting under him. In 1930, Rivera was invited to San Francisco to paint a commissioned mural for the Stock Exchange Club, and another for the California School of Fine Arts (now called the Art Institute). By now, Wight was a paternal but skilful organizer, and Rivera appreciated his abilities to lead his increasingly international crew. Rivera spoke poor English, and Wight naturally became the go-between for the great muralist and his American admirers. It was Wight who took care of Rivera’s correspondence with William Gerstle, who commissioned him to paint in San Francisco. It was Wight who made arrangements for Rivera in Detroit, New York, and Chicago. It was Wight who described the exact materials and metal lath support for the layers of plaster on which the day’s work would be done by the master. It was Wight who directed the plasterers and assistants in their duties and kept careful track of the hours they worked, and the successes and failures of their materials. Enjoying his friend’s company and increasingly depending upon him for preparations and organizing the ever-present crew of enthusiastic volunteers and assistants, in the mural titled Making a Fresco at the

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California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, Rivera painted Wight twice, first as a worker sharpening a chisel and again as one of the other workers perched on the scaffold with their backs turned to the viewer. Wight wrote to ‘the Red Earl’ Viscount Jack Hastings, who had become one of Rivera’s trusted assistants and friends, letting him know that he too was to be immortalized as one of the figures in the painting – he was the workman at the top left with a plumb line above Rivera, who sits at the centre with his back to the world. A first sign of Rivera’s nascent willingness to express his communism in his American murals now appeared. An enthusiastic Wight wrote to Jack, “a red star with the cross and hammer and sickle in yellow … That is going to start something!”5 Considering what was to come in the next three turbulent years of Rivera’s career, Wight’s comment was an extravagant understatement. Actually, it didn’t start anything at all, for Rivera only painted a red circle dangling from a twisted string hanging out of the giant worker’s breast pocket. Although in the completed work the button was colored a light red, with a darker red star upon it, there was no hammer and sickle present, and Rivera explained the red star away as a drawstring tag from a Bull Durham tobacco pouch – a mocked-up circular seal attached to a string that was used to tie the packet closed. Research uncovered no such design for Durham tobacco in 1931, so it seems likely that Rivera was dissembling.6 Wight was probably excited about one of Rivera’s full sized cartoon drawings of the mural when he wrote to Stackpole, and not the mural itself. Perhaps at this early stage of his American adventure, Rivera lacked the determination to express his communist convictions, and was unwilling to offend his hosts. Perhaps he was just waiting for an opportunity to make a more dramatic impact. Perhaps he had not yet become angry enough about the cause of the working class to make the statements he would make in Detroit and New York. If he planned to catch the attention of the public in order to raise the profile of communism in American affairs, then a scandalous mural at a fairly small art school on the West Coast would only be a minor storm in comparison to the tempest he might summon in striketorn Detroit, or the hurricane he would summon in the capitalist citadel in New York, where he would paint for the giants of American industry. During the 1980s, a rebellious student painted a hammer and sickle onto the button using toothpaste as paint, perhaps as a gesture toward Rivera’s original intentions. This graffiti was not removed until the 1990s.7 From June to August 1931, Wight taught a summer school sculpture class at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, and assisted Stackpole on his sculptures for the Stock Exchange building. By November 1931, Wight and Rivera travelled to New York to produce the exhibit of

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murals for MoMA. During 1932, Wight worked for Rivera on the Detroit Industry mural series for Edsel Ford at the Detroit Institute of Arts. A film of Rivera and Wight working on the Detroit murals was shot, showing Wight confidently balanced upon a single plank while using a long stick of charcoal to render the outline drawing of Rivera’s composition onto the wall.8 Once Rivera was well into the work in Detroit, Wight travelled to New York to prepare the walls at the RCA, then to Chicago for the planned Forge and Foundry Project. While Rivera was paid off for the destroyed Rockefeller mural in New York, and travelled back to Mexico, Wight returned to San Francisco, and joined his friend Stackpole to work on the paintings at Coit Tower, arriving in San Francisco by October 29th, 1933.9 Naturally, his expertise as one of Rivera’s assistants was welcomed at the tower and Wight produced four tall figures of his own as part of the immense series of imagery that decorated the interior walls. On February 10th, 1934, Rivera’s RCA mural Man at the Crossroads was torn down. The national newspapers were slow to react, for the destruction was carried out under the cover of the weekend night. When the Coit Tower artists in San Francisco heard the fresco had been smashed, they quickly organized a demonstration, picketing the tower with posters protesting censorship. Artist Maxine Albro was photographed as she proposed a motion to a small crowd of them gathered outside the tower, criticizing the destruction “… as an acute symptom of a growing reaction in the American culture which has threatened for years to strangle all creative effort and which is becoming increasingly menacing.”10 A downcast Wight was there, standing behind the woman in white overalls. Albro paid homage to Rivera in her own mural in the tower by including a woman gathering white lilies – one of Rivera’s favourite motifs. But her commitment to standing against censorship would collapse in the face of the trouble that was about to come to this supposedly harmonious group of painters. An opening celebration was planned at Coit Tower for July 7th, giving the artists the benefit of a solid deadline to work toward, but Marxist imagery included in paintings by Victor Arnautoff, Bernard Zakheim, John Langley Howard, and Wight, caused anger and dismay among the press, who were already stirred up by union agitation and violence on the docks and knew a good story when they saw one. An especially controversial panel titled City Life was painted by Arnautoff, a handsome White Russian officer turned communist artist who had also been an assistant to Rivera. The painting caused trouble because it included a self-portrait of Arnautoff standing at a news stand which conspicuously displayed copies of the

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communist Daily Worker and New Masses newspapers in a rack. The project’s co-organizer Zakheim produced a painting titled Library, which included a series of people reading newspapers with dramatic headlines about the problems confronting the world and the events of the day in San Francisco, including a copy of the San Francisco News dated February 14th, 1934, with the header, “Thousands Slaughtered in Austria.” Within the composition, Zackheim painted a portrait of Stackpole reading a paper with the headline, “Local Artists Protest Destruction of Rivera’s Fresco,” generic broadsheets headed, “Hoover Aid Fights Airmail Fraud,” “Thug Suspect Slain (in) Gun Fight,” a Western Worker header read, “Strikers Defy Police to Fight Fascism,” “Matrimonial Failure,” and “Carner’s 4-1 Shot.” San Francisco sculptor Beniamino Bufano read a paper saying, “B. Bufano’s St. Francis Just Around the Corner – Art Commission Wakes From its Deep Sleep,” “Moratorium in North Dakota,” “Home Foreclosures: Banks Refuse U.S. Home Loan Funds. Oil Magnates Arrested,” and the sequence of figures culminated in a figure reaching up for a copy of Das Kapital by Marx (modelled by fellow-painter and Marxist, Howard), whose ideas were clearly going to provide the solution to all of these issues. Deliberately insulting the artists, the New York Times reported that the figures reading the papers were “a group of ragged, dirty proletarians.”11 And they had a point. Zakheim’s Library was a bibliography for 1930s leftist intellectuals. Among the authors Zakheim painted onto the shelves around Marx were volumes by the Marxist socialist realist author Maxim Gorky, a cryptic “Ostranvanyan,” the Bolshevik revolutionary theorist Bukharin (spelled ‘Bukarhin’ in the painting), the philosopher Hegel, the Marxist economist Iosef Lapidus (spelled ‘Lapidas’), the prominent communist author John Strachey whose books Revolution by Reason (1925) and The Coming Struggle for Power (1932) were essential American socialist texts, the famously Marxist literary critic Granville Hicks, the Marxist poet Langston Hughes, and Grace Lumpkin, the communist American writer whose radical unionist novel To Make My Bread had just won the Maxim Gorky Prize for Literature. On the other side of the window, Zakheim painted volumes by Lion Feuchtwanger, the prominent anti-Nazi communist whose bestselling novel Jud Süß was published as Power in the U.S. in 1925, and was soon adapted as a vicious anti-Semitic film by Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda ministry. In 1940, Feuchtwanger and his wife made an exciting escape from occupied France through Varian Fry’s underground escape route from Marseille. Once safe in America, he foolishly provided the press with several accounts of the adventure, compromising Fry’s network’s cover and bringing the attention of the Gestapo to the route, making it unusable to

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other refugees. Beside Jud Süß, a line of books included titles by E. Evans (sic), Danysh (sic), Ilya Eherenburg, Mareszkowski (sic), Kenneth Rexroth, Michael Chekov, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and Stuart Chase. A stack of three Hebrew texts included the Torah, Prophets, and Wisdom Literature – the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. Above them, a short shelf of 18th century authors carried William Defoe, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollet, Ben Johnson, Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, and James Boswell. Homosexual innuendo in the library scene would have raised an arched eyebrow among knowing visitors to the tower – high up on a ladder, a portrait of the young poet Rexroth, who Time Magazine would call “the Father of the Beats” because of his long career as a leading American poet. Rexroth, who was an anarchist and Industrial Workers of the World activist, reaches with a bejewelled hand for a book titled Douglas tucked between four volumes of Oscar Wilde, referring to Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde was the only author to have so many books in the library. In her description of the Coit Tower murals, Zakheim’s daughter, Masha, said that it was Rexroth who gave her father the names and titles for the books in the painted library.12 Perhaps this explains some of the misspellings. The long shelf continued with Jacques Maritain, the influential philosopher who had recently toured America. Then, there were books by the Marquis De Sade, the viciously cruel and extravagantly libertine writer of 120 Days of Sodom, after whom sadism gets its name; by Hitler, by the bisexual author Jean Cocteau, by Carl Van Vechten, the famous author of the bestselling Nigger Heaven, an influential but controversial novel about the difficulties of love and life in 1920s Harlem; followed by a slew of eighteenth and nineteenth century social reformers, including John Keats, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, William Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Charles Lamb, Walter Scott, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Blaise Pascal. A portrait of Stackpole pulls a book down from a shelf that includes the title “Camp” (perhaps another arch reference to homosexuality), titles by Gill (perhaps the anti-fascist pacifist designer and author Eric Gill), the anti-Nazi Nobel Prize-winner Sigrid Undset (misspelt “Unset” in the mural), Arnold Bennett (misspelt Bennet), the editor of the Socialist New Statesman magazine and author of proletarian novels; the obscure Glynn and Field, the communist novelist Theodore Dreiser, then well-known for revealing the suffering of miners in the Harlan County War; and Ben Hecht, the Hollywood heavyweight screenwriter. Beneath them are volumes by Somerset Maugham, Jules Verne, and unknowns Nerris and Stevens. Far down at the bottom left of the fresco a thick volume titled Alchemy sits beside another equally heavy tome. It is titled Illiteracy.

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Among the other political murals in the tower, Howard’s painting California Industrial Scenes depicted striking miners, one holding a copy of The Western Worker, a disturbing reference to the violent strikes that had brought San Francisco to a standstill. But most egregious of these politically inspired images was a decorative emblem painted by Wight. In homage to the scandalous destruction of the ill-fated Man at the Crossroads, which was perhaps his master’s greatest fresco, and certainly in sympathy with the striking workers on the docks below the hill, above a Coit Tower window, Wight painted the hammer and sickle emblem of the Soviet Union, and the words “United Workers of the World.” This was a popular slogan of the Communist Party, paraphrasing the final rousing sentence of the Communist Manifesto, which reads, “the Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be obtained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains, we have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!”13 These provocative images of striking workers, and direct references to revolutionary communism as the radical solution to the problems of capitalism were treated with particular suspicion during the spring and summer of 1934 in San Francisco, when the port was closed because of a large-scale union dispute between the workers and their management. The American economy was in tatters. Roosevelt’s inauguration in March of the previous year had immediately been followed by his closure of U.S. banks in an extended, weeks-long, ‘holiday’ that prevented any further runs by frightened customers withdrawing their savings. There had been riots and shootings in major U.S. cities, including Detroit, and now San Francisco was in the same turmoil. America was on the brink of revolution. Confronted by a volatile situation and under the scrutiny of the press, the tower project administrators weren’t sure what they should do, so on June 2nd, Walter Heil, Chair of the San Francisco Regional Committee of the Public Works of Art Project, sent a telegram to Technical Director Forbes Watson, who was Edward Bruce’s second-in-command, saying, “Certain difficulties concerning Coit Tower. Some artists have at last minute incorporated in their murals details such as newspaper headlines and certain symbols which might be interpreted as Communistic propaganda. These things not visible when design approved. Tower not open to public yet but through reporter’s knowledge … these things have come to editors of influential newspapers who have warned us that they would take hostile attitude unless these details be removed. Trying our best

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to settle matters tactfully and peacefully … however, what are we to do if they refuse making changes. Please advise immediately.”14 In mid-March, Bruce had written a glowing report of the new Treasury project as a guest correspondent in the Washington Herald, including a description of Coit Tower, saying the artists were having “a grand time” decorating the tower with images of the street life of San Francisco.15 Now, faced with the potential embarrassment of having publicly made an enthusiastic endorsement of what turned out to be blatantly communist propaganda, he was furious that the artists had brought controversy upon the project, and on June 29th, he fired back a telegram to Heil, warning him that he would withhold future funding if the emblem wasn’t deleted, saying, “propaganda of this kind is hurtful to the best interests of American art and is likely to discourage further government patronage.”16 The tensions pulling at San Francisco’s dock strike got tighter still when on June 22nd, Police Captain Charles Goff announced that communists were running propaganda programs in the city’s churches and schools. Then, on the 30th, a vigilante gang of men swinging sledgehammers and prybars assaulted the offices of The Western Worker, a communist magazine associated with the strike, and were chased from the building by angry workers. Up at the tower, the Public Works of Art Project administrators threatened they would not pay the artists until they confessed who had painted the offending symbol. The artists entered the fray and went on strike for several days, and a small group of them picketed the tower with signs protesting censorship, and invited the press to come and visit.17 They locked the entrance to protect the murals from the Public Works of Art Project advisory committee, and from the alarming threats of anti-communist artists who warned them they were coming to the tower to destroy the offensive murals. The official opening date was rapidly approaching, and the Commission insisted that Wight’s symbol, and the paintings by Howard and Zakheim, had to be altered to remove communist imagery from the building. On July 2nd, Wight told a reporter from The San Francisco Bulletin that the order to destroy his mural was a violation of his constitutional right to free speech. Pictures of the picketing artists ran on the front page alongside a column about the argument, with two pretty young assistants who had been employed to help the tower artists, Shirley Stascher, and Julia Rogers, coyly posed next to the ‘Closed’ sign at the tower doors like puzzled fashion models.18 Bruce consulted with Chief Justice Harlan Stone, who advised that altering a work of art might give an artist cause to sue, but erasing it completely should not present a problem. The owner of a work of art had

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the right to destroy it, but could not legally modify it. On Independence Day, the Commission told the San Francisco Chronicle they dropped their orders against Howard and Zakheim, but Wight’s blatantly communist emblem still had to go. The grand opening of the tower was cancelled. The situation down on the waterfront got even worse. On July 5th, the dockers’ strike became lethal when police shot at picketing workers, wounding thirty– three, and killing two. As Heil predicted, the symbols and slogans of the revolution painted in Coit Tower now attracted the critical attention of Hearst’s anti-communist press as radical expressions of red sentiments – and on the same day that the two strikers were gunned down, the Hearstowned San Francisco Examiner ran a nationally syndicated photograph of Zakheim’s Library with Wight’s Soviet emblem cut and pasted above it, making a composite image that exacerbated the Marxist leanings of the paintings. Instead of an opening reception celebrating the completion of the murals, a police cordon surrounded the tower. Bruce huffily wished someone would “wipe the damn painting out of the tower.”19 For Wight, these were violent echoes of Detroit, where only two years before he was present when the Ford Hunger March ended in the shooting deaths of five unemployed workers, and heard the extraordinary sound of tens of thousands of striking workers singing the Internationale after the deaths of their comrades. The fatalities in San Francisco doubtlessly inspired him to follow his master’s lead and stand his ground. During the last few years, he had witnessed killings and iconoclasm against communist idealists determined to improve the lot of working people in terrible times, and these frustrations now came to a head. He refused to delete the hammer and sickle. He sent a statement to Heil explaining the emblem as merely one of the choices available in contemporary American culture, saying, “The artists who were selected to decorate the Coit memorial tower were asked to depict the contemporary American scene. The paramount issue of today is social change – not industrial, agricultural, or scientific development – and so for this reason I made a representation of this historical fact by means of three symbols, the first depicting the capitalism of “Rugged Individualism,” the second “The New Deal” which has superseded the first, and in the third panel, “Communism,” another alternative which exists in the current American scene. This symbol is in no way an exhortation or propaganda but a simple statement of an existing condition as evidenced by the fact that there is in this country today an officially recognized Communist Party that has run candidates for the highest offices … This establishes a precedent of official censorship which would be an intimidation of the artist, preventing a free and frank expression.”20 On July 7th, The New York Times ran a photograph of a San Francisco policeman

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firing a rifle at strikers on Rincon Hill and a platoon wearing masks within clouds of tear gas. The San Francisco News ran a patronizing editorial comparing Wight, Howard, and Zakheim to naughty schoolboys writing graffiti on schoolhouse walls.21 Within a week of the killings, a funeral was held to commemorate the dead, and a martyr’s procession stretched a mile and a half. A general strike was called, and the city stopped work when a hundred and forty thousand workers walked out. Communists organized a blockade of food deliveries. Trucks attempting to break the picket were overturned and burned. The San Francisco general strike lasted four days, coming to a halt when union leaders asked arbitrators to help bring the conflict to a peaceful conclusion. On July 18th, local anti-communist vigilantes took their vengeance upon the organizers of the strike, assisted by National Guardsmen and police officers “in their efforts to exterminate Communist terrorism.” While the Guard blocked the ends of Jackson Street with armored cars, the police helped the vigilantes sack the offices of the Marine Workers’ Industrial Union and the International Longshoremen’s Association soup kitchen, then moved on to the Workers’ Ex-Servicemen’s League headquarters. The violence was intense. Seventy-five raiders breached the Workers’ Open Forum Club with bricks and clubs, leaving it as “a mass of wreckage.” A large crowd cheered for the attackers as they smashed furniture and windows and tore down the partitions of the office, and demolished a grand piano into “splinters and loose wires.” Every window was smashed. In the kitchen, a gas range was torn from the wall and every dish was thrown to the ground, and the floor was covered in sharp china shards. Communist leaflets and banners were torn to pieces and scattered in the street. The Western Worker bookstore and the main offices of the Communist Party, the Workers’ School, and the Mission Workers’ Neighborhood House were also assaulted. The headquarters of the International Workers of the World was left “a pile of debris.”22 More than four hundred arrests were made. Their organization in tatters, the Longshoremen’s strike came to an end on the 29th, and the dockers went back to work, receiving a little more money in their pay packets, and given a hiring hall. Softening their habitually anti-red stance, The New York Times ran a story about police civil rights violations during the riots, saying, “… the city has accordingly witnessed a remarkable spectacle of raids on communist offices, halls and hangouts in which constitutional rights were either disregarded outright by vigilante bands or lightly brushed aside by the constituted authorities.” Municipal Judge Sylvian Lazarus dismissed most of the counts and released many defendants with apologies. “Said he in open court: ‘I am disgusted to think that this good old town should have acted like a pack of mad wolves.

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I don’t know who is responsible, but it should be traced back to its source. Boys never before arrested were thrown into jail and aging men were also subjected to that humiliation. My heart bleeds for them.’”23 But, in the same issue, The Times tied the story of the riots to the murals at Coit Tower, continuing their more habitual anti-communist refrain about the artists’ revolutionary iconography, describing the political paintings as a “red plot,” and “Bolshevik propaganda.”24 Coit artist Otis Oldfield remembered the endgame of the conflict in a rambling interview: “… they told us, “Until that’s removed, you don’t get paid, none of you.” So not one of us moved. They said, “Who did it?” We wouldn’t tell, and that was against us, and it got us a lot of trouble. Finally, they couldn’t get the artists to paint it out so they hired house painters to paint it out. I mean, just a little bit of a thing, the artists wouldn’t tell who it was. Of course, when they went after Wight and when they did get him, he was out. He was hiding someplace in San Francisco. They discovered he was a Canadian, he wasn’t an American at all. He had been living here all these years and was not a native at all. He was getting this money, American money, as an American. Something must have come up, you see, that’s all I know. We all refused to paint out anything, and we wouldn’t tell where he was, we didn’t know. After all, there are lots of places where you can go, I imagine he went back to Canada. I don’t know after that, but I know that they didn’t get a hold of him because nobody would say anything. They tried to penalize us and he wasn’t there. But we got our money.”25 Work on the docks began again on July 31st, but Coit Tower remained closed. By now, a fearful group of the less politically engaged tower artists had become frightened by the intensity of the events unfolding around them and broke ranks with their thicker-skinned leaders, thoroughly hanging Wight out to dry. They wrote to Heil and the Public Works of Art Project to formally ask them to delete the hammer and sickle from above the window, and sent copies to the San Francisco Park Commission, the Art Commission, and all the San Francisco newspapers, positioning Wight as a solitary outsider and emphasizing the solidarity of the rest of the group. Recognizing betrayal, on August 8th, the San Francisco Examiner ran a story on the artists’ renunciation of him under the forthright header, “Artists Flay Wight for Coit Tower Mural.” The artists’ statement was direct and uncompromising. “We are given to understand Coit Tower will remain closed until the symbol used by Wight without authorization in his assigned space is removed. We further understand he has refused to repaint this space voluntarily, using satisfactory subject matter. We wish to go on record as being opposed to this symbol, which is unimportant artistically and has no place in the subject

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matter assigned. In view of these facts, we respectfully request official action be taken to remove the offending work.”26 Their dissembling claim of solidarity disguised the split that divided the tower artists – only fifteen of twenty-six signed the denunciation. The elderly Oldfield’s claim that the artists had staunchly defended Wight was completely untrue. His name was among those of the artists who signed the declaration disowning their colleague. It must have been especially hurtful for Wight to see the signatures of the men and women he had helped, and had painted with, and had eaten with, upon this public betrayal, especially Albro, who had made her passionate defence of Rivera when his Radio City mural was destroyed. Wight had known some of them since their days in Mexico in the late 1920s, where together they had watched and helped their master at work.27 It was Wight’s Gethsemane. On August 11th, Wight was publicly branded as a “dog in the manger” in the San Francisco News, which blamed him for refusing to allow the tower to be opened because of his intransigent attitude. Not only was he portrayed as the antagonist in the tower scandal, but the paper said he would be personally responsible if there was any cutting of further federal support for artists in San Francisco, among whom he counted many allies.28 At the end of August, an understated Literary Digest report said, “Friends of Wight say he may drop the argument. Many think that for the sake of future projects he should do so.”29 Under intense pressure, he steadfastly refused to whitewash or chisel away his offending hammer and sickle, and it was only when he heard that the government had discovered that he was not an American citizen and that he had been claiming Public Works of Art Project wages under his assumed name that he was forced to give up the fight – only American citizens were allowed to claim Project funds. At this point, he fled from San Francisco to avoid being arrested and rented a hotel room in Santa Monica, a beachside suburb of Los Angeles, which to this day is home to many English ex-patriots. At some time in September, with Wight gone, the strike over, and local communists in disarray after the attacks, the caretaker of Coit Tower quietly unlocked its doors, and shadowy figures entered the quiet building carrying a ladder, a bag containing a mallet, a chisel and a trowel, and a few sacks of plaster. Spreading a drop cloth onto the ground beneath Wight’s fresco, an anonymous worker scaled his ladder, raised his tools, and methodically chipped away the hammer and sickle, then carefully replastered the void. The broken fragments of Wight’s slogan were swept into a pile and thrown away, just as the smashed plaster of Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads had been in New York. It was over.

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San Francisco’s attention soon turned from the tower to alarming headlines about Nazi Germany and reports about Hitler building up his army in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, the impressive spectacles of his Nuremberg Rally, and the indictment of a German named Bruno Hauptman for the kidnap and murder of the Lindbergh baby. The images of communist newspapers and striking workers remaining in the tower were left alone, probably to avoid any legal consequences that might reignite the scandal, following Chief Justice Stone’s earlier counsel to Bruce. On October 12th, the tower was opened to the public, and hundreds of people came to see the building and its murals, and all the fuss was presented in the newspapers as a bit of a lark. Instead of screaming about red propaganda, now the headlines read “Coit Artists Enjoy Joke” and San Franciscan readers were provided with light humour about some witty newspaper titles painted into Suzanne Scheuer’s fresco, and encouraged to chuckle over the repeated appearances of the well-known local sculptor Stackpole as a model in several of the murals. Above the article, the paper printed a photograph of fur-clad bourgeois ladies admiring Ben Cunningham’s naïve primitive fresco of happy campers frolicking in an idyllic riverside landscape, among the least political of the images decorating the tower.30 Narrowly avoiding the authorities by boarding ship before they could catch him,31 a chastened Wight returned to England by June of 1935, where he settled in Kensington, London.32 His experiences had hardened his zeal for communism. By September, he had joined his old comrade Hastings again, assisting his friend in painting a fresco at the Karl Marx Memorial Library and Worker’s School that was at first prosaically titled An Interpretation of Marxism,33 but later picked up a grander name as, The Worker of the Future Clearing Away the Chaos of Capitalism. The building was sacred ground for British communists. Here, the exiled Lenin had published his Iskra newspaper. Wight continued to follow the path of political radicalism. In 1937, he visited the Californian pacifist poet Robinson Jeffers and his wife, Una, while they were in London. Una wrote to a friend describing their rendezvous, saying Wight was “an ardent communist and puts forward his views with much clarity and firmness,” working with “might and main for Spain.”34 By now, Spain was caught up in a nasty civil war between the Soviet backed Republicans and the fascist and Nazi backed Nationalists, led by Franco. Wight showed his work in London and designed sets and costumes for a new play by George Bernard Shaw, but that was his last hurrah in making art of any prominence or notoriety. His art adventures were over. He wrote sad letters to Valentiner, to Rivera, to Hastings, but he would never be able to return to his American dream, never able to

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repenetrate the inner circles of power controlling American art. He spent the rest of his career in England, teaching the principles of sculpture as a parttimer at Camberwell School of Arts & Crafts, and the Central School of Art and Design, then took a job as Hastings’ secretary in the House of Lords. In 1961, Wight died in Barcelona after falling from a tram. By 1934, Nelson Rockefeller was already the most influential man in American art thanks to his financial commitments to MoMA, and his other dramatic philanthropic gestures. Ordering the destruction of Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads made his future position on communist imagery very clear. If artists overstepped Nelson’s tolerance for idealistic leftist thinking by making images that could be considered seditious, they would lose his support, regardless of their public prominence or importance to the history of art. Despite his youth, Nelson’s political influence was already pervasive, and would increasingly shape the path that America would take as his power in government increased. The government had publicly expressed its displeasure, too. The Coit Tower fiasco brought the issue of the expression of communist ideals in public art to its nadir. Communist artists who expressed their political views soon found themselves the subject of opprobrium in the anti-communist press and suffered for their faith. And even though American socialist realism used similar propaganda tools to those of official Russian art to spread the word of social change, after Coit Tower, this propaganda had to carefully avoid any endorsement of revolutionary communism and avoid public scandals. Public relations catastrophes like Man at the Crossroads and the Coit Tower debacle delineated the future of American art. In Europe, the embers of resentment left glowing by the Treaty of Versailles were being fanned into flame, as Adolf Hitler’s rise led him to power in 1933. By the outbreak of war in 1939, and Stalin’s unholy alliance with the Führer, it was clear to Roosevelt that America would have to create a new kind of art that differentiated it from its enemies. The grail of American art lay elsewhere.

Notes 1

Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Putnam Adult, May 2013, 135 2 The Coit Tower artists were: Maxine Albro – California. Met Rivera in Mexico in 1927, watched him painting and learned fresco painting from his assistant Paul O’Higgins. Albro visited Rivera many times in the 30s. Married Parker Hall in 1938. Studied at California School of Fine Arts.

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Victor Arnautoff – City Life. Technical director of the Coit Tower murals. Communist Party member. Arnautoff worked closely with Rivera in Mexico in the late 20s. Studied at California School of Fine Arts. Jane Berlandina – Home Life (2nd Floor). Former student of Dufy. A theatrical costume and set designer. Ray Bertrand – Meat Industry. Studied at California School of Fine Arts. Ray Boynton – Animal Force and Machine Force. Boynton studied under Rivera in Mexico in the mid-20s. He taught fresco painting at the California School of Fine Arts; and was highly regarded as a leader by the painters at Coit Tower. Ralph Chesse – Children at Play (2nd Floor) Truly a terrible piece of work – Chesse was a puppeteer, and should have stuck with it. This was his first and only mural. Rinaldo Cuneo – Bay Area Hills. Taught at California School of Fine Arts. Benjamin Cunningham – Outdoor Life (2nd Floor). Studied at California School of Fine Arts. Mallette Dean – Stockbroker, Scientist-Inventor. Studied at California School of Fine Arts. Parker Hall – Collegiate Sports (2nd Floor). Studied at California School of Fine Arts. Hall had watched Rivera painting in Mexico and upon returning to San Francisco began work on his own murals. He married Maxine Albro in 1938. Edith Hamlin – Hunting in California (2nd Floor). Studied at California School of Fine Arts. George Harris – Banking and Law. Studied at California School of Fine Arts. William Hesthal – Railroad and Shipping. Studied at California School of Fine Arts. John Langley Howard – California Industrial Scenes. Howard was a Marxist, and a member of the John Reed Club. He is shown in Bernard Zakheim’s overtly Marxist Library mural, crumpling a newspaper and reaching for Das Kapital by Marx. Robert B. Howard – Phoenix (bas-relief sculpture above the elevator) Lucien Labaudt – Powell Street (2nd Floor staircase) Gordon Langdon – California Agriculture and Industry Jose Moya del Pino – San Francisco Bay North. Spaniard Del Pino had met Rivera and become friendly with him very early, while he was a student in Madrid in 1915. Otis Oldfield – San Francisco Bay, Seabirds, Bay Area Map. Taught at California School of Fine Arts. Oldfield had painted alongside Rivera when Rivera created murals in the San Francisco Stock Exchange Lunch Club Rooms in 1931. Frederick Olmsted – Power. Assisted Rivera with the California School of Fine Arts mural in 1931. Suzanne Scheuer (and Hebe Daum) – Newsgathering Ralph Stackpole – Industries of California. Stackpole met Rivera in Paris when both were students there in the 20s, worked alongside him in Mexico and made the arrangements to bring him to San Francisco. Rivera and Frida Kahlo lived and worked in Stackpole’s studio in San Francisco, and were lifelong friends. Edward Terada – Sports (2nd Floor). Japanese artist. Studied at California School of Fine Arts.

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Frede Vidar – Department Store. Studied at California School of Fine Arts. Vidar went on to Paris to study with Dufy, perhaps making the connection to him through Berlandina. Clifford Wight – Cowboy, Farmer, Steelworker. Wight was Rivera’s principal assistant, translator and secretary while he worked on his famous murals in San Francisco, Detroit and New York. Taught Sculpture at the California School of Fine Arts. Bernard Zakheim – Library. Worked with Rivera in Mexico in the thirties, and worked with Stackpole to get the commission to paint Coit Tower. A Communist Party member. 3 Ralph Stackpole, Letter to Clifford Wight, 16th September 1932, Collection of Julian Baker. 4 Oral history interview with Maxine Albro and Parker Hall, 27th July, 1964, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 5 Clifford White, Letter to Jack Hastings. Cited in: Selina Hastings, The Red Earl, Bloomsbury, 2014, 127 Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, Collection of Francis John Hastings, 16th Earl of Huntingdon. 6 San Francisco Art Institute website, The Red Medallion, http://www.sfai.edu/about-sfai/diego-rivera-mural. 7 San Francisco Art Institute website. Defacement or Restoration? http://www.sfai.edu/about-sfai/diego-rivera-mural 8 Wight can be seen working on the Detroit mural in a film, available at the time of writing on youTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsGL9kifCDM 9 Morris Gouverneur, Letter to Clifford Wight, 28th October 1933, Clifford Wight Collection relating to Diego Rivera, (Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries), Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Microfilm reel 4573. 10 San Francisco News 14th Feb 1934. Cited in: Masha Zakheim Jewett, Coit Tower, San Francisco, Volcano 1983, 46 11 Again Art Battles Vex San Francisco, New York Times, 29th Jul, 1934, E7 12 Masha Zakheim Jewett, Coit Tower, San Francisco, Volcano 1983, 82 13 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Penguin Classics, 1985, 120-121 14 Walter Heil telegram to Forbes Watson, 2nd June 1934, Record Group 121, Preliminary Inventory Entry 129, (Box 2) 114. Cited in: Karal Ann Marling, Wallto-wall America: Post Office Murals in the Great Depression, University of Minnesota Press, 1982, 46 15 Edward Bruce, These Charming People, Washington D. C. Herald, 14th March 1934 16 Edward Bruce telegram to Walter Heil, 29th June 1934, Record Group 121, Preliminary Inventory Entry 129, (Box 6) 116. Cited in: Karal Ann Marling, Wallto-wall America: Post Office Murals in the Great Depression, University of Minnesota Press, 1982, 47 17 Oral history interview with Shirley Staschen Triest, April 12th - 23rd 1964, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

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PWA Murals in Coit Tower Held Communistic, Artist’s Wrath Stirred by Charges, The Call Bulletin, 2nd July 1934, 1 19 Richard D. McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists, Princeton University Press, 1975, 25, and Robert W. Cherny, Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art, University of Illinois Press, 2017 Edward Bruce, Letter to Edward Rowan, 27th July, 1934, Edward Bruce Papers, AAA, D87:805-860 5 20 Clifford Wight, Draft Letter to Heil and Art Commission. National Archives Record Group 121:105, Box 64, Folder i Working papers. n.d. Cc. July 1934}, 3 21 Junius Cravens, Artists Fight to Prevent Changes in Coit Tower Murals, San Francisco News, 7th July 1934, 8 22 U.S. Acts To Oust Aliens – Government Joins San Francisco In Anti-Agitator Drive. New York Times, 19th July 1934, 2 23 George P. West. Coast City Turns its Wrath on Reds, New York Times, 29th July 1934, E1 24 Again Art Battles Vex San Francisco, New York Times, 29th July, 1934, E7 25 Oral history interview with Otis Oldfield, 21st May, 1965, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution 26 Artists Flay Wight for Coit Tower Mural, In: San Francisco Examiner, 8th August 1934, np 27 The statement was signed by Edith Hamlin, Parker Hall, Rinaldo Cuneo, Fred Viday. Suzanne Scheuer, Ralph Chesse, Maxine Albro, Edward Terada, Gordon Langdon, George Harris, Lucien Labaudt, Otis Oldfield, Ray Boynton, Ray Bertrand and Maya del Pino. 28 Junius Cravens, Coit Tower Row Jeopardizes Further US Art Projects Here, San Francisco News, 11th August 1934, 8 29 Evelyn Seeley, A Frescoed Tower Clangs Shut Amid Gasps, The Literary Digest, 25th August, 1934, 24 30 Hundreds Attend Opening of Coit Memorial, Coit Artists Enjoy Joke, San Francisco News, 13th October 1934, np 31 Selina Hastings, The Red Earl, Bloomsbury, 2014, pp169-170 32 “I have Clifford arriving in Hull, England on June 3rd, 1935. He then lives in Kensington, London. So yes quite a gap after the controversy around the Coit. Clifford divorced from Jean on the 13th of May 1949 in Mexico DF and Cheltenham. This was probably about the time Clifford moved to the Cotswolds to live with my mother. Or possibly triggered by Jean wanting to marry a Mr Wightman? It says the reason was “Abandonment.” Jean lived with her mother in Carmel after coming back to America. Though haven’t traced any living relatives. Then she moves to Mexico City and works as a secretary.” Email to the author from Clifford Wight’s stepson Julian Baker, Friday, 15 July 2016. 33 Earl’s Heir Paints Picture for Workers’ College, Daily Mirror, 10th October 1935, np 34 Una Jeffers, Letter to Noel Sullivan, 17th October 1937, in: Ed. James Karman, The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, with Selected Letters of Una Jeffers: Volume Two, 1931–1939, Stanford University Press, Oct 12, 2011, np

PRIMITIVE

“If elephants didn’t exist, you couldn’t invent one. They belong to a small group of living things so unlikely they challenge credulity and common sense.”1 Lyall Watson

In 1942, Jean Lipman’s now-classic book American Primitive Painting was published, promoting the idea that American ‘primitive’ painting popped into existence quite spontaneously and without antecedents in the first three quarters of the 19th century “from craft rather than painters’ traditions.”2 This was an absurd premise. Even a cursory glance at British collections reveals numerous poorly made paintings of a similar cast to the American pictures in her book, like W.R. Noble’s dreadful Portrait of a Royal Bargeman, painted in 1843; or the appalling W. B. Filip, Master Mariner, by a child-like and sensibly anonymous Victorian painter; or the po-faced portrait of Miss Rose, Postmistress of Penryn; or Patrick Brontë’s comically abysmal portrait of John Ogden Wood in the collection of the Brontë Parsonage Museum. These are excellent examples of bad paintings from Britain, just as hackneyed as those of so-called primitives found in America, but no sensible British art historian makes any pretence that they are any good in an attempt to justify the invention of a British school from these meagre foundations. Nevertheless, Lipman connected the primitive to modernism, claiming that despite an almost universal effort to imitate the figurative traditions of portraiture, the primitives were fundamental precedents on the path to the abstract. She pretended there was an intentional effort on the part of primitive painters to establish an abstract tradition. Although the works of limners and other amateur artists were actually simply poorly executed efforts to imitate the work of trained painters, Lipman said, “Individual objects were most often represented in profile or in full face, form was abbreviated and flattened, movement was restricted, contour lines were emphasized, and colors were sharpened. All the compositional aspects of a primitive picture reveal a non-optical attitude. Each unit of the painting seems to exist separately, as it did in the series of memory images in the artist’s mind, and these images appear to have been combined rather than synthesized in the final representation.”3 This misguided passage read like a master’s critique of the work of a poor

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beginning student in a professional studio. Deluded, Lipman listed the symptoms of poor practice, of ignorance of the fundamental principles of visual mimesis. These were not signs of a new species of an aesthetic superiority worthy of the building of a lineage. Primitive painters were poor imitators of a long-established tradition, not trail-breaking innovators. Despite her obvious shortcomings, in 1974, the Whitney Museum honored Lipman for her work establishing primitivism as a precursor to American modernism, granting her the curation of an exhibit of primitive art titled, The Flowering of American Folk Art, cementing the absurd narrative. Lipman’s husband, Howard, a banker and former partner in Neuberger & Berman, had been a trustee of the museum since 1968 and became its president that year. Elitists like Abby and Nelson Rockefeller, Holger Cahill and Alfred Barr were enthusiastic inventors of a new, specifically American world of art, and backed their vision with large fortunes. With the support of President Roosevelt, they raised these amateur paintings up into the realms of high art, and sold Lipman’s patriotic fantasy as part of the American art historical narrative. Tying modernism to primitivism was a necessary and successful strategy in differentiating America’s individualist avant-garde from the art of the enemy. However spurious, cementing a connection between the two meant that the avant-garde could now be cast as nationalistic and American, even though its true roots were European. By the end of the 1960s, even the usually sensible popular critic Hilton Kramer was seduced by the patriotic need to embrace primitive art as great American art. He praised Ammi Phillips’ paintings and condemned academic art in language that would have been impossible a hundred years before, claiming that these charming – if generic – portraits were of “superb quality.”4 Diego Rivera was committed to the idea that truly national art must be based upon the country’s native culture. He wrote, “I know now that he who hopes to be universal in his art must plant in his own soil. Great art is like a tree which grows in a particular place and has a trunk, leaves, blossoms, boughs, fruit and roots of its own. The more native art is, the more it belongs to the whole world, because taste is rooted in nature. This is the secret of primitive art and also of the art of the masters – Michelangelo, Cezanne, Seurat, and Renoir. The secret of my best work is that it is Mexican.”5 But what was the native culture of a country settled by immigrants? While 19th century colonials looked across the Atlantic to their forefathers’ homelands for their inspiration, and travelled to Europe to enjoy the sophisticated art of the masters, at home, provincial Americans made do with a new species of artist who catered to their desires to record their modest lives and experiences. Traveling from town to town, untrained and

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often unskilled artists busily imitated the works of skilled painters, producing a vast quantity of paintings that had a naïve, folkish charm. These ‘limners’ rolled into town, set up shop, and advertised. They were ready to paint whatever people needed. These unsophisticated citizens commissioned portraits, paintings of the farm, signs for their businesses, decoration for their wagons. Although the limners lacked the skill to express subtleties of emotion or nuanced inner life, they compensated for it by including props in the images that were taken from the lives of their subjects. The portrait paintings were formulaic. The artists used repeated idealized eyes, noses, and mouths, made larger or smaller, modifying them slightly to capture likeness, but following a pattern. Innocent portraits by the limner Phillips, whose untrained work became a highly priced and desirable commodity in the 20th century, were almost duplicates of each other. He placed flat, long fingered hands in exactly the same positions, and made minor alterations to the sitter’s features. Small changes to dress patterns made each painting more individual. Limners painted lazy portraits of ladies and gentlemen and their children, their farms and livestock, and they also painted ‘fancy pictures’ of more fantastic themes, including popular patriotic subjects. People were proud of their new settlements, and asked limners to paint them. At the same time Americans were settling into their newly acquired land, her conquered native peoples were struggling to produce their own material culture, producing abstract patterns in their clothing, and ornamentation that prefigured the abstractions that would become a powerful theme in modernist painting in the 20th century. Just before the American entry into the Second World War, something remarkable happened. Instead of these so-called ‘primitive’ paintings being thought of as second or third-rate, and their makers as mere imitators of European masters, they became desirable examples of uniquely American art. What were the roots of this dramatic change? As a result of America’s decisive entry into the Great War, which quickly led to victory for the Allies, the United States entered world politics as a major force. A new confidence in American authority resulted in a hunger for identifying American culture. John Dewey, America’s most influential and famous philosopher in the 1920s and 30s, thought so-called primitive art offered a way forward for identifying a uniquely American and proletarian art. He wrote an extraordinarily influential socialist book, titled Art as Experience, which began as a series of lectures on the philosophy of art given at Harvard in 1931, and was published in 1934. In characteristically convoluted prose, Dewey said museums were misleading – to know about art, we should look for it in our everyday human experiences. He viewed

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museums as shrines to art objects, built with nationalistic motivations to inspire pride in the power and authority of the establishment, built to show off a nation’s cultural achievements, built to contain booty seized in war. Museums were “memorials of the rise of nationalism and imperialism.” He was absolutely right. The Louvre was the first museum opened to the public, precisely a year to the day after the French Revolution of 1792, but its collection only achieved its full magnificence after it was stocked with an encyclopaedic collection by Napoleon’s seizure of great art from the countries he had conquered.6 The British Museum was a palace of treasures supplied with the booty of the Empire. In addition to being an imperial vice, Dewey thought collecting the masterpieces of art was a symptom of capitalism, indulged in by people who wished to show off their success and good standing. Communities, and nations, built galleries and opera houses and museums to demonstrate their collective superiority as an elevated form of snobbery. Dewey’s distaste for museums echoed the fascist futurists of the first decade of the century, who described them in their manifesto for painting as the houses of the dead. They cried, “We will fight with all our might the fanatical, senseless and snobbish religion of the past, a religion encouraged by the vicious existence of museums. We rebel against that spineless worshipping of old canvases, old statues and old bric-a-brac, against everything which is filthy and worm-ridden and corroded by time.”7 But while the futurists looked to violence, speed, and action as solutions to the stagnation of art, Dewey turned to primitive nature, and described a need for a restoration of a broad, unsophisticated personal participation in art appreciation and making, like that of noble, unspoiled savages – proposing an egalitarian art which should be an integral part of our daily lives. Dewey rejected the idea of art as a sophisticated and highly evolved part of bourgeois culture, in favor of a proletarian art that should be available for everyone to enjoy equally, and available for anybody to make. Too often, people thought art was a luxury for sophisticated people to enjoy in their spare time, but actually, it should be created as the consequence of each person’s experience. Everyone was an artist. To show how art should be accessible to all, and created by all, Dewey criticized the relationship between artists and their work. To Dewey, the value of a work of art was as the product of a human being’s experience, and that experience was more important than either tradition or quality. He claimed our experiences of life made it possible to deal with the chaos we were confronted with, and to create moments of order and beauty. When people made art, they did so in response to their experience of life. The work

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of art did not exist by itself – it was the product of the human choice to express selfhood. Dewey made the additional foolish claim that because the experiences of any person making art were as significant as anyone else’s, so was their art. The experiences of an untrained person making a painting were equally as valuable as those of a classically trained painter, disposing of any expectation of artists being technical experts, and birthing the silly idea that anybody could practice art with equal validity. Untrained primitive painters were better than highly skilled academic artists, because of their proletarian origins. To truly experience a work of art, viewers must be aware of – and accept – the artist’s experience. These were radically egalitarian proposals – Dewey had reduced both the making of art, and the enjoyment of it, to experience itself, regardless of considerations of quality. This extraordinary claim also negated the capacity of the artist to create works that were outside their personal experience – rejecting the imaginative world of fantasy which is an important side of human life, and which is a fundamental building block of our cultural history. Without imaginative creativity, we would not have the great narratives of gods and monsters that have contributed so much to the literary and artistic legacy of the arts. He said industry had changed the role of the artist. Mechanization required uniformity and had no room for individual decoration and craftsmanship. Increasingly isolated from everyday life, artists had consequently taken on an esoteric individualism which separated them from ordinary people. Art objects that were universally admired for their technical virtuosity or their celebrity were removed from their actual significance because they revealed little about the artist who produced them. Dewey claimed the value of the work of art was found in the maker’s experience, not in the material product. It was difficult to find insight into finely made works of art, because they were too technically perfect, and sometimes too famous. Dewey wanted to see evidence of the artist’s experience in the finished product, complaining that a sculptor who was a virtuoso in duplicating reality lacked aesthetic quality. In other words, a work of art should show evidence of the artist’s hand upon its surface, should not be too well finished, and should show the marks of the tools. Dewey compared the work of “an intelligent mechanic” to that of an artist, and complained that art had been set upon a pedestal. Here, he was frankly hypocritical. If anybody’s experience is of equal value, regardless of quality, then a bad mechanic’s work is equally as valuable as a good mechanic’s work. But nobody wants a bad mechanic. Dewey correctly said that to the average person the arts were actually to be found in movies, jazz, comics, newspaper stories, and other popular formats. To put art into a museum was to place it within the domain of

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specialists, art historians and critics, separating it from the real experience of art which was to be found in everyday experience. In this sense, he said art was similar to religion, which began as a part of everyday life, but was removed from it. In the past, people decorated objects they used in their normal activities with great care and craftsmanship, but in the present, they collected such things and put them into museums so they could be admired. The job of the philosopher of art was to return the work of art to its proper place as a manifestation of experience. To properly understand a work of art, one must understand the person who made it. If art were approached in such a way, it would be more popular and would also act as social commentary, indicating where there were cultural problems, and where there were positive circumstances. He asked two questions that pushed art into the province of the proletariat, writing, “If artistic and aesthetic quality is implicit in every normal experience, how shall we explain how and why it so generally fails to become explicit? Why is it that, to multitudes, art seems to be importation from a foreign country and the aesthetic to be a synonym for something artificial.” 8 To answer these questions, Dewey said we must have a clear understanding of what “normal experience” may be. To Dewey, this was about physiological comfort within the natural world and living in harmony with the environment: “Direct experience comes from nature and man and nature interacting with each other.” 9 When human beings were out of rhythm with their environment, objects became a tool for restoring order. To truly be in harmony with nature, people must balance their past experiences with their present, and their expectations for the future. Only when they accepted their past and were not disturbed by the future were they fully alive. Art celebrated being in the moment. However, as examples of beings living in rhythm with the environment, Dewey described the lives of dogs and savages. He considered dogs to be fully present, always in harmony with nature. Incredibly, he condescendingly described how savages, like dogs, lived lives which were admirably in harmony with their environment. The life of a noble savage or a dog was better and more authentic than that of a person living in the modern world. Thus, ‘primitive’ art was the most true, democratic, and American form of art. Art should be relevant to the people for whom it was made – American art must reflect the real American experience of the multitudes. The American masses were primitive. Consequently, in the early 20th century, primitive art – whether it was the product of American natives, of untrained limners, of unskilled settlers, or of African Americans – was cast as the foundation of authentically American avant-garde art. The highly developed European-style art

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admired by upwardly mobile bourgeois tradesmen, shopkeepers, or industrialists, was cast as alien. Primitive art had nothing whatsoever to do with the museums of the old order, being created directly by proletarian Americans who simply wanted art as decorations for their homes. Dewey’s rejection of the traditional idea of highly specialized museumquality art as a luxury that aspiring Americans could afford to appreciate and enjoy as symbols of their capitalist success resonated among progressives in Depression-era America. In his inaugural address at the opening of the new MoMA building, President Roosevelt echoed Dewey, making the extravagantly anti-capitalist claim that, “The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit. Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.”10 Two champions of modern art, Alfred Barr, director of MoMA, and Holger Cahill, crafted a relationship between this American primitive art and tribal art, following Dewey’s progressive fantasies of the art of the ‘noble savage’ as a model for the role of artists. In 1936, MoMA opened an exhibit titled New Horizons in American Art, showing the products of the Federal Art Project, and Cahill wrote an introductory catalogue essay including a simple but key phrase which explained precisely why he and Barr took such a serious interest in primitive art. He wrote, “the period between 1820 and 1870 was far more provincial – and so in a sense more genuinely American – then the 18th century had been.” 11 The art might have been primitive, but it was more honestly American than art influenced by European traditions. And much primitive art appeared to be similar to the work of modernists like Marc Chagall or Max Ernst. Primitives and modernists shared the same simplification of forms, the same reduction of realist observation to formal composition, in which illusion was ignored in favor of abstraction. Parisian artists imitated primitive African masks? Then Americans must have been inspired by the art of the Plains Indians and other native cultures. But the equation of Native American art to the poor imitations of the limners was absolutely wrong. Doubtlessly, the Americans who bought a cheap painting by a limner would have preferred a John Singelton Copley, or a Benjamin West, or an Albert Bierstadt had they been available or affordable. The limners were entirely indebted to the Western tradition, creating poorly rendered pastiches of their memories of the highlydeveloped traditions they remembered. Moreover, Native Americans had little interest in imitating the work of the West. Before the invasion of the

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colonist whites, indigenous decorative arts had nothing whatsoever to do with the traditions of European art, and the people who made them had absolutely no desire to participate in the cultural narratives of the West. The progressives’ attempt to co-opt Native American traditions and incorporate them into their ideology was the worst kind of cultural appropriation. A photo of well-dressed white society women watching crouching natives creating a sand painting at MoMA perfectly captured the self-righteous condescension of the idea. Between 1932 and 1933, Barr took a leave of absence from the directorship of MoMA and Cahill stepped in and organized several exhibitions founded upon Dewey’s ideas, among them, American Sources of Modern Art, American Folk Art: Art of the Common Man in America; and American Painting and Sculpture 1862–1932. At first there was some uncertainty about adopting primitive American art into the canon. In 1935, Cahill wrote a lengthy essay for a book produced by MoMA titled Art in America in Modern Times. In it, he incorporated primitive art into the narrative, but was tentative in his approach, and briefly critical of artists attempting to conflate folk art with modern art. He carefully positioned modernism within the context of art history, and absolved it of political radicalism by claiming that, because abstraction emphasized design, it somehow led back to tradition, and then introduced primitive art as an interest of some modernists. Authenticity was important – some artists who imitated primitive art were of “doubtful value”12 while “a few rare souls whose naïveté needed no fillip from fashion” were genuine innocents à la Dewey, like Julia Kelly, John Kane, and “the Indian artists of the Southwest, Fred Kabotie, Awa Tsireh, Ogwa Pi,” whose works revealed “the Indian’s natural feeling for the abstract and the decorative.”13 A patronizing Cahill was happy to include work by these guileless savants in his survey of new American art. As unsophisticated members of the American proletariat, these primitives were cast as archetypal exemplars of Dewey’s progressive ideas. If in 1935 Cahill was noncommittal about primitive art, he was absolutely certain that there was “a new emphasis upon social and collective expression.”14 Artists were not content merely to make still life and studio paintings, preferring to paint people in action, crowd scenes, and portraiture. Muralists were especially engaged in social commentary, as exemplified by the work of the communist Mexican painters Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, Pascual Orozco, and Jean Charlot. The Public Works of Art Projects made it possible for many American artists to paint on walls, but because the best of American painters had no need of monetary relief, they were not tempted by the plumber’s wages offered by the federal

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government. Nevertheless, Cahill commented upon the success of Thomas Benton and Boardman Robinson, and noted the work of Stuart Davis and Yasuo Kunoyoshi at the Rockefeller Centre. In an essay titled New Horizons in American Art, Cahill justified the project’s federal funding by noting the long history of governmental support for the arts dating from ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, to China, and ancient American civilizations. Furthermore, in contemporary times, the governments of France, Italy, Germany, Russia, Sweden, and Mexico all gave substantial support to the arts.15 But what Cahill neglected to point out was that, with the exception of Sweden, which had introduced socialist institutions without violence, all of these countries were ruled by revolutionary socialist, fascist, Nazi, and communist parties, and were committed to using the arts as propaganda. By now, Cahill was fully committed to the Public Works of Art Project as the vehicle for Dewey’s socialist ideas, writing that the artists working in the project shared, “a new concept of social loyalty and responsibility, of the artist’s union with his fellow men in origin and in destiny,” a loyalty that appeared “to be replacing the romantic concept of nature which for so many years gave to artists and to many others a unifying approach to art … This is what gives meaning to the social content of art in its deepest sense. An end seems to be in sight to the kind of detachment which removed the artist from common experience, and which at its worst gave rise to an art merely for the museum or a rarefied preciousness.”16 The exhibit catalog was dominated by studies for mural paintings of the American Scene, with social realism and primitive art taking the lead. Conscious of a deficit of quality, Cahill and other program administrators were moved to excuse the works as the initial stages of a great movement that would certainly lead to the emergence of great genius as time went by. But all of the works presented the characteristic signs of imitation. A number of socialist realist frescos which led the catalogue were clearly derived from the works of the Mexican muralists, showing Americans building a vigorous and healthy society, exactly fulfilling the prescribed subject matter of the Public Works of Art Project bulletins. Other painters were fully immersed in the primitive world, lacking studio training and technique. Many of the pictures were made by enthusiastic amateurs keen to copy the new socialist realist and primitive art they saw in newspapers and magazines – if national publication was an indication of success, these tenderfoot admirers of contemporary fashion were intent on following the examples they were fed. One or two made paintings of abstracted forms, early indications of the full embrace of the individualist avant-gardism that would soon follow the socialist realist experiment. Among the easel painters

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were many bourgeois Sunday artists who longed to be recognized as an American Paul Cezanne, while others made pastiche cubist compositions influenced by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, whose works had headlined American newspapers. A brief section of the catalogue published a dozen examples of children’s art produced at some of the hundred or so art centres initiated under the aegis of the Public Works of Art Project. This was the art of a manipulated people sniffing at a potent scent. It was the smell of government money. By 1938, any doubt Cahill and Barr may have felt about the status of the primitives was completely erased. In the last week of April, MoMA opened Masters of Popular Painting as the third of a triumvirate of exhibits mounted with the clear and deliberate intention of creating a solid, foundational description of modern American art. Masters of Popular Painting was preceded by Cubism and Abstract Art, and the poorly-named Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism, which both had been opened in 1936. Masters of Popular Painting was explicitly designed to raise primitive artists to the role of major figures of cultural importance. In the introduction to the catalogue, Barr wrote, “the purpose of this exhibition is to show, without apology or condescension, the paintings of some of these individuals, not as folk art, but as the work of painters of marked talent and consistently distinct personality.”17 Primitive artists now joined the ranks of cubists, abstractionists, dadaists, surrealists, and social realists as foundermembers of American art, which would be dubbed ‘avant-garde’ by the turn of the decade. Now, openly expressing radical ideas, Cahill explained that his generation’s embrace of primitive art was a rebellion against the standards of the art of the past,18 and furthermore, primitive art was “art for the people.”19 To provide American primitives with additional credibility, the exhibit tied them to artists in France, like the famed painter Henri Rousseau, who captured the attention and admiration of the cubists in Paris. These exhibits were a deliberate campaign to use modern art as nationalistic propaganda, especially made manifest in a show organized by MoMA for the Musée du Jeu de Paume in Paris to run from May to July of 1938, under the official patronage of Jean Zay, the Minister of National Education and of the Beaux-Arts; William C. Bullitt, U.S. Ambassador to France; and the Comte de Saint-Quentin, Ambassador of France to Washington. Trois siècles d'art aux États-Unis (Three Centuries of American Art) was clearly a propaganda set-piece designed to show the cordial relations between the United States and France, and an example of America’s early efforts to use modern art as a symbol of liberty in the face of Nazi oppression. The political situation merited America showing its allegiances in Europe. Two months earlier, Hitler marched unopposed into

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Austria amid the acclamation of that country’s people. His efforts on the cultural front extended into developing architecture across Greater Germany, and in January, he opened an industrial art exhibition at the House of German Art, claiming, “This is the first time ever that an exhibition of such scope is being shown to mankind! This exhibition marks a turning point in time. It documents the beginning of a new era.”20 On July 10th, a couple of weeks before Three Centuries of American Art closed, Hitler returned to Munich, victorious in his bloodless expansion of the Reich, to open the Great Exhibition of German Art. Despite the success of Three Centuries as a propaganda event emphasizing the friendly relations between the United States and France, its artistic reception was an exercise in American humility – French critics were polite but dismissive. One described American art as a child that “merits being loved and protected.”21 A British journalist remarked, “French interest in American painting is bound to be rather like that of a scholarly uncle in the career of his bright young nephew.”22 MoMA’s president, Conger Goodyear, made excuses that the space was too small to tell the whole story of American art, and the best works had not been available, and even Alfred Barr’s curatorial catalogue began apologetically. By contrast, Hitler’s address in Munich at the opening of the Great Exhibition was triumphant and absolutely clear. The Nazis successfully rolled back the catastrophic economic crisis, and saved Germany at the brink of ruin, lifted up the German people from the shame of defeat, and were busy on the long-term project of reviving Germanic culture. Hitler proclaimed, “In the twentieth century, the German Volk is a Volk of a resurrected affirmation of life, enchanted in its admiration of the strong and beautiful and hence of what is healthy and capable of sustaining life. Power and beauty are the slogans of our time. Clarity and logic reign supreme in our efforts. Whoever wants to be an artist in this century must wholeheartedly pledge himself to this century.”23 In Germany, of course this meant pledging oneself to the national socialist cause, the zeitgeist of the time. Visiting Mussolini in Italy, Hitler had arranged to buy an ancient Roman copy of Myron’s famous sculpture of an athlete throwing a discus known as the Discobolos Lancellotti. He displayed it in the sculpture gallery of the Great Exhibition of German Art, and said this was the model to which German artists must aspire. Clearly moved by the beautiful sculpture, Hitler instructed German artists, “Above all, may the artists appreciate how great the sight and the artistic ability of this Greek named Myron must have been as it reveals itself to our eyes today. How marvelous an achievement of that Greek who created a statue two and a half millenniums (sic) ago, a statue

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the Roman copy of which still elicits stunned admiration on our part. And may all of you take this to heart as a standard for the tasks and accomplishments of our time. May you all strive for beauty and perfection so that you shall also stand the test of time both before the Volk and the ages. I have no doubt that you will be moved by the same sensations that moved me when I first saw this unparalleled testimony to eternal beauty and achievement.”24 German art was based on a new Aryan idealism modeled on the classical tradition. This, then, was the contrast between American and German art. Shamed by the weak showing American art had made in Paris, American cultural leaders steeled themselves to the task of producing an American brand that could withstand the competition. The glove was thrown down. Masters of Popular Painting opened in New York, establishing primitive art as the foundation of American art at the same time that Three Centuries of American Art introduced Europe to the idea that there was an American art at all. With such a clear focus on establishing nationalist American art dominating conversations among New York’s powerful cognoscenti for the past year, The New York Times’ art critic Edward Alden Jewell was easily persuaded that a book about it was timely. In June 1939, only a month after Roosevelt’s grand opening of MoMA’s new building, he published Have we an American Art? Considering the dangerous political climate of that year, he opened, oddly, with the assertion that globalization was causing the wane of nationalism, and asking if the time was right to stop thinking of the arts in racial terms. He asked, “Ought ‘international’ to become the unique watchword of a world so changed, of a so startlingly contracted world’s culture?”25Had internationalism done away with the power of local places over the moulding of individuals? The book was published only a year after the Anschluss, less than nine months after the annexation of the Sudetenland in the first weeks of October 1938, a few brief months after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, and Franco’s fascist victory in Spain. Such questions, which were really inspired by the emigration of European artists and intellectuals to America, and the interpretation of American patriotism, and American nationalism, were at the forefront of his mind. Was it possible to identify a truly American art in such a time? Jewell offered a summary of French critical responses to the show to reveal how Europeans perceived American art. The situation was not good. Although the show had been “amiably received,” French critics were, “pretty well agreed that in the realms of painting and sculpture, at least, America has as yet little to show in the way of a distinctive national expression. Derivative notes, it was with some unanimity pointed out,

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abound, from first to last.”26 Jewell emphasized comments by some of the French authors that the so-called American art in the show was actually international – by which they really meant Atlantic. What, then, was the way forward to a true American art? The answer was to follow the trail blazed by Rivera. “Look to your folk art,” one of the reviewers said, “It is through ingenuous manifestations such as we find in those maitres populaires that American artists will become increasingly conscious of and will reinforce their own original potentialities. It is through such manifestations also that they will learn to despise pale imitators of French art.”27 This was exactly the response to Hitler’s hopes for a Nazi idealism founded upon ancient classical art that American thought-leaders at MoMA were looking for. Naturally, an enquiry into American art begs a question – who are Americans? Jewell tackled that awkward and thorny issue by describing the United States as a racial and political nation. It was entirely a nation of immigrants, for even Native Americans had come to the continent from Asia. Echoing Vasconcelos’ cosmic race theory, Jewell said these immigrants were destined to blend together to create a new race, “blended into a vast unified articulate amalgam.”28 The settlers who arrived in the new world severed their ties with their old countries and were now proudly American – and their art was a new branch on the tree which grew from the roots of the countries they left behind. America was an international civilization. Jewell’s international art was specifically American, neither communist nor nationalistic like the tyrannies developing in militaristic states – for only in America, where a truly communal spirit was born of the intermingling of races, could artists “achieve a universality of expression.”29 American artists were citizens of the world, members of an international school, and their art was not sectioned off by the “trifling incidents” of race, time, or place.30 But this international spirit did not mean American artists could ignore their birthright as free individuals. For artists, the individual spirit trumped their service as world citizens. To be an American artist, the artists had only to be themselves – being an individual was the essence of being American. “While reciprocity obtains throughout the relationship … the individual comes first, since it is an aggregate of individuals that makes the communal pattern.”31 Such individualism was completely alien to Hitler’s world in which the state was the priority – a mould into which all citizens must be poured – coerced by might. But, many of America’s artists were impressed and cowed by the authority of French art, becoming cowardly sycophants who followed the lead of French individuals rather than their own. How could a distinctively American school rise from such devotion?

