Watching the red dawn: The American avant-garde and the Soviet Union 9781784997687

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Watching the red dawn

Watching the red dawn The American avant-garde and the Soviet Union

Barnaby Haran

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Barnaby Haran 2016 The right of Barnaby Haran to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

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ISBN 978 0 7190 9722 5 hardback

First published 2016 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of figures vi Acknowledgementsix Introduction: the red Atlantic 1 1. Constructivism in the USA: machine art and architecture at The Little Review exhibitions 10 2. The mass and the machine: The New Playwrights Theatre and American radical Constructivism 54 3. Kino in America: Soviet montage and the American cinematic avant-garde92 4. Camera eyes: the worker photography movement and the New Vision in America 130 Epilogue: red train journeys 174 Bibliography190 Index207

Figures

1.1 El Lissitzky, ‘Proun 1 D’, 1920. Lithograph. British Museum, London.17 1.2 Louis Lozowick, ‘Machine Ornament No. 2’, c. 1927. Ink on ­paperboard. Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. 18 1.3 Louis Lozowick, Modern Russian Art, cover. Cambridge University Library. Courtesy of Mary Ryan Gallery. 20 1.4 El Lissitzky, ‘Veshch no. 1’, 1922. Journal with letterpress on cover. The British Library, London. 21 1.5 Louis Lozowick, ‘Stage Set for Fashion Show at Lord & Taylor Department Store, New York, 1926’. From the Archives Department, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries. 22 1.6 Louis Lozowick, ‘Machine-Age Exposition poster’, 1927. Special Collections Research Center at Syracuse University Libraries. 23 1.7 Frederick Kiesler, ‘Shop Window Display, SAKS Fifth Avenue, New York’, 1928. © 2015 Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna. 29 1.8 Frederick Kiesler, Film Guild Cinema, New York, 1929. © 2015 Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna.33 1.9 Vesnin Brothers, ‘Perspective Drawing of the Palace of Labor’, 1922. The Schusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow. 40 2.1 Louis Lozowick, ‘Setting for Georg Kaiser’s Gas, Kenneth Sawyer Goodman Theatre, Chicago, 1926’. From the Archives Department, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries. 55 2.2 James Abbe, ‘The stage of the Meyerhold Theatre a few moments before the beginning of a play’. Popova’s set design for The



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Magnanimous Cuckold, by Fernand Crommelynk, Vsevolod Meyerhold Theatre, Moscow. Gelatin silver print, 1928. Courtesy of Abbe Estate. 62 2.3 International Theatre Exposition, New York, 1926. © 2015 Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna. 63 2.4 Setting for John Howard Lawson, Loud Speaker, 1927, in John Howard Lawson, Loud Speaker (The Macaulay Press: New York, 1927). Author’s copy. Courtesy of Susan Amanda Lawson and Jeffrey Lawson. 69 2.5 Ralph Steiner, Paul Sifton’s The Belt, 1928, Theatre Arts Monthly (December 1927), p. 909. Author’s copy. Steiner photograph courtesy of the estate. 74 3.1 The Man with a Movie Camera (1929, USSR). Directed by Dziga Vertov. VUFKU/Photofest © VUFKU. 97 3.2 Frederick Kiesler, Film Guild Cinema with Screenoscope, New York, 1929. © 2014 Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna. 98 3.3 Experimental Cinema, 1 (February 1930), cover. Author’s copy. 108 4.1 Tina Modotti, New Masses (October 1928), cover. Tamiment Labor History Library, New York University. 134 4.2 Leo Seltzer, ‘Depression 1933. Rent Strike, East Harlem, New York City’. © Leo Seltzer. 136 4.3 Alexander Rodchenko, ‘Sentry of the Shukov Tower’, 1929. Gelatin silver print. © Rodchenko and Stepanova Archive, DACS, RAO, 2015. 139 4.4 Max Alpert, ‘Workers travelling to the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Combine construction site’, 1930. ©TOPFOTO. 140 4.5 László Moholy-Nagy, ‘Rinnstein (Gutter)’, 1925. Gelatin silver print. © Hattula Moholy-Nagy/DACS 2015. 141 4.6 Albert Renger-Patzsch, ‘Flatirons for Shoe Manufacture’, 1928. Gelatin silver print. © Albert Renger-Patzsch Archiv/Ann und Jürgen Wilde /DACS, London 2015. 145 4.7 Ralph Steiner, ‘Typewriter Keys’, 1922. Photograph. Courtesy of the estate. 147 4.8 Ralph Steiner, ‘Gas Tank’, 1926–7. Photograph. Courtesy of the estate.148 4.9 ‘Edward Weston’, Experimental Cinema, 3 (February 1931). Author’s copy.151 4.10 Margaret Bourke-White, ‘State Farm No. 2’, 1930. Gelatin silver print. © Estate of Margaret Bourke-White/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. 160

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4.11 Margaret Bourke-White, ‘A New Tractor’, 1930. Gelatin silver print. © Estate of Margaret Bourke-White/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. 4.12 James Abbe, ‘Workers Home at Dnieperstroi Dam’, 1932. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the Abbe Estate.

162 165

Acknowledgements

My thanks first and foremost go to Andrew Hemingway, Professor Emeritus in History of Art at University College London, who supervised the Masters dissertation and PhD thesis that formed the basis of this book. Andrew’s guidance and friendship have extended beyond the period of supervision, and his scholarship remains an important model for my own research and teaching. From my time at UCL I would also like to show my gratitude to the following lecturers and colleagues who have offered support and advice: Warren Carter, Briony Fer, Charles Ford, Tamar Garb, Maggie Gray, Tom Gretton, Klara KempWelch, Ed Krcma, Jody Patterson, Martin Perks, and Frederic J. Schwartz. I must also thank Stephanie Schwartz, my co-organizer of the 2013 conference ‘Retracing America: Modernism After Paul Strand’, who has greatly helped me formulate my ideas about photography and film. Colleagues in the Department of History of Art at the University of Bristol gave advice generously, in particular the participants in the Transnational Modernisms Research Cluster: Grace Brockington, Mike O’Mahony, Dorothy Price, and Simon Shaw-Miller. I would also like to thank my fellow staff members at the University of Hull for their encouragement and advice: David Eldridge, Michael Gratzke, Jo Metcalf, Jenel Virden, Simon Willmetts, and James Zborowski. Thanks also to the students I have taught over the years at UCL, Thames Valley University, Bristol, and Hull. The following people greatly helped the research process and completion of the book at various stages with generous assistance or advice: Tilly Abbe, Russell Campbell, Steve Edwards, Robert Haller, Milena Michalski, Tatjana Okresek, Gary Saretzky, Vierle Thielemans, Murray Weiss, John Welchman, and Gerd Zillner. The staff of several organizations facilitated the research process, including Anthology Film Archives, Archives of American Art, Columbia University, Frederick Kiesler Foundation, Houghton Library at Harvard University, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of the City of New

x

acknowledgements

York, Museum of Modern Art, New York Public Library, Syracuse University Special Collections Research Center, Tamiment Labor History Library at New York University, Terra Foundation for American Art, University of WisconsinMadison Special Collections. Throughout the gestation of this book, I have received encouragement and support from friends and family, in particular my mother Rusty Haran, who I thank for her translations of several texts. I would also like to thank Ilona Fingele, for her support, understanding, and love. Finally, this book is dedicated to my daughters Molly and Bridie Haran.

Introduction: the red Atlantic

This book concerns the cultural responses of the American avant-garde to the Soviet Union during the period from the foundation of the USSR to its recognition by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s government in 1933. The Americans in this study who watched the ‘Red Dawn’ were variously artists, architects, designers, writers, curators, collectors, critics, and journalists, all of whom were fascinated by the epic transformations of revolutionary Russia and enthused by the possibilities for new forms of art that would match this epochal social experiment. In practice, I examine American reporting on Soviet culture and the exhibition, largely in New York, of post-revolutionary works, and also discuss how the American avant-garde received Soviet ideas and styles in the conception of its own practices, whether in polemical, utopian or formal terms. All of this activity occurred in an avant-garde milieu that was interdisciplinary in its practices and, like many coeval European groupings such as the Bauhaus and the Surrealist movement, was aesthetically and ideologically sympathetic to the radical cross-pollination of culture in the Soviet Union and its putative irruption of art into everyday life. For this reason alone it is crucial that this book is an interdisciplinary account that explores these interconnections in several media. However, these Americans typically specialized in one medium, fanning their practices out into other areas, and therefore I respect media concentrations in the chapter structures. The chapters do provide surveys up to a point, but the organization is episodic and each chapter consists of an in-depth discussion of a small selection of case studies, of moments and movements that demonstrate the complexities and contradictions of this particular form of international cultural traffic. Yet, beyond this practical remit, there were a number of motifs and tropes that operated across media, of which the most prevalent was that ubiquitous cipher of the early twentieth-century avant-garde: ‘the machine’, or more

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specifically, the American machine. Watching the Red Dawn addresses a curious scenario whereby Americans witnessing the incorporation of the Soviet Union, going ‘into the future’ as Lincoln Steffens notoriously trumpeted, expected to find an unprecedented society but instead encountered an archaic, impoverished nation of Russians looking wistfully to America, lauding American modernity and fetishizing its machines in contrast to their own antiquated technologies.1 Americans might not have invented the machine, but by the 1920s the United States was firmly established as the world’s technological leader and as such signified the mechanized future society that other countries aimed to become. While ‘Américanisme’ in France and ‘Amerikanismus’ in Germany connoted a multiplicity of American novelties – including Jazz, cowboys, and Hollywood – that offered appealingly fleet and modish alternatives to Europe’s weighty and sedimented High Culture, ‘Amerikanizm’ in Russia was more notably concentrated on America’s technological modernity; for Soviets, America was synonymous with the machine. Fascination with American technology was not just the province of the avantgarde of the Soviet Union. The leaders of the Bolshevik Party fervently argued that American capitalist systems of production should be the model for generating communist society from the wreckage of Tsarist Russia, with its diminutive industrial sector and minimal technology, its ancient social order, engorged bureaucracy, stunted private sector, large peasantry and comparatively small working class. Although asserting that the USA was the Revolution’s enemy, Leon Trotsky said that ‘the technology of America, joined with the Soviet organization of society, would produce communism, or in any case, the conditions of life approaching it’.2 The Soviet leadership and the avant-garde, united in the figure of the playwright Anatoli Lunacharsky, the People’s Commissariat of Enlightening, admired America’s rationalized technological processes and methods, colloquially known as Fordism and as Taylorism after Henry Ford’s assembly line and Frederick Winslow Taylor’s labour efficiency studies respectively, and appropriated them to instil new mechanistic mentalities that would engender rapid modernization. Curious cultural outgrowths ensued, such as Taylorist ballets and theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold’s development of rationalized biomechanical stage movements, which he modelled on Taylor’s organization of labour: ‘the methods of Taylorism may be applied to the work of the actor in the same way as they are to any form of work with the aim of maximum productivity’.3 Meyerhold’s theatre was perhaps the most high-profile manifestation of Constructivism. In the early 1920s, the experiments of the Constructivists aimed to bring the machine to the masses and thereby stimulate a new Soviet subject by reconfiguring culture, a process that involved breaking down the artwork into its constituent materials and beginning anew with unprecedented visual



introduction : the red atlantic 3

and verbal languages. Emerging from the intensive experimental firmament of the 1910s that birthed Suprematism and Futurism, and melding the philosophical treatise of Formalism with the mass-engaging praxis of Proletcult, the crystallization of Constructivism marked the first post-revolutionary avant-garde and heralded a Soviet machine age, a technophile workers’ state in which artists were producers and art was an everyday life currency of the masses rather than the luxurious property of the elite or the sacred ornament of the Orthodox Church. Constructivism witnessed a rethinking of the experience of the object in which the rational, communitarian mechanics of the engineer replaced the mystical genius of the expressive maker, although this revision tended to fetishize the machine to the point of quasi-religiosity. The Constructivist machine aesthetic was the channel through which the American avant-garde encountered its Soviet opposite, but the signals in this communication were distorted, as if an actual transatlantic transmission had passed through a mid-Atlantic storm. Crucially, the aims of American and Soviet avant-gardes diverged; few Americans genuinely considered abandoning art altogether, although many were attracted to Constructivism’s millennial, almost magical, rhetoric on the machine. In one respect, a subtext of Watching the Red Dawn might be the emergence of a putative American Constructivism, but such an abortive phenomenon only materialized partially in certain media, notably theatre and film, and lacked the acute theorization, evident in Soviet discourses, of the revolutionary properties of form. One crucial question concerns the degree to which Constructivism was amenable for transnational migration, or whether instead it was contingent upon a sui generis revolutionary situation to secure its social promise. Russian machinolatry of American technology strongly shaped the American avant-garde imagination of the Soviet Union. If American technology served as a template for a Soviet machine aesthetic, then many American visitors were astonished and bemused at the extent of Russian fascination with their country’s capitalist production systems, which as communists or bohemians they often derided and even despised. As a proponent of machine art in the early 1920s, the Russian-born American artist Louis Lozowick was well placed to assess this conundrum. Visiting the Soviet Union in 1922 and liaising with the protagonists of its avant-garde, he recalled in his autobiography that in Moscow ‘almost everyone evinced immediate interest in America, not, however, in its art but in its machines … the two names heard most often in this connection were Ford and Edison’.4 He recalled a typical comment: ‘Ah, America, wonderful machines, wonderful factories, wonderful buildings; give us time – we’ll have as much and more.’5 For these visitors, there was a paradox that lay in the contrast of the American sojourn in Paris, which Malcolm Cowley characterized as an ‘escape’ from standardization, with the Russian journey, undertaken by

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many former Americans in Paris who now confronted an intellectual, political, economic, and cultural discourse that saw the keys to Soviet success in industrialization, rationalization and efficiency.6 Fleeing America in Paris, they found Amerikanizm inescapable in Russia. Yet, even as many Americans travelled to Russia, Paris remained of great importance as a gateway into Europe and beyond, just as Berlin represented a gateway to the East – when Lozowick travelled to Moscow in 1922, he passed through Paris but resided mostly in Berlin. As both a destination point and a portal to the USSR, Berlin was also the metropolis whose exponential growth and intensive modernization positioned it as most similar to the American city yet nonetheless disparate, as the invaluable collection Berlin-New York, Like and Unlike: Essays on Architecture and Art from 1870 to the Present demonstrates.7 Much of the early information about the USSR and Constructivism came to the USA via Germany, carried by figures such as J. B. Neumann, Katherine Dreier, Lozowick, Boris Aronson, the editors of Broom (which was based in Berlin for a time), and Frederick Kiesler. From Berlin Dada to Bertolt Brecht’s barbed satire, ‘Amerikanismus’ was ubiquitous in Weimar culture, and was the site of numerous angry debates.8 Yet Berlin’s geographic proximity to Russia and the radical politics of many of the German avant-garde, from Hannah Höch to Hannes Meyer, meant that the Soviet Union rivalled America in the German cultural imagination. However, the German avant-garde did not especially preoccupy Americans with the same conceptual urgency as Soviet culture, and although many American cultural journals covered German films and buildings the discussion did not contextualize these objects within a comparable socio-political vision. As an interzone between America and Russia, the German cultural world of the 1920s and early 1930s has a vital intermediary role in this discussion. Berlin was an important staging post on the map of the international communist movement. Therefore, in contrast to the established transatlantic model, New York and Paris were not just the terminal cities of an oceanic voyage but coordinates on a radical cultural network that extended from Mexico to Moscow. This ‘red Atlantic’ journey was not necessarily a literal one, undertaken by any number of individuals (although the Mexican Diego Rivera did travel to Moscow in 1927, and Sergei Eisenstein filmed in Mexico in the early 1930s), but existed rather as a network of exchanges in the ‘little magazines’ and in international exhibitions, such as the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, the Machine-Age Exposition, and Film und Foto in Stuttgart in 1929. As such, the international span of the avant-garde was most effectively generated and sustained through transnational exchange. Watching the Red Dawn is the first account of the transnational phenomenon of the American avant-garde reception of the Soviet Union. As a way of articulating cultural traffic between nations, ‘transnationalism’, while not a cogent



introduction : the red atlantic 5

discourse, has been an important theme of cultural studies in recent years, and many accounts, notably Wanda Corn’s The Great American Thing and the collected volume Nexus New York, have usefully elaborated on the transatlantic, transpacific, or transcontinental traffic of forms and ideas at this moment.9 The most famous transnational relay was the New York to Paris circuit, a modernist silk road that took Marcel Duchamp, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein et al., back and forth in the process of germinating American Modernism. This book concerns the less attended ‘red Atlantic’, whereby in the 1930s the American in Moscow supplanted the Parisian expatriate as a transnational paradigm (rivalled perhaps in the later decade by the internationalists in Spain). Many of the protagonists in this book were either Russian-born or the children of immigrants, and belonged to a generation of Jews who had fled antiSemitism in Imperial Russia, among the millions passing through Ellis Island and settling in the ghettoes of Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the Lower East Side. It is important to recognize that for these Americans the sojourn to Russia was a return voyage, and as such we can trace the ‘red Atlantic’ back to the great wave of immigration from Russia in the first decade of the twentieth century. The notional ‘American Constructivism’ of Watching the Red Dawn was therefore a diasporic phenomenon, part of a longer social narrative of the migration of Jewish people and culture from Russia to America, and was a cultural hybrid as much as a transnational avant-garde trend. It was arguably the critical response to the discontents of capitalism felt by marginal citizens who held both insider and outsider perspectives on American society, whose Americanisms were conflicted between the fascination of the machine, the metropolis, jazz, and Hollywood, and anger about immigrant poverty in the tenements, segregation in the South, and the rule of the Boss. Drawn to avant-gardism and left-wing politics in the early 1920s, their vestigial Russian links solidified an identification with the nascent Soviet Union and its epic cultural transformations. The magazine New Masses occupies a central place within this narrative, appearing frequently throughout this study.10 New Masses’s editors and contributors, such as Mike Gold, Joseph Freeman, Joshua Kunitz, William Gropper, and Lozowick, were first- or second-generation Jewish immigrants from Russia or Eastern Europe. Following in the footsteps of The Masses and The Liberator, important radical magazines of the 1910s and early 1920s respectively, New Masses was distinct from its forebears as well as other ‘little magazines’ because it amalgamated the avant-garde machine aesthetic with the broad aims of the communist movement, and although not initially tethered to the Communist Party of the United States of America it nonetheless synthesized art and politics, for example reporting simultaneously on American strike activity and Soviet culture. New Masses responded to Constructivism’s machinolatry with its own discernible machine aesthetic, most evident in Lozowick’s covers and

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illustrations and the Constructivist stagecraft of the New Playwrights Theatre, a group that included Gold and mainstay contributor John Dos Passos. As the magazine was increasingly closely aligned with the communist movement, the shifting editorial policies and cultural identity of New Masses echoed developments in Soviet culture that corresponded with the epochal transformations of the USSR in its first decades. For instance, when the so-called ‘Third Period line’ heralded the Cultural Revolution in 1928, witnessing a drive towards communism proper from the partial free-market economy of the New Economic Policy in the form of Five-Year Plan’s intensification of industrialization and agricultural collectivization, New Masses incorporated the attendant proletarian culture directives into its editorial identity.11 In this climate, a new rhetoric of militant class struggle replaced the broad church ethos of its first two years, as Gold summoned untutored working-class writers to foment a proletarian front against bourgeois culture.12 The output of this ‘worker renaissance’ of the turn of the 1930s is a theme of several chapters of this study that consider theatre, film, and photography. Above all, New Masses was fundamentally interdisciplinary, binding together many different cultural practices by a galvanizing rubric of politicized aesthetics meeting political journalism. As the ‘red Atlantic’ crossed disciplines as well as borders, Watching the Red Dawn is purposefully interdisciplinary, befitting the careers of Lozowick, who made art for galleries, designed store displays and theatre sets, produced posters and advertisements, and wrote and lectured widely on theatre, film, and architecture; or Ralph Steiner, a commercial photographer who exhibited in galleries and gravitated towards experimental and documentary filmmaking, collaborating with members of the Group Theatre, before emerging as a photography critic. The majority of cultural historians addressing the works of this period operate firmly within their subject areas, albeit occasionally extrapolating across media, and this categorical focus often yields excellent disciplinary accounts with developing problematics specific to discrete practices. There have been a handful of specific cultural studies of the phenomenon of American engagements with the Soviet Union. Vladimir Petric’s 1973 doctoral study (at New York University) of the dynamic interactions between the American and Russian film practices, ‘Soviet Revolutionary Films in America (1926–1936)’ remains an exemplary account that highlights the need for similar studies on the American reception of Soviet theatre, literature, fine art, graphic arts, and architecture. The most penetrating interdisciplinary studies in this area are Susan Buck-Morss’s Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West and Terry Smith’s Making The Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America.13 With their respective focuses on the utopian projection of a mass mind and the discourse on the machine, these two books have been thematically and methodologically influential upon the present study.



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Michael Leja has noted that ‘Smith’s text is insistently dialectical, constantly acknowledging contradictions and tensions, notably the strong backward-­ looking tendency that is an integral component of modernizing discourses’.14 In the present study, a dialectical analysis finds that the machine aesthetic was inherently riven with contradictions – whether old and new, communist or capitalist, spiritual or scientific, abstract or figurative, or even American and Russian. Thus, while some members of the avant-garde presented the machine as a unifying motif, it was more often a site of conflict and thereby curiously resistant to meaning. Indeed, my argument is that no cultural product can have a unitary meaning, and that each and every sign contains within it an inner contradiction that frustrates any singular message; yet art works, and products of visual culture more generally, are nonetheless ciphers of ideological struggles. The Soviet linguist Valentin Voloshinov divined an ‘inner dialectic quality’ in these contradictory or, as he put it, ‘multi-accentual’ signs, whereby this conflictual signification is a site of ideological contestation.15 Given the profound identification of Soviet culture with American proletarian consciousness, this book necessarily addresses the ideological arena of class antagonisms during this period, and while methodologically conceived in dialogue with Marxist cultural theories, its attentions extend beyond issues of ideology, hegemony, and determinism. This study engages strongly with the theme of the transnational movement of people, ideas, and forms that marked the international avant-garde networks; a phenomenon about which social theories of culture as yet offer acute, if partial, explanations. However, I approach transnationalism as a methodology with caution as it risks being an amorphous cultural meme, and address the significance of its relational interflows in conjunction with the historical phenomenon of internationalism, which received its most incisive articulation within the matrix of cultural vangardism and the Marxist critical tradition. Finally, the avant-garde itself remains a disputed category, and therefore some clarification about my usage here is necessary. For this study, the avantgarde constitutes a hypercritical entity of culture formed in the dialectics of negation and construction, refuting extant standards and limitations to imagine and forge new socially ameliorative forms of communication, in some instances emanating from its experimental milieu to the masses, from micro- to ­macrocosm, in other cases remaining within discrete enclaves. There is perhaps a dubious mythology of geographical and temporal hotspots whereby c. 1910–30 – the golden age of the avant-garde – burned brightest in places like Berlin, Moscow, or Milan, throwing everywhere else and all since into darkness, a nostalgic trope that bespeaks historical tourism above radically open relations of past, present, and future. Rather than cohering into an alternative bloc facing down official culture, the avant-garde of the interwar years constituted

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a site of contest of powerful ideologies – appearing less as the militations of the phalanx of a smaller rebel army confronting the forces of tradition and social control, and more as the most conflictual area of the battleground. In this study, American and Russian radicals communed, discoursed, and debated in the expanded field of the international avant-garde, manifested in the transfer of magazines and books, and the curation of exhibitions, across the ‘red Atlantic’. Watching the Red Dawn tracks the reception of the Soviet avant-garde by its less canonical American counterpart, and in doing so aims to highlight the multiple Americanisms of American, and indeed international, culture of this period.