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American artists must pay attention to their birth-right of freedom, which allowed them to ignore restrictions and venture into new territory. Individual expression grew from tradition, but refashioned it – art may be “as different from the past as the tree from the seed.”32 But cosmic race and immigration from all nations notwithstanding, Jewell insisted that American art was born from the Western tradition, using Western tools and Western ideas, and, in addition, it had a sacred destiny. To emphasize the significance of its mission, he quoted Jesus himself – like Christ, American art had “come not to destroy but to fulfil.”33 This language sounded similar to the rhetoric of manifest destiny that had justified the invasion and genocide of North America. Although American museums would occasionally tip their hat to artists like Rivera – who had begun his career in Paris, thus initiated into the European tradition – this Eurocentric stance would dominate American art until the 21st century. Jewell repeated his criticism of the Federal Art Project, commenting on how quickly the American Scene had declined from its rise to its “inebriating debauch” and fall. The problem with the projects was that they had not been a true embodiment of American art, but rather a “bandwagon movement” of hangers-on. Such a movement was superficial and could not be truly American. Real American art could only come from artists who were “seriously and spontaneously and unalterably and incorrigibly and joyously bent on expressing what has come to him in his own experience as an American.”34 This was an appeal for American individualism to be allowed to flourish – and where was this to be found in the art world? Only among the bohemian bourgeoisie. Soon, in May of 1940, the Nazis would invade France and many Parisian artists would either flee to American sanctuary, or remain to be crushed beneath the weight of Nazi oppression. Leavened by the influx of these international bohemians, New York would assume its new role as the centre of the modern art world.

Notes 1

Lyall Watson, Elephantoms, W.W. Norton, 2002, 37 Jean Lipman, American Primitive Painting, Oxford University Press, 1942, 3 3 Ibid, 8 4 “... the portraits of Mrs. Isaac Cox and of Deacon Benjamin Benedict (both about 1836) – are of superb quality. To the modern eye, the portrait of Mrs. Cox particularly speaks with a clarity, precision, and sympathy that places it considerably nearer to our own standards of artistic probity than anything to be found in the common run of ‘serious’ painting at the time. If this is ‘innocent’ 2

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painting, it is innocent only of those flatulent academic pretensions which remained the curse of so much of our art in the 19th century.” Hilton Kramer, Recovering the American Past, The New York Times, Sunday, May 10, 1970 5 Diego Rivera and Gladys March, Diego Rivera, My Art, My Life, Dover, 1991, 31 6 Karl E. Meyer, The Art Museum, William Morrow and Co. 1979, 20 7 Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, Manifesto of the Futurist Painters. In: Poesia, February 11, 1910 https://www.unknown.nu/futurism/painters.html 8 John Dewey, Art as Experience, Perigee, 2005, 11 9 Ibid, 15 10 Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inaugural Address of Franklin D. Roosevelt President of the United States, United States Government Printing Office, 1933, 3 11 Holger Cahill, New Horizons in American Art, Museum of Modern Art, 1936, 17 12 Holger Cahill, American Painting 1865 – 1934, In: Ed. Holger Cahill and Alfred Barr, Art in America in Modern Times, Books for Libraries Press, 1969, 34-35 13 Ibid, 42 14 Ibid, 44 15 Holger Cahill, New Horizons in American Art, Museum of Modern Art, 1936, 17 16 Ibid, 41 17 Alfred Barr, Preface and Acknowledgment, In: Holger Cahill, Maximilien Gauthier, Jean Cassou, Dorothy Miller, Masters of Popular Painting, Museum of Modern Art, 1938, 9 18 Holger Cahill, Maximilien Gauthier, Jean Cassou, Dorothy Miller, Masters of Popular Painting, Museum of Modern Art, 1938, 95 19 Ibid, 103 20 Adolph Hitler, Collection of Speeches, 1922 – 1945, Propagandaleiter, n/d, 413 21 Edward Alden Jewell, Have we an American Art? Longmans Green and Company, 1939, 31 22 Ibid, 58 23 Adolph Hitler, Collection of Speeches, 1922 – 1945, Propagandaleiter, n/d, 457 24 Ibid, 458 25 Edward Alden Jewell, Have we an American Art? Longmans Green and Company, 1939, 8 26 Ibid, 8 27 Ibid, 42 28 Ibid, 107 29 Ibid, 129 30 Ibid, 132 31 Ibid, 153 32 Ibid, 189 33 Ibid, 195 34 Ibid, 205

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“The masses are still attracted by somewhat trashy art, but that has nothing in common with artistic degeneracy. If I am asked whether I am prepared to condone this, my reply is that I will condone anything which does not lead to artistic depravity. The admiration for what we sometimes call chocolate box beauty is not of itself vicious; it gives evidence, at least, of artistic feeling, which may well become later the basis for real taste. Permanent injury is done only by real depravity in art.”1 Adolf Hitler, Table Talk

As the financial crisis of the Great Depression infected the global economy, the situation in Germany grew worse with rising unemployment and extraordinary inflation. The surrender that ended the First World War was seen as a betrayal by many of Germany’s soldiers, who had been surprised by the news of their nation’s capitulation even as they stood in their lines in enemy territory. After the Treaty of Versailles was signed in November 1918, German land was partially occupied, her military power was emasculated, and her people were infected with a fever of resentment and national insecurity. Under the guidance of Hitler and his right-hand man Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Party steadily gained influence among the people by making extremely effective use of propaganda, blaming a Jewish-led conspiracy of communists for their problems. Immediately after the First World War, Hitler began his involvement in the political world through undercover work as an informant for the Education and Propaganda Department of the General Command von Oven. The German army trained him to be a nationalist speaker and paid him to persuade their demoralized soldiers of the evils of Bolshevism. As part of his training, he was sent to observe and report upon political meetings, and it was at such meetings Hitler gained a thorough understanding of the secrets of political propaganda and public speaking, and discovered his extraordinary talent for rhetoric. In addition to learning the art of effective political leadership, he became convinced by the antisemitic, nationalist, anticommunist ideas of Anton Drexler, leader of the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Workers’ Party) which he joined September 12th, 1919, becoming an influential figure in its leadership circle. At the famous meeting of two thousand members at the Hofbräuhaus in Munich on February 24th, 1920, which would gain “a sort of mystic significance”2 among Nazis as the

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moment in which Hitler transformed a hostile crowd into devoted followers of Nazi doctrine, “united by a new conviction, a new faith and a new resolve,”3 Hitler renamed the party as the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National-socialist German Workers’ Party) – the Nazi Party – and announced the twenty-five points of the party’s manifesto, which included a radical declaration about the arts: “We demand the legal prosecution of all tendencies in art and literature of a kind that are calculated to corrupt our national life, and the suppression of cultural institutions that violate these demands.”4 Empowered by his success, by the end of July 1921, Hitler had taken over the party leadership and done away with its obsolete committee organization, replacing it with a hierarchical leadership with himself at the top. His military background informed his ideas about the political formation of the greater Reich and the reestablishment of German power and self-respect, but it was his background as a working painter that provided the foundation for his revolutionary ideas about art and culture. Hitler had scraped a living as a painter in Vienna, producing watercolours of the city’s architectural delights, and considered himself an artist, and thought of his work as a politician as an artist shaping his country. When the aristocratic German President Paul von Hindenburg snidely called Hitler “that bohemian corporal (böhmischer gefreiter),” he wasn’t making a foolish mistake about Hitler’s birthplace, he was calling him a scruffy wannabe artist who had only made a low rank in his military service. At party meetings, Hitler spoke of forcibly reforming the arts – in 1922, he demanded change, declaring, “… we need a reform in the sphere of art, literature and the theatre. The Government must see to it that its people are not poisoned. There is a higher right which is based on the recognition of that which harms a people, and that which harms a people must be done away with.”5 These demands were a rephrasing of the antisemitic Kaiser Wilhelm II’s ban of Cubism and Expressionism prior to the Great War, during which museum directors with sympathy for modern art had been fired from their jobs. Displaying remarkable consistency in a turbulent time, the twenty-five demands the party made at the Hofbräuhaus in 1920 were repeated verbatim twelve years later within a mass-printed election pamphlet written for Hitler by the Nazi economist Gottfried Feder, who added, “It is of urgent importance to set our face against all the disruptive influences which are doing harm to our nation in the domain of art, literature, science, the stage, the moving pictures, and above all throughout the entire Press.”6 These “disruptive influences” were radical Jewish and communist artists and writers. But once the products of their art had been swept away, clearing

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German galleries for true völkisch paintings and sculptures, what would this Nazi art look like? Combining his early experience of propaganda and his love of art, Hitler made his opinions crystal-clear about the direction that should be taken by art and culture. Art should serve the people by educating them about what it meant to be a true German – and to be a true German, one had to follow the principles of National Socialism. German art was to be Nazi propaganda, to emphasize, embody, and exemplify the foundations of National Socialist values. And the core values of Nazi philosophy were: Aryan superiority of Nordic people (especially Germans) over all other people; socialist egalitarianism among Germans; antisemitic prejudice against Jews as racial inferiors; prejudice against communism as an inferior and deadly political system; Lebensraum (living space) – the right of ethnic Germans to live together as one nation and to occupy land in the East; and eugenic breeding to improve the genetic quality of the Aryan race. This program had the benefit of providing a smorgasbord of simple issues that appealed to ordinary Germans, especially those living in small towns in the countryside. It was to these small towns that the Nazis took their message, winning their support with membership contests, slogans, brass bands, occult allusions to traditional German paganism, and loathing of the immoral ways to be found in the unhealthy big cities. There, in the cities, hidden in flat-roofed buildings that defied the traditional values of the healthy country life, dwelled weird and alien Jewish intellectuals who had no connection by blood with the honest working people who toiled over the land, but enthusiastically worked to corrupt the minds of good Germans with evil communist ideas. There in the cities, these outlandish people invented bizarre formulae for Cubism, Dadaism, and decadent bohemian art, or “morbid monstrosities which have been produced by insane and degenerate people.”7 In his hypnotic, sensual speeches, Hitler combined a powerful appeal to nostalgia for a mythological Germany with a utopian vision of the nation as she could be, as a wonderland of progress combined with all that was good from the past and cleansed of the evil influence of the Jews. In Mein Kampf, Hitler described the power of enemy propaganda during the First World War and outlined in long passages how he intended to make full use of its potential as leader of his party. Propaganda should always be made for the “uneducated masses” and should always be easy to understand. It should express an idea plainly, and should make a popular appeal to emotion, not to the intellect, because, “… the art of propaganda consists in putting a matter so clearly and forcibly before the minds of the people as to create a general conviction regarding the reality of a certain

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fact, the necessity of certain things and the imperativeness of something that is essential.”8 He understood that propaganda was not about teaching, but about focusing people’s attention upon specific themes. The emphasis of propaganda should be placed upon emotions and feelings, not truth or fact. It should not attempt to sway a minority, but reach as many people as possible. It should not be didactic. It must be persuasive. It should be easily grasped. “When it is a question of bringing a whole nation within the circle of its influence, as happens in the case of war propaganda, then too much attention cannot be paid to the necessity of avoiding a high-level which presupposes a relatively high degree of intelligence among the public.” Because the masses were incapable of understanding complex scientific ideas, effective propaganda should be simple, and persistently repeated, “until the last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward.” Moreover, propaganda should only express the parts of truth that were useful for furthering the cause, not objective truth.9 And, if the masses were uneducated and to be regarded as sponges for simple repeated messages, then aesthetes and intellectuals should never be allowed to be in charge of propaganda. Aesthetes would turn propaganda into “something suitable only for literary tea parties,” while the intellectuals, who were “blasé” and “pests” were “… the mortal enemies of every effort that is made to influence the masses in an effective way.”10 To avoid the dangers of either chance or the dark forces of communist or Jewish intellectualism shaping the minds of the young, Hitler ensured that German schools were the front line of indoctrination. Before 1933, Germany had a well-deserved reputation for providing a thorough education for its people. The Prussians had introduced free and compulsory education in the mid-19th century, and this was the cultured land of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, of Martin Luther. Now, its education system was reformed into a vehicle of propaganda. When Hitler gained power, a radical reinvention of German education was immediately enforced, transforming German children into sponge-like recipients of National Socialist ideals. Bernhard Rust, an old Nazi from the street-fighting days of the 1920s, was appointed as Prussian Reichsminister for Science, Education, and National Culture, and quickly promoted to Minister of Education, extending his authority over the entire Reich by spring 1934. He instantly dismissed Jewish teachers from their positions and replaced them with passionate party members, setting about the reformation of German schools along religiously Nazi lines, declaring, “National socialistic ideology is to be a sacred foundation … it is a holy unit that must be accepted by the students as a holy unit. It must be taught by teachers who fully comprehend the true meaning of our sacred

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doctrines.”11 To Rust, every aspect of education must be about political indoctrination, because ordinary culture merely appealed to the intellect, which had little to do with the new Nazi culture of power and will. The manual he provided for his priest-teachers gave instructions on how to convert German children into Nazis. Physical education was to be their priority. Boys were to be separated from girls because their purposes were completely different; boys were destined to be soldiers and serve Hitler, while girls lived to produce Aryan babies. Rust’s teachers were reminded they were not in the business of producing individual intellectuals, but their students’ minds were in service to the state’s greater consciousness. Nor were his teachers to tolerate or encourage class distinctions, for under National Socialism, all citizens were equal members of the state. The National Socialist teacher’s priority was neither to provide knowledge nor wisdom, but to teach students to submit to authority and fulfil the role the party assigned to them.12 Faith in the party was to replace knowledge.13 By 1937, 97% of Germany’s teachers were members of the National Socialist Teachers Union.14 Gregor Ziemer, who was headmaster of the American Colony School for the children of American diplomats in Berlin, visited numerous schools and institutions to understand what was happening. He reported that young teenage girls attended school Monday through Saturday, studying an unusual curriculum. In the mornings, the traditional liberal arts and sciences were replaced with classes in German language, the geography of Greater Germany, Nazi Party history, nationalistic singing, Nazi ideology, domestic science, eugenics, and health biology. The girls spent their afternoons in organized sports, followed by evening sessions on eugenics, sex education, ideology, and domestic science. All of these classes emphasized that the girls were destined to be mothers for the new Germany.15 Ziemer described watching a calisthenics class in a Bund Deutscher Mädel (German League of Girls) camp in which the scantily dressed eighteen-year-old girls caressed themselves in a series of sensual motions across their thighs and breasts. Ziemer implied the exercises were deliberately designed to sexually arouse the girls, whose camp was strategically placed only a mile and a half from boys at a Hitler Youth camp, to stimulate the breeding of the Aryan race. Aryan girls who became pregnant by SS men or pure Aryan boys were sent to idyllic Lebensborn (Fountain of Life) care facilities run by the Schutzstaffel, or SS, where they were well looked after by the state. If they chose to, they could give up their babies for adoption into a pure Aryan family. Like the girls, boys were indoctrinated with a fanatical desire to serve their Führer, but their classes were oriented toward daily drills of physical

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education as preparation for military service, and party indoctrination. Class work was dedicated to party dogma. In her impassioned attack upon Nazi education, Erika Mann (daughter of the famous refugee author, Thomas Mann) described the account of an English exchange student who said that in his French classes at his German host school, his classmates spent their time translating French newspaper reports of Hitler’s speeches into German. The student thought this was easy work for the boys, who had already memorized all of the Führer’s speeches.16 Ziemer described schoolboys learning Nazi party history, the geography of the lebensraum, singing patriotic nationalist music, studying agriculture and zoology so they might become useful producers for the Reich. Science classes were turned over to the chemical manufacturing of explosives; they studied mathematics in the context of resolving the problems of bomb payloads and navigation, and other subjects that would teach them to become effective strategists and soldiers in service to the state. All education was set within the context of Nazi ideology.17 Children who missed class because they were attending Hitler Youth events were not punished for their absence, but encouraged to attend more. Because the insatiable military hunger for young recruits was considered a critical priority, further education was frequently abbreviated. Like the youth programs, college education was expected to train students for responsible, determined leadership, not for intellectual pursuits. Long-term research goals were discouraged because of the urgent need for serving men in the military machine. In all of these descriptions, Ziemer accurately depicts the organization of schools described in Rust’s handbook Erziehung und Unterricht (Teaching and Education). This racist, völkish, physical, political, and nationalist education gave birth to a German youth which surpassed the decadent, beer-drinking, and bourgeois people of the past. Rejecting that past, Hitler wanted a bright new generation which “… must be slender and supple, swift as greyhounds, tough as leather, and hard as Krupp steel. We must cultivate a new man in order to prevent the ruin of our Volk by the degeneration manifested in our age.”18 The ultimate goal of boys’ education was to prepare young men to serve “in blind faith and blind obedience” in the army, which was “the crowning glory of a National Socialist education which captivates the German man from youth onwards.”19 In the United States, readers were given insights into the novel world of the Führer by the unusual conservative anti-Nazi refugee Hermann Rauschning, who produced propaganda for his American hosts in a couple of best-selling books in which he maintained that he had been personally connected to Hitler. Rauschning claimed the Führer told him the sole

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purpose of education was to create a new generation of Nazis. Hitler demanded “a violently active, dominating, intrepid, brutal youth – that is what I am after. Youth must be all those things. It must be indifferent to pain. There must be no weakness or tenderness in it. I want to see once more in its eyes the gleam of pride and independence of the beast of prey. I intend to have an athletic youth – that is the first and the chief thing ... I will have no intellectual training. Knowledge is ruin to my young men.”20 Rauschning was an excellent propagandist for the West, writing emotional prose designed for distribution to an American audience to instil contempt for Hitler, so his writing must be treated with great suspicion, but here he appears to have captured the intent of Hitler’s real ideas. As early as 1923, while Americans were reassured that Hitler was nothing but “a comedian trying to play tragedy to an audience that wants nothing more than to be entertained” in the “comic opera”21 of Bavarian politics, he had called for dramatic cultural change. “We suffer today from an excess of culture. Only knowledge is valued. But wiseacres are the enemies of action. What we need is instinct and will. Most people have lost both through their ‘culture.’”22 He remained consistently disciplined in his message. Ten years later, immediately after this comedian had become the all-too-serious Chancellor, Hitler announced in a national radio broadcast that “reverence for our great past and pride in our old traditions” would be the foundation of German education.23 A month later he declared that reverence for Germany’s great men must be instilled in German youth.24 Because of his determined emphasis upon physical fitness and ideological preparation for young men to become members of the armed services, despite Hitler’s enthusiasm for painting, sculpture, and music, there were few arts classes in Nazi schools. At first glance this seems surprising, but Hitler associated art inseparably with race – artists were specially gifted individuals who sprang forth from the race, their gifts made manifest as a consequence of their hereditary bloodstock, not as the result of teaching. Artistic genius could be discovered, but not made. It was because of their racial heritage that artists’ ideas resonated with other members of their own race, and thus they were considered geniuses.25 An editorial in a party magazine called Art and Youth advised Nazi art teachers how to direct drawing classes. Ten-year-olds were to focus upon sketching scenes of action taken by heroic soldiers, firefighters, and so forth, while for the older children, explosive military attacks or images of the wartime experiences of the people were a suitable subject. Generally speaking, the arts were to be neglected from the curriculum, because, said the writer, “We cannot and do not desire to train artists, just as we do not desire or attempt to train poets in our German classes.”26 The singular

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purpose of Nazi education was identical to the purpose of its propaganda: to create an indoctrinated population that fully embraced the ideology of the party. It was certainly not to encourage individual creativity, for that might encourage independent thinking. Consequently, experiences that would lead to enthusiasm for National Socialism were prioritized over everything else. Perhaps Hitler’s contempt for intellectuals and education was formed when, as a young man, he failed to get accepted into the art academy in Vienna. It is an often-repeated part of the mythology of Hitler’s story that he was denied entry to the Academy of Fine Arts, but less well known that he was actually rejected twice – first in 1907 when he passed the first selection of candidates, but failed the examination; and again in 1908 when he was rejected out of hand.27 In private, he claimed the professor examining his portfolio recognized its quality but rejected his application only because he lacked a high school matriculation certificate.28 This rejection fomented an anti-intellectual streak in him that would shape the arts of the Reich. When he decided to run for Chancellor in 1932, the Austrian-born Hitler needed to get past the problem of his lack of German citizenship in order to be eligible for election in his adopted country. He already disliked intellectuals enough that in February, this largely self-schooled proletarian rejected an offer of an honorary professorship of ‘Organic Social Theory and Politics’ at the University of Braunschweig which would have automatically allowed him to become a German citizen. Instead, he accepted an appointment to an administrative government position as OberRegierung’s-Rat. Conscious of how his populist image might suffer if he was viewed as an intellectual – even as an honorary, fake intellectual – he preferred the anonymity of a civil service position. As Chancellor, Hitler awarded honorary professorships to prominent people in the arts who he admired, and he enjoyed calling them ‘professor,’ but he also said he could not endure schoolmasters,29 and had little patience for art studio academics, who he derided as either failures or weary old men.30 The problem with the academies, Hitler said, was that, “Either one appoints capable artists as teachers, thereby losing their services in the field of creative art, or one fills the academies with nonentities and leaves the young artistic idea with nothing on which to model itself.”31 Following his distaste for academics, Hitler thought that the solution for this problem was that there should be art academies for art students, providing foundational training in color theory, background painting, anatomy, and so on, but that these fundamentals should be followed by a government-directed apprentice system. These apprenticeships would take place in studios provided by the state for significant German artists who had proven their quality and were willing to give students professional training. Instead of a formulaic

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academic set of standards, these studios would be run according to the wishes of the artist-mentors who were in charge of them, allowing them “a completely free hand.”32 Hitler insisted that after the war, only “genuine artists” would be allowed to help on the gigantic building program he intended to put into motion.33 Doubtlessly, he had in mind artists like his confidante the architect Albert Speer, whose immense eagles and extravagant lighting displays provided the scenography for extraordinary spectacles at the Nuremburg rallies. He had in mind sculptors like his favourite Arno Breker, whose monuments of idealized Aryans flexed their stone muscles in Nazi sport palaces, civic plazas, and as public memorials to the glorious dead. He had in mind Josef Thorak, who decorated Speer’s buildings with bronzes like the horses that stood outside the Reich Chancellery, or carved his immense idealized nude men from gigantic blocks of marble. Hitler believed that the nation’s reputation depended upon its talented individuals, and considered it the people’s duty to support them: “… people should make sacrifices for their great men as a matter of course. A nation’s only true fortune is its great men. A great man is worth a lot more than a thousand million in the State’s coffers. A man who’s privileged to be the head of a country couldn’t make a better use of his power than to put it at the service of talent. If only the Party will regard it as its main duty to discover and encourage the talents! It’s the great men who express a nation’s soul.”34 Speer was paid millions of reichsmarks, showered in honours, and promoted to everincreasing responsibilities, including his appointment as Minister of Armaments, in charge of expanding military production. Breker reported that Hitler said, “my artists should live like princes.”35 And Breker would have known. For his service to the regime, he was given a mansion and a huge studio where he employed forty-three assistants.36 In 1940, Joseph Goebbels reported Breker would be working for the next ten years on “indescribably beautiful and yet monumental” sculptures for a gigantic triumphal arch planned for Berlin.37 Thorak was granted a studio near Munich designed by Speer. Hitler gave the ‘peasant-painter’ Sepp Hilz 100,000 reichsmarks to build a studio for himself (about $5,000,000 in today’s money). The Führer believed wholeheartedly in the importance of a nation’s culture over war, saying, “Wars pass by. The only things that exist are the works of human genius. This is the explanation of my love of art. Music and architecture – is it not in these disciplines that we find recorded the path of humanity’s ascent?”38 Hitler viewed himself as an artist, and in an article in The New York Times published in April 1933, he was presented to the American people as a cultured man with strong opinions about art. The article described a

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meeting between Hitler and German movie star Toni van Eyck, who is now completely forgotten, but was a big hit in the 1930s, with comments from Hitler about how enthusiastic he was about making use of radio as a tool for propaganda, and how movies should be more explicitly political, rather than concealing their endorsement of Nazism. During the interview, he said, “‘Had I not gone into politics I should have become an artist,’ he told Herr van Eyck. ‘In a certain sense, indeed, I am an artist: the architect of a nation. I mean always to have artists near me, for they have life blood in them. I need them in my fight on philistinism.’” The uncredited story was almost certainly wired directly from Goebbels’ propaganda ministry to The Times where it had been rewritten for the paper by a staff writer, for the American editors clearly did not know that Toni van Eyck was a pretty young German movie star and stage actress, not a man, and had obviously not bothered doing any fact-checking to verify the article.39 So here, Hitler was presented to American readers as the strong new Chancellor of Germany, with a deep interest in the arts, and a commitment to using them as a tool for propaganda designed to better his country. Hitler continued with a welcome to real artists of quality: “What I can do to weed out mediocrity and mendacity shall be done. A person of genuine ability need not complain. The genuine artist would join us quite spontaneously, because we are constructive ourselves. All genuine artists are constructive. The true artist can rediscover only among us his lost strength.”40 Hitler was presented as a glamorous man of action, socializing with movie stars, a voice of strength and integrity at a time of depression, weakness, and despair, and an artist who championed a specific kind of art, although it wasn’t immediately clear what form that art should take. Like Hitler, Goebbels viewed political leaders as artists, saying, “Only under the hand of an artist can a people be shaped from the masses, and a nation from the people.”41 He made a perfect ally for Hitler. An excellent publicist and propagandist, he adored his Führer. Together, by 1933, the two men shaped the administration of Nazi propaganda into an efficient machine for spreading the evangelical word of National Socialism to the German people and for increasing their power in government. Goebbels echoed Hitler’s views about the importance of clarity in propaganda and the arts. He believed good propaganda was hard to define because it was always flexible, its character shaped depending upon its audience. It was very difficult to teach a person how to be a good propagandist. He said, “The task of a gifted propagandist is to take that which many have thought and put it in a way that reaches everyone from the educated to the common man.” The success of propaganda could only be measured if it was effective, in other words, if it was popular and increased party membership.

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It did not have to be intellectual or beautiful. It simply had to work. Its purpose was to create and bolster conviction, and it could be endlessly adjusted to fit the people it was aimed at. Goebbels continued, “The task of the leaders and followers is to drive this knowledge ever deeper into the hearts of our shattered nation. Each must make that clear, each must think things through. Everything we do must be clear. We will never give up. If everything is clear, one does not have to be an outstanding speaker. If he can say it all in a few words, he is a propagandist. If we have an army of such propagandists, from the littlest to the Führer himself, and if each spreads our crystal-clear knowledge to the masses, the day will come in which our worldview takes over the state, when our organization seizes the reins of power, when we are no longer members of a slave colony, but rather citizens of a political state that we ourselves have formed. That is our task on this planet: to create the foundation on which our people can live. When we do that, this nation will create works of culture that will endure for eons in world history!”42 In 1927, Goebbels gave a speech to party members assembled in Berlin describing the effective use of propaganda. Paraphrasing Hitler, he began by pointing out its amorality, and explaining that good propaganda could neither be too low nor too crude, and that the measure of its quality could only be found in whether or not it succeeded. The form propaganda took was irrelevant as long as it was successful in spreading an idea among the people. The central idea that was being disseminated had to be simple and must be the cornerstone for building a worldview. Propaganda was the tool to be used to spread the idea so that the Nazi world view could dominate. “The idea becomes a worldview on its way to governmental power … Ideas find people to spread them. The more an idea spreads and reaches all areas of life, the more it becomes a worldview. If an organization becomes the bearer of a worldview, its ultimate goal is the government, which is the bearer of the whole nation. Propaganda reaches its goal if its worldview takes practical form by gaining control of the state. In the beginning is the idea, which is taken up by propaganda and transformed into an organization that seeks to win the state. The task of propaganda is to spread knowledge.”43 Impressively designed Nazi posters appeared all over Germany, plastered liberally around the streets of her great cities. Nazi movies were distributed, reinforcing simple messages of antisemitic and anti-communist blame for Germany’s woes, of the proud German worker, of pride in the Fatherland, of the unity of the German people, of service to the Reich in all its strength and beauty. The people saw the Nazi message on its city walls, heard its message on the radio, and participated in the sensual spectacles of

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immense party parades and rallies. The Nazi propaganda machine was slick, impressive, and extremely professional. Art was an important part of this machine. Keenly aware of the power of propaganda and the arts over the minds of the people, when installed as Chancellor, Hitler immediately appointed Goebbels as head of the new Reichskulturkammer (Chambers of Culture), with complete control over fine arts, music, theatre, literature, press, radio, and film. Goebbels’ new cultural authority required artists to be sanctioned members of the various Chambers if they wished to continue working in their field. Only 42,000 artists were approved. At first, Goebbels presented himself as a tolerant but firm leader, supportive of innovations within the creative fields he now controlled, even encouraging German Expressionism and the publication of a Nazi-run modern art magazine called Kunst (Art), but this tolerance was short-lived and swiftly ended when Goebbels realized how complete Hitler’s intention was to eradicate modern art from German culture. In a memoir written in Spandau prison after the Nuremberg trials, Speer described the moment in which Goebbels turned his back on individualistic avant-garde art. Goebbels commissioned Speer to redecorate his home and build an additional hall as an extension. To decorate the new walls, Speer borrowed some watercolour paintings by Nazi party member Emil Nolde from the Director of the Berlin National Gallery. When Goebbels and his wife Magda saw them hanging in their newly renovated house, they thought the paintings were marvellous, but when Hitler visited to see the improvements and saw Nolde’s paintings, he expressed his disapproval of their expressionist style, so the sycophantic Goebbels ordered Speer to remove them immediately, saying, “The pictures have to go at once; they’re simply impossible!”44 Goebbels wouldn’t make the same embarrassing error again. Shortly after this uncomfortable episode, he heard about an exhibition organized by artist and film-maker Hans Weidemann, which included paintings by Nolde and the Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch. He summarily ordered these offensive works removed forthwith. Although Weidemann had joined the party as early as 1927, and headed the art section of the Propagandaministerium (Propaganda Ministry), when he objected to this censorship, Goebbels removed him from his position and demoted him. Nolde was forbidden from making art and would spend the rest of the Nazi era sneakily painting small watercolours and hiding his work from the Gestapo. Knowing his place, the young Speer learned his lesson, too, accepting that modern art had no place in Nazi Germany, and from then on

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strictly stuck to using a gigantic neo-classical style in his architectural designs. As Hitler quickly took a firm grip upon all aspects of the government of the Reich, Goebbels’ relatively open-minded approach soon turned into Aryan authoritarianism. Racial hygiene, of course, meant that applicants hoping to join the Chambers had to be certified Aryans, not Jews. Any artists who expressed political opinions contrary to Nazi dogma were sure to be excluded. If applicants were denied because of race or ideology, they were forbidden from professional work in their discipline. A piece of correspondence between Goebbels and Wilhelm Furtwängler, who was head of the Reichsmusikkammer (Music Chamber), gave a sense of internal conversations within Nazi top ranks. As head of the Berlin State Opera, Furtwängler wrote to Goebbels in 1933 defending three Jewish musicians who had been barred from performing when their applications for membership in the Reichsmusikkammer were declined. Goebbels refused to allow the musicians to perform, denounced Jews, democracy, and elitism, and declared that art must only be völkisch, saying, “Art must not only be good, it must also appear to be connected with the people, or rather, only an art which draws on the people itself can in the final analysis be good and mean something to the people for whom it is created. There must be no art in the absolute sense as known by liberal democracy. The attempt to serve it would result in the people no longer having any inner relationship to art and in the artist himself isolating and cutting himself off from the driving forces of the time in the vacuum of the ‘l’art pour l’art’ point of view. Art must be good; but beyond this it must be responsible, professional, popular (volksnah) and aggressive.”45 Other key figures in the Nazi party were deeply involved in shaping German art. Detailed descriptions of Nazi values came from ideologues like Himmler, the notorious head of the SS, who was deeply interested in occult symbolism and reviving the old gods of pre-Christian Germany, a passion shared by the influential anti-Christian and antisemitic philosopher Alfred Rosenberg, the lebensreform (life-reform) leader Paul Schultze-Naumburg, and the eccentric Nazi pedagogue Bernhard Rust. While Hitler was imprisoned after the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Rosenberg served as interim leader of the party. Deeply reactionary, he was zealously committed to the superiority of Aryan Germans over other races and viewed art and culture as essential to the reestablishment of prestige and national pride. In 1927, he founded his Nationalsozialistische Gesellschaft für deutsche Kultur (National Socialist Society for German Culture) to witness to the German people about the relationship between art and racial purity. Hitler balanced Rosenberg against Goebbels, making use of their

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intense rivalry to maintain his power. After Rosenberg jealously complained when Goebbels was given authority over the Kulturkammer, Hitler named him ‘Representative of the Führer for the Overall Philosophy and Intellectual Training and Education of the National Socialist Party,’ a flamboyant title which promised much but delivered little power. Nevertheless, the title calmed Rosenberg, and despite being pushed aside from practical authority over the arts, he was a powerful ideological force in the Nazi art world. Apart from publishing the influential magazine Die Kunst Im Dritten Reich (Art in the Third Reich), his book The Myth of the Twentieth Century was a Nazi best-seller. Remarkably for a frequently rabid text, ostensibly written about racist political philosophy, a disproportionately large amount of it was about art. Myth was written in three sections titled, The Conflict of Values, The Nature of German Art, and The Coming Reich. The middle chapter on German art was sub-divided into four parts titled, Racial Aesthetics, Will and Instinct, Personality and Style, and The Aesthetic Will. Indebted to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Rosenberg declared a break from Grecian idealism in favor of an aesthetics dominated by the will of the individual artist in service to his race. To Rosenberg, the will was the source of artistic joy, which was an ecstatic assertion of the triumph of individuality over material, and a celebration of human dominance over nature. This exuberant, triumphant will was not a servant to idealization, neither was its beauty found in harmony, nor in imitation of divinity. Rosenberg saw himself as the inventor of a completely new, thoroughly Aryan aesthetic which was no longer dependent upon Immanuel Kant’s disinterested interest. He rejected the ideas that art should be viewed with detached contemplation, or that true beauty should be universally appreciated, instead advocating a racial aesthetics which was specifically tailored to Northern European sensibilities. In this regard, he differed with Hitler, who admired the Greeks. Rosenberg said, “Greek beauty consisted in the shaping of the body, while Germanic beauty consists in the shaping of the soul. The one signifies outward balance, the latter inward law.”46 To Rosenberg, the central role of art was a mystical call to völkish participation in German heritage. The party had clear expectations of the role of artists as propagandists. Rosenberg’s magazine Die Kunst Im Dritten Reich insisted, “… the Führer wants the German artist to leave his solitude and speak to the people. This must start with the choice of the subject. It has to be popular and comprehensible. It has to be heroic in line with the ideals of National Socialism. It has to declare its faith in the ideal of beauty in the Nordic and racially pure human being.”47 After the war was lost, Rosenberg wrote a memoir in his prison cell, and even while waiting for the judgement of the International Military

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Tribunal at Nuremburg – who he must have known would sentence him to death – he remained preoccupied with art, describing what he saw as the cornerstone to his aesthetic. He wrote, “… anyone who creates a work of art and, in doing so, feels within himself the glow, the excitement, the reality of his will, cannot possibly desire the spectator to experience nothing more than passive contemplation. This one central idea led to all my studies on art and, beyond that, to the investigation of many other more general phenomena of life.”48 Like Hitler, Rosenberg rejected Plato’s insistence that cool analysis of mathematical measurement and scientific research were superior to the sentimental reactions inspired by art and poetry. Instead, great art made an emotional appeal that swayed the viewers’ convictions. This was precisely aligned with Hitler and Goebbels’ views on propaganda. Plato said that in the ideal state, painters and epic poets should be cast out from the city because their work was three steps removed from the truth. Hitler, Goebbels, and Rosenberg required artists to promote sincere belief in their platform regardless of the truth. Plato condemned catharsis as a lie that would lead to the corruption of the human soul. The Nazis saw catharsis as a tool which would shape their utopia. They were uninterested in the enlightenment search for truth through art, or the idea that mankind discovered beauty for its own sake, or the idea that art could be the vehicle for therapeutic individual expression. Following Rosenberg, museums must shed their old role as places for connoisseurs to appreciate the virtues of works of art, and discard Kant’s approach to looking at art with disinterested interest in favour of becoming places for ordinary Germans to accept emotional appeals to their patriotism and racial pride. Art magazines parroted Rosenberg’s words. Otto Klein wrote in Deutsches Volkstum (German Folklore), “The philosophy of national socialism grew from the nature and culture of our volk. It is the proper soil for art and culture, which will grow livelier and more natural here than in the asphalt culture of the intellectuals of past centuries. Our museums too will have to be restructured. It is not enough to remove a few ‘dangerous’ pictures. We must change the old principal of cool distance and bring true popular art to the people … Our museums must once more become museums for the people. Places of national and racial consciousness, not just places to study commercial values. Never again places for the virus of decadence.”49 Such völkish ideas were not new in the German conversation about art, having been wrapped up in the Lebensreform (life-reform) movement of the turn of the century, in which popular writers like the prolific author and architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg enthusiastically encouraged citizens to rethink their approach to daily life in its full diversity, to consider domestic

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decoration, cooking, gardening, and so forth, as part of the cultural life of the nation. Before the Great War, Schultze-Naumburg described a revival of German art and crafts similar to the famous English movement championed by William Morris. His ideas were best known from an inexpensive and popular nine-volume set of books titled Kulturarbeiten (Cultural Work) which he wrote between 1901 and 1917, describing traditionalist methods of building homes, how to plan and design German gardens, roads, towns, villages and castles, and water and land management. He also published a short feminist book titled Die Kultur des Weiblichen Körpers als Grundlage der Frauenkleidung (The Culture of the Female Body as a Basis for Ladies Clothes) critiquing corsetry and championing the natural female form as the proper silhouette for women’s fashion to follow. Books like these were at the heart of the populist völkisch movement, which was rooted in anti-urbanism and romantic nationalism, with a mystical set of neo-pagan beliefs that imagined an idealized, natureoriented Germany. In the late nineteenth century, German industrial growth had produced a new bourgeoisie who expected their children to follow them in their embrace of work, domestic comfort, and consumerism. Instead, many young Germans embraced Lebensreform, forming a subculture within the völkisch movement, rebelling against their parents’ pretensions. They believed that by rejecting urbanism and materialism, which were unhealthy, and instead embracing sexual liberality, nudism, sunbathing, alternative medicine, raw foods, and vegetarianism, they were walking upon the winding path to utopia. Large numbers joined in long ‘back-to-nature’ pilgrimages through the German countryside, called the wandervögel (wandering bird). Barefooted and long-haired, some carried musical instruments which were played beside crackling campfires as they slept beneath the German stars (some of them emigrated to America where they became the precursors and founding fathers of the Californian hippy movement).50 Exploiting the popularity of the Lebensreform movement among enthusiastic young Germans, the Nazis contrasted the solid and true German peasantry who were bound to the land by Blut und Boden (blood and soil) with the nomadic Jews and Slavs who they claimed deserved no land of their own. Among the artists of the Lebensreform movement was the symbolist Wilhelm Diefenbach, whose ecstatic images invoked a spiritual connection with a sublime landscape, in which the divine spirit of the earth was made accessible by making difficult journeys through extraordinary mountain scenes, or discerned in tumultuous seas. His follower Fidus (Hugo Höppener) drew sensual pictures of ecstatic men and women, united in nudity and dancing in mystical pagan rituals. Although he became a reluctant member

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of the Nazi Party, Fidus’ art was condemned as degenerate and he was forbidden from selling his work. Ironically, considering Fidus’ party affiliation, Diefenbach and Fidus’ erotic and spiritual paintings later became the stylistic foundation for the psychedelic art that illustrated the hedonism of the 1970s hippy movement, with its deep connections to bohemia. Lebensreformers hoped for a world in which women were to have equal rights with men, while individuality was suppressed in favor of communal spirit. They longed for a utopia that lay somewhere in the misty space between capitalism and communism. In the face of economic desperation, an ideological drift from Lebensreform to Nazism was almost inevitable, for this middle ground was precisely where Nazi ideology lay, with added emphasis upon proletarian egalitarianism and nationalism. After the end of the Great War, Schultze-Naumburg’s ideas began to take on a more explicitly racist and nationalist form. He warned that paintings and sculptures of “the Nordic type” were seldom seen in German art, and that this lapse was a symptom of racial degeneration. He asked how the German people might avoid this fate. Schultze-Naumburg was quick to join Rosenberg’s antisemitic political society, Kampfbund für Deutsche Kultur (Combat League for German Culture), founded in 1928. He provided theory to support the idea that modern art was the product of inferior races in books like his Kunst aus Blut und Boden (Art from Blood and Soil), which coupled art to the Nazi Party’s romantic connection of the people to the land, and with the lebensraum policy of German expansion into the East, an extremely important theme followed by Nazi artists. In his pamphlet Kampf um die Kunst (The Struggle for Art), he described how artists must set aside their individuality and understand their work as an expression of the community from which they came: a true artist must not occupy a selfindulgent role as a unique genius, but must act instead as a mirror of culture. As Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power, the popular writer and tastemaker showed Germans how degenerate modern artists delighted in racial and physical abnormality. In Art and Race, published in 1928, Schultze-Naumburg compared images of modernist paintings with photographs of deformed and sick people, describing the common themes of the paintings: “Were one to name the symbols that find expression in the majority of the paintings and sculptures of our period, they would be the idiot, the prostitute, and the sagging breast … a genuine hell of inferior human beings.”51 Young Germans were already thoroughly familiar with this kind of imagery, having been indoctrinated with similar ideas about the superiority of the Aryan race in their schools and in the Hitler Youth – fully one third of the Hitler Youth handbook was dedicated to a eugenic description of the racial identity of

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true Germans in comparison to their racial and physiological inferiors.52 Now, images of the bodies of these defective inferiors (physical handicaps, malformations, anatomical abnormalities caused by disease), were printed beside individualist modern paintings and sculptures to prove their inadequacy. The ‘compare and contrast’ style of Art and Race became the basis – on a grand scale – of the infamous Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibit and The Great Exhibition of German Art that opened side by side in 1937. An abbreviated version of Art and Race was republished as a pamphlet in 1932, 1935, 1938, and 1942. It was an effective strategy which simplified the choice Germans faced: the representational art that described the ideals of National Socialist Germany was healthy, good for the people, and built up the volk, while the modernism spawned by Jews and communists was perverse, mentally ill, anti-German, and must be ridiculed and refused. Hitler expected artists to lead the people in populist service to the völkish state as political educators and social manipulators, not as members of a cultural intelligentsia. At the opening of the House of German Art in Munich, he emphasized his special distaste for artistic elitism, and tied artmaking to the health of the people, saying, “An art which must rely upon the support of small cliques is intolerable. The artist cannot stand aloof from his people. His art must reinforce the sure and healthy instinct of a people.”53 Unhealthy elitism was to be dismissed from German museums, which were to serve as vehicles for propaganda, providing Nazi paintings and sculptures for the people, art that moved the masses towards a healthy life, which was living with a passionate enthusiasm for National Socialism and inspired action. Goebbels continued with the theme, saying, “… the mission of art and of the artist is not simply to produce unity: it goes much further. It is their duty to create, to impart form, to eliminate that which is sick and open up the way for that which is healthy.”54 Artists were to serve the state. This subservient role was at the heart of fascist principles – as Hitler’s hero Mussolini said, “… the individual exists only in so far as he is within the State and subjected to the requirements of the state and that, as civilization assumes aspects which grow more and more complicated, individual freedom becomes more and more restricted.”55 Artists had a clearly defined role in Nazi Germany, and it was in Proudhonian service to the state. A first taste of authority in cultural affairs came to the Nazis in 1930, when the party joined the coalition government of Thuringia, and Wilhelm Frick was appointed as Minister of the Interior and Culture. Leaving no doubt about the future direction of the Nazi’s health-oriented cultural propaganda policy, within three months of his appointment, Frick issued

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decrees designed to remove sickness from the arts. Jazz, anti-war novels, new music, and pacifist or leftist theatrical productions and movies (including a filmed performance of the communist Berthold Brecht’s Threepenny Opera) were all banned. That October, Frick ordered the removal of modern art from Weimar’s Schlossmuseum. On 1st April, he struck at the Bauhaus (then known as the Academy of Architecture and Handicrafts), appointing Schultze-Naumburg to the helm of the school, replacing the Jewish Hannes Meyer, who had taken over after Walter Gropius moved to Berlin in 1928. Intent upon eradicating the champions of degeneracy, SchultzeNaumburg immediately fired the Academy’s twenty-nine teachers, destroyed the Bauhaus murals painted in the stairwells by Oskar Schlemmer, and shut the school down. He reopened it a few months later as the State School for Architecture, Fine Art, and Handicraft, focusing its attention upon producing German art for the German people. After the Nazi takeover, Meyer fled to Moscow, where he helped to build Soviet urban housing projects. Gropius escaped across the Atlantic to exile in America. It was the Führer’s will that mattered most in art and architecture, and his authority provided an answer to Schultze-Naumburg’s question of how Germany might avoid a descent into cultural degeneracy. When he was installed as Chancellor of Germany on January 30th, 1933, Hitler immediately made his artistic intentions clear, giving a speech announcing war against Germany’s cultural enemies, declaring, “The National Government … will wage a pitiless warfare upon spiritual, political, and cultural nihilism. Germany must not, Germany shall not go under in the chaos of Communism.”56 Next, within ten days of his appointment, filled with disgust for the coalition government of the Weimar years, Hitler proclaimed that the Nazi party would “… burn out the symptoms of decomposition in literature, in the theatre, in the press – in a word in our whole culture; we want to burn out this whole poison which during these fourteen years has followed into our life.”57 The poison, of course, had been administered by Jews, whose racial inferiority extended into their art, and had to be eradicated in order to purify Germany.58 Although Nazi art was part of Hitler and Goebbels’ broader propaganda plan designed to guide the German volk in their belief in German superiority and the purity of the Aryan race, it was a subtler and more sophisticated tool than their brash poster and film campaigns. No antisemitic paintings were admitted to the Great German Art exhibits because these were shows of art for the ages, not for the present. Because antisemitism would one day be a thing of the past, an unpleasant memory of a dark necessity, images of Jews were reserved for temporary paper posters, and for the fleeting and

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fashionable imagery of motion pictures, quickly discarded and considered as amusements, not as art. Destined to be eradicated, Jews were not to be made immortal by becoming the subjects of the art of the thousand-year Reich. Nazi art was quite literally not to be viewed in the same way as propaganda posters. Hitler said, “The art of the advertisement poster consists in the ability of the designer to attract the attention of the crowd through the form and colors he chooses. The advertisement poster announcing an exhibition of art has no other aim than to convince the public of the importance of the exhibition. The better it does that, the better the art of the poster as such. Although its purpose is to impress upon the public the importance of the exhibition, the poster can never take the place of the artistic objects displayed in the exhibition hall. They are something entirely different. Therefore, those who wish to study art must study something that is quite different from the poster; indeed, for that purpose they must do more than merely wander through the exhibition galleries. The student of art must carefully and thoroughly study each exhibition in order slowly to form a judicious opinion on it.59 Furtwängler’s three Jewish musicians had almost no chance of work or life in Nazi Germany in the years following 1933. By the end of the year, the Nazis had successfully completed the removal of the Jews from Germany’s entire educational and cultural system. By 1935, all artists, musicians, architects, and creative workers who were not members of the Chamber could expect to be unemployed and persecuted, forbidden from making art, and subjected to surprise visits from the Gestapo. Hitler claimed “a vast flowering of cultural and artistic life”60 would be the result of this purification. The arts weren’t only to be cleansed of Jewish, communist, and non-doctrinaire ideas and influences; they were also to be specifically aimed at providing a romanticized ideal of what German life under the Nazis should be. Hitler and Goebbels’ intention was to encourage art as propaganda, imprinting the ideas of racial purity, the German Homeland (lebensraum), and the sacredness of German blood and German earth (Blut und Boden) in the minds of the people. The penalties for failing to make such volkish art were made clear – when Hitler laid the cornerstone to the new Congress Hall of the Reich Party Congresses in Nuremberg, he described modern artists as murderers who wanted “to kill the soul of the Volk.”61 Hitler understood that propaganda was most effective when the same message came to people repeatedly through a variety of media, saying, “… The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their power of understanding is slight. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being

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the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials, and these must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward. If this principle be forgotten, and an attempt be made to be abstract and general, the propaganda will turn out ineffective, for the public will not be able to digest or retain what is offered to them in this way.”62 This understanding was repeated by Rosenberg, who wrote, “Propaganda does not need to be intellectual; it must be effective. It should express our worldview in a way that can be understood by the masses.” 63 All publicists know that getting people to pay any attention to an event, or book, or person requires putting exciting materials that describe it in front of the public over and over again. This is why the themes found in Nazi artworks, literature, poster designs, films, theatre productions, magazines, and spectacles were repetitive. In the first issue of a magazine produced by his propaganda ministry, Goebbels encouraged his network of Nazi artists, journalists, and editors to be vigilantly consistent, for, “In the long run, propaganda will reach the broad masses of the people only if at every stage it is uniform. Nothing confuses the people more than lack of clarity or aimlessness. The goal is not to present the common man with as many varied and contradictory theories as possible. The essence of propaganda is not in variety, but rather the forcefulness and persistence with which one selects ideas from the larger pool and hammers them into the masses using the most varied methods.”64 Nazi art repeatedly emphasized the roles the German people were expected to fill as members of the volk. Artists followed party dogma and created paintings and sculptures that affirmed and reaffirmed Nazi doctrines. They made images of physically perfect Aryan men and women – the subjects of their works were tall, handsome, and blonde, with wellmuscled physiques. They crafted genre pictures of healthy family groups (always with several children, for good Germans were encouraged to outbreed the inferior races which were over-running the country), of babies suckling at their mothers’ breasts, of the old man looking with satisfaction over a hard day’s work in the fields, of burly farmers ploughing the good productive earth, of heroic soldiers struggling in their manly duty to protect the fatherland, of assertive male and female nudes in perfect physical condition. With the weight of political authority behind the idea of German völkish art, travelling shows of fine art and propaganda went from museum to museum, organized by party members under the direction of Rosenberg, Goebbels, and their officers. With titles like, German Art, Blood and Soil, German Land – German Man, Race and Nation, The Eternal Jew, German

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Peasant – German Land, Pictures of the Family, Great Anti-Bolshevist Exhibition, these shows shaped the German National Socialist consciousness. The dark day of German art had come.