Notes 1. Steffens also used variants of this phrase, including ‘I have seen the future and it works’, in conversations and correspondence. Quoted in Thomas C. Leonard, ‘Foreword’, in Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 1931), p. xvi. 2. Leon Trotsky, Pravda (29 November 1926), quoted in Jeffrey Brooks, ‘The Press and its Message: Images of America in the 1920s and 1930s’, in Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Richard Stites (eds.), Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Culture and Society (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 242. 3. Vsevolod Meyerhold, ‘Bio-Mechanics’ (1922), in E. Braun (ed. and trans.), Meyerhold on Theatre (London: Eyre Methuen, 1969), p. 197. 4. Louis Lozowick, Survivor from a Dead Age: The Memoirs of Louis Lozowick (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1997), p. 226. 5. Ibid. 6. Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return: A Narrative of Ideas (New York: Viking Press, 1934), p. 229. 7. Josef Paul Kleihues and Christina Rothgeber (eds.), Berlin–New York, Like and Unlike: Essays on Architecture and Art from 1870 to the Present (New York: Rizzoli, 1993). 8. See Beeke Sell Tower, ‘“Ultramodern and Ultraprimitive”: Shifting Meanings of Americanism in the Art of Weimar Germany’, in T. W. Kniesche and S. Brockman (eds.), Dancing on the Volcano: Essays on the Culture of the Weimar Republic (Elizabethtown, NY: Camden House, 1994); Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 9. Wanda Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999); Deborah Cullen (ed.), Nexus New York: Latin American Artists in the Modern Metropolis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 10. For useful accounts of New Masses, see: Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt, ‘New Masses and John Reed Club Artists, 1926–1936: Evolution of Ideology, Subject Matter, and Style’, The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts (Spring 1989), pp. 56–75; Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926–1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 7–24;



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Rachel Sanders, ‘Experiment and Propaganda: Art in the Monthly New Masses’, in Warren Carter, Barnaby Haran, and Frederic J. Schwartz (eds.) Re-New Marxist Art History (London: Art Books, 2013). 11. Nikolai Bukharin coined the ‘Third Period’ in 1926 at the Seventh ECCI Plenum to follow the First Period (War, Revolution, Civil War) and the Second Period (New Economic Policy). The Third Period involved a ‘shift to the left’ to complete the transition to socialism, and the appellation of ‘social fascism’ to describe social democratic tendencies that were perceived as an obstacle. Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 69–70. 12. Michael Gold, ‘Go Left, Young Writers’, New Masses (January 1929), p. 3. 13. Terry Smith, Making The Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 14. Michael Leja, ‘Review of Making The Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America’, The Journal of American History, 81:1 (1994), p. 315. 15. Valentin Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929), trans. L. Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), p. 23.

1 Constructivism in the USA: machine art and architecture at The Little Review exhibitions

For Americans, the picture of Russian art in the first decade and a half following the Revolution was chequered, and attempts to disseminate Soviet artworks in books, articles, and exhibitions were sporadic and uneven. Too often a prerevolutionary rationale determined the discourse on post-revolutionary work by situating the works within the amorphous and increasingly institutionalized figure of modern art. Therefore the treatment of Constructivism, the most far-reaching cultural phenomenon of the early Soviet Union in its abandonment of art for new forms of production, was unrepresentative because it typically reversed its collapse of disciplines and merging of art into everyday life, ultimately delimiting its social promise. However, there were some occasions when the American avant-garde seemed to grasp the utopian possibilities, if not always the revolutionary politics, of Constructivism Chiefly, two exhibitions took place in New York that engaged thematically with Constructivism – the 1926 International Theatre Exposition and the Machine-Age Exposition of the following year, both of which were hosted by The Little Review, an avant-garde magazine edited by Jane Heap.1 If both exhibitions were international and interdisciplinary in scope, between them they contained the largest concentration of Soviet cultural works, of theatre and architectural designs respectively, shown in the United States to date. While the exhibitions were not specifically concerned with fine art, in its traditional disciplines of painting, sculpture, and printmaking, they were in important ways Constructivist in ethos. The International Theatre Exposition belied the localism of its title by exploring the entire scope of experimental theatrical work, while applying new modes of display so that the exhibition design itself invoked Constructivism. The Machine-Age Exposition situated architectural designs and works of art alongside actual machines according to the Constructivist nexus of artists, architects, and engineers. Uniquely, the exhibitions synthesized



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Russian and international cultural works within a framework that was thematically informed by Constructivism. However, unlike the theatre and film groups discussed in the next two chapters, these exhibitions diverged from Soviet analogues at the point of political intent. Heap, the curator of both shows, had limited comradeship with the Revolution, and importantly promoted Constructivism in the United States as ‘machine art’, minimizing its revolutionary contingency. This was because her conception of machine art derived mostly from her dialogue with Theo van Doesburg, the leader of De Stijl and a pioneer of ‘International Constructivism’. Indeed, the importation of Constructivism into the United States, most evident in Heap’s expositions, was imprecise because even in the Soviet Union the term was contested.

The emergence of Constructivism Constructivism principally involved the remodelling of the arts following the Revolution. It emerged within the new state institutions, taking shape in INKhUK, the Institute of Artistic Culture (Institut khudozhestvennoi kultury), which was an organization within Narkompros, the People’s Commissariat of Enlightening (Narodnyi komissariat prosveshcheniya), directed by the playwright and theorist Anatoli Lunacharsky. Constructivism cross-pollinated across media and included writers (Alexei Gan, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Ossip Brik), artists (Alexander Rodchenko, Liubov Popova, and Vladimir Tatlin), filmmakers (Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein), architects (Alexander and Leonid Vesnin), poster and graphic design (El Lissitzky, Gustav Klutsis, and the Stenberg brothers), and theatre directors and designers (Vsevolod Meyerhold and Alexandra Exter). In the visual arts, the Constructivists engaged in an extensive analysis of the object in quasi-‘laboratory’ conditions termed ‘faktura’, and equated this new rational fabrication of constructions made of mostly unaltered, industrially produced materials with the revolutionary reconfiguration of society. The First Working Group of Constructivists proclaimed that Constructivism was ‘the communist expression of material constructions’.2 Constructivism would catalyse the sovietization of the citizenry, on the understanding that new ways of seeing could engender new ways of being. As the core symbol of the avant-garde’s appropriation of technological modernity – heralded by Futurism and Dada – the machine was the binding motif of Constructivism, and permeated plays, films, photography literature, and even ballet, as well as recalibrated visual art practices. Alexander Vesnin’s ‘Credo’ asserted: Just as every part of the machine is a force that has been realized in an appropriate form and material, active and necessary in a particular system, and its

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form and material cannot be arbitrarily discarded or altered without reducing the efficiency of the system in question, i.e. the object. The contemporary engineer has created objects of genius, the bridge, the steam locomotive, the airplane, the crane.3

Gan proclaimed Constructivism as ‘the slender child of an industrial culture’, whereby through eradicating the reactionary category of art, the Constructivist producer would ‘join the proletarian order for the struggle with the past, for the conquest of the future’.4 Constructivism brought art into everyday life to help generate the new society in the making. The Constructivist would construct the new culture of the Soviet Union as if making a machine, and so the artist merged with the engineer to become the producer. M. Lavinsky coined the term ‘Engineerism’ as the title of a paper delivered at INKhUK in which he enthused that ‘the artist-engineer creates objects at a tempo a million times more intensive, and so justifies his mission to bring about tomorrow’s progress’.5 This convergence of the artist and engineer would ensure that the barrier between art and life would be shattered, as ideology and form were aligned with a transformative revolutionary force geared to the construction of a new society. However, the laboratory mode of Constructivism – especially in the work of Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner, who maintained their status as artists – always risked collapsing into a generic Modernism that catered for an elite. In contrast, the First Working Group of Constructivists asserted ‘WE DECLARE UNCOMPROMISING WAR ON ART!’6 The eradication of art was necessary because ‘without art, by means of intellectual-material production, the Constructivist joins the proletarian order for the struggle with the past, for the conquest of the future’.7

Introducing Constructivism to America When an international audience encountered Constructivism, this invective was less pronounced. The key event was the Erste russische Kunstaustellung, or First Exhibition of Russian Art, which took place at the van Diemen Gallery in Berlin in 1922. The exhibition was the first dedicated display of the new art outside Russia and featured work by El Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Gabo, Kazimir Malevich, and included a model of the Monument to the Third International by Vladimir Tatlin, the definitive Constructivist construction. It also showed works dating back several years by artists operating in older styles, such as Konstantin Yuon and Abram Arkhipov who drew largely from Impressionism and Paul Cézanne, and expatriate modernists such as Alexander Archipenko.8 The van Diemen show couched the exhibits carefully in non-political terms. In the foreword to the catalogue, the curator David Shterenberg stressed that the Revolution stimulated an assault on the ‘dead, official …“high art” ’ that opened



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‘new avenues for Russia’s creative forces’ and demanded ‘new forms of creation and construction’ that would bring artists closer to the people.9 Yet Christina Lodder concludes that the exhibition witnessed the dilution of Constructivism: ‘depoliticized by their emigration to the West, Russian Constructivist experiments were viewed by the Germans solely within an aesthetic context’.10 She specifically cites the non-utilitarian position of Gabo, who ignored the radical disparities between his own version of Constructivism and that of the First Working Group of Constructivists, serving to ‘camouflage the differences which existed in Russia between the constructive artist and the Constructivist’, an ‘identification which forced the West’s concept of Constructivism as an aesthetic’.11 For Lodder, the van Diemen show set an unfortunate trend by facilitating the reception of Constructivism as a stylistic development within, rather than a departure from, art. Conversely, John Bowlt has argued that the van Diemen show was more ‘a political gesture than an altruistic endeavour to disseminate Soviet culture’.12 He quotes the satisfied conclusion of Lunacharsky that it was ‘first and foremost a political success. Even those who were hostile to it assert – not without much spluttering – that once again the Soviet government has demonstrated its diplomatic capabilities in organising this exhibition’.13 The Americans who attended the van Diemen show and thereafter brought Constructivism to the USA largely ignored its political ramifications. Katherine Dreier, the founder of the exhibition and publication organization Société Anonyme, may well have been the first American to own Constructivist works when she purchased pieces by Lissitzky, Gabo, and Popova. From the van Diemen show onwards, Dreier was a crucial figure in the importation of Russian art into America. Founding the Société Anonyme in 1920 with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray as a putative ‘Museum of Modern Art’, she presided over a pioneering forum for the dissemination of European modernist art in general, and in the early 1920s hosted several solo shows of work by Russians, including David Burliuk, Vassili Kandinsky, and Archipenko. Dreier was less interested in the politics of post-revolutionary art, because she favoured a spiritual amalgam of Expressionism and Theosophy over Constructivism’s communist predicates. In her 1923 study Western Art and the New Era, Dreier revealed her preferred Russian artist: ‘it was but natural that that strong and vigorous mind among the painters, Kandinsky, was chosen by the Soviet Russian government to establish museums throughout all the smaller towns’.14 Her 1924 Modern Russian Artists show was the first exhibition in the USA to present Soviet avant-garde developments. It followed two minor exhibitions of Russian art organized by the art critic and dealer Christian Brinton. The 1923 Exhibition of Russian Painting and Sculpture, which was held at the Brooklyn Museum, consisted entirely of expatriate work. As his effusive introductory essay about ‘exotic and passionate’ works ‘transported to us upon the magic carpet of