Notes 1

Hugh Trevor-Roper, Trans. Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, Hitler’s Table Talk, Enigma, 2000, 706-707 2 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, The Stalag Edition, Ostara Publications, 2016, 404 3 Ibid, 321 4 Derek Jones (Editor), Censorship: A World Encyclopedia, Routledge, Dec 1, 2001926 5 Norman H. Baynes Editor, The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, Howard Fertig, 1969, 66 6 Gottfried Feder, Trans. E. T. S. Dugdale, The Programme of the NSDAP The National Socialist German Workers’ Party and its General Conceptions. Franz Eher Verlag, 1932. English edition by B.P. Publications, 1980, 20 7 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, The Stalag Edition, Ostara Publications, 2016, 218. I have used the “Stalag” edition of Mein Kampf throughout this book. This edition was the official German translation of Hitler’s book into English, produced in Berlin between 1937 – 1944 by Franz Eher Verlag, largely for English speaking prisoners of war whom Germany hoped to persuade to become Nazi sympathizers. 8 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, The Stalag Edition, Ostara Publications, 2016, 152 – 153 9 Ibid, 154 - 155 10 Ibid, 157 11 Gregor Ziemer, Education for Death, Oxford University Press, 1941, 21 12 Ibid, 18-20 13 Erika Mann, School for Barbarians: Education Under the Nazis, Dover Kindle Edition, 2014, Kindle location 1219-1227 14 Ibid, 689 - 697 15 Gregor Ziemer, Education for Death, Oxford University Press, 1941, 86-87, 132 16 Erika Mann, School for Barbarians: Education Under the Nazis, Dover Kindle Edition, 2014, Kindle location 1366-1373 17 Ibid, 86-87, 157-158 18 Adolf Hitler, Speech Before 54,000 Members of the Hitler Youth in the Nuremberg Stadium, September 14, 1935, Adolf Hitler Collection of Speeches 1922 -1945, Propagandaleiter, n/d, 268 19 “Just as the German Wehrmacht is dedicated to this National Socialist State in blind faith and blind obedience, this National Socialist State and its leading Party are likewise proud of and pleased with our Wehrmacht. In it we see the crowning glory of a National Socialist education which captivates the German man from youth onwards.” Adolf Hitler, Great Speech Before the Reichstag, February 20, 1938, Adolf Hitler Collection of Speeches 1922 -1945, Propagandaleiter, n/d, 418

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Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks: A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on His Real Aims, Thornton Butterworth, 1939, 247 21 Bavaria Enjoys Fascisti Antics: Parades and Rallies Have Comic Opera Flavor, Los Angeles Times, Jul 3, 1923, 18 22 Adolf Hitler, Speech in Munich April 27, 1923, Adolf Hitler Collection of Speeches 1922 -1945, Propagandaleiter, n/d, 39 23 Adolf Hitler, The First Radio Broadcast of Adolf Hitler’s Proclamation, February 1, 1933, Adolf Hitler Collection of Speeches 1922 -1945, Propagandaleiter, n/d, 106 24Adolf Hitler, Policy Statement on the Enabling Act to the Reichstag, Berlin, March 23, 1933, Adolf Hitler Collection of Speeches 1922 -1945, Propagandaleiter, n/d, 112 25 Adolf Hitler, Speech at the NSDAP Congress on Culture, 3 September 1933, in: Rabinbach, Anson, and Sander L. Gilman. The Third Reich Sourcebook, University of California Press, 2013, 205-206. First published as Adolf Hitler’s Rede auf der Kulturagung der N.S.D.A.P., in Die Reden Hitlers am Reichsparteitag 1933, Franz Eher Verlag, 1934, 23-27 26 Joseph Stuchler, Aerial Defense in the Drawing Class, Art and Youth, May, 1937, In: Erika Mann, School for Barbarians: Education Under the Nazis, Dover Kindle Edition, 2014, Kindle location 1419-1459 27 Ian Kershaw, Hitler: A Biography, Norton, 2008, 26 28 Hitler described his rejection from the Vienna School of Fine Arts at dinner October 28th 1941 in the company of guests including Field-Marshal Von Kluge, Reich Minister Dr. Todt, Reichsfuehrer SS Himmler and Gauleiter Forster. Hugh Trevor-Roper, Trans. Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, Hitler’s Table Talk, Enigma, 2000, 97 29 “I cannot endure schoolmasters.” Ibid, 174 30 “… the academies have nothing to tell me that’s worth listening to. In fact, the professors who are active there are either failures, or else artists of talent (but who cannot devote more than two hours a day to their teaching), or else weary old men who therefore have nothing more to give.” Ibid, 371 31 Ibid, 543 32 Ibid, 542-543 33 “27th March 1942. Genuine artists develop only by contact with other artists. Like the Old Masters, they began by working in a studio. Let’s remember that men like Rembrandt, Rubens and others hired assistants to help them to complete all their commissions. Amongst these assistants, only those reached the rank of apprentice who displayed the necessary gifts as regards technique and adroitness – and of whom it could be supposed that they would in their turn be capable of producing works of value. It’s ridiculous to claim, as it’s claimed in the academies, that right from the start the artist of genius can do what he likes. Such a man must begin, like everyone else, by learning, and it’s only by working without relaxation that he succeeds in achieving what he wants. If he doesn’t know the art of mixing colors to perfection – if he cannot set a background – if anatomy still has secrets for him – it’s certain he won’t go very far! I can imagine the number of sketches it took an artist as gifted as Menzel before he set himself to paint the Flute Concert at SansSouci. It would be good if artists today, like those of olden days, had the training

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afforded by the Masters’ studios and could thus steep themselves in the great pictorial traditions. If, when we look at the pictures of Rembrandt and Rubens, for example, it is often difficult to make out what the Master has painted himself and what is his pupils’ share, that’s due to the fact that gradually the disciples themselves became masters. What a disaster it was, the day when the State began to interfere with the training of painters! As far as Germany is concerned, I believe that two academies would suffice: in Düsseldorf and Munich. Or perhaps three in all, if we add Vienna to the list. Obviously, there’s no question, for the moment, of abolishing any of our academies. But that doesn’t prevent one from regretting that the tradition of the studios has been lost. If, after the war, I can realise my great building programme – and I intend to devote thousands of millions to it – only genuine artists will be called on to collaborate. The others may wait until doomsday, even if they’re equipped with the most brilliant recommendations.” Ibid, 370 34 Ibid, 212 34 Robert S. Wistrich, Who’s Who in Nazi Germany, Routledge 2013, 25 35 Arno Breker, Im Stahlungsfeld der Ereignisse, 1972, 100. Cited in: Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, Overlook Press, 2003, 79 36 Robert S. Wistrich, Who’s Who in Nazi Germany, Routledge 2013, 25 37 Josef Goebbels, Trans. Fred Taylor, The Goebbels Diaries 1939 – 1941, Penguin, 1982, 194, 342 38 Hugh Trevor-Roper, Trans. Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, Hitler’s Table Talk, Enigma, 2000, 257 39 Van Eyck had appeared in several movies – including Geschminkte Jugend (Painted Youth), a film designed to guide young people away from the dangers of licentious living and Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening), in which she perishes at the hands of a lascivious ‘angel-maker’ abortionist after being caught up in a love-triangle which leaves her pregnant. Most recently she starred in the 1932 patriotic film Gefahren der Liebe (Hazards of Love) in which she is the love of the heroic cyclist Heinz Rühmann, who despite having been bribed to deliberately allow his aging German teammate to win an important race, pushes forward and wins for Germany when a foreigner takes the lead of the field. Presumably Goebbels, or someone in his department, had seen the movie, admired Van Eyck’s part in it and persuaded this attractive and patriotic actress to help with Germany’s propaganda. 40 Hitler Describes Himself as Artist, New York Times, Apr 16, 1933, E2 41 Joseph Goebbels, Combat Pour Berlin (The Fight for Berlin), Societe de Presse et d’Editions, 1966, first published 1931. Cited in: Eric Michaud, Trans. Janet Lloyd, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, Stanford, 2004, 1 42 Joseph Goebbels, Erkenntnis und Propaganda, Signale der neuen Zeit. 25 ausgewählte Reden von Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1934, pp. 28-52. Trans. Randall Bytwerk, German Propaganda Archive, Calvin College, 1999 http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb54.htm 43 Alfred Rosenberg and Wilhelm Weiß, Reichsparteitag der NSDAP Nürnberg 19./21. August 1927, Franz Eher Verlag, 1927, pp. 30-32 Trans. Randall Bytwerk, German Propaganda Archive, Calvin College, 1999. http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/rpt27c1.htm 44 Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, Memoirs, Macmillan, 1970, 32

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Correspondence between Wilhelm Furtwängler and Joseph Goebbels about art and the State, In: Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, April 11, 1933; reprinted in: Ed. Paul Meier Benneckenstein & Axel Friedrichs, Dokumente der deutschen Politik, Volume 1: Die Nationalsozialistische Revolution 1933, Berlin, 1935, pp. 255-58. 46 Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century: An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual Confrontations of Our Age, Noontide Press, 1982, Kindle Highlight Loc. 4371-83 47 Hans Kiener, in: Die Kunst in Dritten Reich, July / August 1937, 19. Quoted in: Peter Adam, Art of the Third Reich, Harry Abrams, 1992, 69 48 Alfred Rosenberg, Memoirs, Ziff-Davis Pub. Co., Chicago & NY; Transcription of first edition. January 1, 1949, 46 49 Otto Klein, Das Deutsche Volksmuseum, Deutsches Volkstum, 1934, 942. Quoted in: Peter Adam, Art of the Third Reich, Harry Abrams, 1992, 67 50 Gordon Kennedy, Children of the Sun, Nivaria Press, 1998 51 Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Art and Race (1928), in Ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, University of California Press, pp. 496-99.) 1994, 497 (Translated from Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Kunst und Rasse, J.F. Lehmanns, 1928) 52 Brennecke, Fritz. The Nazi Primer: Official Handbook for Schooling the Hitler Youth, trans. Harwood Childs. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1938. 53 Adolf Hitler, Speech, at the opening of the House of German Art in Munich, 18 July 1937 Ed. Norman H. Baynes, The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, Howard Fertig, 1969, pp. 589–92 54 Cited in: Eric Michaud, Trans. Janet Lloyd, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, Stanford, 2004, 23 55 Benito Mussolini, Speech to the General Staff Conference of Fascism, Discorsi del 1929, Milano, Alpes, 1930. 280 56 Adolph Hitler, Speech, 1st February 1933. Ed. Norman H. Baynes, The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, Howard Fertig, 1969, 113 57 Adolph Hitler, Speech, 11th February 1933. Ed. Norman H. Baynes, The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, Howard Fertig, 1969, 240 58 e.g. Hugh Trevor-Roper, Trans. Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, Hitler’s Table Talk, Enigma, 2000, 370 59 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, The Stalag Edition, Ostara Publications, 2016, 152153 60 Speech by Hitler 11th February 1933. Norman H. Baynes Editor, The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, Howard Fertig, 1969, 734 61 Adolf Hitler, Speech at NSDAP congress hall in Nuremberg, 11th September, 1935, Adolf Hitler, Collection of Speeches 1922 -1945, 262 62 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, The Stalag Edition, Ostara Publications, 2016, 154 63 Alfred Rosenberg and Wilhelm Weiß, Reichsparteitag der NSDAP Nürnberg 19/21. August 1927, Franz Eher Verlag, 1927, pp. 30-32 Trans. Randall Bytwerk, German Propaganda Archive, Calvin College, 1999. http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/rpt27c1.htm

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Joseph Goebbels, Wille und Weg (Will and Way), in: Wille und Weg (later renamed, Unser Wille und Weg), Issue 1, 1931, pp. 2-5. Trans. Randall Bytwerk, German Propaganda Archive, Calvin College, 1999 http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/wille.htm

THE DAY OF GERMAN ART

“A war commander must have imagination and foresight. So, it’s not extraordinary that our people are at once a people of soldiers and of artists. My strength lies in the fact that I can imagine the situations that the troops are called upon to face.”1 Adolph Hitler

October 15th 1933. Munich was wrapped in decorative festoons. Golden heraldic sculptures on red-wrapped plinths lined the streets. The city’s buildings were swathed with hundreds of long medieval banners and decorated with a proliferation of flowers. Extravagant viewing platforms and terraces were erected along the main thoroughfares. Golden swastikas glowed on colourful stripes of cloth. Adolf Hitler was to set the cornerstone of the House of German Art as the exciting centrepiece of a carefully planned celebration of the arts. First, a massive procession marched through the festive city. Black-clad SS troopers lined the streets near the building site, guarding the Führer and other Party dignitaries. Laughing children waved and cheered a military parade bearing red and black flags. Kettle drummers pounded the way beneath the sharp eyes of a giant Nazi Reichsadler eagle. Brisk trumpeters in bright uniforms played flying fanfares for a carnival cavalcade of floats celebrating classical and German art: a colossal ionic capital, spectacular reproductions of ancient wall paintings, a heroic copy of a statue of Heracles, and the majesty and gold of Pallas Athena. Garland girls danced pretty pirouettes. Two heroic black-armoured horseback knights led sixty stoic pages, after a march of Aryan Amazons in red silk. Two handsome stallions pulled a float bearing a spouting Gothic fountain, the water spraying over sculpted copies of the medieval Marusca dancers from Munich’s town hall, followed by a woman playing volkish songs on a lyre. A fabulous rococo extravaganza in the blue and white of the Bavarian flag followed, with winged putti representing hunting, fishing, agriculture, and valor, topped by a sculpture of a winged and naked youth playing a trumpet. Dozens of extravagantly designed floats passed before the waving and clapping crowd. An enormous architectural scale model of Paul Troost’s design for the neo-classical building that was to fill the site was shouldered by twenty-four burly men in tunics, escorted by six horseback boys,

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musicians playing festive fanfares, and potent youths bearing entwined adorning wreaths. “All the periods of the past arrived and passed by, all the high spots of the German kultur.”2 It was an extravagant display, deliberately designed to instil a sense of pride, both in the power and authority of the new regime and in the high points of Germany’s cultural past. There were hundreds of beautiful young participants in the pageant, clothed in the costumes of the ages, exemplifying healthy and energetic German youth as the bearers of the nation’s traditions. The culmination of the event was in the laying of the cornerstone of the new museum. Hitler was supposed to ritually strike the stone three times with a ceremonial hammer specially designed for the occasion by Troost. But the silver hammerhead snapped from the handle on Hitler’s first strike. A consummate performer, Hitler quickly turned and smartly stepped away, drawing no attention to the problem. Later, he recalled it to Speer as a bad omen. An augury of Troost’s unexpected death. Three and a half years later, when the museum was officially opened on July 18th, 1937, there was another procession, even bigger than the performance Munich witnessed on the inaugural Day of German Arts. This parade was three kilometres long and included five thousand participants, five hundred of them on horseback. A proud Hitler reviewed hundreds of pretty girls in long white, blue, and green slit-sided robes, handsome young men costumed as 19th century soldiers armed with muskets, an ox-drawn neo-classical carriage bearing Apollo, a gilded and silvered pair of male and female nudes riding upon golden fish, backed by a columned rotunda. Knights on horseback escorted giant architectural models. Teutonic warriors carried broad red banners. It was a nostalgic feast for the senses, with a sumptuous vision of the military and civil past presented on float after float passing before the delighted crowds. Hitler was deeply involved in the aesthetics of the party’s public face, designing banners, uniforms, and carefully crafting the spectacles of ceremonial rallies and assemblies. He lent an enthusiastic curatorial eye to art exhibits, and was the last word on which paintings were to be shown at the House of German Art, especially in this first exemplary display of National Socialist aesthetic principles. Behind the scenes, things had not gone well. The selection process had been disastrous. Adolf Ziegler chaired a jury of nine, who chose fifteen hundred paintings and sculptures from the fifteen thousand that were submitted. But when Hitler visited the museum to oversee what Ziegler’s committee had selected, he found repulsive paintings of a disgusting modernist character. The Führer was furious. Had he not ordered the words “Art is a sublime mission, which necessitates fanaticism”

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to be cast in bronze and suspended above the lintel of the entrance to the museum? Now, he discovered that same degenerate art he crusaded against included in the first show in his banner museum, defended by the wishywashy excuses of the foolish Ziegler, who had clearly misunderstood his mission. Hitler ordered his photographer Heinrich Hoffman to redo the selection immediately. The Führer returned to the museum on July 13th to examine Hoffman’s curatorial acquiescence, and approved the 600 works that were kept in the show. An irritable Hitler raged against decadent art in full oratorical flow when he gave his opening address before a crowd of Nazi officials including Goring, Goebbels, Himmler, soldiers, artists, and civilians at the opening of the Great German Art Exhibition, declaring, “Therefore I wish to pledge a vow in this hour that it is my inalterable decision to now purge – just as I have the field of political confusion – the life of German art of phraseology. ‘Works of art’ which cannot be understood in and of themselves but require, as justification for their existence, a bombastic set of instructions as to how to finally discover that shy creature who would patiently accept such stupid or insulting nonsense will from now on no longer find their way to the German Volk! All these catchwords such as, ‘inner experience,’ ‘strong cast of mind,’ ‘powerful intention,’ ‘promising sensation,’ ‘heroic attitude,’ ‘sympathetic significance,’ ‘time experienced as order,’ ‘primal crudeness,’ etc. – all these stupid, false excuses, phrases and prattles will no longer be able to absolve or even recommend themselves for products that show no talent and are hence merely worthless. If a person has a powerful intention or an inner experience, let him prove it in his work and not in driveling phrases.”3 Hitler criticized “so-called ‘modern’ art” for its contemptible devotion to fashionable change, for the idea that there should be a new style of art every year. As an expression of the German volk, German art was to be timeless, not an expression of the fashions of the time within which they lived. By making art that memorialized the people, artists would create works that would be eternal. He condemned modern art for its dependence upon critics and literati who contrived endless arguments about it in their contemptible critiques. Their bourgeois scholasticism was to be detested and condemned, for it led to an endless reinvention of art, and its writings were the antithesis of healthy German action. The old German masters had painted eternally valuable works, “… how far removed were the deeds and works of these men from that pitiful marketing of so many of our so-called modern ‘creative artists,’ from their unnatural smearing and dabbling which could only be cultivated, sponsored and approved of by the doings of characterless and unscrupulous men of letters and which were always

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completely alien – and in fact detestable to the German Volk with its sound instincts?” In contrast to these daubing and smearing charlatan intellectuals, being clear, logical, and honest was at the heart of the aesthetic of Nazi art and defined its character. It was a deeply held search for “the real and true character of our volk” that was expressed sincerely and decently. Cubism, Dadaism, Futurism, and Impressionism were “the affected stuttering of people from whom God has withheld the grace of a truly artistic talent and instead whom He endowed with an ability to talk rubbish and to deceive.”4 Clearly intended to emulate the French Salons of the 19th century, the Great German Art Exhibition was elegantly hung in the brand-new building with plenty of space between the works and a pleasant alternation of paintings and sculptures. The new galleries were light and airy, furnished with comfortable bench seating to allow visitors to take their time with the art. However, for a collection which was supposed to reveal “the real and true character of our volk” the majority of the paintings were a disappointing mixture of generic landscapes and pictures of peasants working with animals, or in their homes and workplaces. Several featured cattle herders and the husbandry of livestock, reminiscent of Courbet’s dreadful Return from the Fair. One miserable image of a row of donkeys looked like a tourist painting bought from a seaside stall, hardly an example of the strength and power of the volk. There were many realist portraits of sturdy German peasants which were quite well executed, but utterly tedious. Some of the work was categorically miserable: two dreary paintings of grim peasant families sitting at table breaking bread were presumably intended to encourage solidarity with rural volk and their down to earth participation in providing and sharing food, but more likely convinced bourgeois urban Germans to stick to the comforts of the city, and keep as far away as possible from the bleak life of the wretched countryside. Fritz Mackensen’s downright depressing Gottesdienst im Moor captured a congregation of ancient villagers at a funeral, waiting for their own deaths to catch up with them, adding to the sombre mood. An etching of the construction of a freeway bridge, a painting of the interior of a blacksmith’s shop by Otto Roloff, and a pair of oils of industrial workshops by Otto Hamel provided a flash of contemporary interest, but they were hardly exciting works of art capturing the spirit of a new nation. It is hard to imagine gallery visitors feeling their hearts uplifted by such things. A few of the paintings are thorough clunkers, poorly composed, badly painted, and lacking any semblance of life or merit. However, two really good works among this sad spread of mediocrity truly stood out: Oskar Martin-Amorbach’s Der Sämann (The Sower), and Ziegler’s triptych Die Vier Elemente (The Four Elements), which Hitler

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owned. Although the subject of Der Sämann was a German farmer sowing the fields by hand, Martin-Amorbach succeeded in getting away from the ersatz 19th century style of other peasant genre paintings by lightening his palate, flattening the figure of the man, and placing him in an elegantly stylized landscape complete with the distant figures of a man and woman effortlessly working a team of oxen, pulling a plough toward a rainbow, the ancient symbol of the promise of a brand new world after the catastrophic flood has receded. The landscape was tidy and curved elegantly, and the sower appeared to be in harmony within it. This was something different, unlike the gloomy worker paintings elsewhere in the show. Here, we get a sense of the optimism of Nazi Germany, of the amiable German farmer working toward a bright future, epitomizing the ideals that Hitler expressed in his speech, building upon the foundations of tradition to create a new Reich. Ziegler’s Die Vier Elemente was a triptych composition of four nude women cast as allegorical figures of the elements. They were posed in an austere setting. A black and white tiled floor was laid beneath a dark neoclassical bench, with only a cloth of red, green, grey, and gold to warm the space. Considering that they were naked, they were surprisingly asexual and their faces were expressionless. In the left panel, Fire awkwardly shielded a flaming torch while perched on the end of the bench and threw a sidelong stare at her companions. In the larger central panel, Earth held a sheaf of wheat and sat close to Water, who demurely cast her eyes down to the checkered floor and tilted a bowl as if she meant to pour it over Earth’s leg, while dipping her fingers into the liquid. Earth gazed askance at Air, and mirrored the stare of Fire. There was little luxury or carnal pleasure here. But these were the standout paintings in the show. Another painting by Ziegler, a single nude figure titled Terpsicore, was similar in style to his Die Vier Elemente, and again the figure was strangely non-sensual, following the National Socialist formula for images of healthy women, but it lacked any other interesting feature. A couple of academic nudes by Ivo Saliger failed to reach the potential of the Urteil des Paris (Judgement of Paris) he would show in the 1939 exhibit, but hint at the same flatness of the Ziegler. Hans Hanner’s Mädchentum (Girlhood) tried hard to follow Ziegler and Saliger’s interesting flattened style, but in contrast to their cool objectivity, Hanner’s painting of a naked and embarrassed teenager standing within a quasi-religious mandorla veered disturbingly into the realms of creepy paedophile voyeurism similar to the worst self-indulgences of modernist Balthus, who also painted in this style.

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Several overtly political paintings slammed home party doctrines, including Anton Hackenbroich’s splendid propaganda piece Neue Jugend (New Youth). A dramatic oil of a determined young man smartly dressed in his Hitler Youth uniform proudly marching with the black and white flag of the order, it was painted in a similar style to that of Ziegler and MartinAmorbach, with a palette of greys and pale colours and a simplified background, pulling the figure to the front of the composition. The composition of the striding figure across the canvas emphasized his forward motion, and he stepped confidently into the future with his banner flying over his shoulder. Thomas Baumgartner’s Beim alten Meister (With the Old Masters) combined genre painting and National Socialist imagery in a humble interior grouping of three figures playing music seated around an austere table. But here, a uniformed Hitler Youth boy sat listening to his comrade-brother and father playing music on their flutes. Clearly the youth of the movement were to learn from and emulate their elders. The painting continued the conventions of genre painting and established the Nazis as participants in a comfortable, well-established tradition of German art. There were several portraits of brave soldiers at the front which prefigured the covers of violent British war comics published after the fall of the Reich to bolster pride in the Allies’ success and to remind Western kids of the necessary sacrifices that had been made by their parents’ generation in the fight against fascism. Elk Eber’s dramatic painting of a stormtrooper pulling the pin of his last grenade emphasized the enduring spirit of the German soldier, fighting even unto death. They were exciting and inspiring – and completely lacking subtlety. They thoroughly and successfully fulfilled their purpose as vehicles of National Socialist propaganda. Another of Eber’s paintings, titled Appell am 23. Februar 1933 (Appeal on 23rd February 1933), showed Nazis donning their uniforms, commemorating the first day on which Hitler’s stormtroopers were empowered as the official policemen of the state. As propaganda, the piece completely failed to inspire, lacking any sense of dynamic action. Attempts to insert recent Nazi events into the narrative of history paintings were equally unsuccessful. Richard Lindmar’s Der Tag von Potsdam 21.3.33 (The day of Potsdam 21.3.33) was a truly dreadful painting of Hitler addressing the Reichstag on the day of his historic election. The composition was contrived and the painting was poorly executed. The mediocre paintings were disappointing, but the sculptures were impressive. Josef Thorak delivered Hitler’s propaganda goals in spectacular style. His gigantic Kameradschaft (Comradeship) figures were extraordinary. Two immense nude men with hands clasped together, with body-builder muscles and handsome features, stepped confidently together into the

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future. These were the epitome of ideal Nazi men. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger at his body-building peak, their muscles had muscles. These mighty figures towered over viewers with the physiques of bulls, providing a real sense of power and authority that must have been difficult to ignore. The latent homoeroticism of the sculptures was offset by the camaraderie of military service and the extravagant idealization of masculine energy. They reeked of sublime power. At the opposite end of the gallery, another muscular colossus stood alone with his legs and arms outspread, with his palms turned forward at waist height, presenting himself as the exemplar of German manhood, posed to declare ecce Nazi homo (behold the Nazi man) to awed visitors. This was Thorak’s Mann (Man). These spectacular figures dominated the great hall of the museum. Other sculptures simply couldn’t compete with their scale and dramatic impact. Even though the rest of the collection of sculptures were faced with such extraordinary competition, they were still of vastly superior quality to the paintings. Busts of important leaders were skilfuly hewn, and while a few of the many male and female nudes were awkward and wooden, many more were graceful, presenting an idealization of the German physique as healthy, strong, and grounded. Among the numerous animal sculptures, Friedrich Lommel’s Dianagruppe (Diana Group) stood out for capturing a moment of tenderness between Diana the Huntress and a pair of deer. A graceful stag and a leopard trotted across the gallery, and a great crested grebe, ducks, an otter, a bison, horses, an ape, and a bronze elephant complemented the menagerie. Hermann Geibel’s gentle Kind mit Blockflöte (Child with Recorder) caught a sweet moment of a child’s music-making, and Burkhart Ebe’s Mutter und Kind (Mother and Child) drew sentimental attention to the role of women as mothers of the volk. Georg Wallisch’s Schafscherer (Shearer) returned to the theme of the honest peasant, but did so without resorting to wrapping the image in 19th century technique, presenting the figure of the shearer at work as a focused and modern participant in an ancient farming technique. Joseph Goebbels appointed Ziegler as President of the Visual Arts Chamber at the end of 1936. Almost immediately, he purged all German museum collections of degenerate modern artworks. To reveal the failures of Jewish and communist-led international modernism, Ziegler organized the infamous Entartete Kunst exhibit of degenerate works by German artists – following the compare-and-contrast example of Schultze-Naumburg’s Kunst und Rasse (Art and Race). Although he had disastrously failed to satisfy his Führer with his selections for the Great German Art exhibition, here he succeeded dramatically. A short walk away from the House of German Art, and in complete contrast to the Great German Art exhibition,

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Entartete Kunst was deliberately curated extremely poorly, in Dadaist fashion. Canvases were crammed together, placed low on the wall, and overshadowed by messy texts describing their base nature. There was no semblance of order. Small and large paintings were jumbled together, hung crookedly, randomly dangling on over-long wires, sometimes partially covered by signs ridiculing their disgusting nature, with sculptures jammed against the walls, crowding each other and the paintings. The exhibit showed off the worst of degenerate modern art and derided the artists’ repellent ideas as anti-volk, the product of racial inferiors and the mentally sick. A 1937 propaganda piece in The New York Times attempted to persuade Americans that Nazi efforts to discredit the modernists had failed, claiming that it was attended by crowds three times greater than those who went to the Great German Art show.5 In 1991, publicists for a reconstruction of the show at the L.A. County Museum of Art and the Chicago Art Institute used similar hyperbole to sell the challenging idea that modern art was popular in Nazi Germany. This disingenuous approach persisted into the 21st century. And in a sense, the Entartete Kunst show was popular – not because the people visiting the gallery admired the paintings and sculptures on exhibit, as almost a century of American apologists for modernism would claim – but for precisely the opposite reason. The audience willingly came to the show because they were encouraged to deride individualist artists by Nazi Party propagandists, because their bias against modernism was confirmed and supported, and because the show perfectly fit Nazi pedagogy. School parties and Hitler Youth groups flocked to the display in organized field trips because of its clear match to the antisemitic and anti-communist indoctrination that dominated their education. The 1937 Entartete Kunst exhibit was the culmination of years of exhibits upon the same theme, not a stand-alone event. It is pure wishful thinking to imagine that Goebbels or Rosenberg would tolerate repeated exhibits of this nature if they did not view them as effective and successful tools of propaganda designed to deride modernism and to instill distaste for it among the volk. Since 1927, Goebbels had stuck to a simple rule: propaganda only had to be effective to be successful. At the entrance to the exhibit, these dismissive words were painted onto the wall: “The whole tragic art and culture of cubists, futurists, Dadaists, etc., is neither racially founded nor popularly tolerable – it is to be seen at most as an expression of a worldview that admits of itself that the dissolution of all existing concepts, of all peoples and races, their intermingling and pervading, is the highest aim of their intellectual authors and their guild.”6 Among the other slogans painted onto the walls were the derisive words of

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a Dadaist manifesto which poured scorn upon the naïve stupidity of the public, confirming that their art was a self-admitted elitist scam perpetrated by childish conmen to fool them: “We pretend to be painters, poets or whatever, but we are only being naughty. We cheekily brought a giant hoax into the world and breed snobs who lick our boots …”7 Photos of Hitler and Goebbels visiting the exhibit were published in papers and magazines, and flocks of Germans were herded through the galleries where their convictions about the foolishness of individualist modernism were affirmed, and coupled with racist slogans pitched against Marxists and Jews, whose art and music were inexcusable in völkish Germany. Although a minority of the artists in the exhibit were actually Jews, the objective was to reveal the decadence and perversion of modern artists as an insidious and degenerate section of society. Visitors to the exhibit walked away encouraged to protect healthy German culture from this infectious influence and to purge their artistic taste from the disease of modernism. Unlike the juvenile deviancy of individualist modernism which mocked and exploited the public, Nazi art was to be clear, to be direct, to be logical and true. This idea of German clarity was a call to action – all Nazis were called to action, to the Tat – the deed that was emphasized by Hitler, Goebbels, and Hanns Johst (the playwright who penned: “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I release the safety on my Browning!”)8 Nazi oratory emphasized words that inspired deeds and abhorred intellectualism. Nazi paintings, like Nazi words, like Nazi education, demanded that the German people obey the National Socialist manifesto. Words, lessons, and paintings that did not inspire deeds were worthless, for deeds in service to National Socialism were of far greater use to the völk than knowledge, education, or culture. This doctrinal emphasis upon service and self-sacrifice was extraordinarily strong, beginning in schools and pervading the Hitler Youth. Bernhard Rust’s handbook for teachers insisted, “No individual is to think of himself as having a more brilliant mind than his neighbor. Each mind is to be of equal importance; each mind is to be blended into the great State Conscience.”9 All Germans were to live as one, as a united volk, like bees in a hive, or ants in a colony. Individuality was eliminated except in the personalities of the party’s leaders. The year before Hitler’s speech at the corner-stone ceremony, Goebbels had forbidden art criticism, silencing journalists who might make inappropriately wordy and meaningless remarks about Nazi art, which was to be replaced by art reportage, which “should not be concerned with values, but should confine itself to description.” Moreover, writers who did choose to describe the arts were given the challenging task of working within the

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National Socialist ideology while also speaking “with the honesty of their hearts.” Dismissing art critics as the tail that wagged the dog, Goebbels claimed to replace them with the public itself, with public engagement standing as the measure of quality. In his speech opening the House of German Art, Hitler echoed Proudhon: “The artist does not create for the artist, he creates for the people, and we will see to it that from now on the people will be called upon to judge its art.”10 He imitated Lenin, who had insisted that public sculptures should first be displayed as plaster maquettes so that the people could judge for themselves whether they liked the work or not before it was allowed to be made permanent. And like the Russian communists, Nazi Party officials carefully controlled what art the public was allowed to judge. Artists who fit into Hitler’s vision of German culture were given special treatment. When Germany was poised to attack Poland in 1939, Hitler ordered Goebbels to prepare a list of artists to be exempted from military service. There were more than 20,000 exemptions.11 Even in the depth of war, artists were special to Hitler – when a Prussian artist named Roller was killed at the Russian front early in 1942, the Führer insisted that serving artists should be recalled and assigned special duties to prevent the needless sacrifice of gifted men.12 In June, he described how greatly German art had benefitted from the personal experiences of the artist-soldiers he had withdrawn from action.13 Hitler’s appreciation for sentimental, patriotic art was very personal. In his Myth of the Twentieth Century, Rosenberg provided a public description of the accepted National Socialist line about art. In private, though, he wrote in his journal about Hitler’s views on art with a very different tone, bitchily complaining that his aesthetics were immature. He recalled a conversation with the architect Paul Troost about Hitler’s “embarrassing” ideas. The Führer’s taste was “strictly lower middle class.” Rosenberg said Hitler was consistently opposed to individualist modern art, whether in public or in private – he loathed thickly painted expressionist work and pretentious descriptions of it, and Germany’s painting would have to begin completely afresh if it was to be healthy. He expected it, therefore, to go through a period of mediocrity in which the nation’s art was limited only to völkish painters, who would be forbidden from experimentation. In this, he was entirely in line with Proudhon’s expectations for the slow development of new art for the new era. 19th century painters had been far better than the modernists who had destroyed form and traditional studio-trained skill, and Hitler began to collect them with enthusiasm, planning to house them in a new gallery in Linz when the time came to completely remodel the city. The aristocratic Rosenberg didn’t share the proletarian taste preferred by Hitler

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and he complained bitterly, “… the German spirit does draw a third of its power from Philistinism, but it isn’t absolutely essential to search out the art of only this third!” According to Rosenberg, Hitler’s preferences for paintings in the exhibits he oversaw were largely steered by his admiration for good craftsmanship, which led to the inclusion of a large amount of competent but tedious genre painting. In Mein Kampf, Hitler contrasted the works of Moritz von Schwind and Arnold Böcklin with the modernists, saying that their works were also “… externalizations of an inner experience, but these were the experiences of divinely gifted artists and not of buffoons.” Rosenberg said Hitler particularly favored Ferdinand Keller, and Wilhelm Raabe, who was better known as a novelist, and the volkish paintings and writings of Wilhelm Busch. Hitler bought several large paintings by Max Zäper, and of course, admired Ziegler, whose Die Vier Elemente he purchased and displayed proudly. Rosenberg was jealous of Ziegler’s position as President of the Chamber of Art, claiming that his “laborious” paintings proved that “he could neither draw nor paint, and was really no more than an academic beginner.”14 Chancellor Hitler must have gazed often and appreciatively at Ziegler’s Urteil des Paris while warming himself beside it in its position of honor over the grand fireplace in his luxurious Munich apartment. But Ziegler miserably failed to capture the drama and eroticism of the Greek myth. His Urteil des Paris was a flat and disappointing painting of Paris and the three goddesses of the myth unimaginatively lined up against an almost blank theatrical cyclorama, which resembled one of the featureless canvas backgrounds seen in nineteenth century photo-studios, with a half-hearted attempt at a sky painted on it. The bottom seam of this feeble drop met the ground immediately behind the models. Rosenberg was correct to judge Ziegler harshly in this instance, for the composition was amateur, with figures tediously placed along the picture plane. Paris was arranged like a model in a student’s studio, pretentiously perched in a tiresome and oblique pose upon a fake rock on the right of the canvas, closing a composition that was centrally focused upon the naked figure of Aphrodite, who postured like a porn star with one arm raised over her head to lift and accentuate her breasts. It was a thoroughly dreary and mediocre painting. The Greek myth of Paris’ judgement has been painted so frequently that it is a generic theme in the Western academic canon, but instead of dwelling on the powerful themes of rivalry, the foolishness of men, female seduction, and manipulation that usually dominate paintings of it, Ziegler made his version an allusion to the theatricality of the myth combined with an adolescent voyeurism.

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Perhaps when the publicly asexual and warlike Hitler gazed at the painting, he would have preferred Paris to give the apple to Hera or Athena rather than choosing the most beautiful woman in the world. Aphrodite was the goddess of fertility and love, Hera was the goddess of marriage, and Athena was the goddess of wisdom and war, all themes that resonated deeply with Nazi idealism. But the three goddesses offered bribes to Paris to persuade him to choose them: Hera offered the rule of Europe and Asia, Athena offered the mastery of warfare, and Aphrodite offered Helen of Troy. Perhaps Ziegler would have preferred a more rational patron. By 1943, he realized Germany was going to lose the war and chose to participate in meetings discussing appeasement with the Allies. For this, he was sent to a concentration camp, where such treachery would usually be punished by hard labour or death, but Hitler released him, displaying his strange but habitual tolerance for artists. Naturally, Ziegler was removed from his position as head of the Reich Chamber of Visual Art, but was allowed to retire with some dignity intact. After the war, he lived in obscurity until his death in 1959, unable to revive his artistic career in post-war Germany. Hitler was interested enough in the story of Paris’ judgement to purchase another painting of the myth in 1939, an interesting piece created by Ivo Saliger, whose pictures usually focused upon academic female nudes. Saliger’s Urteil des Paris went deeper than his habitual output. It dovetailed perfectly with National Socialist ideals of womanhood, showing three beautiful young women presenting their naked bodies to a stereotypical young German man, his hair carefully trimmed to the classic short-backand-sides, long-on-top style of the period, wearing wandervögel shorts, and a shirt with his sleeves rolled up, ready to commune with the land. The landscape was far from the Greek islands where the story of Paris and the three goddesses unfolded, instead offering a view over sensible German fields and hedgerows, recalling Blut und Boden. It was a pragmatic and undecorated land, earthy, orderly, and understated. Like the Ziegler paintings of 1937, the bodies of Saliger’s women were on display for Paris, who leaned back upon a stone, holding up the apple which was the prize he would award to the most beautiful of the three goddesses. Clearly there was a power play – the role of women was to submit to the authority of men, and their bodies were objects for display. Women were vulnerable in their nudity, while clothed men looked upon them and judged them. Although the goddesses were naked, in Saliger’s painting their faces were impassive and strangely disengaged from the judgement, appearing insensitive to it. In other painted interpretations of the judgement of Paris, the goddesses smiled seductively, or the losers pursed their lips in anger at Paris’ choice of

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Aphrodite as the winner. Saliger made no attempt to show individual emotions. It seems reasonable to expect that he remained true to the story, and the principal woman in his painting was Aphrodite, offering herself in a submissive pose to Paris with her arms spread and palms open, a gesture similar to the gigantic Mann sculpture by Thorak. If she was Aphrodite, then instead of painting her as the sexual and sensual goddess of the myth, Saliger had her as an idealized lebensreform figure of a healthy mother; her impassivity conformed to the National Socialist ideal that all Germans were working for a common cause, and German women were to accept with resignation their role in building a greater Germany, good Nazi women took their place in society without complaint or fuss, as wives, as bearers of children, and as subjects to the sexual gaze of men. Behold the Nazi woman. The painting fit well into Saliger’s body of work, which was focused upon studio arrangements of healthy, naked German women arranged in awkwardly contrived compositions gazing off into the distance. Again, the women were nude but not sensual – if male spectator-voyeurs anticipated an erotic thrill from them, they would surely be disappointed. Although the blank off-set gazes of the non-sensual but naked women who were the subjects of these paintings appeared indifferent, there was a forbearance in them for the gaze of the men who looked upon them. There was a strange distancing in the composition of these paintings that established a relationship between the viewer and the model that was uninterested in the women’s nudity, that declined treating women as sex objects, while simultaneously objectifying them as utilitarian producers of children. The way the women were presented was reminiscent of the display of prime livestock at an agricultural fair, where the animals were paraded in a ring while spectators considered their health, their anatomy, and their aesthetic quality before buying them, taking them home, and rearing their young. The purpose of painting or sculpting the female body was not to objectify women simply as sexually desirable things, but to emphasize their healthiness as the mothers of the race. Opening a propaganda exhibit titled Deutsches Frauentum which focused specifically on the roles of German women, Goebbels said, “The first, best, and most suitable place for the women is in the family, and her most glorious duty is to give children to her people and nation, children who can continue the line of generations and who guarantee the immortality of the nation. The woman is the teacher of the youth, and therefore the builder of the foundation of the future. If the family is the nation’s source of strength, the woman is its core and center. The best place for the woman to serve her people is in her marriage, in the family, in motherhood. This is her highest mission.”15 Like a beast trudging to the abattoir, Magda

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Goebbels lived up to her husband’s expectations until the end, enduring his multiple affairs, and obeying her beloved Führer’s orders to remain at Joseph’s side despite his notorious philandry. And, as Russian soldiers surrounded the bunker in Berlin in 1945, and Hitler killed Eva Braun and then shot himself, suicidal Magda arranged the poisonous slaughter of her six children, telling the nurse who protested against the murders, “I belong to my husband and the children belong to me.”16 Like Magda, German women were to be pragmatic, to serve the Reich by producing babies for Hitler, but they were also to be respected in this role as the backbone of the family, which was the microcosm of the völk. More German women than men voted for Hitler in the 1933 election.17 Although Hitler began collecting contemporary art from the Great German Art exhibits quite modestly, buying only three half life-sized sculptures and a portrait from the first show, he became by far the biggest patron of the annual exhibits, purchasing one thousand three hundred and twelve of the works of art presented between 1938 and 1944. He found a particular delight in German landscapes and cityscapes, and had a preference for sculptures of nude women in active poses, but he also picked a good selection of genre paintings of working Germans, and a few still life and floral canvases. He indulged in his nostalgia for the good old days when the nascent Nazi Party was in its street-fighting heyday, purchasing a large canvas of marching Sturmabteilung brown-shirts. The central figure in the front rank rolled up his sleeves for action despite his prominently bandaged head, ready to push forward regardless of his injuries, reminiscent of Hitler’s experiences in the putsch. As the war progressed, he bought images of fighting men: a dramatic bronze of a crouching trooper pulling the pin of a stick grenade, a mounted Stormtrooper bugler in full gallop across the battlefield, an impressive mural of the Fallschirmjager paratroopers in battle, which is now in the possession of the 82nd Airborne Division War Memorial Museum at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. In a single rare nod to philosophy, he bought a painting of Nietzsche’s eponymous philosopher Zarathustra. Beyond his interest in patronizing the Great German Art exhibits, Hitler bought large quantities of art from all over Europe. Surprisingly, when author Cris Whetton researched the Führer’s buying habits, he discovered no evidence that Hitler seized or stole the art he personally collected, despite post-war propaganda to the contrary. Whetton wrote in a Daily Beast interview, “I had expected to find that he was directly responsible for the looting and stealing of paintings he wanted for himself and I couldn’t find any evidence for it. I found evidence that he paid for them – sometimes at knockdown prices, but not direct theft.”18 It is baffling and disturbing that a

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man as murderous as Hitler could justify the extermination of millions of souls in death camps and war while insisting upon nominal financial integrity in his art-collecting habits. However, this does not present a complete picture of Hitler’s collecting. He did buy some art at very low prices from people intimidated by his status. – his former financier, Fritz Thyssen, reported Hitler’s collection was often enriched by gifts that were acquired under duress. Although Thyssen contributed huge sums to the Nazi cause, he protested against the persecution of the Jews and the commencement of war. He fled to France and was captured in Cannes, where Varian Fry tried but failed to rescue him and whisk him away to America. He was imprisoned by the party in Sachsenhausen and then Dachau. In 1941, a journalist used Thyssen’s memoirs to create a book directed at an American audience titled, I Paid Hitler. According to this account, which must be viewed with appropriate scepticism as flagrant American propaganda, art dealers who knew Hitler’s taste would acquire paintings they knew would interest him, then approach wealthy opportunists who wanted to impress him, suggesting emphatically that the Führer would like this work of art in his collection. The coercive implication was clear, and the painting would duly be purchased from the dealer, then given to Hitler.19 Gifts that came to him from other Nazis like Goring or Goebbels had similarly dubious provenances. Goring was notoriously amoral and responsible for extraordinarily licentious seizures of art from across Europe. According to Albert Speer’s famous memoir, Hitler’s taste included a great affection for genre paintings of drunken monks by Eduard von Grützner, who he compared to Rembrandt. Speer said he liked the late 19th century naturalists Wilhelm Leibl and Hans Thoma, and that he especially admired Hans Makart.20 Hitler claimed to have “… the best collection of the works of [Carl] Spitzweg in the world.”21 President Roosevelt and the American leadership gained their understanding of Hitler’s personality, and consequently his approach to the arts, from secret reports produced by the American espionage agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The OSS’ S-Project accumulated dossiers on leading Nazis based on the information provided by the eponymous ‘Dr. Sedgwick,’ a pseudonym for Hitler’s old friend from the 1920s, Ernst Hanfstaengl. The OSS also compiled a lengthy Hitler Sourcebook, and a Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler His Life and Legend. The OSS claimed that physical disability had shaped Hitler’s artistic taste. During the First World War, he served as a runner in the German Army, winning an Iron Cross for his bravery. According to his

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autobiographical Mein Kampf, while the young corporal was hospitalized after being blinded by gas in the trenches, he learned of Germany’s surrender and suffered a second bout of blindness in reaction to the news. Roosevelt’s S-file on Hitler, sourced from the testimony of the disaffected ex-Nazi Herman Rauschning, and Hanfstaengl, reported that Hitler’s damaged eyesight may have been instrumental in the development of his artistic taste. The report included this account of Hitler’s unusually insensitive vision and its potential impact upon his appreciation of art. “To be with Hitler, particularly at night, is an ordeal for people with sensitive eyes. Dr. Sedgwick was sometimes driven to distraction in the early hours of the morning by the brilliant light Hitler always insisted on having all round him. Dr. Sedgwick was forced to the conclusion that Hitler’s eyes were not normal, which might have been caused by gas poisoning in the fall of 1918 when he almost went blind. This factor very likely comes into play in his artistic tastes and in the manner in which he judges paintings. Only very bright colors really satisfy him.”22 This is clearly a slur against Hitler’s taste, similar to Rosenberg’s comments in his memoir. The “very bright colors” described by Hanfstaengl simply did not appear in the paintings Hitler admired. More often than not, Greutzner’s drunken monks and brewers were set in beer cellars and dark rooms, dimly lit by single sources that allowed the figures to emerge dramatically from shadows. It is hard to accept either Leibl, or Ziegler as extravagant colorists. Perhaps Rauschning was keen to emphasize his own connoisseurship, or sought to provide a physiological reason for Hitler’s poor taste, or perhaps he simply wanted to show his defiance in the face of power by telling his American hosts stories about Hitler’s weaknesses – to provide useful anti-Nazi propaganda. It is likely that Rosenberg and Rauschning did not understand Hitler’s egalitarian position upon art, in which all Aryan people of the Reich were classless social equals – National Socialism meant egalitarianism for all Aryan Germans, everyone else be damned.

Notes 1

Hugh Trevor-Roper, Trans. Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, Hitler’s Table Talk, Enigma, 2000, 56 2 Nachklang zum Fest der Deutschen Kunst, Die Kunst, December 1933, Vol. 69, Notebook 3, pp. 79 – 83. In Die Kunst im Dritten Reich, August - September 1942, 202. Cited in: Eric Michaud, Trans. Janet Lloyd, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, Stanford, 2004, 103

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Adolf Hitler, Speech, at the opening of the House of German Art in Munich, 18 July 1937. Adolf Hitler Collection of Speeches 1922 -1945, Propagandaleiter, n/d, 371 4 Ibid, 371 5 ‘Degenerate’ Art Popular In Reich, New York Times, 6th Aug, 1937, 15 6 “Das ganze Kunst – und Kulturgestotter von Kubisten, Futuristen, Dadaisten u.s.w. ist weder rassisch begründet noch volklich erträglich – es ist höchstens als Ausdruck einer Weltanschauung zu werten, die von sich selbst zugibt, daß die Auflösung aller bestehenden Begriffe, aller Völker und Rassen, ihre Vermischung und Verpanschung, höchstes Ziel ihrer intellektuellen Urheber und ihrer Führergilde ist.” 7 “Sie sagen es selbst! Wir tun so, als ob wir Maler, Dichter oder sonst was wären, aber wir sind nur und nichts als mit Wollust frech. Wir setzen aus Frechheit einen riesigen Schwindel in die Welt und züchten Snobs, die uns die Stiefel abschlecken …” A. Undo (Kurt Kersten?), Eds.. Wolfgang Asholt, Walter Fähnders. Manifeste und Proklamationen der Europäischen Avantgarde (1909-1938). Stuttgart Weimar 1995 8 Boaz Neumann, Nazi Anti-Semitism and the Decline of Language, in: eds. Murray Baumgarten, Peter Kenez, Bruce Allan Thompson Varieties of Antisemitism: History, Ideology, Discourse, University of Delaware Press, 2009, pp 50 - 74 9 Quoted in: Gregor Ziemer, Education for Death, Oxford University Press, 1941, 20 10 Adolf Hitler, Speech, at the opening of the House of German Art in Munich, 18th July 1937. Adolf Hitler Collection of Speeches 1922 -1945, Propagandaleiter, n/d, 371 11 Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, Overlook Press, 2003, 86 12 “I’ve learnt that young Roller has just fallen at the front. If I’d known that he’d gone out! But nobody told me. There are hundreds of thousands of men who could serve their country in no better way than by risking their lives for her, but a great artist should find another way. Can fate allow it that the most idiotic Russian should strike down men like that? We have so many men seconded for special duties! What harm could it do to add to their number the five or six hundred gifted men whom it would be important to save?” Hugh Trevor-Roper, Trans. Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, Hitler’s Table Talk, Enigma, 2000, 333 13 Hugh Trevor-Roper, Trans. Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, Hitler’s Table Talk, Enigma, 2000, 541-542 14 Alfred Rosenberg, Memoirs of Alfred Rosenberg, Trans. Eric Posselt, Ziff-Davis, 1949, 85 15 Joseph Goebbels, Trans. Randall Bytwerk, German Women, German Propaganda Archive Calvin College, 1999. From: “Deutsches Frauentum,” Signale der neuen Zeit. 25 ausgewählte Reden von Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP., 1934, pp. 118-126 16 Luke Harding, Interview: Erna Flegel, Guardian, Sun 1st May, 2005. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/may/02/germany.secondworldwar 17 Miriam Beard, The Tune Hitlerism Beats for Germany, New York Times, 7th June, 1931, SM4

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Cris Whetton, author of Hitler’s Fortune (Pen and Sword, 2005), quoted in Nico Hines, Adolf Hitler: Secret Billionaire, Daily Beast, 27th June 2014 https://www.thedailybeast.com/adolf-hitler-secret-billionaire 19 Fritz Thyssen, I Paid Hitler, Fonthill Media, 2016, 174 20 Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, Memoirs, Macmillan, 1970, 51-52 21 Hugh Trevor-Roper, Trans. Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, Hitler’s Table Talk, Enigma, 2000, 694 22 Ed. Dr. James E. Davis, “Ahi” (Adolf Hitler) “Verbatim reports of actual conversations with Adolf Hitler” by Dr. Hermann Rauschning, confidant of Hitler and member of the secret party conclaves from 1932 to 1935. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum, President’s Personal File 5780 – Hitler, Adolf, June 1940, 13-14

THE KITSCH ANTINOMY

“I had imagined the Elephant Man to be of gigantic size. This, however, was a little man below the average height and made to look shorter by the bowing of his back. The most striking feature about him was his enormous and misshapen head.”1 Frederick Treves

National Socialist and communist governments were quick to recognize the enormous power of Saint-Simon’s idea of avant-garde art as the vehicle of ideas – as propaganda – and made intense efforts to control their people through visual culture. The Soviets got into the game earliest, abandoning a brief period of anarchic experimentation to follow a steadfast path of adopting avant-gardist socialist realism as the language of their art, using its dynamic and easily understood imagery to promote the successes of the proletarian revolution. They were soon followed in Germany by the Nazis under the leadership of Hitler and Goebbels, whose successful efforts to propagandize their people helped bring their dominion – using art to promote their brand of collective proletarianism dominated by vitriolic nationalism. As the enemy of these totalitarians, the United States had little choice but to get into the propaganda business too, including the crafting of her own brand of avant-garde art. At this point, terminology becomes fluid. From now on, ‘avant-garde’ no longer refers to Saint Simon’s concept, or to Soviet art, or to either social or socialist realism, for the term was co-opted in the West to describe individualist art. This American avant-garde occupied similar territory to the ruined Russian individualist formalists, and to the bohemian experimenters of the Paris School – they were concerned with creating new art for a new era, but with an almost obsessive regard for individual genius, while catering to an elitist bourgeois market. With war coming, this new American avant-garde was obliged to oppose Nazi and Soviet art, and to cast it as the art of the enemy. This was achieved by creating an oppositional duality between old-fashioned kitsch, which was sentimental representational art, and the new individualist avant-garde, which was abstract and modern art. Kitsch was cast as totalitarian propaganda, and the new avant-garde was the representative of individualistic Western freedom.

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The ideas that established representational art as the antinomy of true art were first described in the American press by a popular novelist, the Jewish refugee Dr. Lion Feuchtwanger, who wrote an anti-Nazi column for the Washington Evening Star, titled Hitler’s War on Culture, as early as March 1933. Feuchtwanger began his article by identifying the duality of barbarism and culture pitted against each other in the Reich, where National Socialism was attempting to destroy the best of German culture, particularly drawing attention to a recent Nazi call for the demolition of the signature Bauhaus building in Dessau, which he described as “an international shrine to architecture.”2 He tied antisemitism and anti-intellectualism together with Nazi iconoclasm in a duality pitting kitsch against true art, correlating representational art with Nazi thought, which was deeply antagonistic to decency and intelligence. An immensely popular writer in the United States, where his novels were adapted into movies and stage plays, Feuchtwanger said, “It is, however, not only Hitlerism and education, but also Hitlerism and art that are at opposite poles. ‘Herr Schulze’ [the generic everyman ‘Mr. Smith’] has always been partial to sentimentality and he dislikes realism in art. His ideal is a hazy romanticism, the sweet nothing known in our country as ‘Kitsch.’ The artistic instinct of Adolf Hitler, a man after Herr Schulze’s heart, is similar, and his lack of the appreciation of real art plays an important part in his political life. He lacks the sense for subtleties, confuses the accessory with the essential, the quantity with quality. He is addicted to the monumental, to mass effects.” Kitsch, then, was the opposite of advanced art, and the enemy of modernism. Kitsch was fake art. By May 1933, Feuchtwanger’s name was included on a Nazi list of authors distributed to German libraries whose un-German or Marxist books were to be burned. By August, he was deprived of his German citizenship, and he moved to the south of France, where he worked until the invasion of 1940, selling novels through his American publisher. Soon, Varian Fry would help him escape to the United States. What was kitsch? Early 21st century dictionaries described it as “Art, objects, or design considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality,”3 and as “tawdry, vulgarized, or pretentious art, literature, etc., usually with popular or sentimental appeal.” 4 These unsatisfying definitions depended upon a dubious discrimination between true art and fake art as their foundation, but the message was clear. Kitsch was sentimental and vulgar. It was tasteless. It was mass-produced junk. It appealed to uneducated, lower classes of people. In 1917, the word was used as the title of a posthumously published, unfinished, and otherwise uninteresting play by the German dramatist, Frank Wedekind, who said, “Kitsch is the

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contemporary form of the Gothic, Rococo, Baroque.”5 As early as 1931, the word was in use in America in the sense it is now understood. The Washington Evening Star reported on a German Kitsch Museum of Bad Taste and Trash that had been open in Stuttgart for many years under the guiding hand of a Professor Gustav Pazaurek of the College of Applied Arts. Like the Entartete Kunst exhibit, the museum collected “articles of absurdity and bad art for the purpose of educating the public to high standards by an inverse of the usual methods.”6 By 1938, the word was used frequently enough that the Star fielded an enquiry on its Letters page requesting a correspondent to, “Please translate the German word ‘kitsch.’” The columnist responded, “The word kitsch is a slang expression meaning nonsense.”7Although many books about kitsch followed in the later decades of the century, micro-analysing and justifying the idea in ever smaller categories: camp, cheese, nostalgia – uncool – there was never a simple, satisfactory, and tidy description to be found among the writings of even its harshest critics. What definitions there were disintegrated quickly when pressed, but one thing was clear of them all – righteous critics were convinced that there was true art and there was fake art, and sentimental kitsch was definitely fake. Norbert Elias, another Jewish-German exile who fled from the Nazis to France in 1933, then took refuge in England, coined the term ‘kitsch style’ in an essay he wrote in 1935, titled Kitsch Style and the Age of Kitsch to describe the tasteless products of the bourgeois industrial class who had risen to dominance in the nineteenth century. The essay was published in an anti-Nazi émigré journal, Die Sammlung, edited by Klaus Mann (Thomas Mann’s son) and published by intellectual German refugees. In it, Elias indicated three problems raised by kitsch. First, such art was a luxury which fulfilled what he called the “leisure dreams” of working people whose emotions were suppressed in their daily life. Sentimental art provided an escape for the “pent-up and damaged” feelings of people whose time was excessively consumed by labour. Kitsch satiated a need imposed by industrial society. Secondly, works of art of the period before World War I were characterized by “a specific and especially powerful emotional charge” so strong that they sometimes appeared ridiculous, despite the authenticity of the hunger for emotional fulfilment caused by the working life. Finally, Elias identified a lethal polarity between progressive modern artists (who were not yet described as avant-gardists) and conservative kitsch-makers, saying that while the modernists risked overwhelming form with content, the kitsch-makers buried content behind an obsession with

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technique and tradition.8 This polarity would dominate the conversation about art for nearly a century. Elias was assistant to the founding father of sociology, Karl Mannheim, at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. He was associated with the group of sociologists and cultural commentators known as ‘the Frankfurt School’ which gathered around the Institute for Social Research. There, Marxists like Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Max Horkheimer wrote in defence of modern art and provided nagging critiques of post-First-World-War German material culture, complaining of its kitsch, mass-produced tastelessness. (Elias was not himself a Marxist.) Witnessing the Nazi coupling of populist aesthetics with murderous antisemitism, Aryanism, eugenics, and military expansion, the Frankfurt School took their criticism of kitsch further than Elias’ initial observations, establishing it as the antinomy of pure modern art. To the Marxist thinker Adorno, kitsch was “poison.” 9 His friend, Walter Benjamin, the influential writer who killed himself rather than return to Nazi Germany when his escape attempt through Spain failed, said kitsch was “the last mask of the banal, the one with which we adorn ourselves, in dream and in conversation, so as to take the energies of an outlived world of things.”10 Two years after Elias’ Kitsch Style, Hitler made a determined assault upon modern art and its proponents in his speech about the state of German culture made at Nuremburg on September 7th, 1937. He again condemned cultural critics as “litterateurs” and contrasted the work of “the moderns” with the honest, decent work of the German masters of the past three centuries. Hitler insisted, “A clever and indeed cunning Jewish cultural propaganda has nonetheless succeeded in talking at least his so-called ‘appointed art experts’ – but not healthy individuals – into smuggling these supremely pitiful concoctions into our galleries and thus ultimately forcing them upon the German Volk after all. “The path from the sacred and serious work of our good old German masters to the great painters of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries was certainly more difficult than the path from the average decent art of the 19th century to the primitive scrawlings of our so-called ‘Moderns,’ whose products basically attract attention only because they are behind modern times by a few thousand years. “We have our litterateurs to thank for this ignominious retrogression. They have succeeded, by perpetually using the word kitsch to describe a well meant, decent, average accomplishment, in breeding those exalted aberrations which, to a blasé literary attitude, might perhaps seem to

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present an interesting and even phenomenal innovation, but in fact are nothing but a disgraceful reversion, a deterioration of culture which has never before taken place at any time in the past – and never could take place, either, because never before had litterateurs been accorded such an outrageous influence on the performing and visual arts. “In this context, it is now amusing to note that it is least of all the products of these so-called ‘Moderns’ which can be judged as being, for example, ‘original’ or possessing ‘originality.’ On the contrary, all of these so-called modern artists are the most pathetic and inept copyists of all time. Naturally not copyists of what is decent, but of nonsense!” 11 What inspired Hitler’s anger? The reason he harangued litterateurs and used the word ‘kitsch’ in his speech was doubtlessly because he took Elias’ criticism personally. Kitsch Style and the Age of Kitsch had attracted the attention of intellectuals, and had been praised by Menno ter Braak in Het Vaderland, despite the fact that this Dutch newspaper was funded by Nazi sympathizers. In this essay, Elias described the source of the word ‘kitsch’ as slang derived from the word ‘sketch,’ originating from Viennese dealers and artists who used it to describe their own quickly produced derivative paintings made for sale to tourists. These ‘sketch’ materials were created by artists who knew they were producing junk purely for economic reasons to contemptuously exploit people with uneducated taste – precisely describing the watercolors made by Hitler when he was a bohemian artist in Vienna before the Great War, peddling his postcards and paintings to furniture shops and art dealers. Insulted by the implication that he was insincere, and a producer of artistic trash that was even despised by himself, Hitler surely saw Elias’ comments as a personal attack. He viewed himself as an artist, and had clung to this identity since he was a child, when he upset his father through his strong-willed determination to be a painter, despite his father’s wish that he become a government official. His artistic disposition was promoted to the German people. Joseph Goebbels said, “You artists live in great and happy times. Above you the most powerful and understanding patron. The Führer loves artists because he is himself one. Under his blessed hand a Renaissance has begun … Oh, century of artists! What a joy to be part of it!”12 A sympathetic German biography claimed that Hitler gave away a small inheritance from his mother to his sister and went penniless to Vienna to pursue his artistic vocation as a true bohemian. Attacks against kitsch became stronger as the Nazi power grew. In Vienna, the doubly-damned apostate novelist Hermann Broch wrote a lengthy essay describing how kitsch wore “the mask of the antichrist, who bears Christ’s features but is evil nonetheless.” Worse, “The maker of

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kitsch does not create inferior art, he is not an incompetent or a bungler, he cannot be evaluated by aesthetic standards; rather, he is ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil.”13 Broch’s novelist friend Robert Musil wrote about kitsch literature in florid prose: “kitsch affirms itself as something that peels life off of language. Layer by layer, it strips language bare.” 14 In 1931, Broch published a trilogy of novels called The Sleepwalkers, which was to destined to become a canonical modernist text and turn him into a literary celebrity. Born into an haute-bourgeois 19th century Jewish family in Vienna, the well-dressed and articulate Broch had followed his father into the family textile business, but was disappointed not to have been able to enter intellectual life at university. He converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism immediately before making a socially beneficial marriage to the daughter of an aristocratic Austrian family in 1909. His conversion and marriage were unusual in post-war Vienna, and despite the mutual affection and attraction of the couple, the union ended in divorce after Broch indulged in a series of affairs in 1923. Dissatisfied with his bourgeois life and worried about the rise to power of the Social Democrats on the one hand, and the National Socialists on the other, by 1927, Broch sold his factory so he could become a student, and pursue his long-term goal of becoming a full-time writer. A keen essayist, Broch carefully thought through the implications of a Platonic value system upon art. Following his ideas to a reasonable conclusion, he was moved to describe this hierarchy of art in his 1933 essay Evil in the Value-System of Art, published in the year of Hitler’s election and the Nazi rise to power. The essay painstakingly described how the human mind worked by accumulating knowledge sourced from sensory perception – how, isolated from one another by the physical realm, human minds constructed individual value-systems, then shared those values with others. Broch described our experience of reality as an accumulation of pieces of information, and art-making as a means of sharing them, calling these pieces of information the “vocabulary units of reality.”15 Culture was the shared mind, formed by material expressions of ideas, described by Broch as an expanded value-system. He described insincere art – kitsch – as the work of the antichrist and insisted that art and artists must accurately observe value-systems “… in their incompleteness, in their evolution, ‘as they really are,’ and not ‘as it would like them to be,’ or as they themselves would like to be, completed in the realm of the finite and made concrete in a way in which they never can be.”16 Culture, then, included the struggle of discerning which shared valuesystem should be asserted as the dominant theme. Although Broch opened

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his essay echoing the now commonplace declaration that art was always the visible expression of each era, he quickly distanced himself from it by moving on to explore the ethical nature of true art in his time. Under the direction of the Nazis, the German conversation about art had moved away from the idea of art being made in service to an almighty God as the culmination of a value system. Broch scorned the idea that the beauty of ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ was equated with goodness, and rejected the bohemian idea of art as self-expression. Like the Soviets, the Nazis conceived art and beauty principally as tools of propaganda. Broch found this new equation despicable because of the ethical difficulties it aroused – beauty may stem from evil, or lead people to evil, just as easily as it might be born of goodness, or lead people to goodness. He wanted to reclaim beauty from evil. He thought sincerity must be the key to identifying the goodness of any action. Turning to ecclesiastical authorities for guidance, he quoted Martin Luther’s famous comment about good works: “Good and pious works do not make a good and pious man, but rather a good and pious man does good and pious works.”17 To Broch, sincere intentions distinguished good from evil in a work of art. After the First World War, there was no comfort to be found in a Christian savior provided by the powerful to guide the dying into a utopian eternity. The enlightenment rationalism that took the place of religion had made possible the mechanized slaughter of millions, so Broch looked for a way for the human experience of life to take the place of God. Regardless of whether God was inexplicable and incomplete, or even if he had been killed by science, human life was close at hand and experienced by all. Even if the nature of being remained paradoxical, human sensory experiences provided enough of a shared experience of existence to justify the preciousness of human life as the centre and foundation of culture. He described art and kitsch in a world in which death “had become the somber sovereign of all things …”18 and in which all the order of the bourgeois pre-war value system had been called into question by the hideous consequences of positivism, which held that only sensory experiences of reality mattered and that intangible questions of metaphysics were irrelevant to human experience. From his comfortable haute-bourgeois life in the heart of beautiful fin-de-siècle Vienna, the decorative kitsch centre of the world, its ornamental prettiness starkly contrasting with ghastly recent memories of trench warfare with its incumbent imagery of men drowning in mud and unimaginable slaughter, Broch wrote, “… the horror of death cried out to the heavens: only then had the collapse of all values become apparent, fear of the loss of all life’s values descended upon

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mankind, and the fearful question as to the possibility of a new valueconstruct became inevitable.” 19 The death of God was catastrophic to the Western European sense of assurance that allowed its art to proceed with so much confidence, and now, the slaughter of the First World War revealed the negligible value of an individual life. Broch’s answer to the problem of what followed the decline of religious belief was that that there must be a new value system that took its place, and it was by opposing death to life that he found the underpinning for his ideas about value. He recognized death as the ultimate anti-value, as the valueless opposite of the value of life. The valuelessness of death indicated the value and existence of the infinite – it is by contemplating the end of personal experiences of life that individuals become fully aware of the mystery that other lives will continue after their own departure. Without death, there was no understanding of eternity. Broch noted that the Christian value-system was defined by negatives. Seven of the ten biblical commandments were formulated using ‘thou shalt not ...’ while the other three were absolutes. Consequently, he thought he could use the same principled approach in his understanding of art – if he could identify the evil in art and describe it, then the good art would be revealed. And, to Broch, the distinction between the evil in fake art and the good in true art was easily made. He wrote, “The expression of the age is to be seen in the enormous tension between good and evil within art. For the evil in art is kitsch. There is probably no place where the restructuring of value-standards, where the effective reach of evil in the world is so pronounced as in the existence of kitsch, which significantly is an offspring of the bourgeois age …”20 Kitsch was the shameful object of the ‘thou shalt not.’ Broch positioned this ‘thou shalt not make kitsch’ implication with biblical authority – this was the supreme commandment of art law. And if making kitsch was the great ‘thou shalt not,’ it was followed by an absolute: ‘thou shalt make art that provokes an ethical response.’ If it did not, then it could only be kitsch. Making ethical statements in art was a moral imperative. Creating art that did not make ethical judgements was evil! For good reasons, Broch saw the world of 1933 as a dreadful place that needed fixing. To Broch, decorative art, art-for-art’s-sake, was worthless, defeated by the true artist’s search for the inner elegance of simple forms and a searing realism that recognized and embraced the coldness of human experience, and found an honest, austere aesthetic in it, without comfort, without superficiality, but elegantly beautiful. He imagined artists in the guise of ascetics – almost as artistic anchorites elevated on columns in the wilderness, starving themselves for the sake of true art – and believed that

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relief from a cruel world might be found by denying the human experience of sentiment. In contrast, Hitler described himself as the artistic creator of the ideal state, which he saw as an archetypal woman dominated by sentimental feelings, writing in Mein Kampf, “The great majority of a nation is so feminine in its character and outlook that its thought and conduct are ruled by sentiment rather than by sober reasoning. This sentiment, however, is not complex, but simple and consistent. It is not highly differentiated, but has only the negative and positive notions of love and hatred, right and wrong, truth and fulfilled. Its notions are never partly this and partly that.”21 In this analogy of the population as a female force, he referred to Gustave Le Bon’s famous book, The Crowd, which was a study of the working of the popular mind, published in 1895, based on the author’s observations of the behaviour of the Parisian masses. Le Bon described how a crowd may be seduced by a leader, and how its individual members may be persuaded to believe things and act on things they would never do on their own. Hitler spoke of his role as the romantic partner of his kitsch nation. To Hitler, the people must be romanced by sentiment in order to achieve the ideal state. Art was a tool that would help achieve this Nazi utopia. To Broch, Nazi Germany was a place of violence, and death, and tyranny, and sentimental art was a deceptive fake used to manipulate the people – if reality was cruel, true art must reveal it as it really was. These two opposing approaches to sentiment were utterly incompatible. Hitler despised writers who criticized art but created none of their own, telling his inner circle, “If we were to be deprived of art critics we should not lose very much! One single critique signed with a well-known name may destroy the aspirations of an artist for as long as twenty years.” He offered Richard Wagner as an example of a composer who had suffered much under the scathing pen of the critics, yet had become an icon of great music, continuing, “And now the critics who tore these masterpieces to shreds are completely and utterly forgotten, and the works live on.”22 Hitler was deeply inspired by Wagner’s racist and nationalist ideas, and believed the composer was a great reformer of the order of Martin Luther. “I have built up my religion out of Parsifal,” he said, enjoying the connection.23 Perhaps Broch noticed Hitler’s bohemian debt to the French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, the bohemian connoisseur of darkness and author of an infamous collection of poems titled Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil). When Hitler critiqued litterateurs in the Nuremburg speech, he may have been inspired by a section in Baudelaire’s notebooks which tore at the writers of the socialist French critical establishment, pointing out the predilection of militant leftist critics like Saint-Simon for including martial

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metaphors in the language of their art and literature. “Every metaphor here bears whiskers,” Baudelaire wrote. He had scornfully compiled a list of examples of their clichéd pseudo-military language, like, “Militant literature,” “Man the breach,” “Fly the standard aloft,” “Hold the flag high and firm,” “To throw oneself into the fray,” “One of the veterans,” “The poets of combat,” or “The avant-garde litterateurs.” Baudelaire scathingly derided such language, saying, “All these glorious phrases are generally applied to pedants and slackers,” and that, “These habits of military metaphors denote minds not militant, but made for discipline, that is to say, for conformity, spirits born domestic, Belgian spirits, who can only think in society.”24 Nietzsche said, “there was a lot of Wagner in Baudelaire.”25 Commissioned by Napoleon III to please Princess Pauline von Metternich, Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser was harshly treated by its bourgeois Parisian audience, who jeered it and blew whistles to disrupt its first performances. It closed after only three stagings. Baudelaire wrote in its defence in 1861, and befriended Wagner. As the composer’s fellow devotee, perhaps Hitler saw in the bohemian Baudelaire a kindred revolutionary spirit who admired tradition, despised communism, understood evil, and saw how beauty might spring from unexpected sources. During his years struggling as an artist in Vienna, Hitler lived the life of a shabby bohemian. Did he see himself as heir to Baudelaire’s dusty haberdashery? Hitler was an enthusiastic bibliophile who claimed to read a book every night and owned collections of thousands of books at his residences in Berlin, Munich, and at the Berghof in the Bavarian mountains. Most of his extensive library was lost in the chaos at the end of the war, and how much attention he paid to the French poet’s writings is unknown, but certainly the socialist German litterateurs who Hitler despised were the heirs to the socialist French litterateurs who Baudelaire equally abhorred. The OSS dossier, A Hitler Sourcebook, reported that Hitler owned approximately 16,300 books, spread over three general areas of interest – 7,000 military texts, 1,500 on the arts, and most of the remainder on astrology and spiritualism, nutrition, diet, and the church. His art books included texts on Dada and Surrealism. According to the OSS, Hitler wrote in the margin of one volume, “Modern Art will revolutionize the world? Rot!”26 Hitler loathed wordy intellectual discussions of art and condemned writers like Broch for leading culture astray with discussions of theory and for justifying modernist degeneracy. His threats were sincere, and he dealt with modernists and their apologists in the same way he dealt with his political enemies. Within nine months of the delivery of Hitler’s great speech about culture at the opening of the House of German Art, his armies

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marched into Austria, and on the day after their triumphant arrival in Vienna on March 15th, 1938, Broch was arrested along with tens of thousands of Austrian Jews, political activists, and other undesirables. Thanks to the financial intercession of James Joyce, Broch was spared the fate endured by many Jews in the camps that murdered them, and he was allowed to emigrate. After a short stay in England, he left for the United States where he joined the growing community of Jewish intellectual and artistic refugees who were to become profoundly influential in American art, many of them rescued by the extraordinary and brave American agent, Varian Fry. Hitler’s new, purified German art was precisely the kitsch that Broch despised and condemned in his essays. Broch said kitsch was a fantasy that “… describes the world not as it really is, but as it is hoped and feared to be.”27 Hitler and his followers were sincere in their fervent belief in utopian National Socialism, and endorsed art that imagined a fully realized Nazi world shaped as they wished it to be. Nazi art described the world as it might be if it conformed to their ideals, if it were cleansed of Jews, freemasons, communists, and Social Democrats, and repopulated by a dominant Aryan super-race. The art was specifically oriented toward furthering the National Socialist agenda. The Nazi critic Robert Scholz described the self-negating message of the art in his commentary upon the 1942 Great Exhibition of German Art: “the intention of Nationalist Socialist artistic practice with regard to the arts, and likewise the aim of the great exhibitions of German art in Munich, is to lead the people immediately to the experience of this work that has emerged from the creativeness of this age, a work in which the experience of the age, given form by art, is mirrored and reflected by the spectator, thereby enabling him to participate in the superior will of the community.”28 This was idealized art, offering convincingly realistic imagery of strong men and beautiful blond mothers, brave blue-eyed soldiers, and solid farmers, painted in the visual language and technique of the old masters. This idealized art conjured a romantic vision of an idealized Germany and its healthy volk that added credibility to the new world they imagined. This idealized art invoked a selfless dream of an idealized Germany that its people believed was worth fighting and dying for. To the Americans, it was the art of the enemy of individual liberty. Its name was kitsch.

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Notes 1 Frederick Treves, The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences, Cassell and Company, 1923, 4 2 Lion Feuchtwanger, Hitler’s War on Culture, Washington D.C. Evening Star, 19th March, 1933, 3 3 Oxford English Dictionary 4 Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 20 Penguin, 00, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014 5 Frank Wedekind, Gesammelte Werke, Georg Müller, 1924, vol. 9, 210. Cited in: Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, Duke University, 1987, 225 6 High Standards Inversely Taught, Washington D.C. Evening star, 1st October, 1931, C5 7 Answers to Questions, Washington D.C. Evening Star, 19th December, 1938, A-10 8 Norbert Elias, Trans. Edmund Jephcott, Ed. Richard Kilminster, Early Writings, University College Dublin Press, 2006, pp 85 - 96 9 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans., Gretel Adorno, and Rolf Tiedemann, Continuum, 1997 10 Walter Benjamin, Dream Kitsch, In: Ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, Thomas Y. Levin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media. Belknap Press, Harvard. 2008, 238 11 Adolf Hitler, Speech About the Culture, Nuremburg, September 7, 1937, In: Adolf Hitler Collection of Speeches 1922 – 1945, 1945 12 Joseph Goebbels, Ufa Ton Woche no. 406 13 Herman Broch, Evil in the Value System of Art? In: Ed. and Trans. John Hargraves, Geist and Zeitgeist, Counterpoint, 2002, 28 14 Robert Musil, Trans. Peter Wortsman, Black Magic. In: Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, Archipelago, 2006, 54 15 Curiously, Broch’s mental vocabulary units corresponded closely with 21st century neuroscientific terms describing the work of the mind as it creates concepts and develops. Herman Broch, Evil in the Value System of Art? In: Ed. and Trans. John Hargraves, Geist and Zeitgeist, Counterpoint, 2002, 18 16 Herman Broch, Evil in the Value System of Art? In: Ed. and Trans. John Hargraves, Geist and Zeitgeist, Counterpoint, 2002, 33 17 “Thus these two savings are true: ‘Good pious works never make a good pious man, but a good pious man does good pious works.’” Martin Luther, On the Freedom of a Christian. Hackett Publishing, 2013, 23 18 Herman Broch, Evil in the Value System of Art? In: Ed. and Trans. John Hargraves, Geist and Zeitgeist, Counterpoint, 2002, 8 19 Ibid, 8 20 Ibid, 7 21 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, The Stalag Edition, Ostara Publications, 2016, 156 22 Hugh Trevor-Roper, Trans. Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, Hitler’s Table Talk, Enigma, 2000, 722

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Eric Michaud, Trans. Janet Lloyd, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, Stanford, 2004, 53 24 “De l’amour, de la prédilection des Français pour les métaphores militaires. Toute métaphore ici porte des moustaches. Littérature militante. Rester sur la brèche. Porter haut le drapeau. Tenir le drapeau haut et ferme. Se jeter dans la mêlée. Un des vétérans. Toutes ces glorieuses phraséologies s’appliquent généralement à des cuistres et à des fainéants d’estaminet. Métaphore française. Soldat de la presse judiciaire (Bertin). La presse militante. A ajouter aux métaphores militaires: Les poètes de combat. Les littérateurs d’avantgarde. Ces habitudes de métaphores militaires dénotent des esprits non pas militants, mais faits pour la discipline, c’est-à-dire pour la conformité, des esprits nés domestiques, des esprits belges, qui ne peuvent penser qu’en société.” Charles Baudelaire, Mon Coeur Mis à Nu: Journal Intime, XXXI – XXXII, Brins de Plume 10. Maximilien Vox, 1945 http://www.bmlisieux.com/archives/coeuranu.htm See also: The Collected Works of Charles Baudelaire, Pergamon Media, Kindle Loc. 4769 - 4777 25 Friedrich Nietzsche, “NF, April-Juni 1885,” KGW 7/3:148, 154, 196, and 329 26 Walter C. Langer, O.S.S. Hitler Sourcebook, O.S.S., n/d, 753 27 Herman Broch, Evil in the Value System of Art? In: Ed. John Hargraves, Geist and Zeitgeist, Counterpoint, 2002, 33 28 Robert Scholz, Kunst und Gemeinschaft: Zur Grossen Deutschen Kunstausstellung 1942, in: Die Kunst im Dritten Reich, August – September 1942, 202. Cited in: Eric Michaud, Trans. Janet Lloyd, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, Stanford, 2004, 71

AN AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE

“It is entirely possible for a man to swallow an elephant one bite at a time, and it will make him a bigger, strong man, too.”1 Frank Cody

President Franklin Roosevelt was keenly aware of the power of art as propaganda. With Nelson Rockefeller’s help, he recognized the need for America to develop her own brand, and in 1939, Americans witnessed a dramatic swing of state support toward a newly defined American avantgarde. The establishment of kitsch as the antinomy of true art was given a solid foundation by Roosevelt in his May 1939 speech endorsing Rockefeller’s new MoMA. In September, he directed the drastic reorganization and renaming of the Works Progress Administration, which now became the Work Projects Administration, side-lining the socialist realism of the projects, which was clearly too similar to Soviet propaganda, in favour of a new embrace of abstract and modern art. Shortly afterward, the critic Clement Greenberg condemned kitsch with almost as much vitriol as Broch had, writing a derivative essay titled Avantgarde and Kitsch which re-presented this antinomy to an American audience. In this famous essay, Greenberg contrasted what he understood as avant-garde art with kitsch as a dichotomy, with a profound hostility toward representational art. But Greenberg knew little about art, having been principally a critic of literature and theatre prior to making this excursion into new territory, and his understanding of the word ‘avant-garde’ confused the difference between bohemian individualism and the historical 19th century Saint-Simonian use of the term to describe socialist realist propaganda. Nevertheless, the muddled ideas in his essay were discussed and repeated by art critics, magazine editors, and academics, and although derivative and misguided, the essay eventually became regarded as a seminal text describing the foundations of the new American avant-garde, first in New York, and then throughout the Western countries dominated by the U.S. after the Second World War. Greenberg used Lion Feuchtwanger’s duality of ‘kitsch’ to describe the perceived old guard of bourgeois representational painting and sculpture, and ‘avant-garde’ as its antithesis – a forward-looking and exciting new kind of art. Greenberg may have read Feuchtwanger’s article in the

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Washington Evening Star and based the essay upon it. Greenberg was fluent in Yiddish, French, German, and Italian, and had probably read Norbert Elias and Hermann Broch. For his understanding of ‘avant-garde,’ he most likely had read Guillaume Apollinaire’s art criticism. Apollinaire, who coined the words ‘surrealism’ and ‘orphism,’ used ‘avant-garde’ in its new sense in 1912 to describe, “the young painters of the avant-garde school.” Apollinaire said these avant-gardists wanted to make pure paintings after the fashion of the legendary ancient Greek painter Apelles, who had “… arrived one day on the island of Rhodes to see the works of Protogenes, who lived there. Protogenes was not in his studio when Apelles arrived. Only an old woman was there, keeping watch over a large canvas ready to be painted. Instead of leaving his name, Apelles drew on the canvas a line so fine that one could hardly imagine anything so perfect. On his return, Protogenes noticed the line, and, recognizing the hand of Apelles, drew on top of it another line in a different color, even more subtle than the first, thus making it appear as if there were three lines on the canvas. Apelles returned the next day, and the subtlety of the line he drew then made Protogenes despair. That work was for a long time admired by connoisseurs, who contemplated it with as much pleasure as if, instead of some barely visible lines, it had contained representations of gods and goddesses.” Although Apollinaire used this famous story from Pliny to provide antique roots to the abstraction of the young painters of this new avant-garde, he also claimed, “Theirs is an entirely new plastic art.”2 Novelty mattered more than antiquity, because this new art was intended and expected to fulfil the needs of the new age. Apollinaire used ‘avant-garde’ again in 1914, in a derisive description of the emerging bohemian enclave in Montparnasse, which was “a quarter of crackpots,” replacing “The Montmartre of the old days, of artists and songwriters, of windmills and cabarets, to say nothing of the hashishophages, the first opiomaniacs and the everlasting etherialists – all those (of the real Montmartre crowd) who were still alive and whom the general carousing was driving out of old Montmartre ... All those now emigrated under the name of Cubists, Redskins, or Orphic poets.”3 In this new bohemian neighborhood, “the artists’ paint stores in all the neighboring streets offered the multicolored temptation to all those whom a glance at the avantgarde exhibitions had made cry out: ‘Anch’io son pittore!’ (I too am a painter!)” By the time Apollinaire used ‘avant-garde,’ it was familiar in French publications as a noun describing a plethora of fashionable, cutting-edge activities within a broad range of fields, including aviation, beautiful enamelled art-nouveau jewellery, and modish haircuts, to indicate daring

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novelty and authenticity. It received its first use as the name of an artistic attitude in 1885, when Théodore Dure published a bold book-length review of that year’s Salon titled Critique d’Avant-Garde, writing critical commentary on the work of a list of novel artists and composers, whose names appeared below the large header on the cover. These were the lucky members of Dure’s new clique: the impressionist painters, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edouard Manet, Japanese artist, Hokusai, James Whistler, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and composers Richard Wagner, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Herbert Spencer. Dure made no further use of ‘avant-garde’ beyond the title of the book, but declared his intentions to describe promising newcomers at the salon, especially focusing on those whose work was misunderstood. Courting controversy, he echoed Émile Zola in championing originality, singling out “those who, in their way of seeing and feeling, and in their way of rendering what they have seen and felt, show a distinct personality, and produce works endowed with a character distinct from those of the painters who preceded them … Moreover, we shall often be drawn towards a new painter, precisely by the characteristics of clear-cut personality and profound originality which almost always drive the crowd away from him and render it hostile to him.”4 This was the first time ‘avant-garde’ was used in this new manner to describe audacious individualists whose work was controversial and challenged conventional expectations, rather than propagandists for the socialist cause. ‘Avant-garde’ was picking up an elitist air by 1894, when a snobbish editorial article in L’Ouest-Artiste compared German music audiences to the French, finding the former serious and interested, while with the exception of the intellectual avant-garde elite, the latter wanted to readily “grasp the meaning of what we hear without ever taking the trouble to reflect or seek.”5 Bridging the gap between Saint-Simon’s avant-garde, and the new individualist avant-garde, in 1908, art critic François Émile Michel loathed his colleagues-in-critique for their championing of one new avant-garde genius after another, and for their political emphasis on progressive change. “Never,” he cried, “… has there been so much talk about the social mission of art and the role it must play in popular education … according to them, no era, no school will ever see such an abundant blossoming of masterpieces …”6 By spring of 1908, performances of avant-garde theatre were expected to be shocking and offensive. Critic Marcel Roland, writing for La Critique Indépendante attended a dull play which had been pumped up by its publicists as a daring, risqué, passionate, sexual, and perverse avant-garde scandal. His expectations were deflated by a flat performance. No police were called.7

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In 1918, Apollinaire worked for the Galerie Paul Guillaume, writing under the alchemical pseudonym ‘Paracelse’ two short digests of news, criticism, and literature titled Les Arts à Paris. In March, the premier issue included a lengthy extract from a L’Opinion newspaper review by cubist artist Roger Bissière about Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso – stars of the Paris school – describing them as “the leaders of today’s youth, who best represented the two sides of avant-garde painting.” Bissière continued by describing their avant-garde priorities, “Both wanted above all to react against the excessive place that sensitivity had taken in art, both wanted to return intelligence and reason to the dominant role they had ceased to have … Among all those who tried to make these doctrines triumph, Matisse and Picasso appeared to be the most gifted and the most capable of arriving at sufficiently successful achievements, so they quickly appeared as school leaders.”8 In the July issue, Apollinaire commented on fine drawings by Georges Braque and Fernand Léger published in “the avant-garde journal Nord-Sud,” which allowed readers to “… grasp the evolution of young painting, of which Braque and Léger are, with Matisse, Picasso, Marquet, Derain and De Vlaminck, the most remarkable representatives because of their natural gifts, their science and their audacity.”9 This new artistic avant-garde was distinguished by its focus on novelty, youth, and reason. Apollinaire may have been unaware of the 19th century history of the term as the specific domain of Saint-Simonian socialist realism, or he may have deliberately appropriated it in his search for the nomenclature of modern painting, or – most likely – the word was simply commonplace in the vernacular of his circle of bohemian friends. Regardless, as a famous and influential author, his use of ‘avant-garde’ to describe modern and abstract artists was significant. Now the term was equated with radical efforts to find a new art to satisfy the new time. Greenberg was far from the first to use the term in the United States. As in France, ‘avant-garde’ was used in English-language American newspapers to describe new poetry, music, experimental films, and theatre before it was turned to painting and sculpture, although these appearances usually described foreign art events. One of its earliest appearances was in 1900, in a syndicated article about the French poet Henri de Regnier, who was booked to give eight lectures on French modern poetry at Harvard. According to the article, Regnier “contributed, both in verses and prose, to the most important magazines or reviews of the avant-garde or new movement.”10 In 1901, a lengthy article about the anti-establishment dangers of anarchism referred to Peter Kropotkin’s anarchist publication, L’Avant-Garde,11 and perhaps it was the alarming association of his magazine with radical politics which led to an ebb in the use of the term in

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the U.S. during the noughties. When it returned in a New York Sun article of 1913, it was used in the context of American art when an unnamed author complained that “the critics of the avant-garde” had roughly dealt with a Paris exhibition of James Whistler’s paintings, and also used it to describe the paintings of Ernest Lawson of the Group of Eight, and Jeremy Myers of the Ashcan School, “both of whom are conspicuous members of the American avant-garde and regarded in academic circles as dangerous young persons.”12 Both of these painters were sincere American followers of the realist school of Gustave Courbet and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, using art as a political tool for revealing the struggles of the poor, so the author was using the term correctly in its Saint-Simonian sense. But this anonymous writer was among the last to use it in this sense, for in 1913, modern art arrived in New York in full flower at the Armory Show, when Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase and other cubist and realist paintings were shown, and a bewildered cohort of critics struggled to understand what had happened, and used ‘avant-garde’ in its new context. The New York Sun ran a full page on modern art at the beginning of April 1914, asking What is Happening in the World of Art? The uncredited editorial said, “The avant-garde, the rebels, the cubists, or whatever you choose to call them, are delighted. They know perfectly well, the reprobates, that the dear public won’t understand a word of all this stuff that is written about modern art, but knowing that where there is so much smoke there must be some combustion will seek out the pictures and study them for themselves. When they do that, a large portion of them will become converted. The public for ‘modern art’ grows every day. Even Mr. Kenyon Cox believes it to be the work of ‘in the main, honest if unbalanced and ill regulated minds.’ Something in the very name ‘modern art’ seems to attract people. Besides, all over the world, a pathetic craze for honesty has broken out. Honesty has become such a rare and high-priced jewel that people are arriving at the point where they prefer the honesty of crazy loons to the tiresome fibs of the ‘sensible.’ ‘Honesty, at any rate,’ they cry. A certain portion of the public can be fooled all of the time, as one of the most honest of men discovered. These will be fooled by the modern art just as they are fooled by everything else that comes along.”13 Even so, ‘avant-garde’ took a while to stick. The uncredited Sun editorial, dripping sarcasm, began with a criticism of The Century Magazine, which had chosen not to comment upon the offerings of the annual academy exhibit, and had instead devoted a large section of the magazine to a fumbling series of articles by bewildered critics trying to understand modern art. Scribner’s was only marginally better, allowing Kenyon Cox to release an expression of horror from the depths of his

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outraged soul, while the satirical magazine Puck chose precisely the opposite tack and printed reproductions of modern art as frontispieces. Although the Sun had used ‘avant-garde’ to describe cubism and modern art, none of the authors in the Century Magazine symposium, which the Sun’s article had critiqued, made any mention of ‘avant-garde.’14 Cox didn’t use it in Scribner’s, and Puck made a big joke of the art without mentioning the term. Modern art was seen as a fashionable French import. The Sun printed a gushing review of an exhibit of cubist watercolours at the Carroll galleries, even pretentiously resorting to producing a petit paragraph in French, claiming, “C’est difficile d’etre precis sur ces subjets-la en Anglais, n’estce-pas?” (It is difficult to be precise about these subjects in English, isn’t it?) Commenting on the Picasso show at Stieglitz’ Photo-Secession gallery, the writer perceptively commented that the gallery was “a sanctuary for ‘modern art,’ and the message of ‘modern art’ as everybody knows, is for the very rich.”15 The overlap of the use of ‘avant-garde’ with French arts continued, although it was seldom used in the context of painting. In 1922, it appeared in a New York Tribune article titled Paris News Letter, describing the poetry of Paul Valery, whose verse appeared “at long intervals in the periodicals of the avant-garde during the ‘nineties.’”16 The New York Times was slow to respond to the adoption of the term, and printed ‘avant-garde’ for the first time in 1925 in the context of a review of modern music by Erik Satie, whose compositions, it reported, had been attacked in “little reviews of the avant-garde.”17 In 1928, an article commenting on the closure of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s Avant-Garde Theater in Moscow portrayed the oppression of the bohemianbourgeois revolutionary’s work in communist Russia.18 Because imitators of Meyerhold’s spectacles had named their playhouses in Paris and New York after his Moscow theatre, it is mostly in reviews of drama and film that ‘avant-garde’ was used throughout the 1920s, where it is repeatedly applied to experimental performance. The meaning of the term was shifting. These performances were often politically radical, but they certainly would not have been sanctioned by Saint-Simon, or by the Soviet authorities, who would have condemned them as catering to bourgeois formalism. Prior to breaking away from Konstantin Stanislavski’s realist ‘method’ school, Meyerhold was the darling of the revolutionaries, and clearly believed he was doing the work of the proletariat. As he became increasingly experimental, and his trajectory arced away from socialist realism into live spectacle-making, he fell into disfavor and eventually he and his wife were arrested, tortured, and murdered during Stalin’s great purge of 1940.

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After 1928, ‘avant-garde’ was regularly used in the New York Times to describe experimental symbolist theatre productions in New York and Paris.19 In 1932, it appeared in an interview with the composer Ernst Toch, who said Arnold Schönberg was “one of the leaders of the avant-garde of the German school of composition.”20 In 1937, composer Sergei Prokofiev was “at first regarded as strongly of the avant-garde.”21 The first time the term was used in the New York Times in the context of painting was probably in Julius Miller’s January 1933 review of an exhibit of works by members of the Society of New Painters and the New Art Group at the National Salon in Budapest, Hungary. The show of paintings by this “avant-garde group of painters” was popular, attracting “throngs in attendance at the formal opening by the Minister of Culture.”22 Miller commented that the spirit of Émile Zola’s description of a work of art as “a corner of creation seen through a temperament” was clearly present in Hungary. Zola concluded the last essay of his Mon Salon with the line, following Charles Baudelaire’s similar earlier observation.23 Miller deliberately tied ‘avant-garde’ to Zola’s description of art as the product of individualism, not of any political idealism, and certainly not of the ideas of Saint-Simon. Among the painters in the show, there were works by János Vaszary, “who has long been the field-marshal of Hungarian art;” Vilmos Aba Novák, whose “canvases are like the brilliant facets of some mosaic with their tumbling riot of ultramarine, vermilion, cinobber [sic] (presumably cinnabar) and ochre;” and István Szõnyi, whose painting Spring, “goes very far afield from objective natural phenomenon, but in an imaginative way captures the very essence, the perfume of nature in her most delightful mood.” Pal. C. Molnar’s Landscape with Figures was “striking for its powerful simplicity.”24 These were experimental modernist paintings without a hint of socialist realism or political partisanship. In 1934, the term was used in an uncredited Times review of James Sweeney’s book Plastic Redirections in Twentieth Century Paintings, describing the “striking ‘redirections’ that have made the avant-garde art of our century what it is.”25 Sweeney was a MoMA curator between 1935 and 1946, and then became the director of the Guggenheim, clearly in a position of influence and possessing insider knowledge of the terminology of the art world. But, although the reviewer was comfortable using ‘avantgarde’ to describe the book, Sweeney made no mention of ‘avant-garde’ himself, preferring to use ‘modern art’ to describe non-representational 20th century art. Greenberg’s Avant-Garde and Kitsch was published in autumn of 1939, only a few months after the opening of the new MoMA. The essay began with the common 1930s communist assertion that capitalism was a failed

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and broken system for which the only antidote was Marxism. This apocalyptic stance coloured everything that followed in the essay. With remarkable pessimism, he claimed that avant-garde culture was a response to “the last phase of our own culture.” He started well, noting the birth of the avant-garde coincided chronologically – and geographically – with “the first bold development of scientific revolutionary thought in Europe,” presumably the Saint-Simonians. Struggling to reconcile bohemianbourgeois art with the new spirit in American art, he quickly got his facts absurdly wrong, ridiculously claiming that bohemia “was then identical with the avant-garde,” despite his own admission that bohemians were “demonstratively uninterested in politics.”26 He maintained that the avantgarde emigrated from bourgeois society to bohemia, and rejected the markets of capitalism, but complained that bohemians were also conscious of the fact that they needed bourgeois money. Greenberg explained that avant-garde artists – he really meant bohemians – rejected revolutionary politics and embarked upon a search for the absolute, manifested as art-forart’s-sake, at which point subject matter or content were “avoided like a plague.” The avant-garde tried but failed to imitate, not God, but “the disciplines and processes of art itself.” This imitation of imitation was “the genesis of the ‘abstract.’” 27 Although Greenberg was beginning to discern the formation of a new American species of avant-garde, this was a hopelessly confused and incorrect application of ‘avant-garde’ to the true situation in mid to late 19th century France, in which the bohemian practitioners of art-for-art’s-sake would have vehemently objected to being described by the term. Even Proudhon, the archenemy of the individualist bohemians, made no reference either to their work or the realist school as ‘avant-garde’ in his Principe d’Art. The self-appointed high priest of aestheticism Oscar Wilde never once used the term in his writings. It was entirely absent from ostentatious Walter Pater’s epicurean work. Individualist Emile Zola never mentioned it, and given his contemptuous rejection of Proudhon’s Saint-Simonism, he would have been utterly scornful of its application to himself and his bohemian friends. Nor would many other individualist bohemians have been cheerful about having their lot thrown in with proto-communists, being more likely to be interested in anarchy than in Marx, like Wilde, who was a glibly self-professed anarchist and admirer of Peter Kropotkin. Anarchists, not communists, co-opted the term ‘avant-garde’ in the late 19th century – but they only used it in a political context. Kropotkin himself had edited a Swiss anarchist publication titled AvantGarde in the 1870s, but it was a political rag, not an arts journal. A magazine called L’Avant-Garde was founded in 1920 by The Federation of Young

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Communists of France – but it too had nothing to do with the arts and published propaganda designed to radicalize a young and idealistic audience. Greenberg probably picked up the term from the journalism of Feuchtwanger and Apollinaire rather than by paying attention to its SaintSimonian history. He rightly described the artistic intentions of bohemians to move art forward in the sense that they were indeed on a quest to find new art to satisfy the insatiable hunger for novelty in the bourgeois era, but they lacked a unified utopian idealism. Bohemian-bourgeois artists were far from united, being inherently anarchic and individualistic. Conservative critics often conflated anarchists and communists because they shared a revolutionary zeal for overthrowing the capitalist order. But the goal of idealist anarchists was far from the collectivist enterprise of international communism. Whereas the communists wanted centralized government and emphasized and enforced the equality of all people, anarchists were opposed to hierarchy, seeking a society free from government, in which individuals were able to follow their own desires and goals, making only voluntary associations for mutual aid, and never coerced by force. Although bohemia had anarchic characteristics, with strong fundamental support for the individualism Zola spoke of, it existed in symbiosis with the bourgeoisie. Some bohemians did have a true affinity for anarchism. Paul Gauguin was sympathetic. The Neo-Impressionists Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Maximilien Luce, Camille Pissarro, Lucien Pissarro, Anna Bloch, Charles Angrand, Albert Dubois-Pillet, and Henri Cross were committed anarchists.28 Stephane Mallarme, and many of the symbolists, advocates of art-for-art’s-sake, were either anarchists or sympathetic to its ideals.29 In the American noughties and teens, Emma Goldman’s anarchist principles shaped the aesthetics of Robert Henri, and influenced Man Ray and Adolf Wolff. Goldman had said, “I want freedom, the right to selfexpression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things. Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world – prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.”30 Max Stirner’s anarchism influenced the thinking of Marcel Duchamp and his production of the ready-mades. Ananda Coomaraswamy’s anarchic philosophy had a profound effect upon the art of John and Mary Mowbray-Clarke, Rockwell Kent, and the anarchist art critic Carl Zigrosser, editor of The Modern School journal.31 John Mowbray-Clarke was one of the organizers of the famous Armory Show of 1913, the first hoorah of the modern art that Greenberg would claim as a distinctly American avant-garde. Its most notable participants were European immigrants. Alfred Stieglitz, the

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influential proprietor of 291 Gallery who exhibited Duchamp and Man Ray, said, “I have always been a revolutionist, if I have even been anything at all. At heart I have ever been an anarchist. All truth seekers are that, whether they know it or not. But even that label as a label I hate. So, I am a man without labels and without party.”32 Greenberg said his avant-gardists were inspired by “the imitation of imitating,” and that Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Piet Mondrian, Joan Miró, Wassily Kandinsky, Constantin Brancusi, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, and Paul Cézanne derived their chief inspiration “from the medium they work in.” But the philosophical and political views of these examples, chosen by Greenberg to exemplify his avant-garde, revealed the excessively simplistic duality of his binary opposition of avant-garde to kitsch, for the art world was far too chaotically complex to break down into a naïve duality of a virtuous avant-garde and an evil representationalism with simplistic precision. The first quarter of the 20th century was the age of artistic manifestos, when it seemed that there were as many ‘isms’ as there were individual artists, each striving to become canonical as unique contributors to the history of art. And the artists he listed could hardly be fitted into any kind of orthodoxy, possessing a diverse and individualistic range of beliefs and motivations. Claiming consistency among them was abstruse. Determined to align his avant-garde to his political allegiance, Greenberg claimed that the opposition of bohemian individuals to the uniformity of bourgeois culture was an indication of sympathy with anti-capitalist socialism. But his own examples contradict this assertion. When the chateau-dwelling womanizer Picasso applied for French citizenship in 1940, his application was rejected because the police, who had been watching him for nearly four decades, considered him an anarchist, with a growing inclination toward communism – his roommate the gallerist, Pedro Mañach, was also a known anarchist. The laughable communism that multimillionaire Picasso nominally embraced when he finally became a party member in 1945 was a bohemian publicity stunt. Alfred Barr certainly thought Picasso could be fairly easily persuaded to embrace the American individualist cause. In an undated letter to Nelson Rockefeller written in summer of 1957, Barr reported that a Life Magazine photographer told him that Picasso had “very little to do with the French Party, if at all. In fact, a visit to the States would, in every likelihood (sic) bring some sort of statement from him that would make him break with them openly, for good.” Barr suggested inviting Picasso to the opening of his show at MoMA, continuing, “I think we might do a great deal to ‘corrupt’ him if he could be invited. Even if he shouldn’t come – which is more than likely – his being asked would make a great difference to him … I think

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inviting Picasso would be a bold stroke in the cultural struggle between them and us in which, thanks to various reasons, we miss one chance after another.”33 Rockefeller forwarded the proposal to Allen Dulles at the CIA to get his opinion. Sadly, Dulles’ reply is redacted from the CIA file. No revolutionary, when Picasso died in 1973, the estate of this limousinesocialist was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Braque, who developed Cubism with Picasso during the first decade of the 20th century while living in the fin-de-siècle bohemian enclave of Montmartre, had no political affiliation whatsoever, and made a conscious effort to avoid such commitments. His bohemian allegiance was to art alone. He was so uncommitted to political causes that even when the Nazis invaded France, he maintained a fatalistic posture of “active passivity.”34 Always a sincere individualist, Braque even disliked being called a cubist. His biographer wrote of him, “Movements of any stripe, political, social, or cultural, were not for Braque. To his dying day he defended his own revolutionary practice, and his partnership with Picasso, but always fought shy of cubism as a denomination. The ‘ism’ was too doctrinaire, too programmatic, too collective. Ideas were there to be effaced. Systems were the enemies of creation. Associations were for followers. Georges Braque followed no one, he insisted, except perhaps Cézanne. Braque le solitaire was not a joiner. When others joined him, it was time to move on.”35 When Picasso asked Braque to join the communists with him at the end of the war, he refused, and said, “Picasso used to be a great painter, now he is merely a genius.”36 Like Braque and Picasso, Mondrian moved to bohemian Paris in the first decade of the 20th century to be at the heart of the exciting antiestablishment bohemian art world. In 1908, he joined the utopian Theosophical Society, and for the rest of his life he sought out spiritual meaning in his art. No communist, his ideas were so rooted in theosophy that, a decade later, he told his friend Theo van Doesburg, “I got everything from the Secret Doctrine.” The Secret Doctrine was a two-volume collection of the antimaterialist esoteric thought of Helena Blavatsky, the founder of the popular society. In 1921, Mondrian wrote a letter to Rudolf Steiner explaining that his neoplasticism was “the art of the foreseeable future for all true Anthroposophists.” Steiner didn’t respond, but Mondrian wrote again to van Doesburg to tell him that neoplasticism “exemplifies theosophical art.”37 In Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky described three essential propositions: First, the indisputable truth of the existence of the absolute – the unknowable and indescribable One. Second, the universe is governed by endlessly repeated ebb and flow – a cosmic tidal rhythm. Finally, all souls are units of consciousness – parts of the universal mind. Deeply mystical,

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theosophists saw material culture as an impediment to connection with the One, a metaphysical proposition far from Marxist atheism and materialism. Theosophists were opposed to revolution, and were theoretically antipolitical, although Blavatsky gave a specifically anti-Marxist position in the first issue of The Theosophist, the Society’s monthly magazine, when she wrote, “Unconcerned about politics, hostile to the insane dreams of Socialism and of Communism, which it abhors, as both are but disguised conspiracies of brutal force and sluggishness against honest labor, the society cares but little about the outward human management of the material world. The whole of its aspirations are directed toward the occult truths of the visible and invisible worlds.”38 Furthermore, the Society was modelled upon the American constitution, which extended equal rights to all religious beliefs, respecting each individual’s will to join any sect they chose, provided they did not attempt to enforce their doctrines over others. The newsletter reminded readers to respect unique positions, for “… individual members of our society have their own private opinion upon all matters of a religious, as of every other, nature. They are protected in the enjoyment and expression of the same …”39 Arriving in bohemian Montparnasse in 1920, the Catalan surrealist Miró considered conventional painting bourgeois, and became an imitator of Cézanne and Van Gogh. By 1924, he fell in with the surrealists. A republican anti-fascist, when the Germans invaded France in May of 1940, he and his wife boarded the last train to Spain to escape. Like all good bohemians, he claimed to be utterly opposed to bourgeois artistic standards, but in 1974, he made a tapestry for the World Trade Center, the iconic heart of American capitalism. His works became profoundly valuable as icons of the history of surrealism, and he made the comfortable transition from bohemia to the bourgeoisie. Underscoring the inseparable symbiosis of the bohemians and the haute-bourgeoisie, the tapestry was considered to be the most valuable single material asset destroyed by Islamic fundamentalists in the 9/11 attacks. Another theosophist, Kandinsky, who was also a devout orthodox Christian, wrote important books of theory describing abstract concepts that Greenberg surely must have read. Kandinsky’s first book, Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art) was published in German in 1911, while he lived in Munich after graduating from the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München (Academy of Fine Arts) as an adult student, at the age of forty-five. There is not a mention of ‘avant-garde’ in his book. He was clearly familiar with the Hegelian description of art as an expression of each era that Proudhon had provided in Du Principe De L’art Et De Sa Destination Sociale, and paraphrased the same idea in the opening

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paragraphs of his book. He also responded to Proudhon’s exhortation to produce scientific art, but that was as far as any similarity with him went, for the expression of the era Kandinsky was interested in was a theosophical spiritual awakening, a new age, far from seeking any sort of materialist utopia. Transcendence is always individualistic. Echoing Blavatsky, he wrote, “Our soul, after the long period of materialism, at last begins to awaken from despair born of unbelief, lack of purpose and ideals. This nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game, has not yet passed.”40 To coincide with the publication of Über das Geistige in der Kunst, Kandinsky organized a group show of the work of bohemians named Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). The catalogue text for the show clearly illustrated the conflict he would soon face after he returned to his native Moscow at the beginning of the First World War. In this small exhibition, we do not seek to propagate any one precise and special form; rather, we aim to show by means of the variety of forms represented how the inner wishes of the artist are embodied in manifold ways. The great revolution; The shifting center of gravity in art, literature, and music; The variety of forms: the constructive, compositional (aspect) of these forms; The intensive turning towards the inner (aspect) of nature and, bound up with it, the rejection of any prettifying of the external aspect – - These are in general the science of the new inner Renaissance. To show the characteristic expressions of this change, To emphasize its internal relationship with past epochs, To make known the expression of inner strivings in EVERY form having its own inner sound – - This is the goal that Der Blaue Reiter will endeavor to attain.41 This was individualist and theosophical language that simply could not fit within the narrow spectrum of socialist realism which became the orthodox standard of the Soviet Union. After the revolution, Kandinsky helped Anatoly Lunacharsky establish the Museum of the Culture of Painting, but petty bickering among the revolutionary artists and outright disagreement with the socialist realists (the legitimate propagandist

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descendants of the real avant-garde of Saint-Simon), caused internal dissent about the purpose and nature of socialist arts, and eventually led to authoritarian regulation. Aware of the growing influence of Nicolai Chernyshevsky’s truly avant-garde aesthetics under Lenin and Lunacharsky, in 1920, Kandinsky sensibly returned to Germany, where he taught at the Bauhaus between 1922 and 1933. When the Nazis took over the Bauhaus, he moved to France, where he became a citizen in 1939, apparently having better credentials than Picasso. Brancusi was famous for his spiritual intensity and asceticism, but his anti-materialism was no indication of anti-capitalism. In fact, he had a reputation as a pleasure-seeker among his bohemian friends in the teens and twenties of the new century, although the habits of simple but middle-class living learned as the son of a monastery’s land manager in Romania never left him. When he first arrived in Montmartre, he took a job as a dishwasher, but could not afford to pay for his studio rent and food. He became so weak with hunger that visitors recalled him leaning against his atelier’s wall so he would not faint. His spirituality extended to his home – he refused to buy furniture, and built his own, believing that to accept things made by others would introduce their ‘spirit world’ into his. This conviction caused him some social embarrassment because sometimes he refused wellintended gifts. A student of theosophical thought, he kept a book of Tibetan spiritual teaching on his nightstand.42 His friend Carola Giedion-Walker said he “subscribed to none of the ‘isms,’ nor did he adopt any of the catchwords that … attained such influence and became so characteristic of the different groups of innovators who were seeking, in Paris, to give form to something essential. He joined no group then, and later on, too, kept to himself, although much sought after from every side.”43 Brancusi affirmed this individualism, and advised people looking for theoretical posturing in his works to abandon their search. They were not “to look for obscure formulas or mystery. I offer you pure joy. Look at my sculptures until you see them. Those who are close to God have seen them.”44 Born into a bourgeois home in Bern, Switzerland, Klee’s father was a music teacher, who trained his son to play violin. Klee participated in the second Der Blaue Reiter exhibit in 1912. Despite his bourgeois upbringing, he actually did have some communist sympathies, most clearly expressed in 1918 when he was asked to participate in the executive committee of revolutionary artists in the short-lived communist government of Munich. He was thirty-eight years old, so it is hard to dismiss this as a youthful indulgence, but Klee’s commitment to the communist cause was naive, and based on his belief that, “the part of us which aims for eternal values would be better supported in a communist community.”

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He too taught at the Bauhaus in the twenties, and there learned about theosophy and Rudolf Steiner from Kandinsky. Although he did not become a member of the Theosophical Society, he shared a similar metaphysical approach to art-making, viewing himself as a medium for the divine. “My hand is wholly the instrument of some remote power,” he said, “It is not my intellect that runs the show, but something different, something higher, more distant – somewhere else.”45 While teaching at the Bauhaus, he gave a series of lectures, later published in English as The Thinking Eye, which formalized his theories of design, with long reductive descriptions of the correspondences between spiritual states and gestural renderings. Like the theosophists, he thought there was a polarity between concepts – a perennial flow between oppositions. Art was a symbolic expression of the creation. In his Creative Confessions of 1920, he declared, “Today we reveal the reality behind visible things, thus expressing the belief that the visible world is merely an isolated case in relation to the universe and that there are many more other, latent realities.”46 Notoriously apolitical, and despite biographical protestations that his work represented a struggle against depression and hardship, Henri Matisse was a thorough bohemian-bourgeois, born of a wholesale seed-merchant, and showed little interest in strong opinions. He first came to Paris to study law, and after he was qualified, he worked as a clerk in a small town in northern France. But after only a few years of the bourgeois life, he returned to Montmartre, enrolling in the Académie Julian, and studying under the great masters William Adolphe Bouguereau and Gustave Moreau. Truly bohemian, he struggled to make ends meet, wore a sheepskin coat with the fleece turned outward, slept with his model Caroline Joblau, who bore his child; married Amélie Parayre, had two more children with her, and raised them all together. Matisse’s friendship with Paul Signac and his adoption of postimpressionism at the turn of the century points to a youthful sympathy with anarchism, but the lyrical elegance of his later work is more idyllic than pragmatic, inspired by fantasies of a utopian reverie rather than programmatic socialism. Art historian John Russell said his art was entirely without political or religious commentary, and he “did not aspire to change society, or even to leave a portrait of it.”47 Jack Flam, who edited Matisse’s writings, said that it would be “virtually impossible to reconstruct any of the social or political history of his time”48 from reading him. In 1941, when he was seventy-two years old, he had a religious conversion to Catholicism while recovering from surgery for cancer – it was after this spiritual experience that he produced many of his colourful and iconic gouache on paper cut-outs. During the occupation, he chose to stay in France, and was

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obliged to sign papers stating he was not Jewish. The Nazis tolerated him and his work, despite their perception of the degeneracy of modern art. The banker’s son, Cézanne, was a true bohemian, but he was magnetically drawn toward conservativism, subscribing to the antisemitic Le Croix newspaper, and embracing Catholicism. So much for the scattered and individualistic political allegiances and philosophical motivations of the exemplars of Greenberg’s avant-garde. He continued Avant-garde and Kitsch by correctly identifying his avant-garde as the possession of the ruling class, writing, “No culture can develop without a social basis, without a source of stable income. And in the case of the avant-garde, this was provided by an elite among the ruling class of that society from which it assumed itself to be cut off, but to which it has always remained attached by an umbilical cord of gold.”49 Greenberg rightly recognized that his new American avant-garde depended upon the rich to carry it forward, despite the Marxist emphasis he incorrectly claimed for its artists. Bizarrely, he claimed that this ruling class was in the process of abandoning the avant-garde. This inexplicable assertion was made only three months after Roosevelt’s inauguration of MoMA as America’s temple of modern art, and the adoption of the modernist creed as the United States’ new artistic religion, with the installation of Alfred Barr as its high priest, and the financial backing of the combined treasuries of the U.S. government, and elite American aristocrats like Nelson Rockefeller, Edsel Ford, Peggy Guggenheim, et alia. Either oblivious to recent cultural developments, or blinded to them by his socialist millenarianism, or deliberately obtuse, Greenberg claimed – without explaining how or why – that this alleged abandonment of the avant-garde was the fault of kitsch, which was “ersatz culture.”50 The usual condescension to the masses habitually employed by the preachers of socialist aesthetics now emerged, as Greenberg, speaking as yet another self-appointed voice of the proletariat, declared that this fake culture was “destined for those who, insensible to the values of real culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide.”51 Next, he provided his screed against kitsch, railing, “Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility. It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money – not even their time.”52 This remarkable passage was an excellent example of the propaganda strategy of ‘satanism’ being applied to

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representational art by a modernist communist critic, and it was designed for the sole purpose of establishing popular representational art as the antithetical enemy of the new, true, democratic, honest, fresh, exciting, fashionable, and now, American avant-garde in the minds of his readers. But the kitsch Greenberg described was “popular, commercial art and literature with their chromotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies, etc.”53 This was precisely the culture preferred by the ordinary people, who he, as socialist vox, claimed to guide! Like Proudhon, Greenberg claimed to speak for the people, but he really spoke for an artistic elitism which he admitted was within the creamy province of the hautebourgeois. Regardless of this rancid and hypocritical elitism, he pressed on with another ridiculous claim. Only a government of international socialism could raise up the cultural standard of the proletariat, and this was the reason the avant-garde was outlawed in totalitarian states. Greenberg was correct to observe that the governments of Germany, Italy, and Russia were using representational art as a tool to ingratiate themselves with the masses – but he neglected to mention that America had enthusiastically done the same thing with her Public Works of Art Project and Treasury projects. Pointing out that the American government had been persistent and strategic propagandists of their own people was not Greenberg’s intent. He emphasized that enemy governments promoted the kitsch culture the masses enjoyed to trick them into believing they were actually in control. He offered a new weaponized American avant-garde as a doctrinal defence. Kitsch was the art of the enemy. The details of Hitler’s pact with Stalin were manifested on September 1st, 1939, when they invaded Poland and cut it in two. Greenberg was doubtlessly aware of their unholy treaty. The uncredited editorial article opening the fall issue of Partisan Review, the critical Trotskyite arts journal which contained his Avant-Garde and Kitsch essay, was titled The War of the Neutrals. In it, the author described the invasion of Poland and the impending “final cataclysm” with some relish. The difficult circumstances that now fell before American communists were clear. He wrote, “Ever since Hitler came to power, the Third International has posed as the great champion of the Democratic masses against the menace of fascism. But with the first gun fired in Poland, its big pretensions fell away, its humanitarian vaporings condensed into cynical realpolitik. The transition was made in the abrupt and whole-hog style habitual to the Kremlin bureaucracy. A few weeks ago, the Comintern was agitating for a world crusade against Hitler. Now that the crusade has taken place, it is discovered to be an imperialist

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adventure. Stalin has been transformed overnight from an international philanthropist, whose pipe was an index of his philosophical benevolence, into a Metternichian power politician, his pipe puffing now signifying preternatural guile. “The liberals and fellow travelers have been shocked at last into recognizing that the Kremlin’s interests are not those of the international working-class, but rather those of the Kremlin.”54 The Stalinist American Communist Party made the fatal decision to stand with Moscow – and therefore was in a proxy alliance with Hitler. American communists were now dangerously close to being traitors. Marxist American intellectuals who had been true believers in the revolutionary idealism of the Soviet Union became uncomfortable with Stalin’s seizure of power, and then thoroughly disillusioned after he made the infamous non-aggression pact with Hitler. An exodus of artists abandoned the communist-affiliated Artists’ Union. Their idealistic vision of the utopian revolution utterly collapsed when the U.S.S.R. descended into totalitarianism. George Biddle, Stuart Davis, and Lee Krasner all quit working for the union, which they previously supported with enthusiasm.55 In his diary, Biddle described the 1940 conference when the communist American Artists’ Congress voted to support the Stalinists as “… one of the nastiest meetings I have ever attended.”56 After the non-aggression pact, even the staunchly militant Marxist American unionist Charles Zimmerman rejected Stalinism as imperialist and became a progressive anti-communist. Yet, in Avant-Garde and Kitsch, Greenberg clung to utopian socialism as the only future for American art. Undeterred by the glaring contradictions between bohemian individualism and collectivism that he had pointed out, Greenberg concluded his essay with the absurd claim that not only would socialism preserve “whatever living culture we have right now,”57 but that it would also produce a new culture once it was in control of America. These idealistic claims were doubtlessly inspired by his allegiance to the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, architect of the Red Army and comrade of Lenin. After Hitler and Stalin made their pact, many American communist activists, artists, and writers renounced Stalin in favour of Trotsky, who had fled from the Soviet Union to refuge in Mexico with the intercession of Diego Rivera. As Stalin installed himself as dictator and slaughtered his opposition, Trotsky became the iconic darling of idealistic American socialists. He was the Snowball of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the brilliant, energetic leader of utopian communists, persecuted and murdered for daring to challenge the authority of the tyrant. Disgusted with Stalin’s take-over of the Communist Party, Trotsky spent the last few months of his life writing

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prolifically. In the fall of 1938, a year before Kitsch and Avant-Garde, he helped Rivera and André Breton write an article published in Partisan Review titled, Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art, urging American readers to reject the Soviet Union because, “in our eyes, it represents, not communism, but its most treacherous and dangerous enemy.”58 Self-appointed mouthpieces of the proletariat, Trotsky, Rivera, and Breton repeated Proudhon’s assertion that all artists must serve the people. The Great Depression was evidence of the collapse of capitalism, and the revolutionary state was the only solution. The answer to the collapse was to build a central socialist government, tasked with the development of an anarcho-socialist utopian state, with no top-down authority. Art’s role? Their manifesto claimed, like Proudhon and Saint-Simon, that true art could only be revolutionary, that it must lead the way to the socialist state. “We believe that the supreme task of art in our epoch is to take part actively and consciously in the preparation of the revolution. But the artist cannot serve the struggle for freedom unless he subjectively assimilates its social content, unless he feels in his very nerves its meaning and drama and freely seeks to give his own inner world incarnation in his art.”59 Repeating the hypocritical claim Trotsky made in 1924 and 1937, the manifesto demanded that artists must work with “complete freedom,” a formula that was often repeated by Dewey, Cahill, and their acolytes, but once again emphasized that this so-called freedom was limited by the right of the revolutionary state to protect itself from attacks of all sorts, including those in the realm of art. In the mould of Trotsky, Rivera, and Breton, Greenberg was yet another self-appointed speaker for the working class. Like a snake-oil evangelist emphasizing the exclusivity of his avantgarde flock, Greenberg warned his readers to beware of sinful kitsch traps, which might lure them away from the path of elite righteousness, and could even be found “in the preserves of genuine culture.” The only way to avoid such traps was to have a fanatical zeal for genuine culture – the authentic avant-gardist “must have a true passion for it that will give him the power to resist the faked article that surrounds and presses in on him from the moment he is old enough to look at the funny papers. Kitsch is deceptive.”60 Furthermore, the snares of kitsch were especially present among representational academies: “… all kitsch is academic, and all that’s academic is kitsch. For what is called the academic as such no longer has an independent existence, but has become a stuffed-shirt ‘front’ for kitsch.” Greenberg described his dislike for proletarian taste in a fantasy passage about “an ignorant Russian peasant” standing before an imaginary painting by Ilya Repin – the hero of the social realists in Moscow. Believing for some

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reason that Repin was a painter of battle scenes – actually, he never painted one – Greenberg laughably attempted to walk in the shoes of this Russian peasant, and speak for him. It is hard to imagine anyone less capable of speaking the mind of a proletarian Russian land-worker than the bourgeois Clement Greenberg, in his tailored New York suit and tie, articulating the elitist manners of highbrow art in his smooth, urbane accent. This patronizing city-dweller claimed the peasant’s perception of the painting was simple, because Repin’s realism made it easy to identify the objects depicted. The painting told a story that could be readily appreciated and enjoyed without his dispensation of the effort needed to appreciate a Picasso. Thus, Repin’s work was a shortcut to pleasure, and therefore “Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art.”61 No amount of social conditioning would make any difference to the peasant’s preference for kitsch. Furthermore, even if the government of a capitalist country attempted to endorse genuine culture, this proletarian preference, “… makes all talk of art for the masses there nothing but demagogy.”62 Greenberg was no match to Zola. He misunderstood the history of the real avant-garde, and as the aspirant heir to Apollinaire, he appropriated the term to mean something it had not previously meant. Even so, the timing of the publication of Avant-Garde and Kitsch at the precise moment that the American left cut itself loose from the Stalinist Soviets couldn’t have been better. His essay stands as a landmark to the birth of New York’s novel role as the nexus of radical, individualist, bohemian-bourgeois Western art. After Greenberg, the use of the term changed from a generalization for the cutting edge of any field to a noun specific to the context of art – now, ‘avant-garde’ meant ‘progressive, pioneering American art.’ He established this new avant-garde as the antinomy of kitsch, which was the art of the totalitarian enemy. The essay soon made an impact. By mid-April 1940, the new term ‘avant-garde’ was finding use among New York’s politically radical bohemians. The New York Times published an uncredited article describing a handbill distributed to a thousand artists attending a MoMA preview – presumably printed and circulated by an enthusiastic reader of Greenberg’s article. The handbill – ostensibly produced by “the avant-garde” – was “a frontal attack with broadsides,” complaining that the new museum was not modern enough, and demanding shows of “the English abstractionists,” and “… younger European experimenters.”63 Greenberg would soon explain more of what he meant by ‘avant-garde’ when he published his follow-up essay in the July-August 1940 issue of Partisan Review, which was by then under his editorial control. Towards a Newer Laocoon was a better piece of work than Avant-garde and Kitsch,

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written with some clarity. This time, Greenberg obviously had done a little homework, studiously reading Apollinaire’s criticism as preparation. The title of the piece referred to a famous essay of 1766 by the bourgeois dramaturg Gotthold Lessing, Laocoon; or, On the Limits of Painting and Poetry, and clearly flagged Greenberg’s ambition to define 20th century American art. In it, Greenberg pursued the abandonment of the long-lasting relationship between literature and the plastic arts by abstract artists, observing that their turn toward the medium itself as the focus of painting and sculpture was what distinguished abstract art from previous forms. This was derived from Apollinaire’s 1912 essay, On the Subject in Modern Painting, which used similar language to describe abstraction. Apollinaire wrote, “Verisimilitude no longer has any importance, for the artist sacrifices everything to the composition of his picture. The subject no longer counts, or if it counts it counts for very little. An entirely new art is thus being evolved, an art that will be to painting, as painting has hitherto been envisaged, what music is to literature. It will be a pure painting, just as music is pure literature.”64 Just as the word had lost meaning and become an exploration of form, painting would ultimately lose its form and become concept. If Zola was the prophet of the individualist bohemian-bourgeois triumph, then Apollinaire was the oracle of conceptual art. Greenberg said the romantics attempted to introduce the sharing of feeling to painting, and this made clear the problem that the medium was an obstacle to the shared experience. Poetry thus became the supreme art, for its medium was barely a medium at all. Clarifying who was the enemy of avant-garde abstraction, Greenberg said 19th century figurative painters “sank painting to a level that was in some respects an all-time low. The name of this low is Vernet, Gérôme, Leighton, Watts, Moreau, Böcklin, the Pre-Raphaelites, etc., etc. That some of these painters had real talent only made their influence the more pernicious. It took talent – among other things – to lead art that far astray. Bourgeois society gave these talents a prescription, and they filled it – with talent.”65 It was not talented handling of paint that had done the damage, it was the use of skilled imaginative painting in the service of sentiment that was the nemesis of true avant-garde art. Greenberg repeated his strange assertion that the avant-garde found refuge from the bourgeoisie in bohemia, even putting a date to it – 1848 – the year of the unsuccessful socialist February Revolution. In attempting to tie bohemia to socialism, he completely failed to account for the gradual development of the individualistic character of the romantic bohemian that had been pioneered by Eugène Delacroix, Théophile Gautier, Gérard de

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Nerval, Victor Hugo, and their friends and admirers since the opening of Nerval in 1830. Despite their resentment of the bourgeoisie, bohemians were actually in a symbiotic relationship with them, and although the purpose of the bohemian avant-garde was, as Greenberg said, “to perform in opposition to bourgeois society the function of finding new and adequate cultural forms,” his claim that in the role of his avant-garde, bohemia refused to succumb to bourgeois ideological divisions, and refused “to permit the arts to be their own justification”66 was completely inaccurate. In fact, 19th century Parisian bohemians never participated in any ideological hegemony – the closest they came to an ideology was that making art was the goal of life, and that the root of art was the individual – the exact opposite of Greenberg’s claim. Bohemia was the home of the necessary artistic anarchy that provided the free market with artistic novelty. By describing individualist abstract artists as ‘avant-garde,’ Greenberg appropriated bohemia and concocted a politically progressive flavour for it. The contradiction was self-evident – hadn’t he said himself that his avantgarde was umbilically attached to the elite? His claim that after 1848 bohemia had become a sanctuary from capitalism jars with the historical narrative of the repeated story of bohemians either maturing into members of the bourgeoisie as they found success, or, as Henri Murger had described, finding the hospital or the morgue instead. And despite his affiliation to Proudhon, it is difficult to pretend that Courbet’s relentless selfaggrandizement and enthusiasm for establishing his brand in his marquee exhibits was inspired by selfless philanthropy and was somehow anticapitalist, even if he was an enthusiastic communard in 1871. His letters read as a handbook for self-promotion. It is equally hard to square wealthy Manet’s life or paintings with a socialist narrative, or the bourgeois impressionists’ self-funded exhibits designed to sell their work to their bourgeois audience, or their capitalist relationship with their successful dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, who was hardly in the art business for the exercise of altruism, but to further the success of his family’s prospering gallery. Perceptively, Greenberg pointed out the historical attraction of representational art to literature. The new brand of abstractionist avantgardists was interested neither in narrative painting, nor illustrating stories, nor crafting allegorical puzzles – they were in pursuit of a different kind of art, released from the bondage of the word to explore the medium itself. In representational art, “Everything contributes to the denial of the medium, as if the artist were ashamed to admit that he had actually painted his picture instead of dreaming it forth.”67 In addition to being freed from literature, avant-garde art was freed from subject. Greenberg raised Courbet up as the

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first avant-gardist who had made the break “from spirit to matter” and included Zola among the writers who did the same in literature. The impressionists had gone further than Courbet, and “abandoned common sense experience”68 in their efforts to explore the effects of colour rather than to duplicate nature. The avant-garde had embarked upon a reductionist project of exploring the media of painting and sculpture, stripping away the superfluities of literary influence to find “a radical purity.”69 Avant-garde painters abandoned imitation, chiaroscuro, and shaded modelling. Line – hitherto abandoned because of its absence from nature – found a new importance. Non-representational geometrical forms took prominence, and the picture plane became flattened as illusion was discarded. The cubists eliminated color and perspective. Eventually, the avant-garde reduction of painting and sculpture ended logically in concept art, and then, ad nihilo. In the second half of the 20th century, the avant-garde project evaporated into the tedious repetitions of zombie formalism and the squalor of shock art. But this self-destruction was in the future, and regardless of Greenberg’s historical imprecision, etymological appropriation, and literary imitation, his Partisan Review essays were read and distributed among New York’s new avant-gardist subculture, which was not lacking communist artistactivists inclined to take his pronouncements seriously. The essays offered direction to them just as their intellectual compass was whirling between the Stalinist and Trotskyite poles. The singular importance of Greenberg’s unreliable essay, then, was that it directed American modernists to repurpose the use of ‘avant-garde,’ so it would thenceforth apply to all novel work that challenged the traditional art that was perceived as bourgeois and old. This etymological change was helpful in efforts to distinguish a new, distinctively American art from that of the totalitarians. If the avant-garde was persecuted in Germany and Russia, it would be welcomed in America. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Although it is hard to estimate the extent of the influence of Greenberg’s essays, from this point on ‘avant-garde’ appeared in the press with increasing regularity. While it was seldom mentioned in the context of painting before 1939, after the publication of Avant-garde and Kitsch and Towards a Newer Laocoon, it was frequently used, especially by author and art critic Edward Jewell, who published Have we an American Art in June 1939, only a month after the opening of the new MoMA. In it, Jewell quoted a French reviewer who had visited Three Centuries of American Art and said he had seen, “huge rooms hung with the paintings of the so-called avant-garde, which betray the germ of academic death.”70 Before the publication of Jewell’s book, even the most determined radicals among the

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community of advocates for new art did not use ‘avant-garde’ in their efforts to change the course of art history, preferring ‘modern art’ or ‘abstract art’ to describe the non-objective or primitive work of the radicals they admired. Throughout the 1940s, Jewell consistently applied the term to painting in his Times articles, helping to bring it to common usage. Like Greenberg, Jewell had probably picked up the term from Apollinaire. In 1941, he reviewed a one-man show by Marc Chagall, linking the painter to Apollinaire, who he described as the “poet of the ‘avant-garde’”71 It is not insignificant that the term appeared in scare quotes, indicating its novelty. Throughout the forties, ‘avant-garde’ appeared in music, theatre, and film reviews, but in the context of painting, it only emerged in Jewell’s reviews, where it was used with increasing confidence (and no more scare quotes) to describe modern and abstract art. He used it again in May 1943, as a column sub-header for his sarcastic review of Samuel Kootz’ book New Frontiers in American Painting.72 Although the book emphasized the relationship between left-wing political radicalism and art, the term doesn’t actually appear within its pages, even in a chapter on abstraction.73 In October 1945, Jewell used it comfortably, writing of the anarchist Pissarro, “If he is specifically thought of as a French Impressionist, that is because Impressionism was the avant-garde movement of his era …”74 The impressionists would doubtlessly have been scornful of being described as ‘avant-gardists,’ which they would have understood from Saint-Simonian terminology, but in the 1940s, Zola was not available to put Jewell in his place. In November 1945, Jewell used ‘avant-garde’ again – far from the context of socialist realist communist propaganda – in a review of an inaugural exhibit of surrealist work at the Hugo Gallery titled, The Fantastic in Modern Art, announcing, “The Hugo Gallery, dedicated to the avantgarde, has entered New York’s art-world roster,”75 and described the same show for a second time in December, when he recommended the gallery “… to all who want to keep au courant with the activities of the surrealist branch of the avant-garde ...”76 By 1944, other journalists were picking up the term, albeit in a negative way. Arthur Millier used it for the first time – in scare quotes – in The Los Angeles Times to describe the visit of “a select group of the local ‘avantgarde’”77 to an exhibit of pre-Columbian sculptures. In 1945, the appearance of this irritating foreign word in the language was annoying some writers – in May, B.V. Winebaum reviewed Peggy Guggenheim’s racy memoir Out of This Century in The New York Times, commenting that the term ‘avant-garde’ was a “misbegotten Gallicism.”78 In September, Donald Stauffer reviewed Partisan Anthology, a selection of ten years of Partisan Review, including commentary upon Greenberg’s Avant-Garde

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and Kitsch article from six years earlier. Stauffer wrote “… avant-garde glares at bourgeois, intellectual confronts reactionary, until the square dance seems to have gone on for hours.”79 ‘Avant-garde’ had become a synonym for ‘radical bohemian art’ with a red stain. By 1948, ‘avant-garde’ was commonplace enough that it appeared in The Washington Post to describe “gonzo” print collages by Tom Dryce.80 In March 1949, it was in The New York Times in an In Brief listing of a group exhibit at Roko Gallery: “Twenty-five painters and sculptors working over familiar avant-garde ground with considerable varieties of style.”81 By then, The Times editor clearly expected readers to understand ‘avantgarde’ as a term describing art that was intended to challenge representational art, yet had already fallen into formulaic repetition – but the new American avant-garde had ridden onto the cultural battlefield as the shining apotheosis of true art, in full charge against the dark nadir of representation.