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circumstance’ indicates, Brinton’s priorities were aesthetic and his ambivalence towards the Revolution bordered on critique in citing a ‘social and political cataclysm’; although artists such as Burliuk and Abraham Manievich excitingly evoked ‘the red flare of the Terror’ in their Post-cubist ­semi-abstractions.15 In 1924 Brinton hosted the Russian Art Exhibition at the Grand Central Palace, in collaboration with Igor Grabar of the National Tretiakov Gallery, which included paintings and sculptures that had been sent from Russia, but apparently deliberately avoided avant-garde work.16 Brinton went as far as to boast: ‘you will here find no examples of the production of Cubo-futurist; Suprematist; Tatlinist, and kindred exuberant searchers after new and startling forms of self-expression’.17 In contrast, Modern Russian Artists, which took place in the Heckscher Building in Manhattan, provided an American audience with Constructivists en masse, including works by Tatlin, Lissitzky, Popova, Rodchenko, and Gabo. However, Dreier’s collection was slim and the exhibition collapsed pre- and post-revolutionary tendencies: Rodchenko and Tatlin appeared alongside Chagall and Burliuk. Modern Russian Artists only contained works of fine art, being devoid of the posters, architectural and theatre designs, and household objects that constituted the intractable mass propaganda dimension of Soviet cultural production. Dreier principally integrated Soviet art into a wider modernist pantheon. This was most forcibly evident at her 1926 exhibition International Exhibition of Modern Art, an epic survey of contemporary painting and sculpture held at the Brooklyn Museum, that subsumed Lissitzky’s work into the European avant-garde, alongside van Doesburg, Kurt Schwitters, and László Moholy-Nagy, well-established artists such as Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brancusi, lesser-known figures such as Heinrich Hoerle and Franz Seiwert, and an array of American modernists, such as Louis Lozowick, Charles Demuth, and Stuart Davis (Constructivism had a seemingly direct effect on Davis, who enthused to Dreier about the ‘constructionist school, Lissitzky, etc.’, and began his ‘Egg Beater’ series in response).18

Louis Lozowick: an American Constructivist? Dreier’s more significant achievement at Modern Russian Artists was to commission the Russian-born American artist and writer Lozowick to explain the works. He delivered a lecture in the gallery, and the following year wrote the essay for Modern Russian Art, a catalogue published by the Société Anonyme. Lozowick understood the crucial premise of the post-revolutionary avant-garde ‘that the new art can be the work of a new man, himself the product of a new social system’.19 Modern Russian Art constituted the first serious American account of the Soviet avant-garde, a factor attributable to the author’s extensive



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knowledge of the subject. Not only had Lozowick visited the van Diemen show and met the exhibitors, he had also travelled to the USSR. However, Lozowick saw himself as an American and once complained to Heap for referring to him in The Little Review as a Russian artist – although born in the Ukraine in 1892, he had travelled to America in 1906, and eventually became an American citizen.20 He was based in Berlin from 1922 to 1924, both exhibiting his own work and reporting for The Little Review and Broom. Throughout the 1920s, Lozowick wrote numerous articles on many different aspects of Soviet culture, from the films of Vsevolod Pudovkin to marionettes by Alexandra Exter, as well studies of the Constructivists El Lissitzky and Nathan Altman.21 In his memoirs, Lozowick recalled that he had become acquainted with many Russian artists at the van Diemen Gallery exhibition and had travelled to the Soviet Union following their recommendations.22 In Russia he met Malevich, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Rodchenko (who gave him a catalogue of 5 x 5=25, Constructivism’s 1921 inaugural exhibition), Lissitzky, Ossip and Lily Brik, and Shterenberg. In his account of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, published in Broom in October 1922, Lozowick provided an early explanation of ‘the magic word in modern Russian art: Construction’: Construction is inspired by what is most characteristic of our epoch: industry, machinery, science. Construction borrows the methods and makes use of the materials common in the technical processes. Hence iron, glass, concrete, circle, triangle, cube, cylinder, synthetically combined with mathematical precision and structural logic. Construction scorns prettiness, seeks strength, clarity, simplicity, acts as a stimulus to a vigorous life.23

Although Lozowick celebrated the architectural modernity of Tatlin’s Monument, he appeared sceptical of the ‘Cosmic Symbolism’ of the different speeds of the three rotating parts of the tower and mused that this reflected ‘Romanticism slipping in by a back door’.24 In February 1923, he penned ‘A Note on Modern Russian Art’ for Broom, in which he defined Constructivists as bound by ‘what one might call irreverently a romantic adoration of the machine’. 25 Lozowick was not alone here – Lunacharsky sharply remarked that the Constructivists ‘play at being engineers, but they don’t know as much of the essence of machinery as a savage’ and also ‘Tatlin mimics the machine [but] this is an impossible machine to work’.26 Lozowick cautioned that due to Russia’s limited means the project was far from realization, and referred to the battle between ‘the Philistine enemies’ and Constructivists as ‘a weary exercise’.27 Modern Russian Art expanded these articles into a contextual discussion that, unlike the exhibition itself, boasted an extensive consideration of Constructivism – Lozowick noting that ‘the Constructivist doctrine is, perhaps, the most typical of the Revolution’.28 However, Lozowick was not necessarily

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partisan, and was certainly no blinkered Constructivist acolyte, consistently expressing doubts about their principles and later concluding that ‘the arguments sounded vague and not very convincing’.29 His main objection was the abandonment of art for utility.30 In May 1929, he produced a sequel survey entitled ‘A Decade of Soviet Art’ for The Menorah Journal in which he expressed kinship with Shterenberg’s OST (Society of Easel Painters), whose 1925 founding post-dated Modern Russian Art, approving its favouring of modernist realism (analogous to his own recent work), and the group’s retention of art as ‘the creation of esthetic values for the new collectivity to enjoy’.31 Conversely, he positioned Constructivism firmly in the past as a worthy but failed experiment: Ultimately, when art had accomplished its aim, it was to disappear and the artist to pass into the industries, into the work of organization of the new society. And, indeed, this has, in a sense, already been the fate of Constructivist art; very little of the school is left now, but its influence has been felt powerfully in the theatre, architecture, the cinema and the applied arts.32

Lozowick’s judgement here was acute – Constructivism may have expired as a fine art model, but its legacy lay precisely in the area it had aimed to integrate with, namely the wider fields of design, from architecture to theatre, poster production, and photographic media. There has been debate about whether Lozowick was himself a Constructivist. In a series of studies, Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt and Barbara Beth Zabel have examined the impact of Constructivism upon his output, arguing that Lissitzky’s architectonic monochrome Proun (Project for the Affirmation of the New) designs (Figure 1.1) specifically influenced Lozowick’s Machine Ornament series of semi-abstract ink drawings of different machines (Figure 1.2). In an unpublished note of 1926 entitled ‘Machine Ornament’, Lozowick examined the impact of industry on art.33 He argued that contemporary applied arts ‘give little or no clue to the fact that we are living in an industrial world’ because they invoke organic forms over technology.34 Rather, the applied arts should use the machine as a model: ‘the machine and its products open an inexhaustible source of new machine ornament based on the conventionalization of inorganic, mechanical geometric form’.35 Marquardt and Zabel also share the view that Lozowick’s Constructivist-inflected schematic depictions of cities and machines gave way around 1930 to a more socially oriented mode, championing the worker’s role in constructing machines and buildings to suit the transformations brought by the Great Depression.36 In opposition to Marquardt and Zabel, Andrew Hemingway complicates this narrative by questioning the degree to which the ‘City Paintings’ (of Butte, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis, New York, Oklahoma City, Panama, Pittsburgh, and Seattle) were indebted to Constructivism:



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1.1  El Lissitzky, ‘Proun 1 D’, 1920. Lithograph. While it is perhaps plausible to see in the Machine Ornaments something of the same utopian projection that underlies the Prouns, I do not think this is the case with the city pictures, which are different in form. Rather than being generalised images of mechanisms, they are, with one exception, tied to the specifics of urban industrial capitalism in the United States.37

Hemingway suggests instead that Lozowick’s sources stretched beyond Constructivism to engage with the matrix of post-Dada and emergent Neue

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1.2  Louis Lozowick, ‘Machine Ornament No. 2’, c. 1927. Ink on paperboard.

Sachlichkeit strands remaking German figural art in the Weimar Republic, and asserts the crucial factor, underplayed by Marquardt and Zabel, that Lozowick’s sojourn to Russia was very brief – a few weeks in contrast to his two years in Berlin. His eerie, depopulated Precisionist cityscapes accordingly bespeak the alienated vistas of the ‘Magischer Realismus’ of Georg Grosz and H. M. Davringhausen rather than the utopic, post-art projections of Constructivism.38 Furthermore, Hemingway finds his late-1920s figurative work more thematically nuanced and formally complex than Marquardt and Zabel allow, borrowing compositionally from the New Vision in photography while retaining the graphic art techniques.39 Importantly, Lozowick’s unrivalled knowledge (for



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an American) of Constructivism led to an ultimate rejection of its rubric. Yet if Lozowick’s practice as a gallery artist, in terms of paintings and print production, indicates slight Constructivist influence, due to his residual faith in art and resistance to utilitarian production, then I argue that his work as a designer drew directly from Constructivism. Although retaining adherence to the institutional category of art that Constructivism aimed to eradicate, Lozowick did not seemingly distinguish between his fine and applied arts pursuits. However, the impact of Constructivism was most obvious in the Machine Ornaments, which formed the template for his design work, and so his utilitarian output was the most obviously Constructivist aspect of his practice. For example, the cover of Modern Russian Art features a Constructivist typographic layout (Figure 1.3), in essence a textual Machine Ornament, which, as Marquardt shows, clearly borrows from Lissitzky’s 1922 cover of the journal Veshch/ Gegenstand/ Objet (Figure 1.4).40 Variations of the typographic Machine Ornament appeared on several New Masses covers, and were peppered throughout its pages as illustrations or publicity notices, constituting a visual argot for the catholic phase of the magazine before its proletarian turn in 1928. Lozowick’s Machine Ornaments also adorned publicity materials to the New Playwrights Theatre, run by New Masses editors and contributors (Mike Gold, John Howard Lawson, John Dos Passos, Francis Farragoh, and Em Jo Basshe). For example, Lawson’s The International, a Constructivist jazz farce (discussed in the next chapter), features a schematic rendering of a crane that evokes the play’s geometric, machine aesthetic stage construction. While it is tempting to view Lozowick’s Machine Ornaments in New Masses as exemplary of a politically consonant Constructivism, it is necessary to observe that despite his increasing radicalization he did not restrict these designs to leftist avant-garde forums. International Publishers used a Machine Ornament for the covers of two books by Robert Dunn – Labor and Automobiles (1929) and Labor and Textiles (1931) – that were part of a series on labour by leftwing experts with no obvious avant-garde connection. Conversely, Lozowick contributed designs to organizations and events that were not incipiently leftist, such as his poster for Samuel Russel’s Studio of Modern Art and Lord and Taylor department store in New York, encapsulating his application of Constructivist devices for practical ends. As Marquardt explains, Lord and Taylor hired Lozowick to produce several designs in tandem with its centenary, most notably a window display featured an expanded reworking of his city painting New York with a mannequin sporting a gown with a Léger-esque textile.41 His designs for the fashion show backdrop (Figure 1.5) and platform were more formally analogous to Constructivist motifs, being based around a Machine Ornament entitled Dynamo with an axonometric composition indebted to Lissitzky’s Prouns, which also formed the motif