Notes 1

Frank Cody, What One Representative American City Is Doing In Teaching Americanism, The Detroit Journal of Education, June 1921, 1 2 Guillaume Apollinaire, Ed. LeRoy C. Breunig, Apollinaire on art: essays and reviews, 1902-1918, Viking Press, 1972, 198 3 Guillaume Apollinaire, Ed. Roger Shattuck, Selected writings of Guillaume Apollinaire, New Directions, 1971, 249 4 Théodore Duret, Critique d’Avant-garde, G. Charpentier, 1885, 4-5 5 Nous et les Autres, L’Ouest-artiste, Gazette Artistique de Nantes, 28th April 1894, n/p, 3 6 Émile Michel, Nouvelles Études sur l’Histoire de l’Art, Hachette, 1908, 219 7 Marcel Roland, Le Carnet a Souches, La Critique indépendante, 9th April 1908, n.p., 1 8 “Matisse et Picasso ont été considérés jusqu’ici comme les chefs de la jeunesse actuelle, ceux qui représentaient le mieux les deux faces de la peinture d’avantgarde. L’un et l’autre avaient ... voulu surtout réagir contre la place excessive qu’avait prise la sensibilite dans l’art, l’un et l’autre avaient voulu rendre à l’intelligence et à la raison le rôle prépondérant qu’elles avaient cessé d’avoir. Parmi tous ceux qui essayèrent de faire triompher ces doctrines, Matisse et Picasso apparurent comme les mieux doués et les plus capables d’arriver à des réalisations suffisamment abouties, aussi firent-ils rapidement figure de chefs d’école.” Roger Bissière, In: La presse. A propos de l’Exposition Matisse et Picasso, Les Arts à Paris: Actualités, Critiques, et Littéraires des Arts et de la Curiosité, Paul Guillaume, 15th March 1918, 10 9 Guillaume Apollinaire, Les Arts à Paris: Actualités, Critiques, et Littéraires des Arts et de la Curiosité, Paul Guillaume, 15th July 1918, 4 10 French Lecturer at Harvard, Omaha Daily Bee, February 15, 1900, 7

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History of Anarchism, In: Wauwatosa News, October 12, 1901, n.p. Art News and Comment, In: The Sun, April 13, 1913, Section 8, 8 13 What is Happening in the World of Art? In: The New York Sun, 5th April, 1914, Section 5, 2 14 Ed. R. Watson Gilder & Josiah Gilbert Holland, The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine. Scribner & Co. v.87 1913-1914, November – April, 1914 15 What is Happening in the World of Art? In: The New York Sun, 20th December, 1914, Section 3, 2 16 Lewis Galantière, Paris News Letter, In: New-York Tribune, 24th September, 1922, 7 17 Olin Downes, Some Modern Novelties And Critical Estimates. In: New York Times, 22nd February 1925: X6 18 Walter Duranty, Russian Theatre Centre of Conflict: Suppression of ‘Avant Garde’ Raises a Storm Embarrassing to Lunarcharsky. In: New York Times, 28th Sep 1928, 8 19 Phillip Carr, On the French Stage: Paris Goes in for the Symbolist Movement, But the Farce Writers Stand Pat. In: New York Times, 17th June 1928, 99 20 Ernst Toch Praises Schoenberg. German Composer Credits Him With “Greatest Musical Morality” Among Contemporaries – Describes Own Early Difficulties. In: New York Times, 21st February 1932: X7 21 Hans Kindler, All Russian Program is Choice of Symphony, In: Washington D.C. Evening Star, 9th January, 1937, B-4 22 Julius Miller, The Budapest Art World, In: New York Times, 1st January 1933, X8. 23“La définition d’une oeuvre d’art saurait être autre chose que celle-ci: Une oeuvre d’art est un coin de la création vu à travers un temperament.” Émile Zola, Mes Haines, Causeries littéraires et artistiques, Mon Salon, 1866, Bibliotheque Charpentier, 1893, 307 24 Julius Miller, The Budapest Art World, In: New York Times, 1st January 1933, X8. 25 Plastic Redirections in Twentieth Century Painting. By James Johnson Sweeney. 48 plates, 104 pp. $1.50.: The Meaning Of Unintelligibility In Modern Art. By Edward F. Rothschild. 18 plates, 103 pp. $1.50. In: New York Times, 25th November 1934, BR21 26 Clement Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch, In: Partisan Review, Volume VI, No. 5, Fall 1939, 35 27 Ibid, 36 28 Antliff, Allan. Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007 29 Donald D. Egbert, The Idea of the Avant-Garde in Art and Politics, In: The American Historical Review, Vol. 73, No. 2 (Dec., 1967), pp. 356-357 30 Emma Goldman, Living My Life, Cosimo, 2011, 56 31 Allan Antliff, The Culture of Revolt: Art and Anarchism in America, 1908–1920. University of Delaware, 1998. 32 Alfred Stieglitz chez les anarchists, In: Carrefour Stieglitz, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012 46. Cited in: Allan Antliff, Modernists against the academy, 190812, (2001) 11-38 12

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Alfred Barr, Letter to Nelson Rockefeller, n/d (after 23rd July and before 9th August 1957), General CIA Records, Document number CIARDP80B01676R002500130006-7 34 Alex Danchev, Georges Braque, A Life, Hamish Hamilton, 2005, 223 35 Ibid, 225 36 Ibid, 226 37 Massimo Introvigne, From Mondrian to Charmion von Wiegand: Neoplasticism, Theosophy and Buddhism, In: Black Mirror 0: Territory, Ed. Judith Noble, Dominic Shepherd and Robert Ansell, Fulgur Esoterica, 2014, 47 38 The Theosophist, Vol. 1, Issue 1. October 1879, 7 39 Ibid, 2 40 Wassily Kandinsky, Ed. and Trans. Hilla Rebay, On the Spiritual in Art, Solomon Guggenheim Foundation, 1946, 10 41 Quoted here in full, with formatting respected. Wassily Kandinsky, Ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay & Peter Vergo, Kandinsky: Complete Writings On Art, De Capo, 1994, 113 42 Lanier Graham, Duchamp & Androgyny, No-Thing Press, 2003, 11 43 Carola Giedion-Walker, Constantin Brancusi, Georges Braziller, 1959 44 Ionel Jianou, Brancusi, Tudor, 1963, 12 45 Peter Watson, The Age of Atheists, Simon and Schuster, 2014, 181 46 Paul Klee, Creative Confession, Tate Publishing, 2013, Kindle Location 74 47 John Russell, The World of Matisse, Time-Life, 1969, 19 48 Jack D. Flam, Matisse on Art (revised edition), University of California Press, 1995, 21 49 Clement Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch, In: Partisan Review, Volume VI, No. 5, Fall 1939, 38 50 Ibid, 39 51 Ibid, 39 52 Ibid, 40 53 Ibid, 39 54 Uncredited editorial, This Quarter, The War of the Neutrals, In: Partisan Review, Volume VI, No. 5, Fall 1939, 4-5 55 Barbara Rose, Krasner / Pollock: A Working Relationship, Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, 1981, 5 56 George Biddle diary transcript, 1933-1941, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 103 http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/viewer/george-biddle-diary-transcript14231/39183 57 Clement Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch, In: Partisan Review, Volume VI, No. 5, Fall 1939, 49 58 Leon Trotsky, Art and Revolution, Pathfinder, 1970, 125 59 Ibid, 127 60 Clement Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch, In: Partisan Review, Volume VI, No. 5, Fall 1939, 40 61 Ibid, 44 62 Ibid, 46

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Uncredited article. Artists Denounce Modern Museum, In: New York Times, 17th April 1940, 23 64 Guillaume Apollinaire, Ed. LeRoy C. Breunig, Apollinaire on art: essays and reviews, 1902-1918, Viking Press, 1972, 197 65 Clement Greenberg, Towards a Newer Laocoon, In: Partisan Review, Volume VII, No. 4, July / August 1940, 300 66 Ibid, 300 67 Ibid, 302 68 Ibid, 302 69 Ibid, 307 70 Edward Alden Jewell, Have we an American Art? Longmans Green and Company, 1939, 40 71 Edward Alden Jewell, Art Shows Offer Striking Contrast. In: New York Times 28th Nov 1941: 20 72 Edward Alden Jewell, The Realm of Art: Museum and Gallery Events. In: New York Times, 2nd May 1943: X7 73 Samuel M. Kootz, New Frontiers in American Painting, Hastings House, 1943 74 Edward Alden Jewell, Pissarro and his Circle. In: New York Times, 28th October 1945: X7 75 Edward Alden Jewell, Fantastic in Art at Hugo Gallery: New Exhibition Hall Displays Variety of Unusual Works – Modernists Represented. In: New York Times, 16th November 1945, 13 76 Edward Alden Jewell, 77 Arthur Millier, Pre-Columbian Art Given Nation’s Best Setting Here, Los Angeles Times, 26 Mar 1944: B6. 78 B. V. Winebaum, Mechante – and de Trop. In: New York Times, 26th May 1946, BR7 79 Donald A. Stauffer, Partisan Anthology. In: New York Times, 8th September. 1946: BR2 80 Florence S. Berryman, News of Art and Artists, The Sunday Star Washington D.C. April 04, 1948, C-2 81 In Brief: Exhibitions. In: New York Times, 13th March, 1949, X8

FRENCH FRY

“… with all that the National Socialist regime is giving to the arts, it is unable to give them the one thing which, in the eyes of the Western World at least, is the very foundation of all art and culture, namely freedom of artistic and cultural creation.”1 Otto D. Tolischus, The New York Times

The strategy of deliberately using anti-fascist refugees as tools and symbols of the individual and political freedom guaranteed by American democracy probably came to Roosevelt through a Spanish aristocrat turned communist, Constancia De La Mora, Eleanor’s friend. De La Mora rejected the privileged life of the Spanish upper class in favour of raising her children as a single mother, running her own business, selling folk art, and writing publicity materials for the Spanish government’s tourist agency. A lively anti-fascist and dynamic activist for women’s rights, De La Mora was chief of propaganda for the Republican cause during the vicious Spanish Civil War. When the war pivoted toward the Fascists, she escaped to France and continued with her press work in exile, then fled to the United States to beg for military support for the Republican soldiers dying for the cause in Spain. To the shock of American progressives, on April 1st, 1939, Madrid fell to fascist Franco, and the war was lost. Now, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Austria were firmly under the control of nationalist proletarian parties. And the political situation deteriorated. Stalin’s totalitarian Russia moved toward an alliance with Hitler in August, and Germany’s attitude to Poland became increasingly aggressive. Liberal democracy seemed to be vanishing from the world; it faced the grave threat of extinction. Soon after FDR opened the new MoMA building in May, 1939, De La Mora met with Eleanor on July 15th. Afterwards, she wrote a letter to Eleanor at her request, summarizing their conversation, explaining why she thought it was important for America to support Spanish anti-fascist refugees seeking asylum. In it, she suggested using “… Spaniards arriving in the new world to foster the democratic policies of the United States in Latin and South America,” and pointed out that many of these exiles were “men of the greatest prestige” whose “words and ratings carry great weight.” To illustrate her idea, she described the example of the famed antifascist essayist José Bergamín, who fled across the Atlantic from Spain to

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Mexico and gave a successful series of lectures that attracted “everyone in the cultural world of Mexico, reactionary or liberal.” She summed up dramatically, saying, “to me, this is a most significant thing, and very indicative of the way we can use our people both to counteract the Nazi and Fascist penetration … and to keep the real tradition of Spanish culture alive. For the tradition of our culture is essentially democratic!”2 Clearly impressed, despite the unlikely casting of Spain as an historic champion of democracy, Eleanor forwarded the letter to Under-Secretary of State Sumner Welles, and recommended a discussion of the idea to be included on the agenda for a meeting in September. Responding to the gravitational pull of communist and Nazi art and propaganda by pushing against them, Roosevelt staged America’s dramatic new embrace of the individualist avant-garde two months earlier in an unprecedented hour-long radio presentation endorsing MoMA. Now, he saw the opportunity to build American individualist avant-gardism as a symbol of liberty by welcoming European anti-fascist artists to the land of the free. Roosevelt purposefully chose MoMA as the flagship of artistic freedom, deliberately establishing the individualist avant-garde as American art in contrast to the rigid doctrines of Hitler and Stalin. Now, his embrace of the individualist avant-garde would extend to supporting a covert rescue effort specifically targeted at liberating leftist artists and intellectuals trapped in France by the Nazi invasion. After the invasion, there was a progressive oppression of Jews throughout France, including the southern half that nominally remained under French control in Vichy. At first, a law against public hate-speech motivated by race or religion was removed from the books. Next, in occupied northern France, alien Jews were interned in concentration camps. In the south, the puppet government banned Jews from governmental, military, or media employment. Algerian Jews were stripped of their French citizenship. Jewish refugees in the south were forbidden from returning to the German occupied zone.3 By 1941, Jews were deported from France to camps in the east. Since 1933, there was a constant dialogue between the offices of Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Interior, and the President attempting to resolve the Jewish refugee crisis. Allowing huge numbers of refugees into the U.S. was not an option, and remaining true to established immigration policies seemed the most practical choice, despite the ethical conundrums of abandoning many of the victims of early Nazi persecution to their fate. Fanciful ideas were floated about relocating persecuted European Jews in Alaska, Madagascar, Costa Rica, British Guiana, Haiti, Angola, and Palestine, but these plans for colonization were replete with problems – if a

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huge population of immigrants was settled in Alaska, for example, vastly outnumbering the indigenous and local population, the outcome could be the establishment of a new kind of alien state within the borders of the United States. If they were delivered to Haiti, surely there would be major conflict between the colonists and the Haitian people within a matter of a few short years. British Guiana was surveyed for its capacity to deal with a large colony of refugees, but the cost of preparing the land was so vast that the plan was abandoned. In January 1939, Welles wrote that the revival of an old proposal to settle Angola was so promising that it warranted “heroic efforts to overcome the political obstacles,”4 and Roosevelt supported the idea, writing to Neville Chamberlain that Angola was ideal for the creation for a new Jewish homeland. But the British treated the idea coolly, and the Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar, who possessed Angola as the jewel of his country’s colonial crown, was understandably unenthusiastic about foreign governments planning to send overwhelming numbers of refugees to his territory, and this plan was abandoned. The dictator Generalissimo Rafaelle Trujillo of the Dominican Republic donated 25,000 acres of land for resettlement and built a synagogue for Jewish refugees, in spite of a warning of excommunication from the Catholic church if he so much as visited it. Ignoring such threats, Trujillo offered to take in as many as a hundred thousand Jews, although only five hundred eventually made it to the island. Ironically, the reason Trujillo welcomed Jewish refugees was because he wanted to settle his island nation with more white people, regarding them as a superior race. After the war, although the Jewish immigrants made their colony successful, most abandoned their new homes, and either moved on to the United States or Palestine, or returned to Europe. In 1933, Alfred and Margaret Barr travelled through Germany during a year-long sabbatical from MoMA taken for Alfred’s health (Holger Cahill filled in for him during his absence). Alfred and Margaret witnessed the rise of Hitler’s star among the German people and saw at first hand the eldritch power of his charisma. In late January, they visited Stuttgart so that Alfred could stay with a doctor for treatment for insomnia. Sitting at dinner at their hotel, Alfred asked their host and other patients which political party they supported. None of them admitted any firm commitment. By January 30th, Paul von Hindenburg named Hitler as Chancellor, and guests at the hotel listened intently to his speech when it was broadcast over the brand-new radio, and, “the guests are converted; they cannot get enough of him. New hope and blind enthusiasm sweep the city and the country … Soon the streets echo with the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’ … the melody is infectious.” A month later, the evangelical transformation of the guests into Nazi sympathizers was completed when the Reichstag burned on February 27th, and they

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angrily repeated Goebbels’ propaganda stories, “convinced the ‘filthy Communists’ are to blame.”5 The Barrs saw the beginning of the removal of modern art from the galleries. They visited an exhibit of the work of the Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer which was soon censored and closed because the paintings were inconsistent with National Socialist ideals. Public meetings were held to explain the Nazis’ ideals for philosophy and history and the arts. Margaret described attending one of them with Alfred, a meeting of the Württemberg chapter of Alfred Rosenberg’s Kampfbund für Deutsche Kultur (Militant League for German Culture), a large audience crowding the Civic Theatre. The young head of the Kampfbund, formerly a professor at the University of Tübingen, read Minister of Culture Christian Mergenthaler’s directions, announcing that it was “an important cultural duty of the regime of the new National Resurgence to set free from any foreign, external influence our native creative personalities …” and that “Academic freedom shall and must be preserved. It is the right of the free creative spirit. But it must be a German academic freedom! It must never again be misused to open the door to insidious foreign influences.”6 Totalitarian ideologues had a strange symmetry in their pronouncements on the limitations of freedom. In the Staatsgallerie, the labels describing modern paintings were “covered with yellow and black paper streamers that proclaim, ‘for this trash, 80,000 marks were paid!’” 7 On the streets, yellow and black labels obscured the signs of the practices of Jewish doctors and lawyers. Margaret gave her account of the time in an oral history: “We stayed on in Stuttgart until about May because of this admirable and charming doctor whose name was Gastrecht. We saw the first Jewish persecutions. We saw the first yellow buttons. We saw the first department stores closed as Jewish persecution. And we became very ferociously anti-fascist. We went to great gatherings and meetings in various theatres in the daytime in Stuttgart in which it was announced what would be done in the teaching of literature, to the teaching of history, to the teaching of every branch, including scientific branches, thanks to what they called the National Habolt [sic], that is the National Uprising. We left that place so ferociously anti-Nazi by May. We were sent to Ascona by this doctor. That was supposed to be the sunniest part of Switzerland where we could go to rest. Why he told us to go to Ascona I simply can’t remember. And Alfred, instead of going down to the beach on the lake, lay as naked as possible in the sun on the balcony of our room and wrote nine articles called ‘Hitler and the Nine Muses’ in order to say what Hitler was going to do, to the twisting of everything that was intelligent and intellectual, in the Weimar Republic. When he came back to this country, he tried to sell them to The Times. Alfred had always

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sold every blasted thing he had ever written and he couldn’t believe he couldn’t sell them to Harper’s, couldn’t sell them to the Atlantic, couldn’t sell them to The Times, couldn’t sell them to anyone. The only person that published, I think, what he wrote on movies was Lincoln Kirstein. He published one of Alfred’s articles. And then later, they were all published in Magazine of Art many, many, many years later. Nobody would believe that Hitler was the kind of person that he ultimately turned out to be. Nobody would believe it. Nobody would believe the content of what Alfred wrote.”8 By 1935, the newspapers were becoming more receptive to stories of Nazi oppression. Journalist Varian Fry took a job as editor of the progressive political magazine The Living Age. Before he took up the position in the last months of the year, he took a leave to go to Berlin to observe the situation, sailing third-class on May 28th. Coincidentally, Fry travelled on the same ship and in the same class as Alfred and Margaret Barr, who were returning to Germany on a MoMA ‘campaign’ to purchase art. Arriving in his hotel, one night he was disturbed by excitement in the lobby, and other residents warned him of “an anti-Jewish demonstration” unfolding outside. A good journalist, he went out into the darkness to witness a throng blocking the street, halting traffic, and demanding identification. If these victims of the gauntlet couldn’t prove they were Aryans, they were dragged from their cars, savagely beaten and kicked, while brown-shirted Nazis “chanted of hatred.” Fry described how bourgeois Germans and children indulged in the violence, while a smiling youth laughed, “This is a holiday for us.” After daybreak, Fry returned to the scene and witnessed the aftermath of smashed windows and the bandaged victims of the brutal attacks.9 The New York Times published his story next day on the front page. Fry gave a second, bloodier account of the scene when he returned to the United States, describing hundreds of brown-shirts chanting, “When Jewish blood spurts around the knife, then everything will be fine in Germany.” The passive police did nothing to stop the violence, but protected Nazi-owned cafes from destruction. Fry said that the rioting was encouraged by a Nazi newspaper founded and funded by Goebbels, Der Angriff (The Attack), which incited its readers to “show the Jews a hard hand.” Chillingly, Fry reported to The Times that Hitler’s press advisor Ernst Hanfstaengl told him there were two factions within the Nazi party regarding the position of the Jews in the Third Reich. One group believed that Jews should be deported; the other that the problem should be resolved “with bloodshed.” 10 But even Fry’s shocking stories failed to move the mass of the American public, who were unconvinced of the insidious danger of Hitler’s appalling regime, either swayed by casual antisemitism, or by anti-immigration, or by self-interest. Net immigration to the United States actually declined between

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1932 and 1938.11 Distressing humanitarian appeals continually arrived on President Roosevelt’s desk from people who knew about the tyranny unfolding in Europe. Five short years after Fry filed his account, the German annexation of Austria, and the invasions of Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Netherlands, and France, made Hitler’s dark intentions clear. The world’s press reported the horrifying events of Kristallnacht on the 9th and 10th of November 1938, when Nazi brown-shirts and civilians murdered Jews, smashed their storefronts, and incinerated their synagogues. Roosevelt couldn’t ignore the outcry. Five days after Kristallnacht, he extended the temporary visas of fifteen thousand German Jews living in America. Fraught stories emerged as frightened people fled. In mid-May 1939, a shipload of over nine hundred refugee Jews aboard the St. Louis sailed within sight of the shoreline lights of Miami. When they fled Europe, they rejoiced in their possession of Cuban entry papers, but during the Atlantic crossing the Cuban government changed their immigration law and revoked their validity, backdating the new law to a date before the refugees had left harbour. Docked in Havana, Cuban immigration officials denied entry to the majority of passengers, accepting only those with valid U.S. visas or Cuban papers, then turned the ship away. Not knowing what to do with his passengers, the captain, a decent man named Gustav Schröder, turned the St. Louis north, bearing for the United States, where he hoped they would be able to disembark. Anchored so close to the shores of safety just off Miami, desperate passengers sent telegrams to President Roosevelt begging him to intervene on their behalf, but he did not reply, and the State Department stuck to their policy of admitting only those who had qualified for immigration visas and had deposited a $500 bond. Public opinion opposed letting the refugees disembark. What was the economic impact of resettling large numbers of people as immigrants within the United States? The country was still nervous about anything that might threaten employment prospects during the Great Depression. Roosevelt was reluctant to push against the tide in an election cycle, in which he hoped to win a third term as president, even though the Jewish community had strongly supported his candidacy and opinion polls showed that they were even more likely to vote for him this time around. Nevertheless, 42.3% of the population thought that American antisemitism was the result of “unfavorable Jewish characteristics.”12 Roosevelt’s political enemies were keen to exploit ethnic immigration as a weapon against him, attempting to create a reactionary mood among white voters. In April 1938, antisemitic fliers had been dropped over Los Angeles from an airplane, claiming “The Roosevelt Administration is Loaded with Jews – 12 Million White American

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Workers Jobless – Over ¼ million European Jews are now coming to United States to throw White American workers out of jobs.”13 In Florida, Captain Schröder considered running the ship aground. But coastguard vessels stood between him and the shore. So, reluctantly, he turned the St. Louis back on a course to Europe after a couple of miserable days standing just off the Florida coast, his passengers gazing at the glittering lights on shore and longing to disembark to the safe haven of an American port. On their return to Europe, two hundred and eighty-eight of the refugees found refuge in Britain, while the remainder were dropped off in the Netherlands, many traveling on to Belgium and France. A quarter of them would be murdered in the Holocaust. In January 1940, eight months after the opening of the new MoMA, Robert Hutchins, the President of the University of Chicago, who lent his voice in support of Roosevelt’s public announcement of the ascendency of the individualist avant-garde as America’s artistic voice, wrote to the President asking him to help political refugees in France, if only by asking Ambassador William Bullitt to make an informal request to the French government for better treatment. In June, Freda Kirchway, editor of The Nation, urged him to help with the rescue of anti-fascist intellectuals, and he received letters and telegrams from concerned citizens telling him to take action to save political refugees. Pressure was mounting. A grim problem facing the refugees was that Assistant Secretary of State Breckenridge Long’s office took months over examining the records of visa applicants. To escape from Europe to the West, refugees needed exit visas giving them permission to enter Spain and Portugal, and a visa to their ultimate destination. Before visa applications could be approved by the U.S. State Department, they had to be recommended by the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, then submitted to the Department of Justice for security clearance. Only after these processes were completed could applications be examined by the State Department and issued a coveted visa. This delay was lethal for many of the refugees, for by the time their American visas had been approved, their European transit papers had expired, sending them back to the beginning of the bureaucratic paper trail. Some fell into despair. Turned back from the Spanish border in September 1940 during an attempt to escape France to a new life in New York, Walter Benjamin, the famous author of Marxist essays and a prominent member of the Frankfurt School, took an overdose of morphine and died, desperate and alone. Art critic Karl Einstein hanged himself rather than try to escape a second time. Playwright Walter Hasenclever committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills while interned in a French camp. The political refugee Willi Muenzenberg hanged himself in a tree, his body rotting in the

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air for a week as it swung suspended on the rope before the corpse was eventually discovered. The Czech novelist Ernst Weiss poisoned himself in Paris as the Germans marched into the city.14 Long excused the delays as necessary to exclude people whose activities would not be welcome in the United States, and urged that even more thorough examination of the refugees should be carried out by the Department’s officials abroad, which he suggested would “contribute largely to closing the loopholes against the penetration of German agents for ulterior purposes.”15 Many Americans watched Hitler’s rise to power and steering his country toward war with alarm and fear, yet remained resistant to allowing persecuted Jews into the country. High profile cases of Nazi spies hiding among refugees made headlines, and nationalists made use of all the racist tropes of satanic propaganda, playing upon the fear of good Americans losing their jobs to desperate immigrants, and emphasizing their poor moral character. As a result of intense anti-German propaganda, Americans regarded European refugees with great suspicion, assuming that many of them were spies or saboteurs. A national poll revealed that only 8.7% of Americans were in favour of opening the borders to European refugees. Under the leadership of an apparently antisemitic Long, the State Department was unenthusiastic about providing communist, anti-Nazi, or Jewish refugees with visas providing access to the United States, to the extent that U.S. consuls made deliberate efforts to delay and block the issuance of visas to immigrants. Long had a deep-seated mistrust of the refugees, regardless of the danger they were in because of their opposition to the Nazis. By mid-June 1940, appeals to Roosevelt’s conscience to act on the refugee problem finally began to make an impact. On June 11th, a White House press release reported the President had proposed an appropriation of “at least fifty million dollars” to go to the American Red Cross to help refugees with food, medicine, and clothing.16 An amendment was added recommending an additional appropriation of a million dollars to pay for bringing thousands of children away from the war in Europe to the safety of the United States. But the bill stalled in Congress because of fears that it would lead to unrestricted immigration. Less than two weeks later, on June 23rd, Hitler took a chauffeured dawn tour of conquered Paris with Albert Speer, Arno Breker, and an entourage of officers, first visiting the Paris Opera, then the Sacre Coeur, the Eiffel Tower, and Napoleon’s tomb. France had fallen. Hitler danced. The influential editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, Hamilton Armstrong, wrote to Roosevelt asking him to intervene in getting visas to distinguished anti-fascists trapped in Europe. Echoing De La Mora, he pointed out that if

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the lives of important refugees like Mussolini’s adversary Count Carlo Sforza, or the Polish Prime Minister in exile Wladyslaw Sikorski, or the Spanish Republican rebel leader Dr. Juan Negrin could be saved, they would be “of immense usefulness to us in the future.”17 Coming from so prominent an editor, this interest in the government’s actions to help the refugees had the whiff of potential scandal about it if the President was perceived as doing nothing, and on June 29th, the President’s military advisor and Appointments Secretary, Edwin Watson, replied to Armstrong that the Department of State had wired its offices in Lisbon, Marseille, and Bordeaux “to give immediate consideration to applications for American visas should they be sought by any of the persons named in the list which you submitted to Mr. Davies under date of June 21st.” Watson added an expression of Roosevelt’s distress, “the President has been deeply moved by the tragic plight confronting some of these great men and that he finds it heartening to see efforts being made by such forward thinking Americans as yourself to do something for their relief in these terrible circumstances.”18 Sharply contrasting with the mood of the country and the voices of his own cabinet, Roosevelt received dozens of letters asking him to relieve the plight of the Jews and other refugees from Nazism. Many of them asked him specifically to help political exiles. It was against the backdrop of bureaucratic stagnancy that practical efforts were made by private organizations. Harvard provided funds for twenty German refugees to attend the university on student visas, and encouraged other universities to do the same. Skidmore College followed suit, and was rewarded with a note of Roosevelt’s gratitude from third White House press secretary, Stephen Early. Kent State and other centres of learning initiated similar fund-raising programs to provide scholarships. Civic organizations ranging from youth clubs to Jewish labour unions organized themselves to raise money to provide food and funds to the refugees. Among these private groups, members of American left-wing organizations were eager to rescue their German comrades, some of them creating a new relief agency, the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC), tasked with providing anti-fascist activists, artists, and writers with coveted visas, and just as important, the help they needed to escape. This ERC was the product of an August 1940 lunch meeting attended by over two hundred guests who were each presented with a blank check and asked to donate generously toward the rescue of political refugees. By the end of the meal, the new organization had collected more than $4000, not an insignificant sum in that period. The membership of the Committee was a combination of Socialist European exiles and American progressives sharing either a personal

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concern for colleagues or deeply felt anti-fascism. From its beginning, members of the Committee were connected both to American intelligence and to subversive Austrian and German organizations, and had no qualms about breaking the law to get their colleagues out of France. Of them, two seasoned militant left-wingers, Joseph Buttinger and Karl Frank, were particularly instrumental in furthering the clandestine activities of the Committee’s representatives in Marseille. Frank was a German revolutionary communist who publicly abandoned his utopian idealism and joined the Social Democrats, but secretly continued as a member of a Leninist sleeper group within the party known as New Beginning. When the Nazis moved violently against their left-wing opposition, New Beginning went underground, and Frank became its representative abroad, raising funds for its subversive activities. Frank was also known as Paul Hagen, an alias he adopted after leaving Germany for Czechoslovakia in 1933. (The Gestapo systematically arrested the families of their political enemies in order to apply pressure upon them.) Following the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, Frank relocated to New York after a brief stay in London. Thanks to his marriage to an American girl named Anna Caples, he was able to settle there and continue his anti-Nazi activism. In addition to his efforts for the ERC, Frank worked as research director for an organization known as the American Friends for German Freedom, promoting the idea of the existence of a German democratic underground to his American political connections. After America entered the war, he would write two bestselling propaganda books opposing the Nazis, the first, Will Germany Crack? published in 1942, followed by Germany after Hitler, published in 1944. Before escaping to the United States in 1939, Frank’s friend Joseph Buttinger was a small-town secretary of the Social Democratic Party in Austria. During the dangerous year after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, he was imprisoned. He became an underground political leader of the Revolutionary Socialists, while also becoming a secret member of the Leninist group Die Funke (The Spark), which is how he got to know Frank, while the latter was on a fund-raising trip to Austria.19 When the Germans annexed Austria in 1938, Buttinger and his wealthy American wife Muriel Gardiner fled to Paris, then to America, where he continued his militant political activism against the Nazis, befriending Eleanor Roosevelt through his wife’s connections and committing himself to the activities of the ERC. On June 26th, 1940, Buttinger and Frank met with the First Lady to discuss how the administration might liberate refugees from Vichy France, and handed her a list of three hundred people who the Committee wanted to rescue. Their conversation lasted for several hours, interrupted when

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Eleanor discussed the problem with FDR on the telephone. The President explained that because the Germans had refused to allow American ships to come to Bordeaux, the only way refugees could get out was by making their way to Lisbon. Congress was unwilling to change existing immigration policies. While he was sympathetic, he was keenly aware of the limitations of international law, and felt unable to offer much assistance. Eleanor was made of sterner stuff, and to Buttinger and Frank’s shock, she threatened her husband that if he refused to help, the refugees and their American representatives would repeat the St. Louis debacle of a month earlier, by renting a ship, filling it with asylum-seekers, and sailing up and down the East coast of the United States, “… until the American people, out of shame and anger, force the President and the congress to permit these victims of political persecution to land!”20 In Buttinger’s report to the Committee after the meeting, he said the Roosevelts were willing to do something to help, “within the parameters of the means available to the administration to address it.”21 The ERC was exceptionally well-connected. It was chaired by Frank Kingdon, President of the University of Newark (and a former student of Reinhold Niebuhr, who was also an ERC member). He became the ERC’s principal fundraiser, touring the country as a speaker, appealing for money to rescue Europe’s intellectual and artistic elite at a rate of $350 a head. He was supported in his financial role by Joseph Lash, an expert in fundraising, who had also been one of Niebuhr’s students. Niebuhr was a Protestant minister and theologian who embraced Socialist militancy in the late twenties and early thirties, seeing communism as a solution to the desperate straits of the capitalist West. He ran for political office twice on the Socialist Party platform, but failed to make a significant impression. Disillusioned, he became increasingly absorbed in writing about theology and published numerous articles, becoming well known as a prominent leftist religious leader. Other members of the ERC’s national Committee were influential journalists and public figures. Several famous writers and radio commentators were among them, including Mildred Adams, a New York Times reporter who had developed an intense interest in the plight of Republican refugees during the Spanish Civil War, who acted as the ERC Secretary. She was joined by tough-talking radio broadcaster Elmer Davis, an immensely popular radio correspondent and perceptive writer who would be appointed as head of Roosevelt’s new Office of War Information (OWI) in 1941. The OWI employed 100,000 people during World War II. After the war, his trained propagandists became the new advertising men of the 1950s, taking part in a huge flowering of public relations and advertising; Raymond Gram

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Swing was one of the most respected voices in American radio, presenting commentary on developments in Europe five nights a week; Dorothy Thompson, known as the first lady of American journalism, was a famous lecturer, radio commentator, and writer whose articles reached an audience of millions. Varian Fry, the prominent political editor and journalist who witnessed at first hand the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany and described their desperate plight in those shocking New York Times articles of 1935, was an enthusiastic participant in efforts to set up the Committee. Eleanor Roosevelt’s friend Ingrid Warburg, the socialite banking heiress, opened doors for the members of the Committee. The endorsement of several university presidents lent the ERC intellectual gravitas, including the President of Yale University, Charles Seymour; his leftist colleague Alvin Johnson, President of the New School for Social Research was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation – Johnson hired the refugee Marxist sociologists of the Frankfurt school as faculty, establishing an enclave of postmodern intellectuals who would dominate post-war American thought; the progressive Robert Hutchins, President of the University of Chicago, who had spoken about the innovative aesthetic mission of MoMA when Roosevelt opened the new building; and William Neilson, President of Smith College. The Committee compiled their list of political activists and intellectuals threatened by the Germans by reaching out to prominent Europeans already in the United States.22 At first, the vast majority was comprised of political figures, with names provided by the Nobelist author and anti-Nazi Thomas Mann; by Jacques Maritain, the French existentialist philosopher and leader of the École Libre des Hautes Études, a university in exile for left-wing French intellectual refugees and the heart of the French resistance movement in America. Maritain worked closely with Alvin Johnson. Max Ascoli, leader of the anti-fascist Mazzini Society organization, the exiled Czech politician Jan Masaryk, the far-left Spanish Republican leader Julio Álvarez del Vayo, the Austrian leader of the Socialist underground, and Joseph Buttinger all contributed names. Alfred Barr, the director of MoMA, told the ERC to rescue prominent socialist bohemian-bourgeois artists who fled from the Nazis into unoccupied France. In an oral history recorded for MoMA, Margaret Barr complained about the tedium of her role: “Alfred was beginning to get letters of extraordinary intensity begging for help, letters from artists who were begging for help to be allowed into the United States. Extraordinarily difficult papers had to be procured from the State Department. It was an extremely laborious operation. There was nobody in the Museum that had the time to do this. By that time, my daughter would have been three-and-a-

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quarter years old or something like that and I was more or less nailed into the house, though we had a nurse. Alfred came home and said, ‘There’s nobody in the Museum that can do it. Will you do it?’ And so, I undertook this job. Which was extraordinarily boring, frustrating and laborious. The State Department wanted true proof that none of the artists who were requesting entry was in any way tainted by communism. They never, never inquired whether they were fascist, but they were terrified that they might be communists. By hook or by crook we managed to get papers for: Lipchitz, Masson, Tanguy, Max Ernst – I can’t remember who else.”23 Margaret prepared documents detailing each artist’s biography, exhibit record, museum representation, the appearance of their work in private collections, books they authored, and books about them. Alfred instructed her to attempt only to rescue artists – not other intellectuals – because the process was so complicated and expensive. For each application, she had to find an American sponsor who was willing to sign an affidavit promising that the applicant would never become a burden to the state. Evidence of the purchase of an ocean passage was to be provided. In each application, she described how and why the artist’s life was endangered by remaining in France. The completed papers were sent to the State Department for examination by bureaucratic functionaries who investigated each applicant for any past or present involvement in the Communist Party. The Sisyphean process took so long that by the time the State Department finally approved the application and provided the visa, the refugees’ other papers had often expired. They had to begin the whole awful process again. At times, the Barrs felt a personal motivation for selecting artists for freedom, like German Dadaist Max Ernst, who was in terrible danger because of his opposition to the Nazi regime, his past marriage to a Jewish wife, and his degenerate work. Exhausted from being interned in French concentration camps, escaping, and being reinterned, Max wrote to his son, Jimmy, “You can help me in my liberation through your excellent connections. Do something. Ask important people.”24 Jimmy Ernst worked at MoMA and relayed his father’s appeal for help to Alfred Barr. The list was useless unless the Committee could find a selfless volunteer who was willing to travel to Nazi-occupied France to locate the men and women it wanted to rescue. But literally nobody was enthusiastic about the job. A day after Buttinger and Frank met with Eleanor, Fry wrote to the First Lady asking her to help find any suitable person who would venture to France and rescue the “intended victims of Hitler’s chopping block,” and dropping broad hints that he would be willing to take the risk himself. Fry gave the impression of being unpredictable, of enjoying the drama of the mission too much, casting himself as a reluctant hero in a breathless letter

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replete with theatrical excitement, declaring, “what is urgently needed now is a new Scarlet Pimpernel who will go to France and risk his life, perhaps many times over, in an attempt to find the intended victims of Hitler’s chopping block, and either provide them with means to keep alive in hiding or, if that is possible, to get them out of France before the French authorities reach them … I have volunteered to go myself and shall do so if no more suitable person can be found. But there are many reasons why I am not an entirely suitable person. My French and German are both halting, I have published things which have aroused the ire of the German government, and I have had no experience whatever in detective work. The ideal candidate for the job would, it seems to me, be an adventurous daredevil who speaks French and German fluently, can play the innocent American convincingly, understands the political implications of the work he is doing, and is entirely willing to risk his life.”25 Eleanor quickly penned a note to her husband asking what could be done to help Fry, but Roosevelt replied, “His suggestion may have all the merit in the world, but it most certainly cannot be authorized or abetted by the Government of the United States.”26 The President’s protest was halfhearted. After three weeks of fruitless searching for a better qualified agent, Fry officially volunteered to travel to France, and on July 18th, 1940, he wrote to Eleanor again asking her to help him get a passport and a Swiss visa for his journey to France as representative of the ERC, exclusively to rescue intellectuals, artists, and political leaders. She successfully persuaded her husband to arrange for the State Department to provide Fry with a passport. Within a week, Fry was free to travel to France masquerading as a representative of the American Red Cross. Arch hints of Fry’s secret work were revealed in his correspondence. Even in his application to the State Department Passport Division, Fry was brazenly open about his true purpose, writing inconsistently that because the ERC was openly committed to rescuing anti-Nazi political writers and intellectuals, he would be travelling undercover as an editor for the Foreign Policy Association. Naturally, this deception raised the eyebrows of State Department officials, who declined including this dishonest description of his employment in his new passport. Nevertheless, eager to please his friend Eleanor, Welles expedited Fry’s passport and wrote a letter of introduction for him addressed to American diplomatic and consular officers. Fry’s contract with the ERC instructed him to travel to Marseille. His mission was to rescue refugees; to locate individuals on the Committee’s list, and provide financial aid; and to recruit reliable locals as future agents. Fry was directed to clandestinely investigate shipping routes from Marseille to Lisbon, and from Lisbon to Casablanca, or the Azores; to identify a

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friendly and honest shipping broker; and to establish an underground railroad escape network. The contract ominously ended with a foreboding paragraph warning Fry that if “a more active stage of war,” detained him, or the clipper service failed, his salary would continue to be paid to his wife “for the time you are held.”27 He was ordered to meet with the communist ‘Wobbly’ trades unionist Dr. Frank Bohn as soon as he arrived to ensure there was no duplication of the efforts of two relief organizations. Bohn led a legal rescue mission for the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to assist union leaders. Eleanor Roosevelt had managed to pressure sluggish Long to accept an AFL list of more than 1,200 anti-fascists who were to be provided with emergency American temporary entry visas, valid only for the duration of the war. These people and their families owed their lives to the efforts of William Green, head of the AFL, and David Dubinski, die-hard anti-communist founder and treasurer of the Jewish Labor Committee, who used the leverage of his powerful union to persuade Eleanor and Long that a new American visa category must be created especially for “notable” labororiented refugees whose lives were endangered by their opposition to the Nazis.28 Despite being pressed by these powerful labour union leaders, Long insisted that these “refugees granted the right of asylum by the United States be of democratic political views and antecedents,” a euphemistic phrase for ‘not communist.’29 Preparing for his journey, Fry visited former US ambassador to France, William Bullit, who had recently embarrassed Roosevelt by refusing to obey his instructions from Washington to abandon the embassy in Paris when the German war-machine goose-stepped unopposed into the undefended city, instead demanding machine guns so he could fight. No longer a reliable ambassador of the United States, which had no interest in entering the war at that stage, Bullit was recalled. Fry planned to quiz the former ambassador about conditions in France, and to ask, “How careful shall I be to keep my real interest secret?”30 Doubtlessly, the ambassador told him to keep his mouth shut and his eyes open. Fry’s notes are preserved in the archive at Columbia University. Claiming to be worried by the clandestine nature of his journey, excitable Fry wrote to his boss at the Foreign Policy Association, William Stone, advising him of his perilous secret mission, and asking him to conceal its true nature from his colleagues in the research department. “I believe that I am undertaking a fairly dangerous mission at best. It will be infinitely more dangerous if the French authorities (or the Spanish authorities) learn its true nature,” he wrote, finishing with dramatic flair: “tear up this letter after you have read it. I’m nervous enough not to want such statements lying about.”31 Any nerves or

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excitement he felt were soon concealed beneath an unflappable mask, and on August 4th, 1940, Fry clambered aboard the Dixie Clipper flying boat for Marseille with a few thousand dollars in his pocket, a list of names taped to his leg, and a secret series of messages in his head. Reflecting later why he risked his life to help strangers, Fry claimed his most powerful motivation was political, writing: “Most of all, it was a feeling of sympathy for the German and Austrian Socialist Parties which led me to go to France in the summer of 1940, a sympathy born of long familiarity with their principles and works …”32 But soon after his arrival in Marseille, his interest in political figures was set aside in favour of a clear focus on artists and intellectuals, for when Fry met Bohn, they agreed to divide his list because Bohn’s AFL was already working to rescue the trade union workers and “older socialists.” Fry would “take the writers and artists and all the young members of the various left-wing groups.”33 Consequently, Fry became responsible for saving a large number of prominent bohemian-bourgeois artists and writers and safely smuggling them to the United States, where, under the sheltering wings of the Marxist intellectuals at the New School, of Alfred Barr at MoMA, and of Gertrude Whitney at her museum, many became extraordinarily influential in shaping the course of American art and thought in the 20th century. What motivated Roosevelt to take the remarkable step of helping Fry? The swirling mass of difficulties and obstacles ranged about the refugee problem created a frustrating situation that must have irritated ‘man of action’ Roosevelt. Indirectly authorizing Fry’s sub rosa mission by getting him his passport was a clear chance for him to take action despite the deliberate blocks placed by the State Department in the way of Roosevelt’s desire to aid the refugees. Fry’s particular focus upon rescuing political leaders, artists, and intellectuals would surely help in Roosevelt’s effort to define America as the centre of artistic liberty. For the price of the simple act of helping Fry with his passport, Roosevelt could hope to see America enriched by the presence of some of the great names of European science, art, and literature. Finally, in addition to Roosevelt’s interest in making use of the work of artists and leftist intellectuals as a propaganda tool, and the cultural benefits of supporting Fry’s humanitarian work, helping him on his way to France would make a minor, but active contribution to the newly established collaboration between British Intelligence and the FBI. Roosevelt knew Fry’s mission would provide practical knowledge of secret routes in and out of France that could be used by his nascent military intelligence service. Roosevelt loved cloak and dagger operations. He personally recruited John Steinbeck to spy on German and Russian activities in Mexico in 1940.

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The famed author was good at it, and was offered a full-time job with the Office of War Information in 1942. Steinbeck said Roosevelt, “simply liked mystery, subterfuge and indirect tactics for their own sake.”34 Lacking the budget and organization for extensive gathering of military intelligence, in May 1938, the President sent his multi-millionaire friend, Vincent Astor, on a covert mission in his yacht to spy on Japanese bases in the Marshall Islands, complete with a radio transmitter and secret codes.35 Encouraged by Roosevelt, in 1939, Astor would dig into international financial telegrams, alerting him that the Russians were spending $2,000,000 a week on espionage in the United States, and identifying foreign agents based in Mexico.36 By March 1940, Astor persuaded the British head of intelligence in New York to let him read diplomatic mail routed through Bermuda and Trinidad. This unprecedented access to enemy secrets inspired Roosevelt to give Astor further clandestine assignments and he arranged for the Navy to commission him as a Commander. Joseph Persico, an authority on American espionage during Roosevelt’s early years, colourfully described the President’s circle of spies as “a clique of gentlemen amateurs.”37 Even in the midst of the refugee crisis in the White House, Military Intelligence was at the forefront of Roosevelt’s mind. William Stephenson, who would later become known by the code name, ‘Intrepid,’ and direct British Security Coordination in the United States, which represented MI6 (Secret Intelligence Service), MI5, and Special Operations Executive (SOE), arrived in New York in spring, 1940, to meet with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to discuss the co-operation of British intelligence. Hoover told him that such a relationship would be impossible without the direct order of the President, and even with such a remarkable order, it would have to be kept secret from other government agencies, particularly the State Department, which had instructed him that he was not to work with the British in any way that might affect the neutrality of the United States. After meeting Stephenson, Roosevelt responded enthusiastically, saying, “There should be the closest possible marriage between the F.B.I. and British Intelligence.”38 On April 16th, 1940, Stephenson cabled Stewart Menzies, chief of MI6, with the good news: “Meeting completely successful. Hoover will co-operate fully.” Recognizing the opportunity to expand his own power by this exclusive arrangement with the authoritative British intelligence agency, which worked at levels light years ahead of American efforts in the field, Hoover sent Menzies his “assurances of goodwill and a desire to assist far beyond confines of officialdom,” thus signalling his willingness to bend and even break the law in the service of his country’s interests. 39 In June 1940, Stephenson opened a British Intelligence office in New York at the Rockefeller Centre.40 On July 16th, 1940, Winston Churchill

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famously ordered the Special Operations Executive to “set Europe ablaze.” Fry sent his appeal for help to Eleanor two days later. Until Roosevelt appointed ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan as head of America’s own intelligence agency on July 11th, 1941, the Office of Naval Intelligence reported “… a real undercover foreign intelligence service, equipped and able to carry on espionage, counterespionage, etc., does not exist.”41 Each branch of the military had intelligence services, but they were underfunded and laughably amateurish compared to the British or German agencies. At the beginning of Roosevelt’s presidency, the U.S. Army had less than seventy agents engaged in gathering military intelligence throughout the world. Donovan’s department, hurriedly named Coordinator of Information (COI), was soon renamed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) on June 13th, 1942. Roosevelt’s support of Fry’s mission to France, then, was completely in tune with his willingness to mount ad hoc intelligence missions, and with plausible deniability stretch the bounds of lawful action to protect American interests. He told his ambassador to Berlin, William Dodd, “unofficial and personal influence” would be more effective than official communication where Nazi antisemitism was concerned.42 For all of Fry’s self-importance, to the President he was merely an expendable tool, a minor player in the great drama playing out on the world’s stage. To Roosevelt, the potential benefits of helping him were great, while the disadvantages were minor irritations that could only come home to roost as annoyances to Long. In addition, if Fry succeeded and didn’t die, he would bring cultural figures to America that Roosevelt saw as assets to deploy as propaganda weapons. Helping Fry was a small gesture. Fry arrived in Marseille eleven days after leaving New York, taking a week to meet with various consuls and aid officials in Lisbon, then flying to Barcelona, where he embarked upon the long and exhausting train journey across Spain into France. Fry quickly set up a rescue organization at his hotel, which he named the Centre Américain de Secours, providing financial help, food, and shelter to hundreds of refugees who formed long lines outside his makeshift bedroom office. As one among several aid organizations based in the ancient port city, the Centre provided cover for his illegal operations. He also provided select refugees with forged and purloined documents to help them escape from France. These activities were extensive. During his year in France, Fry purchased blank passports from an official in the Czech consulate who had sympathy for the plight of the refugees; commissioned forged documents; dealt with gangsters; ordered a hit upon a double-crosser who stole the Emergency Rescue Committee’s money instead of providing a boat; laundered money; smuggled

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gold and currency; personally guided escapees across the mountainous border along secret trails; worked as a British agent guiding soldiers back into the arms of their comrades, and provided MI5 with intelligence. His first clients were Karl Frank’s anti-fascist New Beginning friends from Germany. Young, fit, and healthy, all they needed for their escape was money, and they trekked across the border into Spain without difficulty. One of them gave Fry a map of the escape route across the frontier, which he anxiously hid behind a mirror fixed to the door of his hotel wardrobe. Fry was immediately inundated by a wave of refugees desperately seeking escape from the Nazis. He hired a staff of thick-skinned anti-fascists who had the courage to help refugees before saving their own skins. In the first six weeks of the Centre’s existence, Fry and his confederates helped two hundred and fifty people cross the border into Spain under the noses of the French, German, and Spanish authorities. The ERC’s publicity materials begged humanitarian Americans to save European intellectuals, and Kingdon desperately needed big name artists as a fundraising draw. Fry deliberately selected celebrities who fit the bill, including the philosopher Hannah Arendt, the father of surrealism André Breton, the novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, artist Max Ernst, among hundreds of others. Fry personally saved Marc Chagall from being taken away to a concentration camp by telephoning the Prefect in Marseille, shouting he had arrested “one of the greatest living painters in the entire world,” and if he hauled him off he would personally see to it that France would be publicly shamed in the international press, and that he would be sure to name the Prefect as the author of the crime, who would see his name in the world’s newspapers as “le plus grand con du monde.”43 Within twenty minutes of receiving this tongue-lashing, the Prefect surrendered Chagall to Fry’s office escorted by a detachment of plain clothes police. Fry made hurried arrangements to get the artist and his family out of France. On less eventful days, Fry was deeply disturbed by the same difficult ethical dilemma that faced Oscar Schindler, the famous German industrialist who saved thousands of Jews. Who should he help? Those he saved would live, while those he did not would probably die. Who was he to choose? How could he decide which of the refugees were important enough as cultural figures to merit his attention? Jewish refugees were especially at risk, being legally stateless and on the Nazis’ list of wanted people, who had ordered Vichy France to surrender them on demand. Fry immediately set to work getting them out of danger and on their way to America if they fit the ERC profile. He wrote “… each day it would be a little worse than the day before, with more people asking for help, more harrowing stories to listen

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to, more impossible decisions to make.”44 Even adhering to the ERC’s mission to rescue only artists, writers, and political leaders was harrowing. Revealing his turmoil, he wrote to his mother, “One of my major problems has been to find a clear-cut definition of an ‘intellectual.’”45 Unable to untie the Gordian knot, Fry decided to commit to the names on the ERC list, and add to it whenever refugees appeared to fit the Committee’s criteria.46 Fry needed to meet with British intelligence officials to deliver a map that plotted where German minefields were located and an escape route for sea-borne refugees. He decided to make the trip to Madrid himself, planning to escort a party of internationally famous refugee writers, including the poet and novelist Franz Werfel and his extraordinary wife, Alma Mahler, Feuchtwanger and his wife Marta, Thomas Mann’s brother, Heinrich, and his wife, Nellie, and Thomas’ son, Golo, joined by the artist Egon Adler and his wife, Bertha. Werfel was a Czech Jew who had been raised a Catholic. He wrote a narrative describing the brave Armenian resistance against the Turks during the genocide, and lectured about the atrocities throughout Germany, attracting the hostile attention of the Nazis. Werfel’s beautiful socialite wife Alma Mahler was known for her astonishing string of relationships with Europe’s most famous artists. Now a stout sixty-year-old matron, in the first decades of the 1900s, she had had a romantic affair with the great Austrian painter Gustav Klimt, then begun seeing composer Alexander Zemlinsky, then married composer Gustav Mahler and bore two daughters by him. This relationship foundered when Gustav forbade Alma from writing her own music, so she had an affair with the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius. After Gustav Mahler died from heart disease in 1911, Alma had a wild romance with the expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka, then reunited with Gropius, marrying him in 1915, while he was on leave from his service in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War. In 1917, while Gropius soldiered in the trenches, she began an affair with Werfel, moved in with him, and bore his son, who died as an infant. She divorced Gropius in 1920 and married Werfel in 1929. Feuchtwanger wrote unflattering novels describing life under the Nazi regime and was interned in a French concentration camp, escaping dressed in drag with the help of Hiram Bingham, American Vice-Consul in Marseille. Heinrich Mann was a well-known author in his own right, having written the novel Professor Unrat which was made into the famous Marlene Dietrich movie, The Blue Angel, which had been interpreted as a critique of bourgeois German hypocrisy. He was forced to resign from the Academy of Fine Art, and lost both his German citizenship and his property. Golo Mann was interned for months after joining the French army. Egon Adler

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was a Czech Jew who designed posters and publicity materials for Twentieth Century-Fox films. Ominously, it was Friday the 13th. The Werfels were frightened. Just before the group left, Fry heard the Spanish were no longer accepting the papers of stateless German Jews like the Feuchtwangers. Fry had no choice but to leave them in danger in Marseille. The Manns possessed fake American passports. Golo held a genuine American affidavit. The Werfels had authentic Czech passports. The Adlers held American emergency visas. As the only legitimate traveller, Fry carried the astonishing amount of luggage the Werfels brought with them onto the train, while his colleague Dick Ball guided the refugees along the mountainous trail. Struggling through the arduous and clandestine climb, the flamboyant Alma Mahler took the lead, inappropriately clothed in an attention-grabbing white dress and sandals. She was burdened with a heavy satchel containing not only the original score of Bruckner’s 3rd Symphony, but also the first draft of Werfel’s novel The Song of Bernadette, which was soon to top The New York Times bestseller list, and be made into a smash hit Oscar-winning movie, also produced by Twentieth Century-Fox films. Golo and Ball carried the seventy-year-old Heinrich Mann much of the way. Although he had a cardiac condition that had already given him a heart attack and would kill him in 1945, Franz Werfel followed Alma, struggling breathlessly up and down the peaks and valleys. Despite the bad omen of the date and Fry’s fears of tightened border security, the celebrities successfully avoided danger and re-joined Fry and their luggage in Portbou, Spain. While the group celebrated their escape in a restaurant that evening, a British intelligence officer recognized Fry and warned him that the head of the Spanish secret police was dining in the same room. Chilled, Fry discretely told his charges to go to bed and they slipped away, chastened. Within a few days, the chagrined party travelled by air to Madrid, then on to Lisbon and freedom.47 Released from his duties as guide to his distinguished charges, Fry visited the British Embassy in Lisbon to deliver his minefield map, meeting with the Military Attaché, Major William Torr, and the British Ambassador, Samuel Hoare. Fry needed to find a sea-route for escapees who could not risk the journey through Franco’s Spain, including Francisco Caballero, the former Republican Prime Minister. Hoare quietly directed Torr to send $10,000 to the ERC in New York to provide Fry with funding to extract allied servicemen from France, and promised to provide boats from Spain that would rendezvous with Fry’s refugees and British soldiers. Hundreds of soldiers had avoided capture during the catastrophic blitzkrieg invasion of France, but didn’t escape on the Dunkirk armada, and were forced into

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Vichy’s unoccupied territory. Fry was to work with Waitstill Sharp, who was in France to send trapped Czech soldiers to Britain. Finally, Fry was a bona fide secret agent. In an oral history recorded after the war, Marta Feuchtwanger reported in her German-accented English that Fry also worked for American intelligence: “… he was asked by the American government to be a spy, to do some spying work. He did that very reluctantly, because he wanted only to help the refugees, as a Quaker and a humanitarian, but he could not refuse this what they asked him to do. So this was – he was always afraid he endangers the whole thing, and he was also several times arrested. But he always came out all right. Then he had to leave Spain; he couldn’t continue his work on account of this spying thing also.”48 When Fry returned to Marseille, he learned that the Chief of Police had called a meeting with the American consul to warn him his men were monitoring Fry’s activities. The Chief demanded that the consul prevent Fry from breaking the law. Several of Fry’s clients had been arrested while he was away. Portugal tightened its regulations and began demanding tickets to show that refugees had a genuine destination. To add to his worries, Fry now learned the Gestapo was watching him and its agents were confident it could stop him getting Germany’s enemies out of France. Alerted and suspicious, Fry changed all the phones in his offices and ordered daily searches for hidden microphones. Because of the illegal nature of his work, and his commitment to helping the refugees despite both the U.S. State Department and Vichy’s obstructive regulations, diplomatic officials at the Marseille consulate attempted to have Fry recalled. The new American ambassador William Leahy thought Fry and his colleagues risked damaging Vichy-Washington relations for little gain, and deliberately ignored his requests for meetings. On September 18th, the American consulate received a telegram from Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, saying “this Government cannot repeat nor countenance the activities as reported of Dr. Bohn and Mr. Fry and other persons, however well-meaning their motives may be, in carrying on activities evading the laws of countries with which the United States maintains friendly relations.”49 Worse, the telegram told Bohn that he must return to America immediately. Moving from snubbing Fry, now the consulate summoned him and Bohn almost daily to demand their departure. But Consul General Hugh Fullerton had not ordered Fry to return to America in writing, and although Hull’s cable stated the government’s legal position regarding his actions, it had not explicitly directed him to accompany Bohn. Fry disregarded Hull and continued with his mission. Hundreds of refugees needed him. The border was closed to Jews. In the

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first week of October, bound by legal conformity, Bohn decided to call it quits and went home, asking Fry to take over rescuing anti-fascist political leaders. The only substantial help Fry received from American immigration officials came from the vice consul in Marseille, Hiram Bingham IV, who visited French concentration camps and wrote detailed reports about shocking conditions, hunger, and disease. Guided by his religious convictions, and wrecking his career prospects by ignoring the prevailing anti-immigrant mood of the ambassador and his staff, Bingham provided U.S. visas for Fry’s refugees, even sheltering the famous writer Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife Marta in his home after helping him escape from a transit camp dressed as a woman. The Roosevelts took a personal interest in Feuchtwanger’s case. Marta Feuchtwanger said that it was because of the President’s personal intervention that Bingham felt empowered to issue an illegal visa for her husband. “He had a visa – an emergency visa, it was called. He could get that only on account of the order of the Roosevelts. Usually, it has to go first to Washington to be approved by the government. But there was no time anymore, so Mr. Bingham said, ‘Because I have the order of the Roosevelts to do everything what I can, I try to do what is out of my reach. I give you a visa, if you have a pen name.’ So, my husband remembered that once in Berlin, long, long ago – it seemed so long – that he wrote those ballads, satirical ballads about America, under the translation of his name, which was Wetcheek. So, he told him the story, told Mr. Bingham the story, and he gave him a visa with the name Wetcheek.”50 Armed with a counterfeit passport provided by Fry, and Bingham’s visa, the Feuchtwangers were spirited out of the country by the ERC’s underground railroad. Other strange events happened at the American consulate in Marseille under Bingham’s watch. While most people queued for days for the slender chance of exit papers, selected artists and writers seemed to have comparatively little trouble – thanks to Bingham’s relationship with Fry. The expressionist painter Joseph Floch, an Austrian Jew, made his way to Marseille in his flight from the Nazis and found little difficulty meeting Bingham, or getting the coveted visa to escape to America. “In order to obtain a visa to the United States I went to see the American Consul, Mr. Bingham. The consulate, where usually hundreds of people were standing in line, was empty and I was immediately received. I had good luck because a new law enabled the consul to give visas according to his own judgement. This law was soon changed. Mr. Bingham, who was a friendly and art loving man, gave me the visa immediately, saying ‘We would like to have as many artists and writers as possible in New York.’”51 The special treatment Floch

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received even as a minor figure of the bohemian-bourgeois art world stands as a remarkable contrast to the impossible demands faced by ordinary refugees who had no artistic or intellectual gifts that would benefit the United States. Floch’s comment reflected the elitist interest in saving artists and writers, linking Fry’s network in Marseille to MoMA and the White House. While Fry struggled to get refugees out of France, a bureaucratic nightmare unfolded in Washington. On September 18th, 1940, the same day that Secretary of State Hull ordered Fullerton to tell Fry and Bohn to stop their illegal activities, his assistant, Long, wrote to the President, claiming the State Department had issued 2,583 visas more than the set quota, granting the surplus to people on a list provided by the American Federation of Labor, to two lists of Jewish rabbis – dismissively described as “alleged leaders of the intellectual thought of the Jewish religion” – and a list provided by the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, which submitted new names week by week.52 Long recommended the lists should be closed, and investigations of new applicants turned over to consulates and embassies. Long’s letter was a lie. His summary was quickly challenged by James McDonald and George Warren, Chair and Executive Secretary of the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, who said that of two thousand names submitted by them for visas, only fifty people were issued with papers by European Consular officials. Emotional pressure and internal dissent simmered. Not all of the labour leaders were issued their visas, and none of the rabbis on the lists were able to approach a consulate, let alone escape to the United States, all being from Slavic countries that had been overrun by the Nazis. Doubtlessly, most of them died in death-camps. Warren protested there was a clear necessity to take more action to help the refugees, not to reduce it – as the Gestapo tightened its grip on France, the crisis was intensifying, not improving. On September 24th, 1940, McDonald and Warren fired an angry letter to Long complaining that the State Department had deliberately blocked the issue of visas, granting less than fifteen to people on their list of five hundred and sixty-seven names, and that Long was responsible for this “failure to ease the tragedy of those refugees in imminent danger”53 as a direct result of his order to consulates not to issue American visas to anyone who had not already received exit permits. This restriction meant that many on the lists were condemned to remain where they were with their safety a whim of the Nazis. On September 28th, 1940, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to her husband echoing McDonald and Warren’s letter, and declaring Long’s letter was “entirely erroneous.” Her letter concluded “I am thinking about these poor people

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who may die at any time and who are asking only to come here on transit visas, and I do hope you can get this cleared up quickly.”54 By October 8th, 1940, McDonald and Warren sent a memorandum to the President complaining that in fact, not even forty visas had been issued to people on their list of five hundred and sixty-seven intellectual, political, and other refugees sent to the State Department by their Committee. Only Lisbon now remained as a port of departure from Europe. Members of their list managed to flee to the Portuguese capital, but were trapped there, waiting for visas to America, with the jaws of the Gestapo machine looming over them. “To close this last avenue of escape is to condemn many scientists, scholars, writers, labor leaders and other refugees to further sacrifices for their belief in democracy and to bring to an end our tradition of hospitality to the politically oppressed.”55 On October 16th, 1940, Frank sent Eleanor a telegram warning her he had received messages from Marseille that the Consul there had been instructed to issue no new visas after October 1st. She shot a note to her husband saying “Something does seem wrong.” Welles discovered there had been a miscommunication, and in fact, the visa program had been extended to November 1st. Nevertheless, these mistakes cost priceless time that was a matter of life or death to the refugees, and added to the uncertainty that fueled their despair. On November 15th, 1940, Buttinger wrote to Eleanor again, enclosing a damning memorandum from the ERC that disclosed detailed information about the desperate plight of the European refugees, who were only getting visas from the consulates long months after having been approved by the President’s Committee. For people applying for admission through the regular quota, the situation was worse, for they were now required to get letters of recommendation from influential people. Ordinary refuges stood almost no chance of escaping from the Nazis. Shocked, Eleanor passed the letter to the President with a note saying, “FDR, can’t something be done?”56 Roosevelt convened a meeting and thrashed out the process with the State Department, who agreed on November 23rd to defer to the investigations carried out by the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees. On December 9th, 1940, Roosevelt established a ‘supercommittee’ chaired by Secretary of State Long to act as a court of appeal for people who were denied visas, and to settle internal disputes about political refugees who were suspected as possible fifth columnist agents. Although this Committee may have been appointed with the best of intentions on Roosevelt’s part, by appointing Long, he put a fox in charge of the henhouse.