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1.3  Louis Lozowick, Modern Russian Art, cover.

of the Machine-Age Exposition poster (Figure 1.6). In a 1929 article on Lissitzky, Lozowick noted the resistance of Constructivism to translation: ‘when the interior decorators of Europe and America utilized the experiments with materials for purposes of ostentatious display, that is, for purposes directly contrary to the Constructivists’s original idea, the school was facing a crisis’.42 This statement ignored the Mostorg and Mossel’prom department stores in Moscow, with their Constructivist designs, and the commodity culture of New Economic Policy era evident in the advertisements of Rodchenko and Popova. Despite Lozowick’s censure, his own Lord and Taylor designs were therefore consistent



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1.4  El Lissitzky, ‘Veshch no. 1’, 1922. Journal with letterpress on cover.

with Constructivist practices but expectedly diverged in terms of context  – simply put, in the capitalist consumerist locus of the New York department store there was no contingency to the Revolution, which was the necessary Soviet predicate even in the NEP era. If Lozowick’s putative Constructivism manifested in his design work, then the use of the dynamo Machine Ornament for the Machine-Age Exposition poster was apposite because the exhibition was above all a matrix of fine and applied arts with architecture and industry. The specific industrial theme of this Machine Ornament complements the words ‘architecture’, ‘engineering’, and ‘industrial arts’, printed below in red. In a New Masses review, Genevieve Taggard noted how she first became aware of the exhibition after stumbling across ‘the familiar cockade of the Lozowick black and white announcing this exhibition … near the East River … in the dusty window of a print shop’, namely the key New York avant-garde motif for the mid-1920s – ‘the same machine design that we associate with the NEW MASSES, Loony, the Pinwheel programme and

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1.5  Louis Lozowick, ‘Stage Set for Fashion Show at Lord & Taylor Department Store, New York, 1926’.

every radical show in town’.43 As I shall discuss, Lozowick’s poster connoted the Machine-Age Exposition’s Constructivist melding of artists, architects, and engineers, which was most pronounced in relation to the exhibition’s presentation of Soviet architectural designs.

The Little Review and International Constructivism If Broom and The Little Review were the first American magazines to discuss Constructivism, then the latter went further in organizing exhibitions. When Heap reproduced a photo of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International in the Winter 1922 issue of The Little Review she sympathetically conveyed the Constructivist message that the ‘artist … must affiliate with the creative arts in other arts, and with constructive men of his epoch; engineers and scientists etc. In this way the artist would fulfil a ‘social function.’44 In the spring 1924 issue, which reproduced constructions by Gabo and Altman and a photomontage by Lissitzky, Heap was more direct about this social function in a short piece on ‘The Russian Constructivists’. She wrote:



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1.6  Louis Lozowick, ‘Machine-Age Exposition poster’, 1927. Here is a group of men who have broken with painting and sculpture and have become engineers of art. They take the materials of industry: steel, wood, paper, coal, glass … They study the weight, texture and psyche of each material and then treat it with a precision, organization, and balance which produces “constructions” which indicate that there is a necessity for change in the outside aspect of the world.45

The following spring, Heap contextualized the Constructivist artist–­engineer nexus in an American setting by announcing the Machine-Age Exposition, which will ‘show actual machines, parts, apparatuses, photographs and drawings of machines, plants, constructions etc., in juxtaposition with paintings, drawings, sculpture, constructions, and inventions by the most vital of modern artists’.46 Anticipating the exhibition, she juxtaposed photos of factory machines with constructions by Nicolai Granofsky, pronouncing that ‘there is a great new race of men in America: the Engineer. He has created a new mechanical world,

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he is segregated from men in other activities … it is inevitable and important today that he make a union with the artist’ before proclaiming ‘the machine is the religious expression of today’.47 At this point, she parted company with Constructivists such as Lavinsky, who claimed that ‘with the invention of the machine and with the opening up of scientific horizons, the cult of divinity loses all its significance’.48 The real divergence, however, was political. Gan insisted that Constructivists were exclusively harbingers of communist culture: ‘the Soviet system and its practice is the only school of Constructivism’.49 Conversely, Heap vaguely defended ‘the legitimate pursuit of the Western World [which] has been the acquisition of wealth, enjoyment of the senses, and commercial competition’.50 In essence, Heap’s conception relocated aspects of Russian Constructivism into an American context, but was crystallized rather in her encounters with International Constructivism. Indeed, to understand the Constructivism of The Little Review exhibitions it is crucial to recognize that Heap was not aiming to replicate the Soviet model, but was closely engaged with the international version promulgated by Theo van Doesburg, the editor of De Stijl, whose work she exhibited in a solo show at The Little Review Gallery in 1925. International Constructivism involved the ostensibly non-political engagement of the European avant-garde with the work and ideas of Russian Constructivists. Sima Ingberman argues that the reduction of revolutionary dogma was intentional, making it more broadly palatable to European artists and intellectuals as a means of generating interest in the new society, such as in his talk on ‘New Russian Art’ at the van Diemen show, because ‘Lissitzky’s ultimate goal was to unite architects and artists of many nationalities under the banner of communism. Realizing that communism was an intimidating word to many Europeans, he modified communism to Constructivism, a term understood as artistic rather than political.’51 Whether or not Lissitzky was on a cultural stealth mission – Ingberman claims that Lunacharsky personally selected Lissitzky as an emissary to help Europe ‘prepare for a communist takeover of Europe’ – his promotion of Soviet culture was extensive.52 In 1921 Lissitzky travelled to Warsaw and then on to Berlin, establishing contacts and initiating publications and organizations, starting with the foundation of the journal Veshch/ Gegenstand/Objet, which was printed in Russian, German, and French. In the first issue (March–April 1922) Lissitzky and Ilya Ehrenberg wrote a piece entitled ‘The Blockade of Russia is Coming to an End’, arguing that the very existence of the journal heralded dialogues between Soviet and Western European artists.53 Veshch was the founding document of International Constructivism, and their statement that ‘art today is international, though retaining all its local symptoms and particularities’ advocated an international exchange.54 Lissitzky and Ehrenberg, in contrast to Gan, called for ‘an end to all declarations and counter-declarations!’, and asserted that Veshch ‘stands



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apart from all political parties, since it is concerned with problems of art and not of politics’.55 International Constructivism was essentially an alliance of Dadaists with members of the Bauhaus and De Stijl; importantly, it was van Doesburg who organized the Congress of International Progressive Artists and the Constructivist Congress in 1922. An ‘International Faction of Constructivists’ headed by Lissitzky, van Doesburg, and Hans Richter called for the unification of all arts from all countries on a permanent basis. A full report with statements from the editors of Veshch, members of De Stijl, various national Constructivist groups, and a joint statement by the ‘International Faction of Constructivists’ subsequently appeared in De Stijl.56 Van Doesburg had launched De Stijl in 1917 as the mouthpiece of a movement that proposed a universal style, traversing disciplines and uniting fine and applied arts, in which formal and compositional elements were stripped to their constituent parts as geometric shapes in primary colours and non-colours; Piet Mondrian’s paintings and Gerrit Rietveld’s chairs were coterminous manifestations of ‘the style’. Fittingly the International Constructivists demanded ‘freedom from the styles to reach the STYLE’.57 In much the same way, Heap conceived the new ‘machine art’ direction of The Little Review in terms of a universal style that: ‘surpasses ALL … includes ALL … outlives ALL isms … Cubism, Impressionism, Futurism, Unaninism, Neo-classicism, Ultraism, Imagism, Vorticism, Dadaism, Simultaneism, Expressionism … all’.58 ‘The style’, an elemental, dynamic form revealed after the layers of ornament had been stripped away, was a template for the construction of a pacifist, egalitarian, and internationalist social order, in contrast to the imperialism and chauvinism that catalysed the Great War. The ideologues of International Constructivism adapted this principle to post-war Europe, declaring that ‘forgetting questions of nationality, without political bias or self-seeking intention … art must become international or it will perish’.59 Art, alongside science and technology, was a ‘tool of universal progress’.60 Lissitzky stated that during the war ‘we were attacking the same problems in Russia as our friends here in the West, but without any knowledge of the others’.61 International Constructivism was part of a ‘new culture’ in which ‘the artist is companion to the scholar, the engineer, and the worker’, united as ‘fighters for the new culture’.62 Richter, on behalf of Constructivist groups from Rumania, Switzerland, Scandinavia, and Germany, also emphasized the ‘common task’ of a ‘working community’ in furthering the ‘International’, and its aim to ‘solve the problems of society’.63 There was a proliferation of movements and journals following the Constructivist conferences­– the launch of G in 1923 (edited by Richter), Praesens in Poland, Disk and Stavba in Prague, Zenit in Belgrade, the establishment of the Constructivist architectural group ABC in 1924 by Lissitzky, Mark Stam,

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and Hannes Meyer and their journal ABC Beiträge zum Bauen, and the new Constructivist orientation of De Stijl, MA, and Broom, all exemplified the international spread of Constructivism. If International Constructivism witnessed a combination of the Russian original with De Stijl’s universal style, then it retained ‘art’ while discarding the specific communist component, yet nonetheless stressed the collective agency of artists as producers across borders purposed to transform post-war Europe. Although inflected with socialism, this universality was more broadly democratic than revolutionary. In the Soviet Union, however, there was some hostility towards these developments, as evident in Gan’s acerbic comments that ‘in the West Constructivism fraternises with art … flirts with politics’ reflecting the fact that the ‘social and political structure of the R.S.F.S.R. and the structure of capitalist Europe are completely different’.64 Gan’s Soviet Constructivism was, in contrast, ‘fighting for the intellectual and material production of a communist culture’.65 Constructivism’s non-political identity in Europe helped attract international support from artists, writers, and collectors – such as Heap and Dreier – who had minimal sympathy with communism. For Heap, the broader tendency of International Constructivism was amenable to her theosophical machinolatry. She published ‘The Evolution of Modern Architecture in Holland’ and ‘Literature of the Advanced Guard in Holland’ by van Doesburg (with a reprint of ‘Manifesto II of “De Stijl”’ and some typographic poems by his alter ego I. K. Bonset) in the same issue of The Little Review as ‘Machine-Age Exposition’.66 By 1925 van Doesburg and Heap were in regular correspondence (Dadaist Tristan Tzara had initially sent the articles in 1924), and he sent her a hand-written copy, in French, of the 1923 manifesto ‘Towards a Collective Construction’, in which van Doesburg, with Rietveld and Cornelius van Eesteren, saw that ‘a new age is dawning: the age of construction’, in which a ‘new style’ based on architectonic forms and the ‘interrelationships’ of space, time, and colour augured a ‘new and positive unity’.67 Their emphasis on this unity of parts producing a ‘new dimension’ chimed with Heap’s theosophical machine aesthetic. As Susan Noyes-Platt has noted, ‘the articles introduced the principles of De Stijl architecture to America and were the magazine’s first major plunge into modern architecture, a logical step given Heap’s new perspective. De Stijl, as articulated by van Doesburg, emphasized the functional principles of the new architecture in terms of form, ideas that corresponded to the Machine Age principles that Heap promoted.’68 It is arguable that van Doesburg’s presentation of Constructivism as an objective ‘new system’ that in ‘the future will see us finally reaching the expression of a new dimension in the reality of three dimensions’ appealed to Heap’s interests in the theosophical ‘discovery’ of the fourth dimension – as Stephen



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Bann writes, this comment was a residue from van Doesburg’s and Mondrian’s early formulations on Neoplasticism, a philosophy derived from Mondrian’s interest in theosophy.69 If van Doesburg’s views were influential upon Heap’s formulation of machine art at the Machine-Age Exposition, then a more immediate encounter occurred the appearance in New York in 1926 of an International Constructivist: Frederick Kiesler, the De Stijl member who was Heap’s collaborator on the International Theatre Exposition.

Frederick Kiesler: an International Constructivist in New York Heap and Kiesler met in 1925, when the latter, a polymath stage designer, architect, and theorist, curated the Austrian section of the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (International Exhibition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts) in Paris. Kiesler had first attracted attention as a stage designer in Berlin in 1923 with an electro-mechanical backdrop with moving parts and flashing lights for RUR, Karel Capek’s dystopic theatrical satire about a robot rebellion. Van Doesburg attended a performance and invited Kiesler to join De Stijl, introducing him to International Constructivism. Despite belonging to the least politically revolutionary wing of the movement, Kiesler was well-informed about Russian cultural production, and in 1924 he curated the Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik (International Exhibition of New Theatre Techniques) in Vienna, which included the largest collection of Constructivist designs shown anywhere to date.70 Furthermore, Kiesler developed a Constructivist display system for this exhibition that derived from De Stijl’s orthogonal geometry, and coined the terms Leger and Träger (‘layer’ and ‘beam’, also based on the literal L and T shapes) to describe a flexible and provisional system that maximized exhibition space by situating works of art on constructions in the centre of the hall.71 The L and T system chimed with van Doesburg’s principle that an ‘equilibrium of tensions forms the quintessence of the new constructive unity’.72 Accordingly, Kiesler developed a theory of Tensionism and published a manifesto in De Stijl in April 1925 in which he argued for flexible building solutions to fit the ‘elasticity of living’ and instead of walls and foundations called for ‘a system of spans (tension) in free SPACE’.73 The principle of liberated space in Kiesler’s Tensionist L and T system permeated his stage and architectural designs. His Space Stage (first featured at the Vienna show) and City in Space were the centrepieces of his contributions to the 1925 Paris Exposition, where he was in charge of the Austrian section. Impressed by Kiesler’s contributions, Heap invited Kiesler to New York to recreate his theatre show with additional American material and an expanded catalogue;

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Kiesler arrived in New York in January 1926, carrying with him the bulk of the Vienna exhibition in around 70 cases. Kiesler and Heap co-organized the well-attended International Theatre Exposition of February 1926 under the auspices of The Little Review, the  Theatre  Guild, the Provincetown Playhouse, the Greenwich Village Theatre, and the Neighbourhood Playhouse. It took two floors of Steinway Hall to house an enormous collection of 1500 theatre set designs, costumes, and props from seventeen countries, with work by over 100 exhibitors, including well-known figures such as Fernand Léger and Pablo Picasso, and a large number of Russian and International Constructivists (Figure 1.7). The Russian section included all of the key figures of Soviet theatre; as well as Rodchenko and Exter, there was work by Popova, the Stenberg Brothers, Isaac Rabinovitch, Altman, Nikolai Erdman, Varvara Stepanova, Vassili Federovsky, Alexander Vesnin, and Pavel Tchelitcheff. Only the more experimental theatre companies were represented: the Meyerhold Theatre, the Theatre of the Revolution, and the Theatre Beresil from Kiev. As well as the Russian section, the exhibition featured some important figures of the Central and Eastern European avant-garde, such as Oscar Schlemmer from Germany, the Czech Josef Capek, Szymon Syrkus from Poland, van Doesburg from Holland, and the Hungarian Moholy-Nagy, a Bauhaus teacher and leading International Constructivist. Heap and Kiesler produced an extensive catalogue for the International Theatre Exposition, which was published as the Winter 1926 edition of The Little Review. The catalogue featured twenty-three articles by an international selection of playwrights, artists, and commentators, over seventy illustrations and photographic reproductions of plays, costumes, set designs, and film stills – from Yakov Protazanov’s Aelita, Richter’s Steigen-Fallen, and Viking Eggeling’s Vertical-Horizontal. Unsurprisingly the catalogue essays that most directly engaged with Constructivism were those by Kiesler and Lozowick. In ‘Gas: A Theatrical Experiment’, Lozowick considered that the industrial subject of Georg Kaiser’s play, which he had designed for the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, made it apt for staging in America, and wrote that: ‘the settings were to be the crystallization of a vision fashioned by the rigid geometric pattern of the American city; the verticals of its smoke stacks, the parallels of its car tracks, the squares of its streets, the cubes of its factories, the arcs of its bridges, the cylinders of its gas tanks’.74 With its dynamic machine aesthetic and multi-level sets, made of ladders, platforms, high-tension wires, cranes, and giant cogs, Gas was the first major production that was conceived in direct relation to Soviet Constructivism and in particular Popova’s The Magnanimous Cuckold set (I discuss both in the next chapter). Conversely, Kiesler’s catalogue essay on the ‘Debacle of the Modern Theatre’ was an International Constructivist manifesto on the theatre. Here he explained the Space Stage, writing that ‘the theatre of illusion and illustration is ended … the



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1.7  Frederick Kiesler, ‘Shop Window Display, SAKS Fifth Avenue, New York’, 1928.

contemporary theatre calls for the vitality of life itself, a vitality which has the force and tempo of the age’.75 Therefore an ‘open stage’, in which performances would be defined spatially by ‘tridimensionality’ and motion, would secure ‘the systematic cooperation of man and object’.76 Performances were equally visible from any part of the theatre, and with no backdrop the spiralling ramp and ladders of the Space Stage allowed action on different levels. This ‘circus-like’ aspect

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had strong similarities with Popova’s Constructivist sets for The Magnanimous Cuckold. Kiesler imagined performances of machine age ‘space-plays’ on this ‘open stage’, and performances would be defined spatially by ‘the systematic cooperation of man and object’ to build ‘the sound body of a new society’ that might occupy Kiesler’s City in Space model for a Tensionist metropolis suspended in midair.77 For Kiesler, the City in Space was a ‘system of spans (tension) in free SPACE … the first example of “Tensionism”, an elastic building system of tubes, platforms and cables, developed from bridge building’.78 Kiesler explained his theories at a press conference to intrigued but bemused journalists who reported enthusiastically on his call for actor-less theatres of the fourth dimension (the exoticism was heightened by his translator, the actress and mystic Princess Matchabelli). This led to a swathe of unlikely newspaper headlines such as: ‘Constructivism Big Thing at Exposition’ (New York Tribune, 28 February 1926) and ‘A Stage in Fourth Dimension’ (Brooklyn Eagle, 16 March 1926).79 The fourth dimension referred to the affective alignment of the three spatial dimensions with time, and was a widespread interest of the European and Russian avant-garde, taking in Marcel Duchamp, van Doesburg, and Lissitzky, although Linda Dalrymple Henderson points out Russian Constructivists ultimately rejected it as mysticism.80 The principle of fourth-dimensionality drew liberally from theosophical discourses, and spiritual apologists such as Kandinsky and the composer Alexander Scriabin channelled the writings of the theosophist Pavel Ouspensky into their art.81 De Stijl’s convergence of elements into a harmonious universal style involved a conjunctive ‘space-time’ and, as Dalrymple Henderson relays, van Doesburg’s The Little Review article ‘Evolution of Architecture in Holland’ was imbued with fourth-dimensionality.82 For example, ‘Point 10’ stated: ‘Time and Space: the new architecture does not reckon only with space but also with time as an architectural value. Unity of space and of time gives to the architectural appearance a new and plastic element and one more complete. (The aspect-plastic, fourth-dimension of space time).’83 Van Doesburg’s fourth-dimensional nexus of space and time informed Kiesler’s Tensionism, taking form in the Space Stage, the City in Space, the L and T System, and his various plans for buildings and interiors in America. In his press conferences, Kiesler expressed his aim to further the principle of fourth-dimensionality in his nascent architectural career. In a New York Times interview, Kiesler announced a laboratory of modern stage for a ­fourth-dimensional theatre: ‘We will make all the elements of the theatre function together to the last result which will be fourth dimensional’.84 As the journalist recorded, Kiesler’s esoteric Constructivism was non-political: “We need a theatre of the people and the theatre of today is not of the people” said Mr Kiesler, as interpreted by Charles Recht, attorney for representatives



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of Soviet Russia. “We will create a theatre for the masses approaching the project by all paths”… Mr. Kiesler, in response to questions, denied that his plans were to exemplify Soviet ideals and expressed surprise at learning of his interpreter’s affiliations with Bolshevist representatives here.85

His plans for a theatre in Brooklyn Heights proved abortive. Throughout 1927 Kiesler worked as an assistant at the Anderson Galleries, and in 1928 worked briefly for the architects Helme, Corbett, Harrison, by which time he was so financially troubled that he and his wife were evicted from their apartment. However, in 1928 and 1929 Kiesler undertook two important commissions that marked the emergence of architectural Constructivism in America. Firstly, he was employed by Saks Fifth Avenue department store to create window displays.86 Kiesler’s decorations for Saks were innovative and ­arresting – items were displayed like works of art, placed irregularly at points in front of a De Stijl-type Constructivist panel running the entire length of the store (Figure 1.7). Kiesler explained how ‘I simply took out all the side walls which separated the fourteen windows and created a free rhythmic background throughout the entire window space. Each window seemed to continue into the next. Expansion was the basis of the rhythmic effect and continuity.’87 A Women’s Wear Daily reporter described how ‘the backgrounds seem to possess something of a stage property quality. Here a suggestion of a cylinder, there a glint of brass or the spectacle of a mirror, and again the dull reflection of iron are expressive of the industrial age.’88 Kiesler’s continuous backdrop was akin to the City in Space and the Space Stage in amalgamating dimensions according to his De Stijlinspired Tensionist ethos of harmonic totality. The removal of barriers between merchandise and passer-by echoed the Constructivist theatrical device of breaking the fourth wall. If the show window was a performative space, then Kiesler theorized the adaptation of Constructivism to an American commercial setting: The new art is for the masses. If ever a country has had the chance to create an art for its people, not through individuals and handicraft, but through machine mass production, that country is America today. It will be adaptation and a rebirth. It will be American. That is: it will be of the machine. The expression of America is the mass, and the expression of the masses, the machine.89

Notably, the ‘class’ element of Constructivism that Gan had propounded was transformed into the less controversial and more semantically open notion of ‘mass’. As a Constructivist, Kiesler also celebrated the work of the engineer – ‘the engineering constructions of the last fifty years have had the greatest influence on the present form of architecture’– and grain elevators, power plants, and bridges as a source for the designer.90 He combined this Engineerism with an internationalist ethos:

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Happily for contemporary architecture, today is no longer a conglomeration of all sorts of materials and styles, but a living expression of a community, or a personality. And so it is in the best way towards becoming INTERNATIONAL architecture. ONE STYLE FOR ALL. Whether it is in a work of Le Corbusier in France, Frank Lloyd Wright in America, Perret in Tunis, Oud in Holland, Vesnin in Moscow, the modern spirit has, and can only have, the same expression.91