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It was against this background of stress that, in November, one of Fry’s team, Mary Jane Gold, rented a run-down villa outside the city where Fry and his staff could switch off from the anxiety of living and working among the refugees in Marseille, and enjoy some much-needed down-time. A beautiful and wealthy socialite, Gold heard about Fry’s arrival in Marseille almost as soon as he got there, and immediately offered to hand over several thousand dollars to help. Mistrustful at first, Fry was reluctant to meet her, thinking she was probably a spy, but after sharing drinks and chatting for a while with her and mutual friends, he invited her to his new office to conduct interviews, gradually learning to trust her as a messenger. She alerted refugees when their forged passports were ready and they should prepare for escape. Gold quickly learned how to avoid being followed by plainclothes police and to navigate the dangerous back streets and alleyways of Marseille. Refugees clamoured for Fry’s attention day and night, and he had no time to relax. Living thirty minutes away from Marseille, he found respite from the demanding pressure of his mission. Named ‘Air-Bel,’ this tired mansion would briefly become home to Europe’s greatest surrealist, André Breton, his wife and daughter, and the Trotskyite novelist Victor Serge as they travelled through the south of France on their way to America. Max Ernst and Benjamin Péret also passed through Air-Bel’s doors and stayed for a short time. The villa was quickly filled with an eccentric clan of visiting surrealists who gathered around Breton, playing strange games and creating eccentric cadavre equis drawings. In addition to being a sanctuary for friends and relaxation, Air-Bel was more secluded than the office in Marseille, and Fry was able to meet more easily with his secret British contacts.57 Meanwhile, Fry and his team continued to spirit people across the border, helping lost soldiers to find their way to England and the fight, forging passports for refugees, and interviewing candidates for relief. By October, the ERC was sending less money, but Fry’s expenses were increasing. Fortunately, Gold was rich and repeatedly funded the Centre Américain de Secours, and Fry still had some of the money the British had paid him for getting their soldiers out of France. When the Jewish-American heiress Peggy Guggenheim arrived at Air-Bel, she handed Fry “a lot of money.”58 These sources of wealth from outside the ERC must have given Fry a sense of independence, and strengthened his resolve to act to save the refugees by any means, despite the bureaucratic obstacles in his way. But Fry couldn’t get the American visas he desperately needed without the ERC, which was increasingly intimidated by the State Department’s power. Fry was forced to balance his dependency upon the ERC with the necessity of

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taking illegal action to successfully get the refugees out of the hands of the Nazis. Soon, Air-Bel was raided by police under orders to search locations “suspected of Communist activity,”59 and Fry and his colleagues were only able to avoid serious danger by acting quickly. A policeman detained Fry in his room with a female colleague. She distracted the guard while Fry hid incriminating evidence, throwing a forged passport onto the top of a large wardrobe, and desperately emptying illegal papers from his pockets into a fire. Next, Fry and his team were transported to a ship docked in the harbour where they joined six hundred prisoners, where they learned they had been rounded up because Marshall Petain was visiting Marseille. Twenty thousand people were arrested in the security sweep. After two days, all of the prisoners were released. Relieved that the incident was not specifically targeted at them, but unnerved by it, in the weeks after their brief imprisonment, Fry and his tight-knit team became understandably anxious. A friendly police captain warned Fry that a squad of plainclothes detectives was following him. Fry ensured they had a boring time watching him, and after a couple of fruitless weeks, they abandoned their surveillance. The New York Times reported Fry’s arrest with a story detailing his exciting scrapes with the French police, emphasizing he was arrested on suspicion of helping Jews and sending money to a communist. It’s notable that the article described Fry’s Centre Américain de Secours representing MoMA, the ERC, the New School, and the Rockefeller Foundation, all organizations funded by propagandist Nelson Rockefeller.60 Habitually careful to avoid participating in political arguments between the left and the right while under the scrutiny of the French security forces,61 Fry claimed he had been “denounced to the French police, and perhaps to the Gestapo (with which the Communists were then co-operating) as a ‘Trotskyite,’ a charge as preposterous as the charge that I am a ‘veteran fellow traveler,’ but one frequently resorted to by Communists in an attempt to discredit and embarrass their opponents.”62 But the real root of Fry’s difficulties lay in the fact that he had embarrassed the American government. Frank pled with Fry to save his New Beginning friends, Franz Boegler, Hans Tittle, Fritz Lamm, and Wilhelm Pfeffer from the Vernet concentration camp and flee France.63 But how would Fry engineer their rescue? The camp was heavily guarded by pro-Nazi Vichy France soldiers ordered to shoot escapees. Frank’s friends were trapped within a fenced compound within the larger area of the camp. To pull it off, Fry came up with a melodramatic plan that might have been cribbed from a Hollywood war movie. At Fry’s direction, Gold agreed to meet the camp commandant and persuade him to allow the prisoners to visit Marseille to obtain transit papers

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from the Centre. After a long journey on a dusty train, Gold hailed a cab for the concentration camp, where she witnessed the wretched condition of the internees. Admitted to the commandant’s office, a manipulative Gold nervously undid her blouse’s top buttons. Wide-eyed, she begged him to permit the men to travel to Marseille. She claimed she was a friend of their wives, who had solicited her to plead their case. Seductively, Gold asked the commandant for a cigarette, leaning forward to reveal her cleavage when he offered a lit match, sucking the flame into the cigarette, then sensually blowing out the flame through parted lips so he felt her warm breath on his fingers. Spell-bound by Gold’s erotic performance and her suggestive promise to meet him later that night for an intimate dinner, the commandant agreed to the prisoners’ excursion under guard. At sunset, Gold dutifully arrived at the restaurant and slipped into her chair, sipping on dry vermouths while she waited for the amorous commandant to appear for their romantic rendezvous. But something was wrong. Had her plan failed? An hour and a half passed, and there was no sign of her date. Had she made a mistake? Gold returned to her hotel and spent a sleepless night alone worrying for the safety of her charges. Next morning, she returned to the camp, where she was again admitted to the commandant’s office. This time the mood was tense, and she found the commandant shouting orders at his subordinates, breaking off when he saw her to explain briefly why he missed their tryst. The Gestapo had visited the camp the previous evening.64 Although the commandant’s carnal hopes had been crushed, he honoured his commitment to Gold, and the next day the New Beginning men were escorted under guard to Marseille, where for several days they were allowed to visit the Centre Américain and the consulate to get their visas in order. Fry and his agents bribed the guards, and encouraged them to enjoy their cushy assignment. The guards couldn’t believe their luck, and after demanding solemn promises from the prisoners that they would meet them later, left them to their own devices while they explored the brothels and bars of Marseille. Over the next few days, the prisoners were mostly left unattended, building trust with the gullible guards, making sure they were prompt to rendezvous whenever they were told, and deliberately distracting the guards from their duties. After days of subtle deception had seduced the guards into a state of drunken security, Boegler, Tittel, Lamm, and Pfeffer were spirited away by nightfall onto a boat that was intended to take them and a group of French and Belgian officers across the Mediterranean to Gibraltar. But as the duped guards grew drunker on land, the skies grew stormier at sea, and by the next day a savage gale swirled about the boat, battering it out of control. The bilge-pump broke and the

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beleaguered passengers bailed the sea from the floundering vessel. Dismayed, the captain turned about to limp back to Marseille, where they were towed to port by a French coastguard. Recaptured, the wily prisoners were put on trial by Vichy in a threemonth long confrontation between government lawyers and a legal team funded by the ERC. They were sentenced to time served, and released, but walked straight from the courtroom into the arms of waiting police, who immediately reinterned them in the Vernet concentration camp. Back to one. Inspired by a passionate telegram from Fry, Kingdon persuaded President Roosevelt, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, Ambassador Leahy, and Secretary of State Hull to protest the reinternment. Fry’s farce was an international scandal. Under the weight of this powerful pressure, the French swayed, transferring Pfeffer and Tittel to a transit camp for internees who possessed visas. Officials expressed surprise that the American government was interested in allowing Trotskyite communists into their country. This was the first time the Americans heard of the men’s Party connections, which were absolutely taboo to the State Department. Leahy investigated, then angrily reported that of the four, two were former members of a German communist organization, and worse, one was a German fifth columnist agent, confirming Long’s rationale for blocking liberal immigration policies. All four were active members of Frank’s anti-Nazi New Beginning. Deeply embarrassed by the fiasco, Ickes wrote to Kingdon about Fry, “It would appear that someone has allowed his zeal to run away with his judgement. I know of nothing better calculated to create difficulties about admitting refugees to this country than such facts as this case discloses.”65 The debacle was a catastrophe for Fry. He would no longer enjoy even the reluctant support of his government, and his credibility with the ERC was permanently damaged. While Fry struggled through the winter of the phony war at Air-Bel, Peggy Guggenheim spent the first part of it in Paris. She had lost so much money on her first gallery in London, Guggenheim Jeune, that she decided to open a museum, planning to rent a house in London to exhibit her collection. She moved to Paris on a purchasing trip to stock it, guided by the advice of her old friend Marcel Duchamp, “buying a picture a day,” from France’s finest bohemian-bourgeois artists.66 She had known Duchamp since the 1920s and trusted his artistic taste completely, allowing him to organize shows. Her museum ambitions were wrecked by the invasion of France, and three days before the Nazis took Paris, she fled to the south of France, shipping her now formidable collection of modern art to Vichy, and then storing it in the Grenoble Museum. Determined to rescue the surrealist

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artists Ernst, Victor Brauner, and André Breton and his family, she visited Fry in Marseille and enlisted his help. In her memoir, Guggenheim recalled that Fry tried to persuade her to take his place at the Centre Américain while he made a brief trip to the United States, presumably thinking he might be able to calm the nerves of the ERC if he visited them in person.67 He never made that trip. Guggenheim was in love with Ernst, and bought many of his paintings. With her money, and Fry’s help, Ernst made his way to Lisbon where he found his former lover, the fragile British surrealist painter Leonora Carrington. Carrington had lost her mind after Ernst had been taken away by the Germans to a concentration camp for a second time, yet she managed to flee to Lisbon, where she was committed to an insane asylum after a mental breakdown. Her bourgeois parents interceded and sent her to the home of a vigilant Portuguese guardian. She soon escaped. Carrington fled to the Mexican embassy and told officials that the police were after her, so they granted her sanctuary until she made contact with an old friend, a Mexican journalist and poet named Renato Leduc, who she then married so she could leave Portugal. When Guggenheim arrived in Lisbon with Ernst, the ensuing love tangle caused “two months of dreadful complications and miseries on all sides.”68 Carrington still adored Ernst, and believed she should be at his side. Long after the war, she wrote in her journal of madness, “We were always together, all of us. It was a very weird thing with everybody’s children, and ex-husbands and ex-wives. I felt there was something very wrong in Max’s being with Peggy. I knew he didn’t love Peggy, and I still have this very puritanical streak, that you mustn’t be with someone you don’t love. But Peggy is very maligned. She was rather a noble person, generous, and she never ever was unpleasant. She offered to pay for my airplane to New York, so I could go with them. But I didn’t want that. I was with Renato, and eventually we went by boat to New York …”69 When Ernst and Guggenheim escaped on the New York clipper, they flew over the ship that carried Carrington and Leduc. Despite the past awkwardness of the ménage, Guggenheim continued to help Carrington, buying her paintings for her collection. Thanks to Guggenheim’s patronage, Carrington became known as one of the great surrealists. Knowing the ERC was impressed by famous names, Fry visited André Malraux, André Gide, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso, who didn’t need his help and felt safe staying in France. However, Matisse and Picasso both allowed Fry to use their names on the Centre Américain de Secours letterhead, despite the danger of being associated with such a risky venture. Fry hurried to Cannes to meet the German industrialist defector and former

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Nazi financier, Fritz Thyssen and his wife. He arrived too late. They had already been snatched by seven plain-clothes police from Vichy who delivered them to the Nazis, who promptly shipped them back to Germany and imprisoned them. It was the first time the Germans had worked closely with French police to extradite anyone from Vichy France without warning. Frightened by repeated complaints from the State Department, in the middle of December, the ERC sent journalist Jay Allen to Marseille to replace Fry as their liaison in France. Allen was accustomed to working in extremely stressful situations, having covered the Spanish Civil War, where he witnessed the fascist massacre of four thousand Republicans at Badajoz. But the staff of the Centre Américain didn’t trust this unknown newcomer with sensitive knowledge on which lives depended, and Allen found it impossible to replace Fry. He soon abandoned his mission and departed to Vichy. Gold remembered that Allen “decided to devote most of his time to reporting and drinking.”70 Although he narrowly avoided being replaced by Allen, Fry realized the Nazi noose was tightening fast, and worked even harder to get his most endangered refugees out of France, scouting a new escape route to spirit British soldiers and German anti-Nazis across the Mediterranean to North Africa, then on to Gibraltar, and another that led through the mountains into Spain. By the beginning of 1941, his situation in Marseille had become almost untenable. Always erratic, the Spanish border was sealed again, causing panic among the refugees in the unoccupied zone who were now trapped in France. Portugal stopped accepting Chinese, Siamese, Panamanian, and Belgian visas. The French police were dangerous – some had an ambiguous attitude toward the ERC’s efforts to help the refugees, but some were vigorously antisemitic and supported Vichy’s uncomfortable relationship with the Nazis, while others were enthusiastic enemies of the Nazi State. In January, Fry’s own passport expired and he found himself in the same boat as his refugees, living illegally in Vichy France without papers and unable to cross the border into Spain or Portugal – serious handicaps to his rescue work. Absurdly, he appealed to his enemy Consul Fullerton for help, but the best Fullerton would offer him was a new passport with Spanish and Portuguese transit visas that would only allow him to return to the United States, sending him an ominous telegram warning that police action would soon be taken against him, and the only thing protecting him from arrest was that the French did not wish to risk seeing negative press in American newspapers.71 At the end of March, Germany made an agreement with the Vichy government to send any of their citizens remaining in France back to the Fatherland, making anti-Nazi refugees especially vulnerable.

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Desperate to remain in France, Fry asked his wife to appeal to Eleanor Roosevelt for help, believing he could still save many of the hundreds of refugees on his lists if he were allowed to stay on, but faced with the facts of the situation Eleanor replied with a brief note saying there was nothing more she could do. Fry should come home. Unable to get further help from the Roosevelts, and flailing for alternatives, in May, Fry desperately appealed to his influential friends to intercede. He wired Alfred Barr, asking if he could be appointed as an official representative of MoMA, and thus get a new passport for travel in France, Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal.72 Barr in turn telephoned Archibald MacLeish, who Roosevelt had appointed Librarian of Congress, about Fry’s predicament, and wrote a lengthy letter blaming Long for it. Barr emphasized the importance of Fry’s relief work providing shelter and food to desperate refugees, and begged MacLeish to ask the Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs, Adolf Berle, to provide Fry with a new passport. Alvin Johnson, President of the New School for Social Research, wrote a reference letter describing Fry’s heroic efforts to rescue members of his faculty. Edward Pritchard, Special Assistant to the Attorney General, made enquiries of the State Department on Fry’s behalf, and learned his application for a renewal of his passport had been denied “because he had, in addition to his regular emergency rescue work, engaged in certain underground relief work which brought him into collision with other local authorities.”73 Fry’s enemies in the State Department had had enough. Soon, their hostility wouldn’t matter. In June 1941, the State Department stopped issuing visas – and after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, all questions about emigration and refugees would be moot. America was at war. Abandoned by his former allies, all Fry’s efforts to remain in France legally and to regain his favoured position were in vain. On August 27th, 1941, the pro-German Vichy Vice-Premier Pierre Laval and an important far-right government minister, Marcel Deat, were shot and wounded by a communist agent in Versailles at a parade of collaborating volunteer soldiers who enlisted to fight against Russia. In reaction to the assassination attempt, the French police cracked down on communist saboteurs and revolutionaries. Well aware of Fry’s illegal activities, the expiry of his papers, and his involvement in helping communist sympathizers escape, the prefecture in Marseille arrested him on August 29th for “anti-Nazi activities,” accused him of being engaged in secret work against the regime, and expelled him from France.74 Because his passport had expired and he lacked the necessary visa to enter Spain, he was interned at Perpignan, then deported. The New York Times reported a fabricated story that he was

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escorted to Spain from France by Leahy as a member of the Ambassadorial party on a diplomatic trip to Barcelona, and that Fry’s organization had been charged by the French police with “giving assistance mainly to persons with leftist or communistic tendencies.”75 The ERC continued its work without Fry and managed to extricate three hundred more refugees from France, before being forced to go underground, working with the French resistance and British Intelligence to move refugees, soldiers, and agents in and out of the country using their networks of secret paths and hidden safe-houses. On his return to the United States, Fry was briefly put to work by the ERC, speaking at a fundraising luncheon on November 4th, at which he was honoured by Kingdon for carrying out “what we consider to be one of the most important works of these times.”76 But his relationship with the Committee was strained, and Kingdon soon left Fry in the cold. Hunting for worthwhile work in spring 1942, Fry speculatively applied to Roosevelt’s nascent spy service, the Office of Coordinator of Information (OCOI), believing his extraordinary experience would be useful. The OCOI’s Robert Ullman quietly vetted Fry as a potential asset, interviewing the ERC’s treasurer David Seiferheld for the measure of his character. No friend to Fry, Seiferheld warned Ullman, “Varian Fry is an intelligent but highly unstable man. He is uncontrollable even with a supervisor on the spot. He has an infinite capacity for intrigue but not very successful intrigue.”77 Indeed, Fry’s drama-laden, aggressive letters to Eleanor Roosevelt lent the impression of an energized, but histrionic mind. At times, his actions were almost comedic performances. Seiferheld’s disastrous character reference ended Ullman’s consideration for making use of Fry in any further capacity as an agent in occupied Europe, and Fry’s appalling reputation at the Department of State damned his candidacy as a potential OCOI operative. Running out of time in April 1941, Fry had even written to his enemy in the consulate, Fullerton, and clumsily asked him to slip a clandestine film into the diplomatic pouch for delivery to unnamed contacts in the United States. Faced with blunt evidence that confirmed Fry’s illicit and unsubtle activities, Fullerton refused. Brave but blundering, Fry was not discreet enough to be a good secret agent. Fry’s friends in France saw him quite differently. His comrade Emilio Lussu, who ran a clandestine underground railroad like Fry’s without the benefit of a legal cover operation, wrote to the ERC, “Fry is extremely courageous … If you have in the United States a medal for civilian bravery, Fry deserves it utterly for the way he has been behaving here for months on the edge of the war.”78 But Fry was mistrusted by the State Department and American Embassy officials from the top down. He would receive no such

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honours from his government. He even had to campaign on his own behalf to receive any acknowledgement of his bravery from the French. Fry was finally awarded the Legion of Honor in 1967. Fry’s zealous efforts to rescue the Vernet four cast a long shadow into his future. In 1955, he was denounced as a communist fellow-traveler by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Fry claimed he was fervently anti-red, had a consistent record of speaking out against communist participants in the committees he served on, and had lost his job at The New Republic as a consequence of his hostility toward the editorial board’s procommunist stance. He testified, “the Emergency Rescue Committee was so strongly anti-Communist that it was repeatedly attacked as reactionary by the communists” both in the United States and abroad.79 Nevertheless, the accusations and suspicion were enough to deny Fry the opportunity of contracting with the U.S. military to make training films when he made a brief interlude into the motion pictures business after the war. He returned to labour union work, freelance journalism, and publishing, but none of his adventures were as exciting as the year of drama enacted in Marseille. He was unable to adjust well to ordinary life. He divorced, remarried and had three children, but in the last year of his life, Fry lapsed into manic depression. Struck by a cerebral haemorrhage, he died in his bed without fanfare late in 1967. Roosevelt’s expectation that Fry’s work would help create an American bohemian-bourgeois avant-garde was well-founded. Margaret Barr fully understood the impact of the arrival of the European refugee artists upon the American art scene. She said, “I think that there’s one more thing to say about this question of the refugee artists. It’s not only the ones that I’ve mentioned that came, but also, for instance, Matta and Breton, whom I did not help out. And they got all involved with Gorky, and Leger got involved with these people and they were a tremendous leaven in the group of American artists that they associated with and had a very great influence on them.”80 Safely in New York with her paintings and her love, Ernst, Guggenheim opened her second gallery, naming it Art of This Century. Grateful for their freedom from Nazi oppression, Duchamp, Ernst, and Breton were happy to help her build her collection, which under their guidance naturally favoured surrealism, but also included artists like Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Motherwell, who Alfred Barr described as “the chief pillars of the formidable new American school.”81 Margaret Barr gave a list of some of the artists who made it to New York, including Yves Tanguy, André Masson, Lipchitz, Chagall, Duchamp, Fernand Leger, Roberto Matta,

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Carrington, Breton, Mondrian, and Ernst. “All these valuable men create a great ferment among the New York artists,” she wrote.82 Fry made a lasting impact upon the art of the Western world by saving some of Europe’s greatest bohemian-bourgeois artists. He was the Harriet Tubman of the new avant-garde.

Notes 1

Otto D. Tolischus, Nine Muses Regimented To Serve Nazi Kultur, New York Times, Aug 22, 1937, SM4 2 Constancia De La Mora, Letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, Sumner Welles Papers Box 55, Folder 14, Office Correspondence, Eleanor Roosevelt, Selected Digitized Documents Related to the Holocaust and Refugees, 1933-1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum 3 Mary Jane Gold, Crossroads Marseilles, 1940. Doubleday, 1980, 146-147 4 Sumner Welles, Letter to President Roosevelt, Selected Digitized Documents Related to the Holocaust and Refugees, 1933-1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum, OF3186, Political Refugees, Jan-June 1939. 12th January 1939 http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/_resources/images/hol/hol00070.pdf 5 Margaret Scolari Barr, Our Campaigns: 1930-1944, In: The New Criterion Special Issue, Summer 1987, 31 6 Ibid, 33 7 Ibid, 32 8 Oral history interview with Margaret Scolari Barr concerning Alfred H. Barr, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 1974 February 22-May 13, Tape 1, Side 2 http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-margaretscolari-barr-concerning-alfred-h-barr-13250 9 Varian Fry, Editor Describes Rioting In Berlin, New York Times, 17th July 1935: 4 10 Editor Holds Riots Inspired By Nazis, New York Times, 26th July, 1935, 8 11 Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, 1789–1943, 36-37. Cited in: Henry Feingold, The Politics of Rescue, Rutgers, 1970, 3 12 Henry Feingold, The Politics of Rescue, Rutgers, 1970, 8 13 Jews! Jews! Jews Everywhere! Selected Digitized Documents Related to the Holocaust and Refugees, 1933-1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum, OF 76c: Church Matters-Jewish, 1938 14 Varian Fry, Assignment Rescue, Scholastic, 1968, 24 15 Breckenridge Long, Letter to Franklin Roosevelt, Selected Digitized Documents Related to the Holocaust and Refugees, 1933-1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum, OF3186, Political Refugees, July – Sept 1940, 18th September, 1940

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Franklin D. Roosevelt, Press Release, Selected Digitized Documents Related to the Holocaust and Refugees, 1933-1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum, OF3186, Political Refugees, Jan-June 1939, 11th June 1940 17 Hamilton Armstrong, Telegram to Marguerite Le Hand, Selected Digitized Documents Related to the Holocaust and Refugees, 1933-1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum, OF3186, Political Refugees, July – Sept 1940, 18th June 1940 18 Edwin Watson, Letter to Hamilton Armstrong, Selected Digitized Documents Related to the Holocaust and Refugees, 1933-1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum, OF3186, Political Refugees, July – Sept 1940, June 29th 1940 19 Eric Thomas Chester, Covert Network: Progressives, the International Rescue Committee, and the CIA, Sharpe, 1995, 12 20 Mary Jane Gold, Crossroads Marseilles, 1940. Doubleday, 1980, pp. xiii-iv 21 Joseph Buttinger, Report on “Attempts to Organize Assistance for Political Refugees in France and England” (Report of meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt), June 26-27 1940, Selected Digitized Documents Related to the Holocaust and Refugees, 1933-1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/_resources/images/hol/hol00441.pdf 22 Varian Fry, Surrender on Demand, Johnson Books, 1997, 247-248 23 Oral history interview with Margaret Scolari Barr concerning Alfred H. Barr, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 1974 February 22-May 13, Tape 2, Side 3 http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-margaretscolari-barr-concerning-alfred-h-barr-13250 24 Max Ernst, Letter to Jimmy Ernst, 27th October 1941, in Jimmy Ernst, A Not So Still Life, St. Martin’s Press, 1984, 170 25 Varian Fry, Letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, Varian Fry papers, courtesy of Columbia University, 27th June 1940 26 Franklin Roosevelt, Memorandum to Eleanor Roosevelt, Selected Digitized Documents Related to the Holocaust and Refugees, 1933-1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum, OF3186, Political Refugees, July – Sept 1940, 3rd July 1940 27 Mildred Adams, Emergency Rescue Committee Letter to Varian Fry, 3rd August 1940, Varian Fry papers, courtesy of Columbia University 28 Robert D. Parmet, The Master of Seventh Avenue: David Dubinsky and the American Labor Movement, New York University Press, 2005, pp. 193-194 29 Emergency Rescue Committee, Lives, Publicity Brochure, 1941 30 Varian Fry, Notes for a Meeting with Ambassador Bullitt, ND, Varian Fry papers, courtesy of Columbia University 31 Varian Fry, Letter to William Stone, 21st July 1940, Varian Fry papers, courtesy of Columbia University 32 Varian Fry, Surrender on Demand, Johnson Books, 1997, xiii 33 Frank Bohn speaking to Fry. Varian Fry, Surrender on Demand, Johnson Books, 1997, 11

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John Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect, Harper, 1950, 146. Cited in: Joseph E. Persico, Roosevelt’s Secret War, Random House 2001, 97 35 Joseph E. Persico, Roosevelt’s Secret War, Random House 2001, 11-12 36 Ibid, 16 37 Ibid, 18 38 William Samuel Stephenson, British Security Coordination: the Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas, 1940 – 1945, Fromm International 1999, xxv. H. Montgomery Hyde, The Quiet Canadian, Constable, 1989, 26 39 Gordon Thomas, Greg Lewis, Shadow Warriors of World War II: The Daring Women of the OSS and SOE, Chicago Review Press, 2017, 65 40 Hoover’s initial enthusiasm for the office for British Security Coordination would turn to outright hostility when “Wild Bill” Donovan’s office was established. It became clear to Hoover that because the FBI had no mandate for gathering overseas intelligence, Donovan’s OSS would retain access to the BSC, gaining powerful access to British Intelligence that Hoover coveted. BSC wholeheartedly helped to create American Military Intelligence. 41 Christopher Andrew, For the Presidents Eyes Only, HarperCollins, 1995, 92. Cited in: Joseph E. Persico, Roosevelt’s Secret War, Random House 2001, 96 42 William Dodd & Martha Dodd, Ambassador Dodd’s Diary 1933- 1938, Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1941. Cited in: Henry Feingold, The Politics of Rescue, Rutgers, 1970, 16 43 “The biggest cunt in the world.” Varian Fry, Letter to Stephen, 2nd March 1965 Varian Fry papers, courtesy of Columbia University 44 Varian Fry, Surrender on Demand, Random House, 1945, 30 45 Varian Fry, Letter to Lilian Mackey Fry, 3rd November 1930 Varian Fry papers, courtesy of Columbia University 46 Varian Fry, Assignment Rescue, Scholastic, 1968, 26 47 For full accounts of the escape see: Varian Fry, Surrender on Demand, Random House, 1945, pp. 57-71. Sheila Isenberg, A Hero of Our Own, Random House, 2001, pp. 76-79 48 Marta Feuchtwanger, Interviewed by Lawrence M. Weschler, An Emigre Life Volume III, Oral History Program University of California Los Angeles, The Regents of the University of California, The University of Southern California, 1976, 1036 49 Varian Fry, Assignment Rescue, Scholastic, 1968, 82 50 Marta Feuchtwanger, Interviewed by Lawrence M. Weschler, An Emigre Life Volume III, Oral History Program University of California Los Angeles, The Regents of the University of California, The University of Southern California, 1976, 1025-1026 51 Joseph Floch, Memories, Leo Baeck Institute Archives, LBI Memoir Collection. PID: 530293. Unpublished manuscript, 85 http://digital.cjh.org/view/action/singleViewer.do?dvs=1514834559275~534&loca le=en_US&VIEWER_URL=/view/action/singleViewer.do?&DELIVERY_RULE_ ID=6&frameId=1&usePid1=true&usePid2=true 52 Breckenridge Long, Letter to Franklin Roosevelt, Selected Digitized Documents Related to the Holocaust and Refugees, 1933-1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt

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Presidential Library & Museum, OF3186, Political Refugees, July – Sept 1940, 18th September, 1940 53 James McDonald, George Warren, Letter to Breckenridge Long, Selected Digitized Documents Related to the Holocaust and Refugees, 1933-1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum, OF3186, Political Refugees, Oct – Dec 1940, 24th September 1940 54 Eleanor Roosevelt, Letter to Franklin Roosevelt, Selected Digitized Documents Related to the Holocaust and Refugees, 1933-1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum, OF3816, Political Refugees, Oct – Dec 1940, 28th September 1940 55 James McDonald, George Warren, Memorandum to the President, Selected Digitized Documents Related to the Holocaust and Refugees, 1933-1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum, OF3186, Political Refugees, Oct – Dec 1940, 8th October 1940 56 Joseph Buttinger, Letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, Selected Digitized Documents Related to the Holocaust and Refugees, 1933-1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum, OF3186, Political Refugees, Oct – Dec 1940, 15th November 1940 57 Mary Jane Gold, Crossroads Marseilles, 1940. Doubleday, 1980, 258 58 Peggy Guggenheim, Confessions of an Art Addict, Ecco Press, 1997, 80 59 Varian Fry, Assignment Rescue, Scholastic, 1968, 124 60 New York Times, American Seized by French Police, New York Times, 1st Sept 1941, 3 61 Varian Fry, Assignment Rescue, Scholastic, 1968, 29 62 Varian Fry, Deposition, House Committee on Un-American Activities, Undated, page 6, Box 9, Varian Fry papers, courtesy of Columbia University. 63 Varian Fry, Assignment Rescue, Scholastic, 1968, 86 64 Mary Jane Gold, Crossroads Marseilles, 1940. Doubleday, 1980, pp 217-224 65 Harold Ickes, Letter to Frank Kingdon, Selected Digitized Documents Related to the Holocaust and Refugees, 1933-1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum, OF3186, Political Refugees, 1941, 26th February 1941 66 Alfred Barr, Introduction, in: Peggy Guggenheim, Confessions of an Art Addict, Ecco Press, 1997, 12-13 67 Peggy Guggenheim, Confessions of an Art Addict, Ecco Press, 1997, 80 68 Ibid, 86 69 Leonora Carrington, Down Below, NYRB Classics, 2017, 67 70 Mary Jane Gold, Crossroads Marseilles, 1940. Doubleday, 1980, 291 71 Hugh Fullerton, Letter to Varian Fry, Varian Fry papers, courtesy of Columbia University. 29th June 1941 72 Varian Fry, Telegram to Alfred Barr, Varian Fry papers, courtesy of Columbia University. 6th May 1941 73 Edward Pritchard, Letter to Varian Fry, Varian Fry papers, courtesy of Columbia University. 74 Frank Kingdon, Letter to Mrs. Fry, Varian Fry papers, courtesy of Columbia University. 25th October 1941

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New York Times, Leahy Takes Fry With Him Into Spain, New York Times, 7th Sept 1941, 31 76 Frank Kingdon, Letter to Mrs. Fry, Varian Fry papers, courtesy of Columbia University. 25th October 1941 77 Records of the Office of Strategic Services (Record Group 226), Entry UD 136A, Downes Papers. File 58 – Fry, Varian, Box 3. National Archives 78 Emilio Lussu quoted in Max Ascoli, Letter to Ingrid Warburg, Varian Fry papers, courtesy of Columbia University. 17th July 1941 79 Varian Fry, Deposition, Varian Fry papers, courtesy of Columbia University, August 1955 80 Oral history interview with Margaret Scolari Barr concerning Alfred H. Barr, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 1974 February 22-May 13, Tape 2, Side 3 http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-margaretscolari-barr-concerning-alfred-h-barr-13250 81 Alfred Barr, Introduction, in: Peggy Guggenheim, Confessions of an Art Addict, Ecco Press, 1997, 14 82 Margaret Scolari Barr, Our Campaigns: 1930-1944, In: The New Criterion Special Issue, Summer 1987

ELEPHANT

“It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant – it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery – and obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow.”1 George Orwell

A year before Varian Fry began his heroic mission to save Europe’s artists, President Roosevelt set a new course for American art. In a narrative that is punctuated by remarkable events, the opening of the new Museum of Modern Art building in New York on May 10th 1939, stands out as the seminal date on which the new intentions for American arts were promised by Roosevelt and his elite circle of allies from the close-knit world of the Washington D.C. propaganda community and New York’s bohemianbourgeoisie. This was the moment the individualist avant-garde became America’s official brand. America had been familiar with the idea of privately-owned, commercial museums for a century, with establishments like Rembrandt Peale’s American Museum in Baltimore, Moses Kimball’s Boston Museum, and P.T. Barnum’s Museum in New York. Now, in 1939, Nelson Rockefeller led the funding of a new building for MoMA, the New York establishment his mother Abby founded ten years earlier. In her mid-sixties, Abby relinquished her influence on the museum to Nelson, who was presented at the opening ceremony as its bright new star. Not only was the museum to be novel and at the heart of American art, architecture, design, and aesthetics, but it was to be a social centre for New York’s bohemianbourgeois aristocracy. Time magazine covered the story of the opening of the new museum in a seven-page spread that gushed adjectival triptychs of praise for the MoMA cohort. Nelson was the “brisk, hefty, sunny” leader of the new museum, while on the cover a full colour photograph of him had the title “From a Center to a Citadel” printed beneath it. Nelson was landlord of the new Time–Life building at Rockefeller Center, and the magazine was careful to pay its respect to him. Alfred Barr, MoMA’s director, was “young, lean, black-haired.” The museum’s staff of curators were “energetic,” “learned,” and “bright-eyed.” The crowd of six thousand attending the opening of the building was “swank, sober and

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glamorous,” including Grace Vanderbilt, Juan Negrin, the former Republican premier of Spain, and the sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Although they didn’t get adjectival glory, the board of trustees was a hyperbolic “galaxy of the enlightened rich.” 2 The opening ceremony for MoMA’s new building was a welladvertised event with powerfully influential speakers praising it and the institution it would house. Nelson asked President Roosevelt to broadcast an enthusiastic endorsement from the White House. Since 1933, Hitler and Roosevelt had been engaged in what Time magazine characterized as a “rhetorical battle.”3 When Hitler laid the cornerstone of his museum in 1933, Americans had been told by The New York Times that the House of German Art would be “… an act of homage to art such as the world has never seen before,” and that “… art can flourish only under the shelter of the State power.” Hitler’s special State commissar for German art, Adolf Wagner, said works of art based on blood and soil were “… something sacred for a people. But if our fellow Germans are to look on these works, they can do so reverently only when they find them in a setting, in a house, which itself corresponds to the greatness and loftiness of the German soul.” 4 The House of German Art was a spectacular building intended to provide a spiritual sanctuary for the German volk which would see itself reflected back in the art that revealed them to themselves. Austere and boxy, MoMA’s architecture couldn’t have been more of a contrast to the new House of German Art that Hitler opened in Munich in 1937. Unlike the minimal, simplified lines of the Bauhaus influenced exterior of MoMA, Hitler’s museum had a huge neo-classical façade of columns and an impressive staircase spanning the entire width of the building. And if the architecture of the buildings was dramatically different, so were the words of the two nations’ leaders in their addresses when announcing them and opening them. Hitler opened Germany’s great new museum with a pronouncement that German art would not indulge individualism but emphasize the unity of the volk. Roosevelt responded by embracing individualist avant-gardism as American art, and as an article of faith in the credo of liberal democracy. Hitler knew that American agencies were providing papers, aid, and passage to refugee artists, writers, and musicians, helping them to escape from his forces, commenting caustically on the runaways in July 1938, when he opened the third exhibit of Great German Art, “There is no room for any Neanderthal culture in the 20th century, no room for it at least in National Socialist Germany. We rejoice that the democracies are opening their progressive doors to these degenerated elements for, after all, we are not vindictive. Let them live, we do not mind! For all we care, let them work

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– but not in Germany!”5 America was not only the refuge for Hitler’s hated Jewish enemies, but it was prehistoric in its culture, subhuman, not rising to the cultural level of the perfected Aryan Homo sapiens which was to be found in Germany. The Los Angeles Times reported the speech to the American people under the header: “Hitler Says Democracies Welcome to Modern Artists.”6 The cultural battle lines had been drawn clearly. The remarks of the speakers at the MoMA opening were broadcast across America in an hourlong radio program over the NBC Blue Network and Station WOR. The Columbia Broadcasting System (later known as CBS) and the Mutual Network joined the program to air Roosevelt’s speech. Building anticipation for Roosevelt, MoMA’s freshly appointed President and principal donor, Nelson Rockefeller, began the show, tying the museum to a new species of artistic excellence and to the present, saying, “Our purpose is to show in the most representative way the best that American and foreign artists are doing today. The Museum of Modern Art represents the art of the past fifty years, a dynamic museum. There are plenty of splendid institutions that show the arts of the past — other ages than our own. The purpose of our talented director, Alfred Barr, is to keep the Museum always up-to-date.”7 The museum was presented as progressive, novel, and modern. Clearly, like Roosevelt, Rockefeller didn’t expect MoMA to keep up-to-date with all art, excusing it that task because the arts of the past – representational, academic, and traditional – were adequately represented in other galleries. Rockefeller meant that MoMA would keep up-to-date only with new art, institutionalizing and legitimizing it. “The Museum,” he said, “encourages the development of new ways of art to fit the changing conditions of the contemporary world, and displays the new principles of art to the public, thereby making them available for use and for the modernization of taste.” Rockefeller continued, “We present paintings and sculpture, architecture, industrial design, photography and the film of the past fifty years. The policy of the Museum is to acquire new works constantly — and always show the representative art of the past fifty years.”8 But 20th century art that was based on traditional techniques of representational oil painting and sculpture didn’t fit into the mold of the new museum, and its practitioners were to be ignored whether they painted within the last fifty years or not. The focus was to be on social realism and the individualist avant-garde. The fact that MoMA was forging ahead with exhibiting and actively promoting the individualist avant-garde as American art, and also defining its aesthetics and stretching the boundaries of what could be considered art – and all upon the international stage of government policy – was not lost

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on Robert Maynard Hutchins, the new President of the University of Chicago, founded in 1890 by John D. Rockefeller. Only thirty years old, and freshly appointed to his post that April, Hutchins was the youngest University President in America. He was fresh, and bright, and he was already making a name for himself as the public face and voice of the new, progressive American Academy. He understood publicity and marketing very well – in his first year at the university, he would give numerous interviews in magazines and newspapers, and make sixty-four public addresses, including many on the radio.9 Hutchins followed Rockefeller’s speech at the inauguration, describing MoMA’s innovative and revolutionary role as a dynamic institution that both displayed modern art and educated the public on how it should be regarded and appreciated, saying, “The Museum of Modern Art is a place of demonstration. It follows that the Museum of Modern Art is a place of action. A university, on the other hand, is a place for study, contemplation, and decision. Aesthetics, or the philosophy of art, is an important subject matter which no one will deny should be contemplated in a university. Perhaps the reason it is contemplated inadequately is that it is too difficult. The Greeks left the subject relatively unexplored because they considered an artist no different from a shoemaker. They were, therefore, unable to recognize in his production the symbol of beauty. It appears that it is difficult for us to think without the Greeks. The Museum of Modern Art is going ahead without the help of the universities and without the Greeks. It has recognized its double burden and its double privilege. It is making decisions about beauty as well as displaying beauty. It is also attempting to teach aesthetics. It knows that it is not enough to have exhibits. People have eyes and perceive. Perception can be taught. Perception is understanding.”10 In these extraordinary comments, Hutchins, Rockefeller’s anointed representative of the academy, announced to the nation that American universities no longer led the exploration of aesthetics, which was now placed in the hands of MoMA! Moreover, he declared America’s flagship art gallery was no longer attached to the ancient traditions of the West, nor founded upon Greek aesthetics. The Greeks couldn’t appreciate beauty! Freed of these restraints, MoMA was authorized to judge beauty and to create a new aesthetics. The “modernization of taste.” To exemplify this brand-new direction for Western art, next the popular culture genius, Walt Disney, spoke from California in support of the new museum, and commented upon the historic importance of film records to the future.11 Film had never before been considered as fine art, but MOMA was particularly interested in motion pictures from its opening, collecting this most popular of art-forms into an unprecedented archive of film.

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These authorities had prepared the ground for the climax of the hourlong broadcast. Now it was time for the performance of the nuptials of the museum and the state by the highest priest of the progressives – the President of the United States, who ceremonially announced the coming of the individualist American avant-garde. In direct contrast to Hitler, Roosevelt’s words were a clear statement of opposition to the art policies of the totalitarian governments flexing their muscles in Europe. If individualist bohemian-bourgeois art was a disgrace in Germany, America would embrace it as a symbol of personal liberty. The European war was about to begin and Roosevelt decided that America must compete with Germany on all fronts. This wasn’t just a museum opening, it was a declaration of U.S. government art policy, a wedding ceremony binding the individualist avant-garde to the state as American art, which would be delivered to the audience of the world through extensive propaganda campaigns. Coincidentally, on May 10th, 1940, the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, Belgium, and France – exactly one year to the day after MoMA held its opening ceremony. Roosevelt began with a clear statement that what would follow would be an official endorsement of the purpose of MoMA, placing the museum within the context of American political freedom, and deliberately positioning American art as the antithesis of totalitarian art. He declared, “When men dedicate a new edifice for a common enterprise, they are at once celebrating an achievement and announcing a purpose. They cannot refrain nor could they properly be excused from making clear what that purpose is. “From all that has been said by the speakers to whom we have been listening tonight, the mission of this Museum is plain. We are dedicating this building to the cause of peace and to the pursuits of peace. The arts that ennoble and refine life flourish only in the atmosphere of peace. And in this hour of dedication, we are glad again to bear witness before all the world to our faith in the sanctity of free institutions. For we know that only where men are free can the arts flourish and the civilization of national culture reach full flower.” Now, Roosevelt dismissed Hitler’s art policies in Nazi Germany: “The arts cannot thrive except where men are free to be themselves and to be in charge of the discipline of their own energies and their own ardors. The conditions for democracy and for art are one and the same. What you and I call liberty in politics results in the long run in freedom in the arts. There can be no vitality in the works gathered together in a museum unless there exists the right of spontaneous life in the society in which the arts themselves are nourished.

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“A world that is turned into a stereotype, a society converted into a regiment, a life translated into a routine, make it difficult for either art or artists to survive at all. If you crush individuality in society, you crush art as well. If you nourish the conditions of a free life, you nourish the arts, also.” The Museum of Modern Art was to be a different kind of museum, an exemplary model of individualism, a temple of freedom. Roosevelt decreed, “In encouraging the creation and enjoyment of beautiful things, we are furthering democracy itself, and that is why this Museum is a citadel of civilization. As the Museum of Modern Art is a living museum, not a collection of curious and interesting objects, it can therefore become an integral part of our democratic institutions, it can be woven into the very warp and woof of our democracy.” Next, Roosevelt turned to the ways in which MoMA would lead the world, and how its art would be exhibited and appreciated in the West, with particular emphasis on the program of traveling exhibits that would carry new ideas across the country and exert a transformative influence upon the American public’s perception of what art should be. He dramatically expanded the description of what the boundaries of fine art were, including contemporary industrial design, architecture, housing, photography, printed books, illustration, advertisement, poster design, theatre, and movies. He continued, “Because it has been conceived as a national institution, the museum can enrich and invigorate our cultural life in every home by bringing the best of modern art to all of the American people. And this I am gratified to learn will be done through the traveling exhibitions of this new museum. It is most important that the museum make these traveling exhibits an essential part of its work. By this means the gap between the artists on the one side and American industry and the great American public on the other can be bridged, and most important of all, the standards of American taste will inevitably be raised by thus bringing into far-flung communities the results of the latest and finest achievements in all of the many arts. These traveling exhibits are going to extend the perspective of the general public, which too often has been accustomed to think of the fine arts as merely painting, or merely sculpture, but the proposed traveling exhibitions and nationwide shows will make all of our people, in the big communities and down into the small communities, increasingly aware of the enormous importance of contemporary industrial design and architecture of all kinds of buildings: homes and public buildings and business buildings and every other kind of building, and will include the great social art, housing, which by its very nature is one of the most formidable challenges to a democracy such as ours, and will include as well such arts as photography, the printed

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book, the illustration, the advertisement, the poster, the theater, and the moving picture. Thus, a nationwide public will receive a demonstration of the force and the scope of all of these branches of the visual arts, things that you and I can see with our eyes.” 12 And MoMA would immediately deliver modernism in spectacular style! In January 1940, the museum’s Bulletin reported having thirty-three touring exhibits on current display in twenty-eight venues scattered throughout the United States, including shows of works about and by a broad range of artists, architects, and designers. The Bauhaus, Frank Lloyd Wright, Modern American Houses, the Evolution of the Skyscraper, and other shows presented contemporary American modernist architecture, while individualist bohemian-bourgeois art was represented in prints by Georges Roualt, Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, and a collection titled ‘Small Paintings by Modern Artists.’ While these shows were shipped all over America, MoMA mounted an exhibit with the pragmatic title ‘Useful Objects Under Ten Dollars,’ including the best of modernist design to be found in the stores of New York.13 Having dramatically broadened the scope of what would be considered art in the United States, Roosevelt drew attention to MoMA’s relationship with the Federal Art Project – part of the Works Progress Administration he established as one of the series of emergency relief programs begun in 1933 to provide employment to artists throughout the country. Again, he underscored the difference between the free, democratic nature of American art in contrast to the repressive state of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, claiming the Federal Art Project’s artists spoke for the people – they were paid by the government, but unfettered in their expression. And alongside his endorsement of the individualist avant-garde, he laid American culture at the feet of MoMA. Roosevelt declared American artists were free: “Art in America has always belonged to the people, it has never been the property of an academy or a class. The great Treasury projects, through which our public buildings today are being decorated are an excellent example of the continuity of this tradition. The Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration is a practical relief project to take care of people who otherwise would starve, a relief project that also emphasizes the best tradition of the democratic spirit. The WPA artist in almost every state and county of this community is rendering his own impression of things. He is speaking also for the spirit of his fellow countrymen throughout the nation. And so, I think that the WPA artist exemplifies with great force the essential place that the arts as a whole have in this democratic society of ours.”

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But Roosevelt knew he was about to shut down the projects, and now he described the weaponization of avant-garde art as propaganda for his own people, saying, “In the future, we must seek more widespread popular understanding and appreciation of all of these arts. Many of our great cities provide of course the facilities for such appreciation, but we all know that because of their lack of size and their lack of riches the smaller communities are in most cases denied this opportunity. And that, my friends, is why I am giving special emphasis to the need of giving to these smaller counties and communities the visual chance to get to know modern art.” Modern art – individualist avant-garde art – was going to be taught at new art centers throughout the country. He continued emphatically, “As in our democracy, we enjoy the right to believe in different religious creeds, or in none at all, so can American artists express themselves with complete freedom. Complete freedom from the strictures of dead artistic traditions, or political ideology. While our American artists have discovered a new obligation to the society in which they live, these artists have no compulsion to be limited in method, or limited in the manner of their expression. The opportunity before this Museum of Modern Art is just as broad as the whole of the United States. I trust that the fine example that this institution is affording will be widely copied throughout the land and that the good work will continue, until the influence of the best and the noblest in the fine arts will permeate every community in the nation that we call the United States.” 14 The leader of the free world had spoken. America’s President and Commander-in-Chief, Franklin Roosevelt, had officially endorsed modernism, and stated his intention that it would be disseminated throughout the country. John Dewey’s egalitarian ideas were to be taught as doctrine in Works Progress Administration art centres throughout the country. Modern art was American art and MoMA was its flagship. The speech was entirely intended to steer American art on the path of the new avant-gardism for its propaganda value. Further, Roosevelt had announced his public disdain, and by extension, the American people’s disdain, for “dead artistic traditions.” The President’s words about the difficulty faced by artists in expressing their individuality applied equally well to Americans employed by the Federal Art Project as it did to Nazi and communist artists. Roosevelt had had a change of heart about deploying art. Journalists took note. Within a month, the patriotic art critic Edward Alden Jewell, who served in the Chemical Warfare Service, published his book Have we an American Art, centred on the direction art was taking, and rightly criticized the projects. He remarked, “A people’s art cannot be ordered and paid for like the portrait of a bogus ancestor invented by a nouveau-riche nobody with social

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pretensions to hang above the bogus armorial shield on a fake Tudor or Queen Anne fireplace.”15 The President defined American modernism as the novel antithesis of the art of her enemies, who were mired in tradition. But his speech included disturbing echoes of communist thought – there are loud echoes of Trotsky’s hyperbole in Roosevelt’s insistence upon the artists’ “Complete freedom from the strictures of dead artistic traditions, or political ideology.” This was reminiscent of Trotsky’s insistence of the state’s authority over artists, “while holding over them all the categorical criterion, for the revolution or against the revolution, to give them complete freedom in the sphere of artistic self-determination.”16 Like Russian artists, who Trotsky claimed had complete freedom of expression as long as their work made no criticism of the revolution, American artists were free to create anything, as long as their work filled the prescription of individualist avantgardism, and the MoMA agenda. And surely American leftists could not help but recognize the allusion to the communist anthem the Internationale in Roosevelt’s address. Communists sang, “No more tradition’s chains shall bind us, Arise, you slaves, no more in thrall!” This was a time when families nestled about radio sets to listen to their avuncular President with patriotic attention. Now, the nation knew the individualist avant-garde was enthusiastically endorsed by their government, represented by the President himself; by American industry and the elite embodied in Rockefeller; by Disney, the iconic leader of American popular entertainment; and by a young, prestigious, and energetic leader of the American academy, who had surrendered authority to MoMA’s coup over the art of the West. The ideas the speakers expressed were in harmony with Dewey’s fundamentally socialist aesthetics, which were embraced by his young friend, the museum’s director Barr. The Museum of Modern Art was not the nationalistic shrine the Louvre or the British Museum were – while those institutions were treasure houses for collections of the spoils of war and glorified the triumphant accomplishments of nations, MoMA was a shrine to American individualism, revealing genius artists as the outcome of liberal democracy. Deploying its exhibits across America, MoMA would be an active agency, bringing the art of the people to the people, because art would be a part of the daily life of all Americans – the art experience was proletarian, not elitist. Finally, following the principles of Dewey’s book Art and Experience, ‘primitive’ art was embraced as a true, democratic, American form of art – both the naïve paintings of untrained limners, and the traditional art of native Americans were to be well represented in exhibits at MoMA, which was keen to establish the hereditary roots of the new hybrid American art brand.