Fellow De Stijl architect J. J. P. Oud’s Rotterdam Café de Unie was the model for the façade of Kiesler’s Film Guild Cinema, which opened on West Eighth Street in February 1929 (Figure 1.8). The Film Guild Cinema was a project commissioned by the Film Arts Guild, an organization founded by Symon Gould in 1926 (as the International Film Arts Guild) that screened many seminal foreign movies of the 1920s, including The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and The Battleship Potemkin, as well as experimental short films, such as Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s 1920 Manhatta and Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger’s 1924 Ballet Mécanique.92 The Film Guild Cinema was heralded as a ‘screen-center devoted to cinema art’ and the ‘first 100% cinema’, and boasted Kiesler’s innovative ‘screenoscope’, which I discuss in Chapter 3.93 Despite its debt to Oud’s café, Gould claimed that it was ‘a structure directly inspired by the innate necessities of the cinema and embodying revolutionary principles of architectural formations, both exterior and interior’.94 The building had a ‘Neues Bauen’ frontage featuring asymmetric intersecting orthogonal white concrete pillars against a smooth black surface with large irregular windows, and an axonometric marquee and electric sign; the exterior of the building advertised the experimental, ‘European-ness’ of the films screened inside, further evident in the foyer and the lobby, which was replete with bespoke furniture and décor, continued the asymmetric geometry of the exterior. Gladys Fabre notes the conjunction of film and De Stijl in relation to the poster for van Doesburg’s Little Review Gallery solo show, and conflates the dynamic diagonal, which provoked Mondrian’s disapproval, with the notion of film ‘as a plastic expression of the fourth dimension’.95 Fabre shows the strong visual analogy of fragmented cuboid abstractions in the pages of De Stijl, illustrating van Doesburg’s synthesis of the radical reversibility of Hans Richter’s Rhythmus abstract animation series, via his article ‘Film Moments’, Lissitzky’s axonometric Prouns, and his own Tesseractic Study series.96 In sum, Kiesler’s Film Guild Cinema was America’s first International Constructivist building. From Kiesler’s arrival in New York, architecture and interior design were increasingly the main sites of his practice. It is possible that he had a hand in an abortive exhibition that Heap planned in late 1926 entitled ‘International Exposition of New Systems of Architecture’. An undated circular with the heading heralded ‘an exposition showing the most recent developments in new systems of building, city plans, urbanism, time space construction – by the most



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1.8  Frederick Kiesler, Film Guild Cinema, New York, 1929.

vital architects in America, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Poland, Russia, etc – organized by The Little Review’.97 As the circular states that the closing date for entrants was 14 February 1927, one can assume that plans for this exhibition began after the International Theatre Exposition. A letter from Lozowick to Heap dated 6 February, in which he promised to ‘be one of the most enthusiastic rooters for the Architectural Show’, further suggests that until February 1927 Heap’s plan was to follow the theatre show with a similar treatment of architecture – an idea perhaps conceived in tandem with Kiesler,

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given the similarity of the title to his 1924 Vienna exhibition and the duplication of the sans-serif typography that he had introduced to The Little Review for the Winter 1926 issue (which was the International Theatre Exposition catalogue).98 Heap and Kiesler appear to have ceased collaborating after the International Theatre Exposition (their last known association was their joint membership of the Film Associates Inc., which was launched in October 1926), but the dates are hazy and it is conceivable that the architecture show was partly his conception.

The Machine-Age Exposition: artists, architects, and engineers By March 1927, Heap had returned to the Machine-Age Exposition, which was originally planned for 1926 but postponed for the International Theatre Exposition. An invitation to prospective members of a general committee, dated 18 March, now proposed ‘an exposition showing the most recent developments in architecture, engineering and industrial arts … as related to one another in this time’ which would run from 25 April to 14 May at the Scientific American Building on West 40 Street.99 The architectural show was now integrated into a wider display of machines, although it was at this stage still focused on the products of industry rather than art. The circular for the International Exposition of New Systems of Architecture had stated that ‘the purpose of this exposition is to show the most recent developments in Architecture in all countries; to further the work of the modern architect; and to establish an international bond’.100 In contrast, the tone of the new Machine-Age Exposition invitation rekindled the esotericism of Heap’s article: ‘the purpose of this exposition is to create a better understanding of this Age; to show that our contributions to civilization are not entirely “materialistic”’.101 Lozowick’s poster and the exhibition flyer also specified the new date, 16 May to 28 May, and venue – 119 West 5 Street, aka Steinway Hall, where the International Theatre Exposition had been held the previous year. Herbert Lippmann praised the appropriateness of Steinway Hall as a venue in a review in The Arts that compensates for the lack of surviving photographs of the display: The setting of this exhibition itself had significant form. This was the unpainted white plaster finish of walls, columns, beams, girders, and floor slabs of an unpartitioned office floor of a common type of building erected for commercial renting. An amusing touch was the use of ordinary tin pails inverted as refractors in the place of lighting fixtures. Radio sets, valves, gears, propellers, metal cupboards, ventilators, aeroplanes, diving apparatus, rifles and machine guns, slicing machines, harvesting implements, scales, gas manufacture, piano frames, motor car designs and electric light bulbs were among the exhibits. These stood about like the pieces at a sculpture exhibition, on pedestals of a sort, numbered and catalogued.102



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The exhibition itself was much smaller than the theatre show, with 444 from seven countries as opposed to 1500 from eighteen countries. Nearly 300 of these were architectural exhibits – models, drawings, or photographs – indicating the architectural origins of the exhibition, and these alone were organized by country, which implies that the architecture exhibition was mostly ready before the resurrection of the machine exhibition. As the publicity materials show, the Machine-Age Exposition amalgamated the arts with technology according to a machine aesthetic: ‘architecture, engineering, industrial arts, modern art … presented together for the first time in such a manner that the inter-relation-inter-influence will be shown and emphasized’.103 Alongside the machines, machine parts, and models and photographs of machines, the machine art on display was broad, reflected by the contrast of Lozowick’s Constructivist Machine Ornament poster for the show with the interlocking discs of Léger’s catalogue cover. The exhibits included Ralph Steiner’s photographs, Lozowick’s Machine Ornaments, and Exter’s robot costumes; paintings by Charles Demuth and van Doesburg; sculptures by Archipenko, Pevsner, and John Storrs; and decorations by Gabo and Hans Arp. However, critics seized upon the absence of machine movement. In a New Masses review Genevieve Taggard complained that the machines on display lacked dynamism: If she couldn’t get the engineers to rig up something in motion why didn’t Jane Heap get Léger’s movie, Ballet Mechanic [sic] and have some Antheil music playing in a little dark room? Is that too much to ask? Jane Heap is content with machine sculpture; but most people want machine dance or drama [ironically an outline for ‘Mechanical Ballet’, aka Ballet Mécanique had appeared in the Autumn/Winter 1924–1925 issue of The Little Review].104

Lippmann also found that ‘the machine will look better on the job’ but conceded that ‘it is interesting to have observed that photographs although static can look more dynamic than machinery itself when stationary. The high-tension wiring and typewriter keys photographed by Ralph Steiner showed this beautifully.’105 The catalogue, which was also produced in advance and was thus incomplete, lacking the Russian section (which ‘will arrive too late to catalogue in detail’), was designed by Heap and appeared as a supplement to the Spring/ Summer 1927 issue of The Little Review.106 With nine essays and forty-five illustrations, the Machine-Age Exposition catalogue was a modest affair compared to that of the International Theatre Exposition. Some of the essays had appeared in The Little Review already and were reprinted for their relevance to the exhibition, such as Enrico Prampolini’s ‘The Aesthetic of the Machine and Mechanical Introspection in Art’, and Heap’s ‘Machine-Age Exposition’.107 These articles amounted collectively to a generic account of machine art

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that nonetheless had common features that were consonant with aspects of International Constructivism. Archipenko’s self-aggrandising ‘Machine and Art’ indicated a fourth-dimensional ‘union of Art and Action’, a convergence in his thinking of ‘Einstein’s Theory of Relativity as well as the ambience of the most modern city of the world, New York’.108 Meanwhile, the Futurist Prampolini’s text presented the machine as the ‘tutelary symbol of the universal dynamism’ calling for a ‘plastic-mechanical analogy that the Machine suggests to us in connection with various spiritual realities’.109 It was this ‘plasticmechanical analogy’ that Heap saw in the hybrid of the artist and engineer in a spiritual age of the machine. In contrast, Lozowick’s essay ‘The Americanization of Art’ assessed the immense achievements of American technology. Written in 1924 following a trip to Russia and Germany, but unpublished until the Machine-Age Exposition, this essay was one of Lozowick’s many contributions to the exhibition. As well as producing the poster and a catalogue essay, he spoke on Soviet architecture at a special ‘Russian Night’ at the exhibition, and contributed more work than any other artist, including twenty Machine Ornaments, several American city paintings, and his designs for Kaiser’s Gas and Lord and Taylor. As a prominent committee member, Lozowick also helped in the general organization of the exhibition, although he later affirmed that Heap was ‘really the head’.110 Lozowick located source material in ‘the skyscrapers of New York, the grain elevators of Minneapolis, the steel mills of Pittsburgh, the oil wells of Oklahoma, the copper mines of Butte, the lumber yards of Seattle’, but cautioned against literal mimicry, arguing that artists should address the ‘character’ of American technology.111 There are traces of Constructivist ‘Amerikanizm’ in the following passage: The dominant trend in America of today, beneath all the apparent chaos and confusion is towards order and organization which find their outward sign and symbol in the rigid geometry of the American city: in the verticals of its smoke stacks, in the parallels of its car tracks, the squares of its streets, the cubes of its factories, the arc of its bridges, the cylinders of its gas tanks.112

Hemingway argues that rather than any Constructivist influence, a Neue Sachlichkeit ‘disenchantment of the world’ is evident here, reflecting the proximity of the essay’s production with his Berlin stay that betrays ‘an essentially deterministic conception of the artist as one ineluctably conditioned by his or her epoch’.113 However, Heap’s editorial framing of the text within the catalogue’s machine aesthetic screed – accompanied by the reproduction of two Machine Ornaments, and photographs of a 60-inch ‘Superior McCully All Steel Gyratory Crusher’ and an industrial plant in Russia – maximizes the Constructivist connotations in Lozowick’s references to ‘standardization’, ‘equilibrium’, and



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‘objectivity’. Indeed, the catalogue produces this effect throughout, uniting the varying presentations of machine art through the illustrations, which are dominated by drawings and photographs of industrial architecture. With architectural exhibits constituting two-thirds of the Machine-Age Exposition, the catalogue also contained several articles that related to the abandoned ‘new systems of architecture’ exhibition, mixing polemic with technical discussions. For instance, Hugh Ferriss’s foreword on ‘Architecture of this Age’ detailed practical issues of construction, such as the effect of legal restrictions on the style of skyscrapers in New York, while proclaiming a ‘new architectural race’.114 André Lurçat’s appraisal of ‘French Architecture’ (dated January 1926) and Frederick L. Keppler’s ‘Modern Glass Construction’ were informative studies of issues in contemporary architecture and new construction techniques. Szymon Syrkus’s ‘Architecture Opens up Volume’ (dated 1926) was clearly derived from Le Corbusier’s writings, and the author celebrated Purism, alongside Suprematism and Cubism, as formal means for generating a ‘new conception of space’, while criticizing Constructivism for ‘technical hypertrophy’, whereby ‘problems of form were neglected in favour of problems of pure technique’.115 Many of the architectural exhibits were commercial and industrial buildings, ranging from skyscrapers in New York, such as Raymond Hood’s Radiator Building and Arthur Loomis Harmon’s Shelton Hotel, to power plants in Germany and Russia. There were models and photographs of power plants, grain elevators, industrial boilers, airports, and car parks. Other architectural exhibits, including private houses, apartment blocks, gardens, churches, theatres, and shops, made reference to the machine through techniques and characteristics such as prefabrication and rejection of ornament.