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If, in the past, these had been cast in second place to the high art that depended upon the ancient Western aesthetic tradition, now they were consecrated ex cathedra by the ordained high priests of American art. Although aristocratic Roosevelt did not personally endorse the individuals leading American art in its new direction, Rockefeller elevated Barr as the exemplary director of MoMA, and emphasized his commitment to keeping exhibits always new, always fresh. Barr was the right man for the job. He taught the first course on individualist avant-garde art ever offered at a university – Tradition and Revolt in Modern Painting – at Wellesley College in 1926. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Modern Art and Cubism, but hadn’t submitted it because he was hired by the Museum of Modern Art as its director. He was aged only twenty-seven when he took the position. Because of the success of the museum, he would have an extraordinary and unassailable influence on the course of American art, so much that he has been described as the ‘inventor of modernism.’ Barr’s thought was in complete harmony with the principal speakers at the opening ceremony. He believed art should have no boundaries – paintings, motion pictures, furniture, and sculpture were to be included in the museum under his direction. The museum should always exhibit new forms of art and architecture, and it should emphasize American art. Barr had seen, at first hand, the oppression of the Jews in Nazi Germany, and abhorred it. His firm commitment to the museum’s service within the nascent propaganda machine of the U.S. government was the consequence of his experiences in Germany between January and May 1933. By mid-August, The New York Times was still reporting on the broadcast, squeezing as much propaganda value out of it as possible. Barr wrote a press release describing MoMA’s new acquisitions of four paintings and a sculpture by exiled European artists displayed in the Art in our Time exhibit. In it, he claimed the artists Henri Matisse, André Derain, Ernst Kirchner, Paul Klee, and Wilhelm Lehmbruck were all “condemned by the Nazis.” In fact, in 1939, Matisse was living in the south of France where he spent his time in bed painting and drawing, tolerated by the Vichy government. Fry offered escape, but Matisse was sanguine about his safety. His friend Derain stayed in occupied Paris, where, far from being condemned by the Nazis, he enjoyed their attention. They encouraged him to travel to Berlin to see an exhibit of Arno Breker’s sculpture – and after the war he was publicly castigated for collaborating with the enemy. The mentally unstable and physically fragile bohemian Kirchner was dead, having killed himself at his home in Switzerland in 1938. Fired by the Nazis from his teaching position at the Bauhaus, Klee returned to his native Switzerland, indeed a victim of Nazi persecution. Lehmbruk had committed

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suicide in 1919, when the Nazi Party was not even a fantasy in the mind of Adolf Hitler. Regardless of these inaccuracies, Jewell wrote an article affirming Barr’s press release titled The Creative Life Vs. Dictatorship, which provided a clear idea of how representational art was cast as the art of the enemy by American propaganda makers. Barr wrote, “Hitler’s taste in art is as reactionary as was that of Lenin in the Russian revolutions of twenty years ago,” and, “Hitler was at one time a painter of feeble and mediocre academic watercolors – a fact which seems permanently to have affected his taste.” Next, Jewell quoted Thomas Mann’s recently published propaganda booklet, The Coming Victory of Democracy, saying that although Hitler spoke authoritatively about art, intellect, sculpture, painting, and literature, his ideas were “nonsense” and “these ‘kultur’ orations are nothing but low and vulgar babble and that their only value is to prove how democracy degenerates when it loses the necessary influences of intellectual leadership.”17 Art was a weapon deployed against Hitler. War was about to begin in Europe, and because art was integral to Hitler’s vision of the rising of the Third Reich, MoMA was enlisted in American efforts to counter Joseph Goebbels’ impressive propaganda machine. The museum served not only as the provider of art and artists who embodied the nation’s liberal policy, but also produced documentary propaganda films for distribution around the world, exemplifying American freedom in contrast to Soviet and Nazi totalitarian oppression. The web of connections between personnel at MoMA, propaganda and intelligence agencies, and the U.S. military, with an enthusiasm for promoting specifically individualist avant-garde art was pervasive and undeniable. Museums interested in identifying and promoting individualist avant-garde art as American art were active and willing participants in Rockefeller’s propaganda machine at the office of the Coordinator of InterAmerican Affairs (CIAA), and the Office of War Information (OWI) – and agents crossed easily between the organizations. At MoMA, the web of East-coast elite relationships between powerful political influence, the U.S. military, propaganda, the press, and art were clear. The members of MoMA’s board in 1938 dovetailed with the U.S. government’s propaganda agencies. Conger Goodyear, MoMA’s President, was a First World War Colonel, and served as the representative of the United States Secretary of War. Board member Cornelius Bliss II was a member of President Wilson’s War Council in the First World War and chairman of the American Red Cross advisory council on war activities. His sister, Lillie P. Bliss, was one of MoMA’s founders. Trustee Mildred Barnes Bliss was chairman of the

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executive board of the Red Cross’ Woman’s War Relief Corps in France. In the Great War, Mildred’s husband Robert Woods Bliss, a trustee of Rockefeller's Museum of Primitive Art, served as secretary of the United States Embassy in Paris, and briefly as Chargé d’Affaires in the Netherlands. A career diplomat, by 1920 he was Acting Chief of the Division of Western European Affairs in the State Department, then in the following year, he became Third Assistant Secretary of State. He then became the U.S. Envoy to Sweden and served from 1923 to 1927, then U.S. Ambassador to Argentina until 1933. During the Second World War, he served as special assistant to U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Rockefeller’s man John ‘Dick’ Abbott was a key connection between the museum and the production of propaganda films for Rockefeller’s CIAA. He was director of MoMA’s film department. His wife, Iris Barry, was its curator. Together, they used the film library to help produce antiNazi propaganda for South American audiences during World War II, working closely with CIAA. After the war, René d’Harnoncourt, who became MoMA’s new director after Barr was sacked, worked for Rockefeller at both CIAA and the museum. The relationship between the museum and the press was comfortably assured. Stephen C. Clark served in the First World War as a lieutenantcolonel. A founding trustee of MoMA and chair of the board of trustees from 1939 – 1946, Clark owned three newspapers. Another founding board member and trustee, Francis Crowninshield, was the long serving editor of Vanity Fair. Marshal Field was founder of the Chicago Sun and the weekly magazine Parade, and owned PM, a liberal New York newspaper. In 1946, Parade had a circulation of 3.5 million. Board member Helen Lansdowne Resor was a famed advertising executive, married to Stanley Resor, President of J. Walter Thompson Company, one of the oldest and biggest advertising agencies in the world (in 1965, their son Stanley would become Secretary of the Army). Mabel Sheppard’s husband, John S. Sheppard, was an FM radio pioneer and owner of the Yankee News Service, and the Yankee Network of radio stations. Founder and honorary trustee, Mary Quinn Sullivan, was married to lawyer Cornelius J. Sullivan who was MoMA’s legal counsel until his death in 1932. Together, they amassed an impressive private collection of modern art including works by Amedeo Modigliani, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Georges Rouault, Vincent van Gogh, and Winslow Homer. Board member Edward Warburg served in the U.S. Army during World War II, and was a pioneering philanthropist and collector who bought paintings by Picasso directly from the artist’s studio. Board member William Paley was President of the ubiquitous broadcasting company CBS, which he turned into a formidable news

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gathering network. He served as a colonel in the Psychological Warfare Division of OWI during World War II, and after Hitler was defeated, and the Cold War began, he helped found the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Paley served on the board of MoMA’s International Program, chaired by ex-OSS man John Hay Whitney, a MoMA Vice-President and chairman of Selznick International Pictures from 1936 to 1940. During the Second World War, Whitney served as an OSS intelligence officer in occupied France, where he was captured by the Germans, but escaped from a POW transport train when it was strafed by allied planes.18 He became director of the CIAA Motion Picture Division, working for Nelson Rockefeller. Whitney achieved the rank of Colonel in the Army Air Force. Later, he served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom between 1956 and 1961.19 In 1958, John helped establish the Granary Fund, a CIA front for funnelling clandestine money to aid European organizations. His sister, Joan Whitney, also served on the board under the name of her husband, as Mrs. Charles S. Payson. The multimillionaire Julius Fleischman also served on MoMA’s International Program board, and allowed his name to be used to give credibility to the Farfield Foundation, now notorious as a CIA front funding abstract expressionism in Europe. Monied board member Paul Sachs was a partner in the family business Goldman-Sachs, and one of the founders of the museum. He was a curator at the Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard University. MoMA board member Duncan Phillips, who also happened to be the owner and director of the Phillips Collection Museum in Washington, D.C., the first museum of modern art in the United States, said that in the face of tyranny, “we must cling to our faith in art as the symbol of the creative life and as the stronghold of the free and aspiring individual.”20 Duncan’s son, Laughlin, served in the Second World War as an army intelligence officer, then joined the CIA, leaving the agency in 1966 to run his family museum as chairman of the board. Porter McCray was director of MoMA’s foreign activities under d’Harnoncourt’s authority. When pressed, he denied working for the CIA,21 however, MoMA curator Dr. Peter Selz commented that at the museum, McCray, “ran his own institution, which we didn’t know too much about … a C.I.A. kind of institution … he never told anybody what was going on. He had all kinds of connections ... To various countries and inside the Museum.”22 A former OSS operative himself, Selz served as MoMA’s curator of painting and sculpture from 1958-1965, and was outed as a CIA agent in 1968 when he moved to a new position at the University of California, Berkeley.

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The CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom contracted MoMA to organize major art exhibits promoting individualist avant-garde art as quintessential American art. Donald Jameson, Chief of the Soviet Division of the CIA’s Operations Directorate in the 1950s, explained the Agency’s strategic involvement in art: “Regarding Abstract Expressionism, I’d love to be able to say that the C.I.A. invented it just to see what happens in New York and downtown SoHo tomorrow! … But I think that what we did really was to recognize the difference. It was recognized that Abstract Expressionism was the kind of art that made Socialist Realism look even more stylized and more rigid and confined than it was. And that relationship was exploited in some of the exhibitions.” 23 The cosy relationship between U.S. propaganda agencies and MoMA grew stronger after the war. As a tried and tested tool, individualist avantgarde art and artists would have the American government’s enthusiastic support as long as they were on the side of the social democratic left without straying too far towards communism. The term “non-communist leftist” gradually became commonplace parlance at the State Department.24 The museum had to be properly positioned in line with its new role as the flagship of the official brand of the United States. In November 1940, Barr published the biggest Bulletin publication MoMA had ever put together, titled American Art and the Museum, defending its role as the champion of American art. From MoMA’s beginning, Barr had been an enthusiastic importer of European individualist avant-garde art and artists, rather than American primitivism, which was more within Holger Cahill’s world of interest. Now the Bulletin’s opening paragraphs disingenuously underscored the depth of the museum’s relationship to American art, and contrasted its open-minded tolerance against the exclusivity of the dictatorial European States. If the Nazis persecuted individualist avantgarde artists, MoMA would embrace them. The Bulletin began with an introduction identifying the opposition of American artistic liberty to Nazi and Soviet oppression, saying, “The Museum of Modern Art has always been deeply concerned with American art. But the Museum was founded upon the principle that art should have no boundaries, that paintings and motion pictures, furniture and sculpture from any country in the world should be shown in the Museum provided they were of superior quality as works of art. “This principle is of course in diametric opposition to the hysterically intolerant nationalism which has swept over half of Europe destroying the freedom of art along with the freedom of speech and religion. Fortunately, there are in this country only a few signs of such intolerance. Nevertheless, the Museum has at times been criticized for concerning itself overmuch with

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the art of foreigners, particularly foreigners who have produced disturbingly new forms, new kinds of pictures or architecture.”25 A remarkably detailed statistical survey of exhibits and works of art followed, providing a picture of a nationalist institution that was thoroughly in harmony with the U.S. government’s desire to promote itself as the home of free expression and creative liberty. The Bulletin bragged that since 1931, “the Museum of Modern Art has sent out nearly one hundred exhibitions which have been shown over a thousand times in 222 cities in the United States, Canada and Hawaii. These exhibitions have been so much in demand that it has been impossible to keep pace with requests for them, and in a number of instances duplicate exhibitions have been required.”26 The museum was repeatedly enlisted to show off the successes of the government’s art programs. In 1934, MoMA arranged an exhibition of approximately two hundred and fifty works created by artists in the Public Works of Art Project; in 1936, it mounted a show of architectural designs for government housing, and with Cahill’s assistance, Dorothy Miller curated a flagship exhibit titled New Horizons in American Art, including more than four hundred paintings, sculptures, and prints by artists of the Works Project Administration’s Federal Art Program, and renderings from the Index of American Design. The broadcast was a wedding announcement of the marriage of modern art to the American government, and the newlywed MoMA was proud of its place as the flagship of the establishment. Keen to underscore the cosiness of its relationship with the administration, MoMA trumpeted that it, “again and again collaborated with the Federal Government in the interests of American art and architecture.”27 In the spring of 1940, the museum granted $5000 toward the exhibition and educational program of the Work Projects Administration as a public gesture to emphasize the solidity of their relationship. MoMA put its money where its mouth was. Preceding and during the Second World War, Hitler made immense efforts to build an imperial architecture and culture to fulfil his vision of a spectacular new German Reich. Lenin and Stalin exerted their power to control and shape a distinguished Soviet culture in order to emphasize the superiority of their arts, and deployed them as a propaganda tool to seduce the West with alluring promises of financial support for artists, the provision of comfortable studios, and the chance to participate in building an ideal state. Hitler’s turnaround of the German economy impressed Western leaders facing similar economic problems during the worldwide depression. How would the United States counter what many Americans admired and praised without following national socialist or communist ideas about culture?

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Late to the game, in 1940, Francis Taylor, the newly appointed director of the Metropolitan Museum, told George Biddle, “We must overcome Nazi propaganda with positive, not negative, democratic propaganda.”28 As early as 1938, with the Three Centuries of American Art exhibit, Roosevelt and his government clearly recognized the propaganda value of opposing the arts policies of their enemies with individualist avant-gardism, responding to Hitler and Stalin with great emphasis upon the difference in their outlooks. In response to the steely grip of German and Russian policies wrapped around artistic expression, the anti-communist but leftist Roosevelt presented the opposite – in the United States, artists would have the liberty to invent whatever they wanted. The World War turned this theme into a staple of American propaganda that would endure for the rest of the century. Any protests against the government’s endorsement of the individualist avant-garde were swiftly condemned as reactionary and even pro-Nazi. The Bulletin pronounced, “As ignorant as Hitler and showing many of his prejudices about art, unwilling to learn anything from the history of such masters as Whistler and van Gogh, the reactionary groups have attacked many modern exhibitions throughout the country, including some sent out by the Museum. The Milwaukee Art Institute has in the past shown a dozen of the Museum’s most important traveling exhibitions, several of which were so vehemently assaulted that the Institute’s very existence was threatened but, be it said to their great honor, its Board of Trustees recently published the following resolution: ‘Resolved, that freedom of expression in art is akin to freedom of speech, of the press and of teaching ... and it shall continue to be the policy of the officers to guarantee that freedom in connection with its exhibitions; that it is precisely through such clash of conflicting ideas that art may be expected to develop … and that such clash of ideas should therefore be welcomed.’”29 In using MoMA to develop relationships within the highest levels of power in other countries, Nelson was following in his father’s footsteps. He was raised in a family that was in the habit of crafting its public image. A very early adherent to the use of propaganda, John D. Rockefeller hired the ground-breaking publicist Ivy Lee in June 1914 to shape public relations after a deadly Colorado strike. The entrepreneurial Lee exploited his relationship and accounts with the Rockefellers to establish his own firm, handling the public relations of the Pennsylvania railroad, a steel company, and New York’s Interborough Rapid Transit. But it was the Rockefeller family who would have his greatest attention for the next twenty-three years, and they truly valued his services. They paid him the impressive salary of a thousand dollars a month.30

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By 1940, Nelson was already accustomed to using individualist avantgarde art as propaganda to sell the freedom of the United States to other countries. Although initially reluctant to embrace full-scale propaganda as a weapon wielded in foreign affairs, in August, Roosevelt named Nelson as Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, leading the United States’ first propaganda agency within the continental Americas to combat the Nazi lie that was taking root south of the border. In establishing the CIAA with Rockefeller at its helm, Roosevelt followed the advice given by Edward Bernays: “The function of the propagandist is much broader in scope that that of a mere dispenser of information to the press. The United States Government should create a Secretary of Public Relations as member of the President’s Cabinet. The function of this official should be correctly to interpret America’s aims and ideals throughout the world, and to keep the citizens of this country in touch with governmental activities and the reasons which prompt them. He would, in short, interpret the people to the government and the government to the people. Such an official would be neither a propagandist nor a press agent, in the ordinary understanding of those terms. He would be, rather, a trained technician who would be helpful in analyzing public thought and public trends in order to keep the government informed about the public, and the people informed about the government. America’s relations with South America and with Europe would be greatly improved under such circumstances. Ours must be a leadership democracy administered by the intelligent minority who know how to regiment and guide the masses.”31 The agency promoted the arts, scheduled tours of ballet, theatre, and art exhibits, founded publishing companies, and organized conferences for academics from north and south to peddle American ideas and values. Its hefty initial budget of $3.5 million in 1938 swelled quickly to $38 million by 1943 – a giant leap from $10,000 a day to a startling $100,000 a day! The New York Times provided an article explaining that the agency was “… not really a government office, but a combination international bank, trade bureau, art gallery and propaganda office. It is something unique even for Washington.”32 To organize cultural affairs at CIAA, Rockefeller convened an Advisory Committee on Art, chaired by MoMA’s executive Vice-President Abbott. Stanton Catlin, who helped curate the Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art exhibition at the museum in 1940, served as its secretary. Alfred Barr served as a member of the Committee with Laurance Roberts, who had been appointed as Director of the Brooklyn Museums in 1938, and would serve as an Army Intelligence Captain during the war. They were joined by Juliana Force, Director of the Whitney Museum, Francis Taylor, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, George

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Valliant, Associate Curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and Grace Morley, Director of the San Francisco Museum. Morley claimed her museum’s respectably altruistic mission to help Latin American countries “to discover we are concerned deeply and sincerely with cultural things … will be a revelation … and furnish a basis of common understanding.”33 In 1941, Roosevelt formed more agencies to create domestic and foreign propaganda, consolidating them in 1943 as the Office of War Information, directed by Elmer Davis, which disseminated propaganda as leaflets, posters, and radio broadcasts, and worked with Hollywood to push American propaganda in movies. The famed curator Douglas MacAgy began his career planning propaganda for OWI in 1943, and was promoted to Chief of the Japan Section of the Propaganda Analysis Division. By 1945, Davis directed 11,000 operatives to missions abroad.34 The Office of Strategic Services ran covert warfare and secret operations, and also handled so-called ‘black’ propaganda. Operations were designed to deceive, to create disinformation, to feed the rumour mill that would undermine German authority, to cultivate a defeatist attitude, and to spread dissent among enemy soldiers and civilians.35 Though neither OWI nor OSS were active promoters of art, Nelson Rockefeller served on the committee that directed OWI’s news releases, radio, and motion picture propaganda, which fell under MoMA’s span of interests within its new cinema department. Nelson channelled money from the agencies he controlled to MoMA to fund traveling exhibits and motion picture projects. Within months of its establishment, the committee diverted large sums toward the museum, allocating $150,000 to MoMA to produce an exhibit to tour South America. Although the project fell apart, this was an indication of how cosy the relationship would be between the agency and the museum. When he wrote his annual report to the MoMA board in 1941, Barr dissembled about the museum’s role in national defence as a CIAA contractor, claiming that its exhibits for Latin America were simply friendly efforts to represent the U.S. as a good neighbour. He wrote that the museum’s participation was, “actually, a voluntary contribution made to the defence effort over and above the Museum’s normal activity.”36 This was an outright lie. Far from being a volunteer effort, the museum was reciprocating for $62,062.07 received from CIAA in that year alone.37 By the end of the war, MoMA would complete U.S. government projects worth $1,590,234, contracted by agencies including OWI, Rockefeller’s CIAA, and the Library of Congress.38 Adjusted for inflation, this represents commissions worth over $26,000,000 in 2023.

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In the middle of March 1941, Roosevelt opened another great museum, the National Gallery of Art. The contrast between it and MoMA couldn’t have been sharper. The new National Gallery housed a spectacular collection of Old Master paintings, icons, and sculptures in a fabulous neoclassical building on the Washington Mall, all donated by conservative Republican multi-millionaire and former Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon. Mellon’s initial donation of one hundred and twenty-six paintings and twenty-six sculptures formed the heart of a growing museum which accumulated an exceptional collection given by other philanthropists who recognized the scale and prestige of the gift and added their own art to the museum’s holdings. A further three hundred and seventy-five Italian paintings were donated by five and dime department store magnate Samuel Kress in time for the opening ceremony, which was attended by some 8,000 people. Roosevelt was asked to open the museum. Although the President expressed the gratitude of the nation, instead of speaking about the superb collection of traditional art that would be housed inside the new museum, he seized the opportunity of his nationally broadcast speech to emphasize the vitality of new American art. He commended the new building, but downplayed the collection, and emphasized the innovations of the present, “I think it signifies a relation – a new relation here made visible in paint and in stone – between the whole people of this country, and the old inherited tradition of the arts. And we shall remember that these halls of beauty, the conception of a great American architect, John Russell Pope, combine the classicism of the past with the convenience of today …” Then, ignoring the art of the past, and focusing upon the novelty and freshness of the new American aesthetic, Roosevelt firmly steered the attention of the gathered assembly to the success of the Federal Art Project, away from the art of old Europe, and toward the mission of identifying and promoting American primitive art made by and for the American public. He declared, “… recently, within the last few years – yes, in our lifetime – they have discovered that they have a part. They have seen in their own towns, in their own villages, in schoolhouses, in post offices, in the back rooms of shops and stores, pictures painted by their sons, their neighbors – people they have known and lived beside and talked to. They have seen, across these last few years, rooms full of painting and sculpture by Americans, walls covered with painting by Americans – some of it good, some of it not so good, but all of it native, human, eager, and alive – all of it painted by their own kind in their own country, and painted about things that they know and look at often and have touched and loved.” An exhibit titled ‘New Acquisitions: American Painting and Sculpture’ opened only days before at MoMA, March 10th.

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Next, Roosevelt reminded the people of Dewey’s principle that museums were no longer imperial treasure houses, but centres for egalitarian experiences of the present. The new art was fresh, strong, and alive, and above all, made by Americans in America. “The people of this country know now, whatever they were taught or thought they knew before, that art is not something just to be owned, but something to be made: that it is the act of making and not the act of owning that is art. And knowing this, they know also that art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all the living and creating peoples – all who make and build; and, most of all, the young and vigorous peoples who have made and built our present wide country.”39 Neither making any effort to discuss the great new collection the nation had been given, nor conceding any gratitude to the principal donor, the recently deceased Mellon, who Roosevelt detested, the speech was essentially a repetition of the endorsement of modernist novelty that Roosevelt had made only two years earlier for MoMA, promoting “complete freedom from the strictures of dead artistic traditions, or political ideology.” His comments clearly touched a nerve in Berlin. Irritated by the prestigious opening of yet another American art museum, two days before Christmas, Hitler told his dinner guests, “It occurs to me that already Linz Museum can bear comparison with no-matter-which museum in New York.”40 Inspired into action by the necessities of countering violent assassination attempts, and recognizing the power of foreign and domestic propaganda, and espionage, Roosevelt deliberately steered his administration into the subtleties of using the new individualist avant-garde to compete with Stalin, Goebbels, and Hitler. He had learned how effective propaganda could be from the Creel Committee, from the Russians, from the Nazis, and through his own formidable propagandists Charles Michelson and Louis Howe, doubtlessly careful readers of the writings of American masters like Edward Bernays and George Creel, whose innovative books on their techniques were published in the late twenties and early thirties. In public, Roosevelt would make use of individualist avant-garde art, but at home, his taste was very specific and conservative. He gathered a large collection of prints and a smaller number of paintings almost entirely devoted to naval battles, ships at sea, and portraits of important ship’s captains and officers who had played important roles in naval history, reflecting his deep love of the ocean, and doubtlessly inspired by his service as Secretary of the Navy. In the Oval Office, he surrounded himself with his favourite prints and paintings of ships at sea, landscapes from the Hudson River valley, and a portrait of Eleanor. But in the catalogue of Roosevelt’s collection there is a solitary, jarring exception to the traditional art he enjoyed. It was a heavy, blocky,

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abstracted sculpture, which stood out for its complete inconsistency with the rest of the works the President collected. The story of how it came to him revealed the private contempt Roosevelt felt for the modern art he endorsed in public. In 1915, Roosevelt visited the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, where he saw a beautiful neo-classical sculpture of a nude woman in an attitude of prayer by artist Ralph Stackpole. It was a delicate study of grace and humility, perfectly proportioned and crafted with the light touch of a skilled master. Roosevelt was deeply moved by the piece, which he described as “a delightful composition.”41 It was “a conception of youthful feminine beauty and spirituality which had always lingered in his mind.”42 Twenty-three years later, still haunted by his memory of the sculpture, the President contacted Stackpole through friends to ask if he might buy a copy for his Hyde Park home. Stackpole was delighted, but because the original had been crafted in plaster, it had long ago deteriorated and crumbled as the result of years standing exposed in the Pacific winds and fogs. He offered to create a new version of the work in travertine. The President agreed. Despite pestering from Roosevelt’s friends who brokered the deal, five more years would pass until 1943, when Stackpole finally announced he had completed the new version. The sculpture was carefully crated and dutifully shipped across the country, and the President was “all eagerness and curiosity” in anticipation when it finally arrived at Hyde Park. The wooden panels of the crate were broken open, but instead of the graceful, humble figure Roosevelt had imagined, the sculptor reinvented the piece in his new modernist style. Where there had once been elegance and light, now there was heaviness and bulk. Roosevelt’s personal secretary, William Hassett, described the sculpture as “a huge hulk of a female” with “hands hanging down like great hams, to which were attached square fingers – modernist in every aspect.”43 The perfect proportions and gentle grace of the original had been replaced by a chunky mass owing far more to Diego Rivera than to Phidias. By chance, a small bronze model of Stackpole’s graceful original was found and gifted to the President, perhaps giving him some consolation. The President hated the “huge hulk” so much that he immediately ordered it hidden behind trees in the grounds of his home, where it remained neglected until 2015, when it was rescued and restored by presidential library staff. Now, prominently displayed in the library, the sculpture’s position misleadingly gives the impression that Roosevelt admired it. Roosevelt’s embrace of the individualist avant-garde was entirely a matter of political expediency. His public endorsement painted America as

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the exemplar of creative freedom. He bore the banner of the individualist avant-garde in opposition to the oppression of his totalitarian enemies. This was a deliberate and impersonal choice made as a strike in the battle for the ‘third front’ of public opinion, weaponizing art to persuade the world that liberty was the heart of the United States. This third front was where what Lasswell described as “the war of ideas on ideas” was fought.44 By validating individualist avant-gardism as America’s brand, Roosevelt established an art policy that would stand well into the Cold War. The American avant-garde was a tool of the establishment, in service to the American state, just as Nazi idealism served in Germany, just as Soviet socialist realism served in Russia. The defining principle of the American individualist avant-garde in the 20th century was its use as a political weapon. This was the avant-garde elephant.

Notes 1 George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant, in: A Collection of Essays by George Orwell 1903-1950, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1953, 152 2 Art: Beautiful Doings, Time Magazine, Monday, May 22, Vol. XXXIII No. 21, 1939, 82-89 3 National Affairs, In: Time Magazine, May 8, 1939, Vol. 33, No. 19, 11 4 Guido Enderis, Nazis Glorify Art That is ‘Germanic,’ In: New York Times, 15th October 1933, E2 5 Adolf Hitler, Speech at the Great Exhibition of German Art, Munich, July 10, 1938. 10th July 1938 6 Hitler Says Democracies Welcome to Modern Artists, Los Angeles Times, Jul 11, 1938, 5 7 Sarah Newmeyer, Museum of Modern Art Press Release. President Roosevelt Discusses Importance Of Modern Art In Contemporary World On Radio In Connection With Opening Of New Building. 10th May, 1939, MOMA Press Archives. https://www.moma.org/learn/resources/press_archives/1930s/1939/1 8 Sarah Newmeyer, Museum of Modern Art press release. Nelson A. Rockefeller Becomes New President of Museum of Modern Art, MOMA Press Archives. 8th May 1939 https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_archives/486/releases/M OMA_1939_0017_1939-05-08_39508-17.pdf?2010 9 Office of the President, Robert Maynard Hutchins. The University of Chicago Website. Accessed 5th January 2016. https://president.uchicago.edu/directory/robert-maynard-hutchins 10 Sarah Newmeyer, President Roosevelt Discusses Importance Of Modern Art In Contemporary World On Radio In Connection With Opening Of New Building. Museum of Modern Art Press Release, MOMA Press Archives. 10th May, 1939

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https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_archives/509/releases/M OMA_1939_0040_1939-07-24_39724-34.pdf?2010 https://www.moma.org/learn/resources/press_archives/1930s/1939/1 11 “It was only four years ago that there was considerable talk about the real need for this film library, and tonight it’s an accomplished fact. I believe at the time it was said what a profound tragedy it would be if the record of motion pictures was lost to posterity. The human critter just naturally can’t swallow the thought of himself and life’s work passing into oblivion completely. I understand that’s why those kings of Egypt built their tombs, the pyramids, to last forever. And the fascination of the past has drawn millions to the pyramids for a look. But think how much more interesting, if we had motion picture records of the actual building of the pyramids, if we could see and hear those old kings buried. “How would you like to watch Nero fiddling while Rome burned? Well, our film library will be on the right side of the ledger there. And think of the knowledge we’ll give posterity — the way we talk and dress and act — and the ladies’ hats, especially! And perhaps a thousand years from now or some far time when our world is ruled by tolerance and reason — posterity will delve into these film archives of today and see great cities ruled by gangsters — see the insane savagery of war — and perhaps the world will be so changed that our tragedies will seem strange — unbelievable — incredible! And that will make posterity feel superior — a very pleasant feeling — a gift from us.” Walt Disney commenting on the opening of MoMA, in: Sarah Newmeyer, President Roosevelt Discusses Importance of Modern Art In Contemporary World On Radio In Connection With Opening of New Building, Museum of Modern Art Press Release, MOMA Press Archives. May 10, 1939 12 Franklin D. Roosevelt, Radio Dedication of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, May 10, 1939. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15761 13 Circulating Exhibitions. In: Circulating Exhibitions. The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 6 (6). The Museum of Modern Art: January 1940. 12 http://www.jstor.org/stable/4057918. 14 Franklin D. Roosevelt, Radio Dedication of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, May 10, 1939. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15761 15 Edward Alden Jewell, Have we an American Art? Longmans Green and Company, 1939, 196-197 16 Leon Trotsky, Art and Revolution, Pathfinder, 1970, 102 17 Jewell, Edmund, The Creative Life Vs. Dictatorship, In: The New York Times, 13th August, 1939, X, 7 18 Allies Confirm Escape of Col. ‘Jock’ Whitney, The New York Times, 15th September 1944, 21 19 Congressional Record – Senate, February 9, 1982, pp. 1210-1211 20 Harry Sylvester, America’s First Modern Art Collection, Voice of America script, April 6, 1955. Cited in: Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists – Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy, Columbia University Press, 2015, 169 21 David R. Beasley, Douglas MacAgy and the Foundations of Modern Art, Davus, 1998, 25

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Sharon Zane, Interview with Peter Selz, MoMA Archives Oral History: P. Selz, 14th Feb 1994, 22 https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/learn/archives/transcript_selz.p df 23 Frances Stonor Saunders, Modern Art was CIA ‘Weapon,’ In: The Independent, 22nd October, 1995 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon1578808.html 24 Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe. The Free Press, Collier MacMillan, 1989 Kindle Loc. 1022-29 25 American Art and the Museum. In: The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, 8.1 1940, 1 26 Art for the Nation, In: The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, 7. 5, The Museum of Modern Art, September 1940, 3 http://www.jstor.org/stable/4057975 27 American Art and the Museum. In: The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, 8.1 1940, 18 28George Biddle diary transcript, 1933-1941, June 24th 1940. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 106 http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/viewer/george-biddle-diary-transcript14231/39183 29 Art for the Nation, In: The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, 7. 5, The Museum of Modern Art, September 1940, 6 http://www.jstor.org/stable/4057975 30 Scott M. Cutlip, The Unseen Power – Public Relations, a History, Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994, 58 31 Edward Bernays, Propaganda, IG Publishing, Kindle Highlight Loc. 1518-27, 32 James B. Reston, Our Second Line of Defense, In: New York Times, 29th June, 1941, SM7 33 David R. Beasley, Douglas MacAgy and the Foundations of Modern Art, Davus, 1998, 22 34 William Benton, Letter to Cordell Hull (November 5, 1948). Benton, William. Papers [Box# 273, Folder# 3), Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. 35 Alan Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad. University Press of Kansas, 2006, 30 36 Alfred Barr, The Year’s Work: In: Annual Report to the Board of Trustees and Members of the Museum of Modern Art for the Year July 1, 1940 - June 30, 1941, William E. Rudge’s Sons, December 1941, 23 37 Olga Ulloa-Herrera, The U.S. State, the Private Sector and Modern Art in South America 1940-1943, George Mason University, 2014, 331 38 The Minutes of the Sixteenth Annual General Meeting of the Board of Trustees and Members of the Corporation of the Museum of Modern Art, The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, XII, no. 3, September 1946, 5

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Franklin D. Roosevelt, Address at the Dedication of the National Gallery of Art., March 17, 1941. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=16091 40 Hugh Trevor-Roper, Trans. Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, Hitler’s Table Talk, Enigma, 2000, 80 41 Jesse Lilienthal, Unreal its Peace, Unpublished journal, Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, Hyde Park, NY. 1943 42 William D Hassett, Off the Record with FDR 1942 – 1945, Enigma Books, 2016, 26 43 William D Hassett, Off the Record with FDR 1942 – 1945, Enigma Books, 2016, 27 44 Harold Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in the World War, Peter Smith, 1927, 12

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INDEX

16th century 87 17th century 281 18th century 1, 7, 97, 207, 225, 281 19th century 1, 6, 9, 12, 13, 21, 23, 42, 50, 61, 82, 85, 97, 102, 107, 207, 219, 220, 233, 237, 249, 261, 263, 264, 266, 269, 270, 274, 280, 281, 283, 291, 294, 298, 311, 312 20th century 45, 51, 85, 115, 131, 137, 175, 180, 221, 224, 229, 300, 301, 311, 313, 334, 339, 359, 360, 379, 384, 385 21st century 95, 232, 267, 279, 289 291 Gallery 300 Aba-Novák, Vilmos 297 Abbott, John “Dick” 369 absinthe 71 abstract 46, 49, 50, 51, 104, 108, 150, 155, 156, 172, 173, 177, 178, 219, 221, 225, 226, 227, 228, 254, 278, 291, 292, 294, 298, 302, 310-314, 378 abstract expressionism 370, 371 abstractionists 172, 228, 310, 312 academic freedom 322 Académie des Beaux-Arts 64 Académie Julian 305 academy 6, 14, 103, 114, 136, 241, 252, 295, 302, 316, 338, 361, 364, 366, 383, 389 Academy of Artistic Sciences 109 activists 28, 31, 39, 48, 288, 308, 313, 327, 330 ad nihilo 313 Adams, Mildred 329, 354 Adler, Bertha 338 Adler, Egon 338 Adorno, Theodor 281, 289, 383

advertisement 253, 363, 364 aesthete 6, 53, 79, 237 aesthetic 9, 13, 31, 35, 37, 38, 42, 43, 48, 54, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 155, 156, 163, 180, 187, 220, 223, 224, 247, 248, 257, 261, 263, 269, 272, 281, 283, 285, 298, 299, 304, 306, 330, 358, 360, 361, 366, 367, 376, 383, 390 African 190, 225 Airborne Division War Memorial Museum 273 Akademie der Bildenden Künste, München (Academy of Fine Arts, Munich) 302 AKhRR (The Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia) 108, 109, 110, 115, Alaska 320, 321 Albro, Maxine 202, 205, 213, 215218 alchemy 207 alcohol 5 Alexis, Paul 17 Algeria 45, 320 Allen, Jay 349 Allied Artists of America 151 ambition 7, 15, 311, 347 American avant-garde 224, 278, 295, 306, 307, 315, 379 American Colony School 238 American Communist Party 140, 142, 308 American Federation of Artists 146 American Federation of Labor (AFL) 333, 334, 342

Kitsch, Propaganda, and the American Avant-Garde American Folk Art: Art of the Common Man in America 163, 226 American Friends for German Freedom 328 American Magazine of Art 146 American Museum in Baltimore 358 American Museum of Natural History 375 American Painting and Sculpture 1862–1932 163, 226 American Red Cross 326, 332, 368 American revolution 23, 32, 50, 143, 386 American revolutionary 26, 196 American Scene 149, 154, 155, 165, 167, 171, 172, 210, 227, 232 American Sources of Modern Art 163, 226 amorality 3, 244 amusement 13, 15, 71, 253 anarchism 53, 96, 105, 106, 294, 299, 305, 316, 383, 388 anarchist 13, 39, 78, 105, 108, 114, 123, 124, 125, 127, 207, 294, 298, 299, 300, 314, 316 anarchy 78, 84, 85, 88-90, 96, 105, 115, 298, 312, 316, 383, 387 Anderson, Margaret 149, 160, Angola 320, 321 Angrand, Charles 299 Anschluss 231 Anthroposophist 301 anti-Semitic 206, 234, 235, 236, 244, 246, 250, 252, 267, 306, 324, 326, 349 anti-Semitism 252, 276, 279, 281, 323, 324, 336, 384 Antipope Benedict XIV (Garnier, Bernard) 14 antiquarian 41 antiquity 44, 68, 70, 292 Apelles 292 Aphrodite 70, 270, 271, 272

393

Apollinaire, Guillaume 292, 294, 299, 310, 311, 314, 383 Apollo 87, 261 architecture 13, 30, 31, 50, 51, 58, 74, 111, 115, 116, 131, 134, 189, 229, 242, 252, 279, 358, 359, 360, 363, 364, 367, 372, 383, 384 Arendt, Hannah 337 argot 5 aristocracy 1, 9, 11, 27, 55, 72, 85, 101, 102, 103, 104, 165, 358 aristocrat 9, 39, 46, 111, 197, 306, 319 aristocratic 2, 13, 25, 26, 28, 36, 50, 61, 94, 143, 154, 162, 171, 186, 235, 269, 283, 367 Armory show 150, 295, 299 Armstrong, Hamilton 326, 354 Arnautoff, Victor 205, 216, 218, 385 art commission 202, 206, 212, 218 art history 41, 79, 114, 226, 314 art of the enemy 220, 278, 288, 307, 368 Art of This Century 352 art-for-art’s-sake 53, 54, 79, 104, 284, 285, 298, 299 Artists Union 145, 151, 154, 160, 172, 173 Aryan 230, 236, 238, 242, 246, 247, 250, 252, 254, 260, 275, 281, 288, 323, 360 ascetic 35, 36, 44, 50, 54, 285 asceticism 304 Ascoli, Max 330, 357 Ashcan School 170, 295 Astor, Vincent 335 Astruc, Zacharie 11 ateliers 5, 17, 90 Athena 70, 260, 271 Austria 46, 182, 206, 229, 241, 283, 288, 319, 324, 328, 330, 334, 338, 341 authentic 224, 309, 339 authenticity 226, 280, 293,

394 authoritarian 13, 39, 50, 82, 104, 130, 135, 175, 246, 304 Auvray, Louis 62, 64, 66, 73, 74, 75, 384 avant-garde 11, 13, 23, 24, 25, 29, 31, 32, 36, 43, 51, 52, 55, 86, 103, 108, 109, 111, 114, 138, 150, 165, 166, 170, 172, 173, 175, 178, 220, 224, 228, 245, 278, 279, 287, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 302, 304, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314, 315, 320, 325, 352, 353, 358, 360, 362, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 371, 373, 374, 377, 379, 386 Avant-Garde Theater 296 Avenue de l’Opera 8 Avenue Montaigne 95 Azores 332 Aztec 186, 189, 190 Baille, Baptistin 15, 17, 21 Baker, Julian 137, 203, 217, 218 Bakunin, Mikhail 108, 127 Ball, Dick 339 Ballin, Hugo 169, 170, 177 Balthus 264 Barbizon 62 Barcelona 215, 336, 351 Barnum Museum 358 Barnum, P.T. 358 Barr, Alfred 149, 152, 153, 159, 160, 163, 176, 199, 220, 225, 226, 228, 229, 233, 300, 306, 317, 321, 322, 323, 330, 331, 334, 350, 352, 354, 356, 357, 358, 360, 366, 367, 368, 369, 371, 374, 375, 381, 384, 387 Barr, Margaret 321, 322, 323, 330, 331, 352, 353, 354, 357 Barrault, Émile 30, 31, 33, 38 Barry, Iris 369 Barton, Bruce 187, 200 Bastiat, Frédéric 84, 85, 97, 384 Bastille 2, 125

Index Batignolles 10, 11 16, 84, 96 Batignolles Group 10 Batiza, Ignacio 183 Battle of Austerlitz 41, 22 Battle of Sedan 94 Baudelaire, Charles 8, 12, 13, 19, 20, 71, 76, 89, 286, 287, 297, 384 Bauhaus 114, 252, 279, 304, 305, 322, 338, 359, 364, 367 Baumgartner, Thomas 265 Bazard, Amand 28 Bazille, Frédéric 11 beard 3, 8, 11, 12, 14 beautiful 14, 18, 37, 38, 51, 54, 58, 65, 67, 69, 70, 71, 79, 88, 89, 94, 105, 111, 146, 171, 187, 229, 242, 244, 261, 271, 284, 285, 288, 292, 299, 338, 344, 363, 378 beauty 14, 37, 38, 44, 54, 55, 70, 71, 86, 87, 88, 90, 108, 111, 155, 167, 222, 229, 230, 234, 244, 247, 248, 284, 287, 361, 376, 378 Benjamin, Walter 281, 325, 289 Bennett, Arnold 207 Benton, Thomas 171, 177, 227 Bergamín, José 319 Bergerac, Cyrano de 5 Bergson, Henri 148, 159, 384 Berle, Adolf 350 Berlin 40, 103, 115, 238, 242, 244, 245, 246, 252, 255, 256, 257, 258, 273, 287, 316, 323, 336, 341, 353, 367, 377, 383, 386 Berlin National Gallery 245 Berlin Wall 103, 115, 316, 384 Berlioz, Hector 5 Bermuda 335 Bern 304 Bernays, Edward 117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 129, 135, 136, 137, 374, 377, 381, 384 Berry, Duc de 27 Bible 207

Kitsch, Propaganda, and the American Avant-Garde Biblical 87, 285 Bibliophile 287 Bida, Alexandre 79 Biddle, Francis 140 Biddle, George 139, 140, 141, 142, 144, 145, 147, 149, 154, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 166, 168, 170, 308, 317, 373, 381, 384 Bierstadt, Albert 225 Bingham, Hiram 341, 338 Bissière, Roger 294, 315 Blavatsky, Helena 301-303 Bliss, Cornelius II 368 Bliss, Lillie P. 368 Bliss, Mildred Barnes 369 Bliss, Robert Woods 369 blitzkrieg 339 Bloch, Anna 299 Bloch, Lucienne 194, 195, 196, 200 blut und boden (blood and soil) 249, 250, 253, 271 Böcklin, Arnold 270, 311 Boegler, Franz 345, 346 Bogdanov, Aleksandr 109 bohemian 19, 20, 21, 22, 97, 109, 110, 114, 147, 150, 152, 153, 163, 169, 173, 180, 232, 235, 236, 278, 282, 284, 286, 287, 291, 292, 294, 296, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304, 305, 306, 308, 310, 311, 312, 315, 330, 334, 342, 347, 352, 353, 358, 362, 364, 367, 389, 390 bohemian-bourgeois 6, 10, 11, 18, 23, 53, 66, 150, 152, 153, 296, 298, 299, 305, 310, 311, 330, 334, 342, 347, 352, 353, 358, 362, 364 Bohn, Frank 333, 334, 340-342 Bolotowsky, Ilya 172 Bolsheviks 50, 94, 131 Bolshevism 39, 106, 115, 186, 234, 386 Bonaparte, Napoleon 4, 41, 46, 62 Boston Museum 358 Boswell, James 208

395

Bouchardy, Joseph 25, 32 Bouchon, Max 42 Bouguereau, William Adolphe 305 Bourbons 11, 26, 28, 88 bourgeois 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 23, 25, 31, 35, 41, 44, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 55, 60, 61, 64, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 78, 80, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 93, 94, 95, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 109, 110, 111, 114, 141, 173, 178, 186, 214, 222, 225, 228, 232, 239, 249, 262, 263, 278, 280, 283, 284, 285, 287, 291, 296, 298, 299, 300, 302, 304, 305, 307, 310-313, 315, 323, 338, 348, 358 Boyd, Brian 107, 115, 384 Braak, Menno ter 282 Brancusi, Constantin 300, 304, 317, 359, 386, 387 Brangwyn, Frank 192 Braque, Georges 228, 294, 300, 301, 317, 385 Braun, Eva 273 Brauner, Victor 348 Brecht, Berthold 253 Breker, Arno 242, 257, 326, 367 Breton, André 309, 337, 344, 348, 352, 353 bric-a-brac 45, 222 Brigot, Ernest-Paul 82, 90, 91 British 23, 26, 159, 180, 214, 219, 222, 229, 265, 320, 321, 334, 335, 336, 337, 338, 339, 344, 348, 349, 351, 355, 366, 390 British Museum 222, 366 British Guiana 320, 321 Broch, Hermann 45, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 292, 384, 386 Brontë Parsonage Museum 219 Brontë, Patrick 219 Brooklyn Museum 150, 374 Brown, George 151

396 Bruce, Edward “Ned” 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 162, 163, 170, 208, 209, 210, 214, 217, 218 Bufano, Beniamino 206 Bukharin, Nikolai 108, 116, 206, 388 Bulgakov, Sergius 39, 40, 56 Bullitt, William C. 228, 325, 354 Bureau of Fine Arts 172 Burgundy 2 Burke, Edmund 23, 74, 84 Burroughs, Bryson 149 Busch, Wilhelm 270 business 1, 7, 63, 117, 118, 120, 121, 134, 143, 146, 187, 221, 238, 278, 283, 312, 319, 352, 363, 370 Butt, A. W. 198, 200 Buttinger, Joseph 328, 329, 330, 331, 343, 354, 356 Byron, Lord 4, 5, 207 C.B.S 360, 370 Caballero, Francisco 339 Cabanel, Alexandre 17, 79, 90, 91, 94, 98 Cabet, Étienne 29, 30, 33 cadavre equis 344 café 8, 12, 19, 20 Cahill, Holger 157, 161, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 170, 172, 174, 176, 177, 178, 191, 220, 225, 226, 227, 228, 233, 309, 321, 371, 372, 384, 385 California 170, 182, 202, 208, 214, 249, 256, 258, 317, 355, 361, 371, 386, 388, 389 California School of Fine Arts 182, 201, 203, 204, 215, 216, 217 calisthenics 238 Camberwell School of Arts & Crafts 215 Cambodia 83 Canada 202, 203, 212, 372 Canadian Mounted Police 202

Index canvas 13, 15, 24, 47, 51, 62, 63, 66, 67, 68, 91, 92, 95, 104, 105, 146, 153, 174, 175, 196, 222, 265, 267, 270, 273, 292, 297 capitalism 6, 25, 83, 85, 101, 112, 113, 127, 141, 156, 168, 181, 183, 185, 186, 189, 191, 192, 208, 210, 214, 222, 250, 297, 298, 302, 304, 309, 312 capitalist 1, 6, 13, 25, 73, 83, 87, 89, 101, 112, 113, 122, 123, 125, 126, 127, 145, 167, 169, 170, 182, 186, 192, 195, 197, 204, 225, 299, 300, 310, 312, 329 Caples, Anna 328 Carrington, Leonora 348, 353, 356, 385 Carroll galleries 296 Casablanca 332 Cassat, Mary 170 Catlin, Stanton 374 celebrity testimonials 41 censorship 7, 30, 70, 107, 109, 168, 169, 196, 205, 209, 210, 245, 255, 387 Central Committee 108, 110 Central School of Art and Design 215 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 317, 354, 370, 371, 381, 385 Centre Américain de Secours 336, 344, 345, 346, 348 Century Magazine 295, 296 Cézanne, Paul 10, 14, 15, 16, 17, 61, 64, 65, 67, 96, 149, 220, 228, 300, 301, 302, 306, 364, 369, 385 Chagall, Marc 114, 225, 314, 337, 352 chains 102, 208, 366 Chaldeans 3 Chamberlain, Neville 321 Champs-Elysées 73, 95, 383 Charles X 88 Charlot, Jean 227

Kitsch, Propaganda, and the American Avant-Garde Chase, Stuart 132, 134, 137, 140, 142, 143, 158, 385 Chatterton 14 Chekov, Michael 207 Chennevières 80 Chernyshevky, Nicolai 29, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 44, 53, 83, 86, 56, 103, 104, 106, 107, 110, 112, 113, 115, 165, 171, 178, 304, 385 Chicago 55, 56, 58, 119, 126, 136, 199, 201, 203, 205, 258, 267, 202, 204, 206, 267, 325, 330, 355, 361, 379, 381, 385, 389, 390 Chicago Sun 369 Chichen Itza 181 Chief Justice 209, 214 China 83, 176, 227 China (porcelain) 211 Chinese 6, 349 Chinese art 146 Chintreuil, Antoine 63 Christ 32, 50, 78, 80, 94, 103, 109, 232, 282 Christian 30, 40, 44, 94, 147, 207, 246, 284, 285, 289, 302, 312, 322, 388 Christianity 26, 28 church 26, 44, 46, 49, 82, 86, 209, 287, 321, 353 Churchill, Winston 335 Clandestine 194, 328, 332, 333, 335, 339, 351, 370 Clark, Stephen C. 369 class 1, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 23, 24, 27, 28, 31, 35, 36, 37, 50, 52, 53, 60, 61, 71, 72, 88, 93, 94, 95, 100, 101, 102, 103, 112, 124, 125, 133, 143, 152, 154, 166, 170, 175, 184, 186, 196, 204, 208, 238, 239, 240, 256, 269, 275, 279, 280, 304, 306, 308, 309, 319, 323, 364 class struggle 27, 37, 101 class war 124, 154, 196

397

classical 40, 43, 65, 69, 78, 79, 87, 103, 110, 147, 148, 152, 154, 223, 230, 231, 246, 260, 261, 264, 359, 376, 378 classicism 8, 11, 13, 43, 51, 64, 65, 71, 79, 80, 90, 94, 110, 154, 376 classicists 5, 6, 16, 17, 30, 41, 45, 53, 61, 69, 71, 80, 103 Club des Hachichins 12 Coatlicue 189, 190 Cocteau, Jean 207 coercion 39 Cogniet, Léon 64 Coit Tower 199-219, 391 Cold War 85, 107, 113, 370, 379, 381 collective 46, 86, 103, 134, 150, 163, 178, 222, 226, 278, 301 collectivism 25, 46, 79, 143, 308 colonials 220 colonist 226, 321 Columbia Broadcasting System 360, 370 Columbia University 333, 354, 355, 356, 357, 381 Comintern 142, 307 Commission of Fine Arts 144, 159 communal 5, 7, 36, 37, 53, 54, 82, 83, 231, 250 communard 41, 53, 94, 96, 312 commune 5, 28, 35, 41, 52, 83, 85, 94, 105, 271, 383 communist 13, 23, 27, 29, 30, 33, 35, 36, 37, 39, 44, 46, 48, 52, 53, 83, 100, 101, 102, 104, 106, 107, 108, 111, 113, 114, 123, 127, 128, 131, 134, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144, 145, 151, 154, 156, 158, 164, 165, 167, 168, 169, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 180, 181, 182, 183, 185, 186, 191, 192, 194, 195, 196, 198, 199, 200, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 226, 227, 231, 234, 235, 236,

398 237, 244, 251, 252, 253, 266, 267, 269, 278, 288, 296, 297, 298, 299, 301, 304, 307, 308, 313, 314, 319, 320, 322, 326, 328, 331, 333, 345, 347, 350, 351, 352, 365, 366, 371, 373, 388 Community Art Center Program 164 composer 286, 287, 293, 297, 316, 338 Comte de Saint-Quentin 228 concentration camp 271, 320, 331, 337, 338, 341, 345, 346, 347, 348 concept art 313 Conger Goodyear 229, 368 Congress for Cultural Freedom 371, 381 connoisseurs 69, 248, 275, 286, 292 conservative 28, 66, 105, 109, 110, 144, 150, 163, 164, 175, 239, 280, 299, 376, 377 conspiracy 37, 234, 381 content 23 38, 51, 54, 58, 82, 91, 98, 109, 110, 112, 126, 175, 226, 227, 280, 298, 309, 323, convention 2, 4, 6, 12, 25, 43, 61, 70, 78, 80, 85, 88, 92, 94, 108, 112, 118, 159, 265, 293, 302 Coolidge, Calvin 187, 200 Coomaraswamy, Ananda 299 Coordinator of Information (COI) 336, 351 Copley, John Singleton 170, 225 Corcoran, Paul E. 33, 385 Corcoran Gallery 159, 156 Corot, Camille 62, 63, 65, 78, 79, 80 Costa Rica 320 counterfeit 45, 341 countryside 5, 7, 16, 45, 47, 52, 65, 94, 236, 249, 263 coup 7, 19, 21, 41, 43, 72, 76, 153, 366 Courbet, Gustave 11, 12, 13, 17, 21, 22, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 48, 49,

Index 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 81, 82, 86, 90, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 171, 263, 295, 312, 313, 383, 385 Cox, Kenyon 295, 296 Coyoacán 179, 180 Creel Committee 117, 121, 377 critic 7, 8, 25, 30, 31, 37, 42, 49, 53, 56, 65, 72, 81, 84, 87, 91, 92, 93, 110, 115, 146, 151, 154, 164, 178, 202, 206, 220, 224, 229, 230, 262, 269, 280, 281, 286, 288, 291, 293, 295, 299, 307, 313, 325, 365, 391, critical art 51, 54, 103 critical idealism 54 criticism 9, 19, 31, 48, 49, 58, 80, 81, 82, 92, 107, 150, 151, 165, 167, 232, 268, 281, 282, 292, 294, 295, 311, 366 Cromwell, Oliver 87, 97, 387 Cross, Henri 299 Crowninshield, Francis 369 cubism 110, 112, 180, 228, 235, 236, 263, 296, 301, 367 cubist 108, 173, 189, 228, 267, 292, 294, 295, 296, 301, 313 Cuernavaca 182 culture 6, 15, 18, 48, 50, 61, 72, 86, 89, 56, 96, 103, 105, 106, 108, 111-113, 115, 131, 162, 175, 181, 186, 187, 190, 196, 205, 210, 220, 221, 222, 225, 229, 230, 235, 236, 237, 238, 240, 242, 244, 245, 246, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 246, 267, 268, 269, 278, 279, 281, 282, 283, 284, 287, 289, 297, 298, 300, 302, 303, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 316, 319, 320, 322, 359, 360, 361, 362, 364, 372, 373, 383, 388, 391 Cunningham, Ben 214, 216 Czechoslovakia 230, 328 d'Harnoncourt, René 369, 370

Kitsch, Propaganda, and the American Avant-Garde d’Izalguier, Eugène 31, 32, 34, 43, 385 Dachau 274 Dada 236, 263, 268, 287, 276, 287, 331, Dadaists 228, 267, 331 dandy 12 Dauzats, Adrien 79 David, Jacques Louis 46 Davis, Elmer 132, 329, 375 Davis, Marion 166 Davis, Pablo 38, 183, 184, 185, 189, 191, 200 Davis, Stuart 151, 172, 177, 227, 308 Day of German Art 255, 260, 261 de Kooning, Willem 172 de Nerval, Gérard 4, 312 de Pelleport, Marquis 2 de Regnier, Henri 294 de Sade, Marquis 2, 13, 207 de Saint-Simon, Henri 24, 25, 27, 32, 33, 171, 390 de Tocqueville, Alexis 33, 84, 390 Dead Christ with Angels 78 Deat, Marcel 350, debt 3, 19, 29, 286 decoration 30, 51, 138, 157, 200, 221, 223, 225, 249 deeds 113, 123, 127, 262, 268 Defoe, William 207 Degas, Edgar 10, 369 degenerate 47, 236, 250, 251, 262, 266, 267, 276, 268, 331, 359, 368 Delacroix, Eugène 5, 17, 21, 22, 45, 47, 60, 62, 79, 103, 311 Delaroche, Paul 63 Dell, Floyd 140, 141, 158, 385 Delvau, Alfred 19 democracy 23, 82, 84, 117, 122, 123, 124, 131, 135, 143, 154, 158, 165, 246, 319, 320, 343, 359, 362, 363, 365, 366, 368, 374

399

democratic 6, 26, 39, 52, 82, 87, 118, 119, 124, 161, 224, 307, 319, 320, 328, 333, 363, 364, 366, 371, 373, Department of Justice 145, 161, 145, 325 depravity 234 Depression, The 119, 120, 131,132, 133, 135, 138, 141, 142, 144, 146, 148, 156, 165, 166, 166, 170, 183, 192, 217, 225, 234, 309, 324, 388 Der Blaue Reiter exhibit 303, 304 Desbrosses, Jean 63 Desbrosses, Léopold 63 Desnoyers, Fernand 8, 20, 65, 66, 74, 385 despotic 84 Detroit Institute of Art 182, 185, 197, 199, 205, 384 Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Workers' Party) 234, 235 Deutsches Volkstum (German Folklore) 248, 258 Dewey, John 147, 157, 163, 164, 165, 167, 168, 171, 176, 186, 221-227, 233, 309, 365, 366, 377, 385 Diana the Huntress 266 Dickens, Charles 207 Diefenbach, Karl Wilhelm 249, 250 diet 55, 287 Dietrich, Marlene 338 Diller, Burgoyne 172, 173 Dimitroff, Stephen 194, 196, 198 Director of the Brooklyn Museums 374 disinformation 375 Disney, Walt 361, 366, 380 Dodd, William 336, 355, 386 dogma 54, 104, 107, 239, 246, 254 Dominican Republic 321 Don Quixote 180 Donovan, William Joseph ‘Wild Bill’ 336, 355 Doré, Gustave 13, 21, 79, 82

400 double-speak 46 Douglas, Lord Alfred 207 Dows, Olin 138, 161 Dr. Karlstadt 111 Dr. Sedgwick 274, 275 Dreiser, Theodore 207 Drexler, Anton 234 drinking 3, 35, 169, 158, 239, 349 drugs 5 Dryce, Tom 315 Dubinski, David 333 Dubois-Pillet, Albert 299 Dubuffe, M. 93 Duchamp, Marcel 295, 299, 300, 317, 347, 352, 387 Dulles, Allen 301 Dumas, Alexandre 2 Dunkirk 339 Dupuis, Phillipe Félix 64 Duret, Théodore 293, 315, 386 Dutch Reformation 44 Dutch school 50 Earhart, Amelia 170 Early, Stephen 327 Eastman, Max 140, 141, 142, 199, 390 Ebe, Burkhart 266 Eber, Elk 265 Ecce Homo 80, 266 École des Beaux-Arts 62, 78, 79, 87 École Libre des Hautes Études 330 economy 7, 35, 78, 95, 119, 120, 131, 138, 143, 149, 208, 234, 372 education 39, 93, 101, 102, 110, 122, 155, 164, 165, 166, 174, 180, 181, 203, 228, 234, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 247, 253, 255, 256, 267, 268, 276, 279, 293, 372, 388, 391 Efros, Abram 110, 115 egalitarian 28, 29, 82, 148, 157, 165, 171, 191, 222, 223, 275, 365, 377 egalitarianism 53, 236, 250, 275 Egyptian art 43

Index Ehrenburg, Ilya 207 Einstein, Karl 325 Elias, Norbert 280, 281, 282, 289, 292, 386 elite 40, 60, 72, 79, 108, 109, 150, 152, 165, 166, 178, 199, 293, 306, 309, 312, 329, 358, 368 elitist 5, 25, 95, 153, 220, 268, 278, 293, 310, 342, 366, Emergency Relief Appropriations Acts 162 Emergency Rescue Committee 327, 336, 352, 354, 386, Emperor Louis-Napoleon 7, 41, 42, 60, 61, 62, 65, 69, 70, 80, 82, 85, 91, 94, 95 Enfantin, Barthélemy 28 Engels, Friedrich 7, 19, 29, 56, 57, 37, 100, 106, 114, 217, 386, 388 England 202, 214, 215, 218, 344 Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) 251, 266, 267, 280 entertainment 13, 31, 158, 366, 385 environment 82, 148, 168, 172, 224 equality 27, 39, 82, 83, 299 Ernst, Max 225, 331, 337, 344, 348, 352, 353, 354 erotic 49, 69, 70, 79, 80, 90, 250, 272, 346 Escousse, Victor 14 esoteric 189, 191, 223, 301, 317, 389, establishment 30, 72, 78, 90, 92, 102, 106, 120, 144, 149, 222, 235, 246, 286, 291, 294, 301, 321, 358, 372, 375, 379 ethical 50, 192, 193, 194, 274, 284, 285, 320, 337 ethics 53, 106 Étienne, Louis 14, 29, 33, 64, 65, 66, 33, 73, 74, 386 eugenics 238, 281 Eurocentric 232 European 7, 28, 39, 124, 136, 147, 148, 170, 172, 179, 202, 220, 221, 224, 225, 226, 230, 232,

Kitsch, Propaganda, and the American Avant-Garde 247, 285, 299, 310, 320, 325, 326, 327, 330, 334, 337, 342, 343, 352, 362, 367, 369, 370, 371 European-style 224 Evergood, Philip 173, 177 evil 45, 61, 133, 234, 236, 282, 283, 284, 285, 289, 290, 300 exhibit 54, 63, 64, 65, 66, 70, 72, 78, 80, 81, 90, 94, 95, 96, 108, 109, 149, 153, 156, 157, 163, 165, 166, 172, 182, 204, 220, 225, 227, 228, 251, 252, 261, 264, 266, 267, 268, 270, 272, 273, 280, 288, 295, 296, 297, 300, 304, 312, 314, 315, 322, 331, 347, 359, 360, 361, 363, 364, 366, 367, 371, 372, 373, 374, 375, 376 exhibition 48, 60, 61, 62, 65, 66, 81, 150, 160, 167, 172, 226, 228, 229, 245, 251, 253, 255, 262, 263, 266, 267, 288, 292, 295, 303, 318, 363, 371, 372, 373, 374, 379, 380, 383 experience 16, 17, 24, 37, 38, 43, 85, 113, 123, 126, 127, 131, 138, 144, 157, 164, 167, 171, 175, 180, 214, 220-233, 236, 240, 241, 248, 262, 269, 270, 273, 283, 284, 285, 286, 288, 305, 306, 311, 33, 332, 351, 366, 367, 377, 385 experimentation 51, 60, 269, 278 exploitation 100, 101, 151 expressionism 110, 112, 235, 245, 370, 371 Eyck, Toni van 243, 257 fake 4, 12, 15, 91, 241, 270, 279, 280, 285, 286, 306, 309, 339, 366 fake art 279, 280, 285 family 9, 10, 12, 25, 43, 81, 101, 123, 132, 142, 136, 163, 186, 198, 202, 238, 254, 272, 273, 283, 312, 337, 348, 370, 373

401

Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism 228 Fantin-Latour, Henri 10, 11, 61, 65, 71, 81, 96 Farfield Foundation 370 fascist 105, 133, 166, 168, 207, 214, 222, 227, 230, 251, 302, 319, 320, 322, 325, 326, 327, 257, 330, 331, 333, 337, 341, 349 Fatherland 244, 255, 349 Fauvists 13 Federal Art Project 131, 139, 148, 154, 156, 157, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 178, 225, 232, 364, 365, 376 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 123, 127, 128, 136, 334, 335, 355 Federal Government 140, 156, 166, 372, Federal One Programs 156 Federal Project No.1 139, 162, Federal Theater Project 156 Federal Writers Project 156, 162, Federation des Artistes 52 Federation of Artists 41, 146, 159 Federation of Young Communists of France 298 fellow-traveller 141, 164, 352 feminist 29, 36, 250 Feuchtwanger, Lion 206, 279, 289, 291, 299, 337, 338, 339, 340, 341, 355 Feuchtwanger, Marta 338 feudal 1, 28, 100, 103 Fidus (Höppener, Hugo) 249, 250 Field, Marshal 256, 369 Fielding, Henry 207 figurative art 110 film 133, 134, 137, 159, 160, 177, 205, 206, 217, 245, 252, 254, 257, 280, 294, 296, 314, 339, 351, 352, 360, 361, 368, 369, 380 fin-de-siècle 48, 284, 301

402 First Congress of Soviet Writers, 1934 112 First World War 142, 144, 202, 234, 236, 274, 284, 285, 303, 338, 368, 369, 388 Flanders 2 flaneur 60 Flaubert, Gustave 17 Fleischman, Julius 370 Floch, Joseph 341, 342, 355 Fogg Museum of Art 370 folk art 110, 162, 163, 176, 220, 226, 228, 231, 319, 385 folkish 22 Force, Juliana 375, 383 Ford Hunger March 183, 210 Ford Motor Company 188 Ford, Edsel 189, 191, 195, 197, 205 Ford, Henry 182, 185, 188 Foreign Affairs 62, 326 Foreign Policy Association 332, 333 formalist 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 114, 278 Fourier, Charles 5 Fox, William Henry 149 Français, François-Louis 20, 79, 290 France 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 10, 11, 23, 24, 26, 27, 33, 38, 40, 41, 43, 50, 59, 61, 62, 64, 74, 82, 94, 95, 114, 203, 206, 227, 228, 229, 232, 274, 279, 280, 294, 298, 299, 301, 302, 304, 305, 319, 320, 324, 325, 326, 328, 330, 331, 332, 333, 334, 336, 337, 339, 340, 342, 344, 345, 347, 348, 349, 350, 351, 354, 362, 367, 369, 370, 385, 381 Francis, Chris 172 Franco 214, 230, 319, 339 Franco-Prussian war 7 Frank, Jerome 140, 144 Frank, Karl 328, 337 Frankfurt School 281, 325, 330 Fraternity 26, 39, 67, 85 Frederic Delano 147, 148 free love 5, 28, 78

Index free thought 84 free-trade 100, freedom 23, 37, 50, 53, 64, 84, 85, 104, 107, 125, 155, 168, 169, 172, 174, 175, 197, 232, 251, 278, 289, 299, 309, 319, 320, 322, 328, 331, 339, 352, 362, 363, 365, 366, 368, 371, 373, 374, 377, 379, 381, 388 Freemasons 288 French revolution 23, 24, 32, 84, 222, 386 fresco 10, 181, 182, 183, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 195, 197, 198, 199, 201-208, 213-218, 227 Frick, Wilhelm 251, 252 Friedrich, Caspar David 103 Fromentin, Eugène 79 Fry, Varian 114, 206, 274, 279, 288, 323, 324, 330-358, 367, 386 Führer 215, 238, 239, 242, 243, 244, 247, 252, 260, 261, 262, 266, 269, 274, 282 Fullerton, Hugh 340, 342, 349, 351, 356 Furtwängler, Wilhelm 246, 253, 258 future 30, 31, 41, 55, 61, 63, 69, 79, 83, 89, 90, 122, 137, 141, 142, 170, 179, 181, 190, 191, 193, 209, 213, 214, 215, 224, 251, 264, 265, 266, 272, 301, 308, 313, 327, 332, 352, 361, 365, 385 futurism 105, 110, 112, 115, 233, 263 futurist 105, 108, 110, 115, 222, 233, 267, 276, 384, Gainsborough, Thomas 293 Galerie Paul Guillaume 294, 315, 318, 383 Galerie Martinet 95 Gallet, Louis 81, 82, 96, 386 Gan, Alexei 111, Gardiner, Muriel 328 Gauguin, Paul 299

Kitsch, Propaganda, and the American Avant-Garde Gautier, Théophile 4, 5, 6, 11, 12, 19, 20, 21, 25, 32, 71, 78, 79, 81, 90, 97, 96, 97, 311, 386, 387 Geibel, Hermann 266 general strike 211 generation 11, 25, 27, 50, 61, 65, 71, 88, 114, 133, 153, 170, 186, 193, 228, 239, 240, 250, 265, 272 genius 14, 25, 27, 52, 53, 64, 66, 82, 85, 86, 88, 90, 93, 105, 112, 187, 227, 240, 242, 250, 256, 278, 293, 301, 361, 266 genocide 232, 338 genre 50, 54, 64, 68, 93, 94, 168, 254, 264, 265, 270, 273, 274 Germanic 229, 247, 379 Gérôme, Jean-Léon 79 Gerstle, William 182, 203 Gestapo 206, 245, 253, 328, 340, 342, 343, 345, 346, Gibraltar 346, 349 Giedion-Walker, Carola 304, 317, 386 globalization 100, 230 God 31, 44, 67, 86, 94, 112, 263, 284, 285, 298, 304, Gods 25, 40, 44, 47, 49, 55, 56, 70, 186, 223, 246, 292 Goddess 80, 189, 190, 271, 272 Goebbels, Joseph 113, 206, 234, 242-259, 262, 266-278, 282, 289, 322, 323, 368, 377, 386, 387 Goebbels, Magda 245, 272, 273 Goff, Charles 209 Gold, Mary Jane 344, 345, 346, 349, 353, 354, 356, 387 golden apple 70, 73 Goldman-Sachs 370 Goldman, Emma 299, 316, 387 Goodrich, Lloyd 150 Goodyear, Conger 155, 229, 368 Gorky, Maxim 110, 116, 172, 206, 352, 388 Gothic art 44

403

Goujon, Jean 87 Granary Fund 370, great depression 119, 120, 131, 138, 141, 170, 217, 234, 309, 324, 388 Great Exhibition of German Art 229, 251, 288, 379 Great War 108, 119, 124, 132, 144, 203, 221, 235, 249, 250, 282, 369 Greece 227 Greek 43, 47, 70, 86, 154, 229, 247, 270, 271, 292, 361 Greek sculptures 43 Green, William 333 Greenberg, Clement 45, 291-292, 294, 297-300, 302, 306-315, 316, 317, 318 Grenoble Museum 347 Gropius, Walter 252, 338 Gropper, Bill 140, 142 Grosz, George 169 Groton 139, 140 Group of Eight 295 Grützner, Eduard von 274 Guardian bank 185 Guggenheim, Peggy 344, 347-348, 352 Gypsy 2, 10, 18 Hachette 10 Hagen, Paul 328 Haiti 320, 321 Hamel, Otto 263 Hamerton, Philip 65 hammer and sickle 204, 208, 210, 212, 213 Hanfstaengl, Ernst 274-275, 323 Hanner, Hans 264 Harrington, Colonel Francis 174 Harvard 221, 327, 370 Hasenclever, Walter 325 hashish 4, 12, 292 Hassett, William 378 Hastings, Jack 180, 182, 204, 214, 215, 217 Hauptman, Bruno 214

404 haute-bourgeois 10, 60, 283, 284 Hebrew 207 Hecht, Ben 207 Hegel 13, 41, 43, 206, 302 Heil, Walter 208, 209, 210, 212, 217, 218 Helen of Sparta 70 Hemingway, Ernest 207, 387 Henry III 93 Hera 70, 271 Heracles 260 Herzen, Alexander 39 Het Vaderland 282 Hicks, Granville 206 Hilz, Sepp 242 Hindenberg, Paul von 235, 321 Hirst, Damien 80 Hitler Youth 238, 239, 250, 255, 258, 265, 267, 268, 384 Hitler Youth handbook 384 Hitler, Adolf 113, 114, 121, 129, 131, 132, 133, 141, 168, 174, 179, 207, 214, 215, 228-279, 281, 282, 283, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 307, 308, 319-332, 359-362, 368, 370, 372, 373, 377, 379, 382, 384, 387-391 Hoare, Samuel 339 Hodson, Bill 140, 141, 158 Hofbräuhaus 234, 235 Hoffman, Heinrich 262 Hokusai 293 Hood, Raymond 194 Hoover, Herbert 117, 137, 158 Hoover, J. Edgar 119, 120, 128, 129, 130, 136, 137, 141, 206, 335, 355, 386 Hopkins, Harry 148, 162 Horkheimer, Max 45, 281 Hotel Dieu 14 Hotel de Lauzun 12 House of German Art 229, 251, 258, 260, 261, 266, 269, 276, 287, 359 House of Lords 215

Index Howard, John Langley 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 211, 216 Hudson River valley 377 Hughes, Langston 206 Hugo Gallery 314 Hugo, Victor 5, 6, 74, 81, 87, 88, 97, 312, 318, 387 Hull, Cordell 340, 342, 347, 369, 381 humanism 44 Hunt, Henry T. 140, 144, 148 Hutchins, Robert Maynard 325, 330, 361, 379 hypocritical 44, 45, 80, 101, 151, 223, 307, 309 Iceland 157, 163 Ickes, Harold 140, 145, 347, 356 Ickes, Secretary of the Interior 145, 320, 347 iconoclasm 111, 198, 210, 279 ideal 4, 13, 17, 27, 43, 44, 46, 48, 49, 50, 54, 55, 83, 84, 86, 87, 91, 106, 111, 113, 131, 139, 144, 145, 162, 164, 168, 170, 215, 237, 247, 248, 251, 253, 264, 266, 271, 272, 279, 286, 288, 199, 303, 321, 322, 332, 372, 374 idealists 26, 35, 37, 49, 87, 114, 133, 168, 172, 175, 210, 215, 299, 308 idealism 29, 41, 43, 44, 47, 49, 54, 138, 141, 144, 158, 167, 175, 230, 231, 247, 271, 297, 299, 308, 328, 379 illustration 45, 65, 307, 363, 364 imagination 4, 8, 24, 29, 32, 48, 49, 50, 51, 54, 57, 87, 106, 107, 155, 187, 260 imitation 38, 41, 45, 50, 54, 80, 84, 88, 92, 104, 156, 225, 227, 247, 298, 300, 313 immigrants 220, 231, 299, 321, 324, 326 imperial 7, 11, 40, 41, 46, 61, 94, 222, 372, 377

Kitsch, Propaganda, and the American Avant-Garde imperialist 307, 308 imperialism 23, 222 Impressionist 13, 60, 65, 80, 81, 95, 96, 149, 293, 299, 312, 313, 314 Independence Day 210 Index of American Design 162 individual 46, 52, 53, 54, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 92, 95, 103, 131, 165, 168, 170, 219, 221, 223, 228, 230, 231, 232, 237, 238, 241, 247, 248, 251, 254, 268, 272, 278, 283, 285, 286, 288, 300, 302, 312, 319 individualism 46, 53, 83, 84-88, 92, 101, 104, 105, 106, 143, 171, 174, 210, 223, 231, 232, 291, 299, 308, 359 individualist 2, 25, 42, 46, 51, 52, 53, 79, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 103, 104, 105, 108, 109, 111, 114, 150, 166, 170, 172, 173, 175, 178, 220, 227, 245, 251, 267, 268, 269, 278, 293, 298, 299, 300, 301, 303, 306, 310, 311, 312, 320, 325, 358, 359, 360, 362, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 371, 373, 374, 377, 379 individuality 44, 83, 86, 93, 101, 103, 104, 105, 109, 247, 250, 268, 263, 365 industrial revolution 1, 11, 103 Industrial Workers of the World 207 industrialists 24, 26, 31, 120, 186, 225 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 47, 62, 103 innovative 81, 330, 361, 377 intelligentsia 36, 40, 110 International Longshoremen's Association 211 International Military Tribunal 247 International School of Workers 196 International Workers of the World 211 Internationale 183, 191, 210, 366 internationalism 321

405

Iron Cross 274 Isabey, Eugene 62 Ishutin, Nikolai 37 Iskra 214 Islam 302 ivory tower 148, 159 Izaacs, Stanley 140 J. Walter Thompson Company 369 Jackson Street 211 Jahyer, Félix 81, 96, 387 Jameson, Donald 371 Japanese art 216, 293 Jarves, James 7, 8, 19, 21, 387 Jeffers, Robinson 214, 218, 387 Jeffers, Una 214, 218 Jesus 50, 93, 232 Jewell, Edward Alden 230, 231, 232, 233, 313, 314, 318, 365, 368, 380, 387 Jewish Labor Committee 333 Joblau, Caroline 305 Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main 281 John Reed Club 142, 216 Johnson, Alvin 330, 350 Johnson, Ben 207 Johst, Hanns 268 Joseph, Alexandre Florian 62 journalists 39, 72, 117, 125, 129, 130, 149, 254, 268, 314, 329, 365 Joyce, James 288 Judaism 283 July Revolution 28 Juncker, Frederick 64, 74 justice 22, 18, 39, 47, 161, 196 Justice Department 139, 145, 161, 325 Justine 2 Kabotie, Fred 226 Kahlo, Frida 134, 136, 137, 179, 180, 182, 183, 184, 216 Kaiser Wilhelm II 235 Kampfbund für Deutsche Kultur (Combat League for German Culture) 250, 322

406 Kane, John 226 Kandinsky, Wassily 51, 114, 178, 300, 302, 303, 304, 305, 317, 388, 391 Kant, Immanuel 247, 248 Karakozov, Dmitry 37 Karl Marx Memorial Library and Worker’s School 214, 217, 388 Karlinsky, Simon 106, 115 Keats, John 207 Keller, Ferdinand 270 Kelley, Julia 225 Kensington 214, 218 Kent State 327 Kent, Rockwell 299 Kimball, Moses 159, 358 Kingdon, Frank 329, 337, 347, 351, 356, 357 Kirchwey, Freda 325 Kirstein, Lincoln 323 kitsch 45, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 288, 291, 297, 306, 307, 309, 310, 313, 314 Kitsch Museum of Bad Taste and Trash 280 Klee, Paul 178, 300, 304, 305, 317, 367, 388 Klein, Otto 248, 259 Klimt, Gustav 338 Kokoschka, Oskar 338 Kootz, Samuel 314, 318, 388 Korolyov, Boris 108 Kramer, Hilton 220, 233 Kristallnacht 324 Kropotkin, Peter 294, 298 Kuniyoshi, Yasuo 227 kunst (Art) 245, 266, 267, 280 la raza cósmica 187 labour 1, 7, 100, 102, 128, 134, 140, 271, 327, 333, 342, 343, 352, 354, 389 laboratories 60 laissez-faire 78, 85 Lamb, Charles 208 Lamm, Fritz 345, 346

Index landscape 36, 50, 60, 63, 64, 66, 68, 69, 78, 79, 80, 81, 94, 165, 183, 187, 189, 214, 249, 263, 264, 271, 273, 297, 377 Lantier, Claude 16, 17, 18, 67, 69, 71 Lapidus, Iosef 206 Lapostolet, Charles 64 Lash, Joseph 329 Latin Quarter 1, 12, 13, 19, 21, 389 Laval, Pierre 350 Lawson, Ernest 295 Lazarus, Sylvian 211 Le Bon, Gustave - The Crowd 286 Le Tourneur, Pierre 5 Leahy, William 340, 347, 351, 357 Lebensborn (fountain of life) 238 Lebensraum (living space) 236, 239, 250, 253 lebensreform (life-reform) 246, 248, 249, 250, 272 Leduc, Renato 348 Lee, Ivy 373 legacy 223 Léger, Fernand 294 Légion-d'Honneur (Legion of Honor) 94 Leibl, Wilhelm 274, 275 leisure 72, 280 Leopold, King of the Belgians 61 Léopold, Robert 47 Lescaze, William 172 Lessing, Gotthold 37, 56, 311 Levé, Charles 64 libertarian 32, 53 limners 219, 221, 224, 225, 366 limousine-left 168 limousine-socialist 114, 301 Linz Museum 377 Lipchitz, Jacques 331, 337, 352 Lipman, Jean 219, 220, 232, 388 Lisbon 327, 329, 332, 336, 339, 343, 348 Literary Digest 156, 213 literati 149, 262

Kitsch, Propaganda, and the American Avant-Garde literature 8, 47, 48, 55, 56, 58, 96, 97, 98, 107, 206, 207, 235, 245, 252, 254, 279, 283, 287, 291, 294, 303, 307, 311, 312, 313, 322, 334, 368, 388, 391, 55, 56, 58, 96, 97, 98, 381 litterateurs 9, 55, 281, 282, 286, 287 Lommel, Friedrich 266 London 37, 39, 146, 214, 218, 328, 347 London, Kurt 112, 113, 115, 388 long hair 4, 8, 19 Long, Breckenridge 325, 326, 333, 336, 342, 343, 347, 348, 350, 353, 355, 356 Los Angeles 169, 324 Louis-Napoleon 7, 41, 42, 60, 61, 62, 66, 69, 70, 80, 82, 85, 91, 94, 95 Louis-Phillipe 29 The Louvre 16, 61, 87, 222, 366 Luce, Maximilien 299 Lumpkin, Grace 206 Lunacharsky, Anatoly 303, 304, 107, 108, 109 Lussu, Emilio 351, 357 Luther, Martin 86, 237, 284, 286, 289, 388 luxury 13, 175, 222, 225, 264, 280 MacAgy, Douglas 375, 381 Mackensen, Fritz 263 MacLeish, Archibald 176, 350 Madagascar 320 Mademoiselle de Maupin 12, 21, 386 Mahler, Alma 338, 339 Mahler, Gustav 338 Maison, André 79 Maître, Edmond 11 Makart, Hans 274 Malevich, Kazimir 104, 105, 106, 109, 114 Malfilatre, Jacques 14 Mallarme, Stephane 299 Man Ray 299, 300 Mañach, Pedro 300

407

Manet, Édouard 10, 11, 12, 16, 17, 20, 60, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 78, 79, 80, 81, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 98, 293, 312 Manhattan 142 manifesto 27, 44, 57, 82, 100, 102, 104, 105, 106, 110, 114, 115, 143, 144, 208, 217, 222, 233, 235, 268, 300, 309, 384, 388 Mann, Erika 239, 255, 256, 388 Mann, Golo 338, 339 Mann, Heinrich 338, 339 Mann, Nellie 338 Mann, Thomas 280, 330, 368 Mannheim, Karl 281 manufacturers 100, 101 Mao Zedong 83 Marat, Jean-Paul 46 March, Gladys 179 Marine Workers' Industrial Union 211 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 105, 106, 115 Maritain, Jacques 207, 330 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia 179 Marseille 206, 327, 328, 332, 334, 336, 337, 338, 339, 340, 341, 342, 343, 344, 345, 346, 347, 348, 349, 350, 352, 353, 354, 356, 387 Martin-Amorbach, Oskar 263, 264 Marx, Karl 27, 29, 33, 36, 37, 41, 44, 55, 56, 57, 83, 93, 100, 101, 102, 104, 106, 114, 144, 164, 171, 206, 214, 216, 217, 298, 385, 388 Marxist 46, 83, 151, 116, 151, 154, 178, 181, 189, 205, 206, 210, 216, 268, 279, 281, 302, 306, 308, 325, 330, 334 Masaryk, Jan 330 Matisse, Henri 147, 294, 300, 305, 315, 317, 348, 367, 386, 390 Maugham, Somerset 207 Maxim Gorky Prize for Literature 206

408 Mazzini Society 330 McCray, Porter 370 McDonald, James 342, 343, 356 means of production 1, 100 mechanization 223 medieval 13, 40, 111, 260 Meissonier, Ernest 79 Meissonier, Jean-Louis-Ernest 62 Mellon, Andrew 376, 377 memories 37, 67, 139, 225, 284 Mennith, Courcy 66, 74, 388 Mergenthaler, Christian 322 mestizo 187, 190 metaphor 68, 148, 287 Metropolitan Museum of Art 149, 375 Meurent, Victorine 70, 80 Mexican 139, 145, 164, 167, 180, 181, 183, 186, 189, 194, 204, 226, 227, 348, 374 Mexican Communist Party 181, 194 Mexican Revolution 139, 145, 180 Mexico 26, 139, 141, 176, 179, 180, 181, 182, 186, 187, 195, 196, 201, 203, 205, 213, 215, 216, 217, 218, 227, 308, 320, 334, 335 Meyer, Hannes 252 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 296 MI5 335, 337 MI6 (SIS) 335 Miami 126, 324 Michel, François Émile 294, 389 Michelangelo 64, 86, 220 Middle Ages 86 military 24, 25, 26, 29, 45, 48, 68, 174, 234, 235, 239, 240, 242, 247, 260, 261, 266, 269, 281, 287, 319, 320, 327, 334, 335, 336, 339, 352, 355, 368 militaristic 231 Mill, John Stuart 35, 84, 97, 389 Miller, Dorothy 163, 173, 177, 233, 372, 385 Miller, Julius 316, 297 Millet, Jean François 52, 53, 58, 385

Index Millier, Arthur 169, 176, 177, 314, 318 Milwaukee Art Institute 373 Minister of Fine Arts 3 Minor, Bob 140, 142 Miró, Joan 300, 302 Mission Workers' Neighborhood House 211 modern art 42, 73, 77, 147, 149, 150, 155, 156, 157, 159, 163, 166, 167, 176, 178, 182, 192, 197, 199, 225, 226, 228, 232, 233, 235, 245, 250, 252, 253, 262, 266, 267, 268, 269, 278, 280, 281, 282, 287, 291, 295, 296, 297, 299, 306, 314, 316, 322, 347, 358, 360, 361, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 369, 370, 371, 372, 378, 379, 380, 381, 382, 385, 387 modernism 147, 153, 219, 220, 226, 251, 266, 267, 268, 279, 364, 365, 366, 367 modernist 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 156, 163, 166, 172, 194, 221, 225, 226, 250, 261, 264, 267, 269, 270, 280, 283, 287, 297, 306, 307, 313, 316, 318, 364, 377, 378, 381, 383 Modigliani, Amedeo 180, 369 Mogador 48, 57 Molnar, Paul. C. 297 Monarchy 1, 28 Mondrian, Piet 180, 300, 301, 317, 352, 353 Monet, Claude 10, 60, 79, 80, 81, 93, 225, 226, 293 money 8, 13, 15, 16, 50, 55, 95, 120, 121, 126, 130, 133, 138, 143, 145, 148, 149, 151, 169, 173, 179, 211, 212, 225, 228, 242, 298, 306, 327, 329, 336, 337, 344, 345, 347, 348, 370, 372, 375 Montesquieu, Charles 85

Kitsch, Propaganda, and the American Avant-Garde Montmartre 8, 12, 35, 80, 292, 301, 304, 305 Montparnasse 302, 293 Moody, Helen Wills 182 Moore, Charles 148, 159 Mora, Constancia de la 319, 326, 353 moral 8, 24, 49, 50, 51, 53, 55, 80, 84, 85, 190, 274, 285, 326 morality 3, 48, 53, 101, 106, 244, 316 moralizing 54, 82 Moreau, Gustave 13, 14, 79, 82, 305, 311 Morgue 14, 312 Morisot, Berthe 79, 80 Morley, Grace 375 Morris, William 250 Morrow, Dwight 182, 388 Moscow 35, 107, 114, 162, 179, 180, 194, 252, 296, 303, 308, 309, 385 Motherhood 154, 272 Motherwell, Robert 352 Moulin Rouge 4 movies 243, 244, 252, 257, 279, 323 Mowbray-Clarke, John 299 Mowbray-Clarke, Mary 299 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 237 Munch, Edvard 245 Munich 229, 234, 242, 251, 256, 257, 258, 260, 261, 270, 276, 287, 288, 302, 304, 359, 379, Münzenberg, Willi 325 mural 131, 139, 142, 144, 145, 148, 153, 154, 155, 156, 162, 164, 165, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 191, 192, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 203, 204, 205, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 213, 214, 216, 217, 218, 226, 227, 252, 273, 384, 385, 388

409

muralists 139, 145, 153, 167, 172, 180, 201, 226, 227 Murger, Henri 1, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 19, 21, 69, 312, 389 Musée du Jeu de Paume 228 Musées Impériaux 79 Museum of Modern Art, MoMA 149, 156, 157, 159, 163, 172, 176, 182, 187, 191, 197, 198, 199, 205, 215, 225, 226, 228, 229, 230, 231, 233, 291, 297, 300, 306, 310, 313, 319, 320, 321, 323, 325, 330, 331, 334, 342, 345, 350, 358, 359, 360, 361, 362, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369, 370, 371, 372, 373, 374, 375, 376, 377, 379, 380, 381, 382, 385, 387 Museum of Primitive Art 369 Museum of the Culture of Painting 303 music 5, 24, 47, 50, 58, 68, 72, 131, 139, 162, 170, 239, 240, 242, 245, 246, 249, 251, 253, 261, 265, 266, 268, 286, 293, 294, 296, 303, 304, 307, 311, 314, 316, 338, 359 Musil, Robert 283, 289, 389 Mussolini 132, 133, 229, 251 Myers, Jeremy 295 Nabokov, Vladimir 106, 107, 376, 384, 389 Nadar (Tournachon, Gaspard-Félix) 10, 12 Narodniks 36 nation 47, 55, 59, 61, 100, 119, 122, 131, 138, 141, 147, 150, 156, 157, 165, 171, 222, 231, 232, 234, 235, 236, 237, 242, 243, 244, 248, 261, 263, 269, 272, 286, 318, 321, 325, 359, 361, 363, 364, 365, 366, 368, 376, 377, 381, 388 national 4, 47, 63, 100, 101, 102, 121, 122, 123, 130, 131, 135, 136, 139, 140, 141, 144, 150,

410 151, 167, 181, 185, 205, 210, 211, 214, 218, 220, 222, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 243, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 254, 255, 261, 264, 265, 268, 269, 271, 272, 275, 278, 279, 283, 286, 288, 297, 319, 322, 326, 329, 357, 359, 362, 363, 366, 371, 372, 373, 375, 376, 379, 382, 386 National Academy of Design 151 National Conference of Social Work 141 National Gallery of Art 376, 382 National Guard 4, 211 National Socialist Teachers Union 238 nationalism 100, 222, 230, 249, 250, 278, 371 native 88, 179, 186, 187, 188, 190, 212, 220, 221, 224, 225, 226, 231, 303, 322, 366, 368, 376 nature 8, 20, 23, 31, 38, 39, 41, 44, 48, 49, 51, 54, 58, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 91, 93, 96, 98, 103, 104, 122, 145, 146, 192, 220, 222, 224, 227, 247, 248, 249, 267, 279, 284, 297, 302, 303, 304, 313, 333, 340, 363, 364 Nazi 94, 114, 122, 130, 131, 133, 166, 173, 206, 207, 214, 228, 231, 232, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 259, 260, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 286, 288, 290, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 326, 345, 347, 349, 350, 352, 353, 362, 364, 365, 367, 368, 369, 371, 373, 374, 379, 384, 388, 389, 391 NBC Blue Network 360

Index Nechayev, Sergei 36 Negrín, Dr. Juan 327, 359 Neilson, William 330 neo-classical 79, 147, 246, 260, 261, 359, 376, 378 Neoplasticism 301 Netherlands 324, 325, 362, 369 Neuilly 4, new age 13, 52, 103, 152, 292, 303 New Art Group 297, New Beginning 328, 337, 345, 346, 347 New Deal 131, 132, 134, 138, 143, 144, 156, 162, 167, 171, 387, 388, 389 New Gallery 150, 269, 390 new man 36, 239 New School for Social Research 330, 350 New Workers School 196 New York 114, 115, 135, 142, 145, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 156, 159, 160, 161, 171, 176, 177, 182, 183, 187, 191, 192, 194, 196, 197, 198, 200, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 210, 213, 217, 230, 232, 258, 291, 295, 296, 297, 310, 313, 314, 316, 318, 325, 328, 335, 336, 339, 341, 348, 352, 353, 354, 358, 364, 369, 371, 373, 375, 377, 380, 383, 384, 389, 391 New York City Council 142 Newark Museum 163 Newstead Abbey 4 Niebuhr, Reinhold 329 Nietzsche, Friedrich 36, 247, 273, 287 Nieuwerkerke, Comte Alfred Émilien O'Hara van 61, 62, 64, 65, 74, 78, 79 nihilism 36, 40, 252 nihilist 40, 104, 391 nobility 27, 41, 44, 48 Noble, W.R. 219 Nolde, Emil 245

Kitsch, Propaganda, and the American Avant-Garde Nord-Sud 294 Normandy 94 North America 187, 232 nostalgia 236, 273, 280 novelist 9, 17, 50, 55, 106, 207, 270, 279, 282, 283, 326, 337, 338, 344 novelty 13, 52, 85, 103, 105, 106, 292, 293, 294, 299, 312, 314, 376, 377 nude 66, 69, 79, 90, 147, 154, 155, 188, 242, 254, 261, 264, 265, 266, 271, 272, 273, 295, 378 nudism 249 Nuremberg 245, 253, 255, 258 Nuremberg Rally 214 Ober-Regierung’s-Rat 241 Obregón, Álvaro 139, 180 occult 236, 246, 302 October revolutionaries 36 Office of Naval Intelligence 336 Office of Strategic Services (OSS) 274, 287, 336, 370, 375, 390 Office of the Co-ordinator of InterAmerican Affairs (CIAA) 368, 369, 370, 374, 375, 376 Office of the Co-ordinator of InterAmerican Affairs Advisory Committee on Art 147, 148, 368, 369, 370, 374, 375, 376, 368, 369, 370, 374, 375 Office of War Information (OWI) 132, 141, 329, 335, 368, 375 Oldfield, Otis 212, 213, 216, 218 oligarchy 85 opium 4 oppression 45, 85, 101, 102, 107, 141, 184, 192, 228, 232, 296, 320, 323, 352, 367, 368, 371, 379 Order of Cincinnatus 26 orientalist 79 ornamental 284 Orozco, Jose 145, 180 Orozco, Pascual 226 Orphism 292

411

Orwell, George 46, 100, 114, 155, 168, 308, 358, 379, 389 oval office 377 pagan art 44 Palais des Champs-Elysees 62, 73, 74, 383 Palestine 320, 321 Paley, William 370 Pallas Athena 260 Panama Canal 26 Panama Pacific Exposition 378 papacy 55 parade 179, 180, 245, 260, 261, 272, 350, 369 parakeet 15 Parayre, Amélie 305 Paris 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 23, 25, 26, 28, 37, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 48, 52, 63, 66, 69, 70, 71, 73, 82, 83, 87, 93, 94, 95, 96, 114, 147, 149, 178, 180, 181, 189, 203, 216, 217, 225, 228, 230, 232, 264, 270, 271, 272, 278, 286, 287, 294, 295, 296, 297, 301, 304, 305, 312, 326, 328, 333, 347, 367, 369, 383, 385, 387, 388, 389, 390 Paris Commune 41, 383 Pascal, Blaise 207 Pasquier, Étienne 14 passion 4, 6, 14, 18, 24, 40, 51, 68, 69, 72, 78, 79, 86, 88, 104, 147, 150, 213, 237, 239, 246, 251, 293, 309, 347 Passos, John Dos 207 passport 332, 334, 336, 339, 341, 344, 345, 349, 350 past 17, 30, 31, 36, 41, 50, 51, 66, 71, 80, 88, 91, 92, 104, 105, 109, 110, 143, 150, 183, 187, 190, 192, 201, 222, 224, 228, 230, 232, 233, 236, 239, 240, 241, 248, 252, 261, 281, 282, 303, 332, 348, 360, 367, 373, 376, 377

412 pastiche 12, 45, 169, 225, 228 Pater, Walter 298 patriotic 45, 117, 131, 138, 147, 149, 165, 198, 220, 221, 239, 269, 365, 366 patriotism 105, 230, 248, 105, 231, 249 patronage 2, 159, 160, 209, 228, 348 Pavilion of Realism 95 Payson, Charles S. 370 Pazaurek, Gustav 280 Peale, Charles 358 Pearl Harbor 350 peasant 40, 47, 49, 101, 112, 168, 193, 242, 249, 255, 263, 264, 266, 309, 310 paedophile 264 Pelletier, Jules 64 Peoples, Admiral Christian 147 Péret, Benjamin 344 permissiveness 5 Persico, Joseph 335, 355, 389 Petain, Philippe 345 Peter and Paul fortress 35 petite-bourgeoisie 1 Pfeffer, Wilhelm 345, 346, 347 Pflueger, Timothy 181, 185 Phelan, James 182 Phillips, Ammi 220, 221 Phillips Collection Museum 370 Phillips, Duncan 159, 370 Phillips, Laughlin 370 philosopher 38, 52, 108, 148, 171, 206, 207, 221, 224, 246, 273, 330, 337 philosophy 29, 42, 50, 51, 54, 82, 119, 163, 164, 165, 221, 236, 247, 248, 273, 299, 322, 361, 391 Phoebus 87 Photography 360, 363 physiological 224, 251, 275 Pi, Ogwa 226 Picasso, Pablo 147, 180, 203, 228, 294, 296, 300, 301, 304, 310, 314, 348, 364, 369

Index Pierre Leroux 28 Pils, Isidore-Jean-Augustin 79 Pissarro, Camille 10, 60, 65, 79, 80, 299, 314, 318 Pissarro, Lucien 299 Place Vendôme 41 Plains Indians 225 Plan for Monumental Propaganda 107 Plato 248, 283 Plautus 48 plein aire 13, 17, 63, 64, 65, 71, 79, 80 Pliny 292 poetry 3, 5, 6, 23, 24, 88, 108, 248, 294, 296, 311 poet 4, 6, 14, 30, 31, 44, 46, 50, 87, 206, 207, 214, 240, 248, 268, 286, 287, 292, 294, 314, 338, 348 Pol Pot 83 Poland 174, 269, 307, 319, 324 police 37, 50, 60, 125, 127, 153, 183, 202, 206, 209, 210, 211, 265, 293, 300, 323, 337, 339, 340, 344, 345, 347, 348, 349, 350, 351 political 7, 11, 23, 25, 27, 29, 35, 42, 43, 46, 64, 70, 81, 83, 85, 100, 101, 102, 103, 106, 107, 109, 110, 113, 119, 119, 121, 128, 131, 134, 139, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 164, 167, 168, 169, 170, 172, 173, 175, 180, 181, 183, 191, 194, 197, 208, 212, 214, 215, 226, 228, 230, 231, 234, 235, 236, 238, 239, 243, 244, 246, 247, 250, 251, 252, 254, 262, 265, 279, 287, 288, 293, 295, 296, 297, 298, 300, 301, 302, 305, 306, 310, 312, 314, 319, 321, 323, 324, 325, 327, 328, 329, 330, 332, 333, 334, 338, 341, 342, 343, 345, 362, 365, 366, 368, 377, 379, 384, 389

Kitsch, Propaganda, and the American Avant-Garde politics 18, 24, 26, 29, 52, 85, 100, 122, 133, 140, 167, 191, 192, 221, 240, 241, 243, 294, 298, 302, 362, 385, 386, 388 Pollock, Jackson 173, 317, 352, 390 Pope, John Russell 376 popular art 47, 61, 248 Porn 13, 70, 90, 270 Pornocracy 48 portraiture 47, 219, 226 Portugal 325, 340, 348, 349, 350 Post Office 138, 142, 148, 155, 156, 169, 376, 388 poster 117, 131, 165, 205, 244, 252, 253, 254, 339, 363, 364, 375 poverty 9, 14, 15, 16, 18, 40, 71, 103, 119, 165, 170, 183 power 1, 4, 7, 9, 10, 11, 24, 26, 27, 31, 41, 63, 72, 84, 88, 92, 93, 94, 101, 103, 105, 106, 111, 120, 121, 124, 127, 133, 135, 140, 146, 150, 164, 165, 171, 175, 186, 191, 192, 193, 197, 201, 206, 215, 221, 222, 229, 230, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 250, 253, 261, 262, 263, 266, 270, 271, 275, 278, 280, 282, 283, 284, 291, 297, 305, 307, 308, 309, 321, 326, 333, 334, 335, 344, 347, 359, 368, 372, 373, 377, 385, 390 Pre-Raphaelite 13, 311 press 5, 39, 61, 66, 72, 78, 80, 95, 118, 119, 124, 127, 128, 129, 130, 142, 149, 154, 162, 164, 189, 196, 198, 199, 202, 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 215, 235, 245, 252, 279, 313, 319, 323, 324, 326, 327, 337, 349, 367, 368, 369, 373, 374, 383, 384, 385, 386, 387, 388, 389, 390, 391 priesthood 24, 25

413

primitive 16, 40, 104, 155, 156, 163, 188, 214, 219-228, 230, 232, 281, 314, 366, 369, 376, 388 primitivism 165, 191, 220, 371 Prince Albert 61 principles 4, 5, 30, 35, 38, 40, 43, 50, 53, 54, 81, 83, 85, 101, 113, 148, 157, 164, 171, 183, 191, 215, 220, 236, 251, 255, 261, 285, 299, 334, 360, 366, 371, 377, 379, 386 Pritchard, Edward 350, 356 progress 25, 31, 50, 52, 89, 100, 138, 156, 162, 164, 166, 167, 169, 199, 236, 291, 364, 365, 388 progressive 101, 106, 109, 114, 140, 142, 143, 144, 146, 148, 167, 169, 172, 186, 197, 225, 226, 280, 293, 308, 310, 312, 319, 320, 323, 327, 330, 359, 361, 362, 385 Prokofiev, Sergei 297 proletarian 1, 9, 24, 29, 36, 45, 46, 50, 53, 83, 100, 101, 102, 104, 108, 109, 110, 125, 165, 173, 174, 175, 178, 192, 196, 206, 207, 208, 221, 222, 223, 225, 241, 250, 269, 278, 309, 310, 319, 366 proletarian art 110, 174, 221, 222 proletariat 1, 24, 36, 37, 39, 44, 45, 52, 53, 93, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 113, 124, 131, 143, 168, 178, 186, 191, 224, 226, 296, 306, 307, 309 proletkults 108 propaganda 23, 27, 29, 30, 31, 38, 39, 41, 43, 46, 53, 83, 86, 94, 107, 113, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 126, 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 138, 140, 141, 142, 145, 151, 156, 162, 165, 166, 168, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 178, 195,

414 206, 208, 209, 210, 212, 214, 215, 227, 228, 229, 234, 236, 237, 239, 241, 243, 244, 245, 248, 251, 252, 253, 254, 265, 267, 272, 273, 274, 275, 278, 281, 284, 291, 299, 306, 314, 319, 320, 322, 326, 328, 334, 336, 358, 362, 365, 367, 368, 369, 371, 372, 273, 374, 375, 377, 384, 387, 388 Propagandaministerium (Propaganda Ministry) 245 propagandists 11, 25, 28, 29, 46, 52, 113, 117, 118, 119, 127, 131, 132, 134, 155, 187, 202, 244, 245, 247, 267, 293, 303, 307, 329, 345, 374, 377 property 1, 2, 25, 27, 30, 84, 85, 101, 102, 104, 111, 121, 338, 364 prosperity 1, 11, 18, 28, 50, 102, 103, 120, 135 prostitute 55, 66, 70, 80, 250 Protestant 329 proto-communist 13, 23, 29, 35, 36, 48, 52, 53, 298 Protogenes 292 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 13, 29, 38, 39, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 79, 81, 82, 83, 86, 88, 91, 96, 97, 100, 101, 103, 104, 165, 171, 178, 251, 269, 269, 295, 298, 302, 303, 307, 309, 312, 389 provincial 3, 15, 41, 220, 225 Prussian 7, 94, 96, 237, 269 Public Works of Art Project 138, 140, 145, 146, 149, 151, 152, 154, 155, 156, 166, 167, 169, 171, 178, 191, 201, 202, 208, 209, 212, 213, 226, 227, 307, 373 publicity stunt 300 Puccini, Giacomo 14 Pyat, Felix 3, 5, 16, 18, 19, 22

Index Pythagoras 54, 181 Quai de Bourbon 16 Raabe, Wilhelm 270 racial 190, 191, 230, 231, 236, 240, 246, 247, 248, 250, 252, 253, 267 racial hygiene 246 racist 104, 239, 247, 250, 268, 286, 326 Radek, Karl 112, 113, 115, 116, 388 radicalism 51, 214, 226, 314 radio 120, 130, 134, 192, 240, 243, 244, 245, 320, 321, 329, 330, 335, 360, 361, 366, 369, 375 Radio City 145, 199, 213 rallies 27, 242, 245, 256, 261 Rand School 196 Raphael 69 rationality 54 Rauschning, Herman 239, 240, 256, 275, 277 raza cósmica 181, 187 reactionary 23, 101, 109, 192, 246, 315, 320, 324, 352, 368, 373 Reader’s Digest 141 realism 10, 17, 29, 35, 43, 47, 51, 52, 53, 55, 65, 68, 86, 92, 93, 95, 100, 104, 107, 109, 110, 112, 113, 114, 131, 147, 148, 154, 165, 170, 171, 172, 173, 175, 179, 191, 215, 227, 278, 279, 285, 291, 294, 296, 297, 303, 310, 360, 371, 379 realist 13, 40, 41, 43, 48, 52, 60, 62, 65, 79, 81, 82, 92, 93, 103, 105, 108, 109, 110, 113, 138, 153, 154, 156, 165, 166, 168, 170, 171, 172, 174, 175, 206, 225, 227, 228, 263, 288, 291, 295, 296, 298, 303, 309, 314 realist school 39, 54, 55, 295, 298 red waistcoat 6 reform 24, 29, 38, 43, 46, 48, 54, 144, 164, 171, 185, 186, 207, 235, 286 reformation 44, 50, 61, 134, 237

Kitsch, Propaganda, and the American Avant-Garde reformed 38, 44, 55, 237 refugees 207, 280, 288, 319, 320, 321, 324, 325, 326, 327, 328, 329, 329, 330, 331, 332, 333, 334, 336, 337, 338, 339, 340, 341, 342, 343, 344, 345, 347, 349, 350, 351 Reich Chancellery 242 Reichskulturkammer (Culture Chamber) 245 Reichsmusikkammer (Music Chamber) 246 Reiset, Frédéric 79 religion 2, 3, 13, 30, 50, 78, 85, 100, 101, 144, 187, 193, 222, 224, 284, 286, 306, 320, 342, 371, 391 religious 3, 12, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 40, 44, 78, 79, 86, 100, 147, 237, 264, 285, 302, 305, 329, 341, 365 Rembrandt 44, 50, 256, 257, 274, 358 Renaissance 1, 40, 44, 87, 139, 147, 282, 303 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 10, 60, 79, 80, 220, 293 Repin, Ilya 309, 310 Republican 39, 40, 130, 142, 167, 214, 302, 319, 327, 329, 330, 339, 349, 359, 376, resistance 51, 63, 101, 127, 330, 338, 351 Resor, Helen Lansdowne 369 Resor, Stanley 369 Resor, Stanley Jr. 369 reviews 72, 294, 296, 314, 383 revolution 1, 2, 6, 7, 9, 11, 19, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 46, 50, 52, 55, 84, 85, 88, 89, 94, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 107, 108, 109 110, 111, 112, 124, 125, 131, 133, 139, 142, 143, 145, 167, 168, 169, 175, 179, 185, 186, 206, 208, 210, 222,

415

258, 278, 302, 303, 308, 309, 311, 366, 368, 386, 390 revolution of 1848 7, 19 revolutionary 2, 6, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 43, 46, 50, 52, 55, 61, 67, 84, 86, 94, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113, 122, 123, 124, 126, 132, 143, 145, 168, 169, 170, 175, 180, 185, 186, 187, 191, 194, 195, 196, 206, 208, 212, 215, 227, 235, 288, 296, 298, 299, 301, 303, 304, 308, 309, 328, 361 Revolutionary Socialists 55, 328 Rexroth, Kenneth 207 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 293 Ribot, Théodule 93 Rigolboche (Amelia Marguerite Badel) 48, 57 riot 153, 154, 208, 211, 212, 297, 323 Rivera, Diego 134, 139, 145, 153, 171, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 220, 226, 231, 232, 233, 308, 309, 378, 384, 385, 389, 391 Robert-Fleury, Tony 78, 79 Robert, Lawrence W. Jr 140, 145, 146, 148 Roberts, Laurance 374 Robinson, Boardman 227 Rockefeller Center 134, 153, 185, 186, 191, 192, 200 Rockefeller Foundation 141 Rockefeller, Abby 157, 163, 182, 191 Rockefeller, Nelson 145, 185, 186, 191, 200, 317, 379 Rodrigues, Olinde 24, 25, 29, 32, 83 Rogers, Julia 209 Roko Gallery 315

416 Roland, Marcel 293 Roloff, Otto 263 Roman 26, 48, 187, 229, 230 Roman Catholicism 283 romance 35, 49, 286, 338 Romanesque 87 Romanticism 5, 13, 36, 43, 45, 47, 51, 71, 79, 279 Romantic 4, 5, 6, 11, 13, 14, 17, 25, 30, 37, 39, 40, 43, 45, 49, 52, 53, 54, 61, 62, 69, 79, 85, 87, 88, 103, 227, 249, 250, 286, 288, 311, 338, 346 Roosevelt, Franklin 46, 114, 117149, 156, 157, 158, 159, 162, 165, 168, 170, 173, 174, 175, 186, 197, 208, 215, 220, 225, 230, 233, 274, 275, 277, 291, 306, 319, 320, 321, 324, 325, 326, 327, 328, 329, 330, 332, 333, 334, 335, 336, 341, 342, 343, 347, 350, 351, 352, 353, 354,355, 356, 358, 359, 360, 362, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 373, 374, 375, 376, 377, 378, 379, 380, 382, 386, 387, 389, 390 Roosevelt, Eleanor 117, 118, 135, 136, 146, 148, 156, 159, 319, 320, 328-336, 342-351, 353, 354, 356, 377 Rops, Félicien 13 Rosenberg, Alfred 150, 160, 246258, 267-276, 322, 390 Rosenberg, James 150, 160 Rouault, Georges 364 Rouge plant 183 Rousseau, Henri 228 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 207 royal 27, 31, 41, 55, 94, 219 Roybet, Ferdinand 93 Ruderman, Terry 142 Russell, John 305, 317, 390 Russia 29, 35-43, 103, 105-111, 113-114, 121, 122, 131, 132, 133, 135, 138, 140, 141, 142,

Index 143, 154, 162, 164, 165, 168, 171, 172, 174, 175, 178, 180, 185, 205, 215, 227, 269, 273, 278, 296, 307, 308-310, 313, 319, 334-335, 250, 366, 368, 373, 377, 379, 384, 388, 391 Rust, Bernhard 237, 238, 239, 246, 268 S-Project 274-275 Sachs, Paul 370 Sachsenhausen 274 Salazar, Antonio 321 Saliger, Ivo 264, 271-272 Salon 6, 10, 16, 17, 35, 40, 44, 45, 50, 60-82, 87, 90, 96 Salon des Refusés 73-77, 95 Salon of Venuses 90 San Francisco 181, 182, 201-214, 216-218, 378, 391 San Francisco Art Association 182 San Francisco Museum 375 San Francisco Regional Committee of the Public Works of Art Project 208 San Francisco Stock Exchange 185 Santa Monica 213 Sargent, John Singer 170 Satie, Erik 296 Scheuer, Suzanne 214, 216, 218 Schindler, Oscar 337 Schlemmer, Oskar 252, 322 Schlossmuseum 252 scholasticism 262 Scholderer, Otto 11 Scholz, Robert 288, 290 Schönberg, Arnold 297 Schopenhauer, Arthur 247, 293 Schröder, Gustav 324, 325 Schultze-Naumburg, Paul 246, 248252, 258, 266, 390 Schwarzenegger, Arnold 266 Schwind, Moritz von 270 science 26, 28, 31, 38, 51, 54, 89, 92, 109, 192, 197, 235, 237, 238, 239, 284, 294, 303, 334, 390

Kitsch, Propaganda, and the American Avant-Garde Scott, Howard 140 Scott, Walter 2-3, 5, 19 Scribner’s 130, 154, 166, 295, 296 sculptor 16, 24, 25, 61, 66, 87, 107, 108, 109, 159, 165, 202, 206, 214, 223, 242, 315, 337, 359, 378 sculpture 7, 13, 43, 58, 74, 87, 95, 104, 107, 108, 111, 113, 115, 116, 138, 147, 150, 156, 159, 160, 163, 165, 170, 182, 201, 202, 203, 204, 215, 216, 217, 226, 229, 230, 236, 240, 242, 250, 251, 254, 260, 261, 263, 265-266, 267, 269, 272, 273, 291, 294, 304, 311, 313, 314, 360, 363, 367, 368, 370, 371, 372, 376, 377, 378 seascape 50, 79, 81, 95 Secession 13 Second Empire 7, 82 Second World War 172, 175, 370 Secretariat of Education 203 Secretary of State 140, 320, 325, 340, 342, 343, 347, 350, 369 Secretary of the Interior 145, 320, 347 Section of Fine Arts 139, 158 Section of Painting and Sculpture 138, 147, 156 Seiferheld, David 351 self-expression 50, 284, 299 self-indulgence 15, 264 Selz, Peter 370, 381, Selznick International Pictures 370 Seneca 48 Sensier, Alfred 52, 58 sensuality 30, 40, 54 sentiment 23, 27, 29, 38, 39, 91, 93, 147, 156, 175, 210, 248, 266, 270, 278, 279-280, 286, 311 Serge, Victor 344 Sert, Josep Maria 192 Seurat, Georges 220, 299 sex 5, 35, 69, 71, 238, 249, 272, 293 Seymour, Charles 330

417

Sforza, Carlo 327 Shakespeare, William 5 Sharp, Waitstill 340 Shaw, George Bernard 214 Shelley, Mary 2 Shelley, Percy 207 Sheppard, Mabel 369 shock art 313 Siberia 36 Signac, Paul 299, 305 Sikorski, Wladyslaw 327 Silvestre, Armand 12, 21 Siqueiros, David 145, 180, 226 Sisley, Alfred 10, 60 Skidmore College 327 Slavonic Review 39 Sloan, John 151, 153 Smith College 330 Smollet, Tobias 207 Social Democrats 283, 288, 328, 371 socialism 35, 39, 45, 46, 50, 53, 82, 83, 85, 102, 112, 113, 140, 141, 174, 184, 185, 186, 194, 236, 238, 241, 243, 247, 248, 251, 268, 275, 279, 288, 300, 302, 305, 307, 308, 311 socialist 7, 11, 13, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 35, 36-55, 82, 94, 100, 308, 309, 311, 312, 314, 319, 322, 327, 328, 329, 330, 334, 359, 366, 371, 373, 379 socialist realism 29, 35, 54, 55, 100, 104, 107, 110, 112, 113, 114, 131, 165, 171, 215, 278, 291, 294, 296, 297, 303, 371, 379 Société des Artistes Indépendants (Society of Independent Artists) 96, 163 Society of Independent Artists 163 Society of New Painters 297 Sociology 29, 281, 330 Soirée d'été 80 Solicitor General 140 Sorolla, Joaquín 179

418 Soviet Union 35, 46, 83, 103, 108, 110, 114, 131, 143, 175, 180, 208, 303, 308, 309, 364 Spandau prison 245 Spanish Civil War 319, 329, 349 Special Operations Executive (SOE) 335, 336, 390 Speer, Albert 242, 245, 257, 261, 274, 277, 326, 390 Spencer, Herbert 293 Spinner 49, 64 Spitzweg, Carl 274 St. Louis 324, 325, 329 St. Petersburg 35, 37 Staatsgallerie 322 Stackpole, Ralph 181, 182, 194, 199-207, 214, 216, 217, 378 Stalin 46, 57, 83, 104, 110, 114, 115, 121, 129, 132, 133, 137, 141, 144, 168, 171, 174, 175, 179, 180, 186, 215, 296, 307, 308, 319, 320, 372, 373, 377, 384, 390 Stalinist 107, 112, 168, 173, 186, 308, 310, 313 Stascher, Shirley 209 State Department 324, 325, 326, 330, 331, 332, 334, 335, 340, 342, 343, 344, 347, 349, 350, 352, 369, 371 State School for Architecture, Fine Art, and Handicraft 252 Station WOR 360 Stauffer, Donald 314, 315 Steinbeck, John 334, 335 Steiner, Rudolf 301, 305 Stella, Joseph 172 Stephenson, William 335, 355, 390 Sterne, Laurence 207 Stieglitz, Alfred 153, 296, 299, 316 Stirner, Max 299 Stone, Harlan 209, 214 Stone, William 333, 354 Strachey, John 206 Sturm und Drang 41 Sturmabteilung (brown-shirts) 273

Index Stuttgart 276, 280, 321, 322, 390 Styka, Tadeusz 166 subculture 4, 6, 9, 23, 249, 313 Sudetenland 321 Sullivan, Cornelius J. 369 Sullivan, Mary Quinn 369 Suprematism 105 Surrealism 228, 287, 292, 302, 337, 352, 229, 287, 292, 302, 337, 352 surrealists 228, 302, 314, 344, 347, 348 Sweeney, James 297 Swift, Jonathan 207 Swing, Raymond Gram 330 Switzerland 41, 178, 304, 322, 350, 367, 368 symbolist 13, 82, 249, 297, 299 Szõnyi, István 297 tapestry 302 taste 3, 4, 7, 8, 40, 44-45, 47, 48, 50, 58, 64, 72, 91, 103, 108, 109, 110, 111, 147, 149, 178, 179, 195, 220, 234, 250, 251, 268, 269, 270, 274, 275, 279, 280, 281, 282, 309, 347, 360, 361, 363, 368, 377 Tatlin, Vladimir 104, 107, 114, 115 Taylor, Francis 159, 373, 375 Tchoumakoff, Theodore 94 Temperament 16, 86, 92, 297 Ten Eyck Houses 172 Terence 48 Terror 11, 23, 104 Texas 137, 155, 217 Thackeray, William 207 theatre 3, 5, 6, 8, 72, 79, 118, 120, 156, 162, 202, 235, 245, 252, 254, 291, 293, 294, 296, 297, 314, 322, 363, 364, 374 theologian 39, 329 Theosophy 51, 180, 301, 302, 305 Third Republic 78, 85, 94, 96 Thoma, Hans 274 Thompson, Dorothy 330 Thorak, Josef 242, 265, 266, 272

Kitsch, Propaganda, and the American Avant-Garde Thuringia 251 Thyssen, Fritz 274, 349, 390 Tibet 304 Titian 80 Tittle, Hans 345 Toch, Ernst 297, 316 Torah 207 Torr, William 339 totalitarian 29, 54, 55, 82, 131, 168, 169, 278, 307, 308, 310, 313, 319, 322, 362, 368, 379 touring exhibit 364 trade union 100, 334 traditional 101, 104, 110, 123, 146, 149, 175, 225, 236, 238, 249, 269, 313 Trajan’s Column 41 transcendence 303 transcendentalism 51 transvestism 70 Treasury Department 138, 162, 383 Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP) 138, 142, 156 Treasury’s Advisory Committee on Fine Arts 147 Treaty of Versailles 214, 215, 234 tribal art 225 Trinidad 335 Troost, Paul 260, 261, 269 Trotsky, Leon 110, 115, 141, 162, 168, 169, 176, 180, 186, 199, 307, 308, 309, 313, 317, 344, 345, 347, 366, 380, 390 true art 45, 187, 279, 280, 284, 285, 286, 291, 309, 315 Trujillo, Rafael 321 Tsar 35, 37, 107, 109, 111, 113 Tsar Alexander II 37 Tsireh, Awa 226 Tubman, Harriet 353 Tugwell, Rexford 140, 148 tyranny 23, 27, 39, 52, 80, 107, 125, 169, 193, 286, 324, 370 Undset, Sigrid 207 Unemployed Artists Group 151, 153

419

unemployment 119, 120, 132, 138, 140, 141, 151, 153, 154, 156, 166, 173, 174, 185, 193, 201, 210, 234, 254, 383 Union of Artists of the USSR 108 United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration 141 United States 114, 128, 132, 138, 140, 141, 147, 148, 150, 164, 171, 180, 183, 185, 187, 188, 199, 201, 202, 221, 228, 229, 231, 233, 239, 252, 278, 279, 288, 294, 306, 319, 321, 323, 324, 325, 326, 328, 329, 330, 332, 333, 334, 335, 340, 341, 342, 348, 349, 351, 352, 362, 364, 365, 368, 369, 370, 371, 372, 373, 374, 379, 388, 389 United States Information Agency 141 United States Information Service 141 Universal Exposition 95 universal suffrage 7 University of Braunschweig 241 University of California Berkeley 371, 388 University of Chicago 325, 330, 361, 385 University of Newark 329 University of Tübingen 322 U.S. Army 336, 369 utilitarian 13, 53, 83, 106, 272 Utopia 5, 7, 13, 23, 24, 25, 29, 31, 40, 50, 52, 83, 86, 113, 175, 185, 186, 190, 191, 236, 248, 249, 250, 284, 286, 288, 299, 301, 303, 305, 308, 309, 328 Uxmal 181 Valadon, Jules 62, 63 Valentiner, William 182, 183, 185, 189, 214 Valery, Paul 296 Valliant, George 375 van Dyck, Anthony 80

420 Van Vechten, Carl 207 vandalism 196 Vanderbilt, Gertrude 150, 160 Vanderbilt, Grace 359 Varin, Émile 29, 33 Vasconcelos, José 180, 181, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191, 200, 231, 390 Vaszary, János 297 vaudeville 3 Vayo, Alzarez del 330 Veblen 140 vegetarian 249 Velasquez 60, 66 Vendôme column 41, 52 vernacular 294 Verne, Jules 207 Vernet concentration camp 345, 347 Vernet, Horace 45, 47, 48 Veronese 65 Versailles 214, 215, 234, 350 Vichy 320, 328, 337, 340, 345, 347, 349, 350, 367 Victoria, Queen 61, 73, 391 Victorian 219 Vienna Academy of Fine Arts 241 vigilantes 211 violence 7, 27, 37, 105, 205, 211, 222, 227, 286, 323 Virgin Mary 47 visa 182, 196, 324, 325, 326, 327, 331, 332, 333, 339, 341, 342, 343, 344, 346, 347, 349, 350 Vizetelly, Alfred 16, 17 volk 229, 230, 239, 248, 251, 252, 253, 254, 262, 263, 281, 359 völkisch 236, 246, 249 Voltaire 85 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 5, 237, 281 von Hindenburg, Paul 235 von Sacher-Masoch, Leopold 13 W. B. Filip, Master Mariner 219 Wagner 68 Wagner, Adolf 359 Wagner, Richard 286, 287, 293

Index Wallisch, Georg 266 Walton, Thomas 17 wandervögel (wandering bird) 249, 271 War 6, 7, 18, 23, 25, 26, 70, 85, 105, 107, 108, 113, 114, 117, 118, 119, 121, 123, 124, 132, 132, 133, 135, 136, 141, 142, 144, 157, 162, 166, 172, 174, 175, 192, 193, 196, 202, 203, 207, 214, 215, 221, 222, 234, 235, 236, 237, 240, 242, 247, 248, 250, 251, 252, 255, 257, 260, 265, 269, 271, 273, 274, 278, 279, 280, 282, 284, 285, 287, 291, 301, 303, 307, 319, 321, 326, 328, 329, 333, 335, 338, 340, 345, 347, 348, 349, 350, 351, 352, 362, 366, 367, 368, 369, 370, 371, 372, 373, 374, 375, 379, 383, 388, 389, 390 Warburg, Edward M. 149, 269 Warburg, Ingrid 330 Warren, George 342, 343, 356, Washington 26, 125, 137, 139, 140, 146, 153, 154, 155, 160, 200, 209, 217, 228, 279, 280, 292, 315, 333, 340, 341, 342, 358, 370, 374, 376 watercolours 150, 162, 187, 235, 245, 282, 296, 368 Watrous, Harry 151 Watson, Edwin 327 Watson, Forbes 151, 208, 217 weapon 24, 25, 30, 126, 140, 324, 336, 368, 374, 379 Weidemann, Hans 245 Weimar 253, 322, 388 Weiss, Ernst 326 Welles, Sumner 320, 321, 332, 343, 353 Wells, H. G. 46, 132, 186, 391 Werfel, Franz 338, 339 west 39, 86, 107, 112, 144, 170, 171, 189, 190, 204, 225, 226,

Kitsch, Propaganda, and the American Avant-Garde 240, 278, 325, 329, 361, 363, 366, 372 West, Benjamin 226 West, Bert 203 Western tradition 225, 232 Western Worker 206, 208, 209, 211 Whetton, Cris 273, 277, 391 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill 10, 61, 65, 66, 74, 81, 90, 96, 293, 295, 373, 391 White House 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 134, 140, 145, 165, 326, 327, 335, 342, 359 White Russian 106, 205 Whitney Museum 150, 152, 153, 154, 159, 160, 166, 220, 375, 383 Whitney Studio Club 152 Whitney, Harry Payne 150 Whitney, Joan 370 Whitney, John Hay 370 Wight, Clifford 181, 182, 183, 185, 192, 194, 197, 198-215, 217, 218 Wilde, Oscar 13, 207, 298 Winebaum, B.V. 314, 318 Wobbly 333 Wolfe, Bertram 178, 187, 196, 199, 200, 389, 391 Wolff, Adolf 299 women 26, 27, 30, 31, 35, 48, 49, 52, 68, 92, 101, 105, 179, 188, 193, 194, 213, 226, 249, 250, 254, 264, 266, 271, 272, 273, 319, 331, 390 Workers' Ex-Servicemen's League 211 Workers' Open Forum Club 211 working class 1, 9, 31, 88, 100, 101, 125, 133, 184, 186, 204, 309 works of art 37, 38, 51, 72, 85, 108, 109, 148, 165, 166, 167, 169, 171, 178, 191, 201, 223, 248, 262, 263, 273, 280, 359, 371, 372

421

Works Progress Administration 138, 156, 162, 164, 167, 169, 291, 364, 365 world politics 221 World Telegram 195 World Trade Center 302 Wright, Frank Lloyd 364 Yankee News Service 369 Yorktown 26 youth 1, 3, 4, 5, 11, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 53, 67, 68, 94, 103, 105, 106, 123, 215, 216, 239, 240, 255, 256, 257, 260, 261, 265, 267, 268, 272, 294, 304, 305, 323, 327, 378, 384 Zakheim, Bernard 201, 205, 206, 207, 209, 210, 211, 216, 217 Zakheim, Masha 208, 217, 391 Zapata, Emiliano 187 Zäper, Max 270 Zarathustra 273 Zasulich, Vera 37 Zay, Jean 228 zeitgeist 43, 54, 70, 229, 289, 290, 384 Zemlinsky, Alexander 338 Zetkin, Clara 111, 115, 391 Ziegler, Adolf 263, 264, 270, 264, 271 Ziemer, Gregor 238, 239, 255, 276, 391 Zier, Victor 94 Zigrosser, Carl 299 Zimmerman, Charles 308 Zingaro 3 Zola, Émile 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 55, 59, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 71, 75, 77, 78, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 96, 97, 98, 99, 293, 297, 298, 299, 310, 311, 313, 314, 316, 391 Zola, Émilie 9 Zola, François 9 zombie formalism 313 Zorach, William 151, 160