Soviet architecture at the Machine-Age Exposition There were fifty Russian items on display but only six reproductions in the ­catalogue – four images of industrial sites, donated by Amtorg, and two architectural designs – and information about the Russian section remains fragmentary. Critics praised the Machine-Age Exposition as a unique opportunity to witness the latest developments in Soviet architecture – indeed; it was the only exhibition of Constructivist architectural works in the USA in the 1920s. A New York Sun reporter wrote that: For the first time in this country there is an exhibition of the new Russian architecture. It is not generally known that the Soviet government has in its  employ established architects whose business it is to create designs and models for new cities. Moscow and Leningrad are actually being reconstructed so as to provide better working conditions for its citizens.116

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The New York Times concurred that this was the ‘first exposition in America to show a Soviet Russian section … [and] a complete survey of the architecture of Russia since the revolution’.117 The paper followed this notice with a longer article entitled ‘New Architecture Develops in Russia’, which was printed the day after the exhibition closed. The author noted that ‘present-day Russia, which has undergone political, social and economic transformations in the last ten years, is busily developing an entirely new art and architecture with modern industrial civilization as its basis’.118 The models and photographs on display at the exhibition ‘constituted the first authentic evidence since the Revolution of how this vast upheaval has affected the architecture of the nation’.119 This article was especially important as the sole record of the ‘Russian Night’ talks hosted during the run of the exhibition, which alongside Lozowick featured critic Oliver Sayler on the influence of Russian theatre on architecture (drawing specifically on the Kamerny Theatre and Moscow Art Theatre), and B. W. Delgass of the Amtorg Trading Corporation. From quotations in the New York Times article, we know that Lozowick asserted that ‘Russia is the biggest builder in the world … in Russia it is the entire state that is trying to rebuild the country. The Government has plans for the great cities, plans for workers’ housing, plans for rebuilding Moscow, and it is setting out to do all these things on a permanent, monumental basis.’120 The uniqueness of Russian architecture was its marriage of the utilitarian and monumental, but Lozowick noted that the Russians lacked the technical knowhow of the Americans and stressed the importance of American and Russian relations: ‘in all such matters the Russians are avid for information coming from American architects. They are eager, for example, to get the benefit of American engineering experience regarding skyscraper foundations, and the stress and strain of gigantic structures.’121 If American architects and engineers imparted their knowledge it ‘would be their greatest contribution toward better cultural relations between the Soviet Union and the United States’.122 This was reiterated by Delgass, who invoked ‘Amerikanizm’ by stating that Russian architects saw America as ‘the embodiment of the highest form of industrial development, the most significant illustration of the Machine Age in actual practice’.123 The Amtorg Trading Corporation supplied photographs of Soviet industrial sites, such as an image of giant boilers and an aerial diagram of a factory. Anne Blood offers that either Lozowick or Brinton, on behalf of the American Society for Cultural Relations with Russia, which was closely associated with the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR (VOKS), organized the collation and delivery of the Russian section.124 As the catalogue did not detail the Russian works, we know only that the exhibition included unspecified designs by ‘Mellnikoff’ (Konstantin Melnikov), ‘Work of the Association “ASNOVA”’ (Assotsiatsiia novykh arkitekturov, Association of New Architects, founded 1923)



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and ‘Work of the Society “OSA”’ (Obedinenie sovremennykh arkhitekturov, Society of Contemporary Architects, founded 1925). ASNOVA was a ‘rationalist’ group that numbered Nicolai Ladovsky, Nicolai Dokucheyev, Melnikov, and briefly, Lissitzky. In 1926 Ladovsky theorized ‘rationalism’ in the group’s one-off publication, Izvestiya Asnova, as a means of engaging the masses and transforming society by examining the scientific basis of architecture through a ‘psychotechnical laboratory’, drawing on the ‘still young science of pscyhotechnics’ which had its origins in American workplace analysis.125 A statement elsewhere in Izvestiya Asnova that ‘the measure of Architecture is Architecture’ brought hostile criticism from the politicized Constructivists who made up OSA, including Moisei Ginzburg and Alexander, Victor, and Leonid Vesnin – in 1929 Alexander Vesnin denounced the earlier group for promoting ‘the ideology of the decadent streak in Soviet architecture’.126 OSA reiterated the radical ‘engineerist’ formalism of Constructivism; arguing in its journal Sovremennaja arhitektura, Ginzburg stated that ‘Constructivism sees FORM as ACTIVE. It considers the ORGANIZATION OF PERCEPTION of equal importance to the organization of material factors.’127 Lozowick argued that these differences were less substantial than the groups claimed: ‘theoretically, OSA, somewhat more rigidly “functionalist”, stresses more the engineering function of architecture, while ASNOVA considers architecture as a separate science, distinct from engineering. In reality the differences between the two societies is rather tenuous. OSA uses functional elements decoratively; ASNOVA frequently stresses the importance of “functionalism”.’128 If the Machine-Age Exposition glossed these differences, it is nonetheless notable that the two groups were listed separately. Explaining Soviet architectural developments, Lozowick wrote in 1929 that ‘Constructivism was not the sole factor’, citing the importance of transnational exchanges between the USSR and other countries, notably Holland, Germany, France, and, to an extent, the United States.129 Catherine Cooke notes that the Vesnin brothers and Ginzberg’s architectural design and teaching ethos amalgamated Le Corbusier’s building principles with Gan’s Constructivism.130 This was especially apparent following OSA’s 1927 Exhibition of Contemporary Architecture, which had an international range including Max Taut, Rietveld, and several Bauhaus members (including Walter Gropius and Hannes Meyer), Soviet Constructivist architecture differed from European avant-garde work (Soviet architectural designs before 1927, when ‘Neues Bauen’ became the primary model, were distinguished by greater use of signage, a ‘fascination with the skeleton frame’, ‘volumetric gymnastics’, evident in ‘polychromatic surfaces, highly articulated walls, exposed structures, displays of mechanical equipment, and colliding volumes’).131 The Vesnin brothers’ 1923 pioneering but unrealized design for the Palace of Labour (Figure 1.9), which predates OSA, was the only

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1.9  Vesnin Brothers, ‘Perspective Drawing of the Palace of Labor’, 1922.

identified Constructivist building in the Machine-Age Exposition catalogue – it encapsulated Soviet architecture’s international influences. Selim Khan-Magomedov writes that ‘the competition for the Palace of Labour [for which the Vesnin brothers’s design won Third Prize] was a decisive moment in the evolution of Soviet architecture. It burst the already crumbling dams of traditionalism and opened the new ways of research. The Vesnins’s project became, in a way, the symbol of … Constructivism.’132 Alexander Vesnin was a teacher at VKHUTEMAS (Vysshie Khudozhestvenno-tekhnicheskie Masterskie, Higher State Artistic and Technical Studios), an exhibitor at 5 x 5=25 (and responsible for its catalogue cover), and the designer of the Constructivist stage set for Alexander Tairov’s Chamber Theatre 1922 production of G. K. Chesterton’s The Man who was Thursday (costumes and a model of the set were on show at the International Theatre Exposition). Cooke writes that Vesnin and Popova’s collaborative designs for a ‘communist city of the future’ for the events at the Third Congress of the Third International in 1921 were a ‘belated development’ of Gan’s ‘mass action’ premise, which he defined as the basis of Constructivism.133 The Moscow Architectural Society (MAO) and the Mossoviet (the city council) orchestrated the competition for the Palace of Labour, which would be constructed next to Red Square, specifying that ‘the multiple aspects



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of the Palace of Labour should be reflected both internally and externally and should be expressed in simple, contemporary forms, without reference to any specific style of any past era whatsoever’.134 Like Tatlin’s Monument, the Palace of Labour would be a multi-purpose building, featuring a communist party’s Moscow Committee headquarters, a museum, a refectory for 1500 people, and an enormous auditorium for 8000 members of government and the press.135 In 1930 Lissitzky recalled that it was designed ‘for the new collective ruler, the worker. It was to serve for large congresses, mass rallies, meetings, theatrical productions, and so on.’136 The Vesnins explained the design, which was made up of three main parts, including a skyscraper-type tower, an elevated walkway, and the circular hall: ‘to concretise a meaningful form of the palace for the masses we worked on plans, sections, elevations, perspectives, axonometrics simultaneously, not thinking of parts but of the volumetric and spatial composition as a unity, checking every change in the plan by a three-dimensional drawing’.137 Lissitzky praised the design as ‘the first step from destruction to construction … the first attempt to create a new form for a social task that in itself was ill-defined at the time objective in mind’ although noted that ‘the compulsion to rely on columnar organisation is pervasive. The complex is crowned by a romantic allusion to radio-tower technology, and the large space designed to accommodate 8,000 persons is still completely conventional’ (the remnants of Classicism were yet more pronounced in another design in the Machine-Age Exposition catalogue – Georgiy Golz and Alexander Shvidkovskki’s 1926 Balachna paper plant).138 The building had one notable precursor. The tower of the Palace of Labour bears a strong resemblance to Gropius’s Chicago Tribune Tower proposal of the previous year, which despite failing to win the commission nonetheless introduced ‘Neues Bauen’ into America. Khan-Magomedov argues that Gropius’s exterior was lighter with predominant glasswork, whereas the Vesnins’s concrete façade was ‘more brutal’.139 In 1927 Ginzburg conceded in Sovremennaja arhitektura the similarity of the exteriors, but differentiated the relationship of the interiors to the buildings’ functions respectively as commercial office space and communist ceremonial and bureaucratic uses: Although Gropius’s Chicago Tribune is brilliantly executed and radically constructed in new simple forms, he offers the usual American solution to the arrangement of the interior. On the other hand, the Vesnins’ “palace” is the result of a new social solution regarding the building’s organism and as such establishes the fundamental particularity of Soviet Constructivism.140

The circularity of transnational architectural influences is evident in Manfredo Tafuri’s comment that Gropius and [Max] Taut’s designs ‘were clearly influenced by the “dynamic equilibriums” of International Constructivism’.141 Whether in Russia or Europe, Constructivist architecture was an analogue

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of the ‘Neues Bauen’ that Gropius had pioneered as a member of Deutsche Werkbund from the 1910s, such as the 1911 Fagus-Werk factory Alfeld an der Leine, which had a load-bearing steel frame that liberated the walls for a window shell that maximized light, and was technically and stylistically derived from skyscrapers of Chicago and New York. The abandonment of ornament precipitated ‘Neues Bauen’, of which the apotheosis was Gropius’s Bauhaus at Dessau, an axonometric, asymmetric structure that was a pinnacle of International Constructivism. A photograph of the staff houses at the Bauhaus and another of the main buildings appeared in the Machine-Age Exposition catalogue, which also included Gropius and Adolph Meyer’s coeval State Theatre at Jena, but the listing was typically vague about German work on display – for example exhibits 186 to 209 were cited simply as photographs of ‘New German Architecture’. Unfortunately, as Margaret Kentgens-Craig has written, ‘German architecture was only poorly represented in the accompanying text, but the fact that reviewers often mentioned its impressive formal quality implies that the visual material of the show balanced the textual inadequacies and allowed the audience to gain some insight into the work’.142 Indeed, the absence of essays on Constructivist architecture in Russia and Germany, and the presence instead of unrepresentative polemics on machine art, undermined the exhibition’s strongest suit and severed the artist–­architect–engineer matrix from its Soviet origins.

Constructivism against functionalism If the ethos of the Machine-Age Exposition and the revolutionary principles of Soviet architectural Constructivists were non-aligned, then this disconnection further reflected the exhibition’s debt to van Doesburg’s version of International Constructivism. Van Doesburg had been admiring of Melnikov’s Constructivist pavilion for the Russian contribution to the 1925 Paris Exhibition, seeing potential for a ‘healthy development of elementary architecture in Russia’.143 However, the following year he rounded upon Soviet architects in a 1926 De Stijl article provocatively entitled ‘Architecture on Paper: the Trap of Romantic Constructivism’, in which he attacked Tatlin’s Monument and Lissitzky’s orators’ platform, and said that ‘the Russians love to toy with modern construction “on paper” for mostly inexecutable designs … [which] discredited the serious constructive activities of modern architects’.144 Soviet plans (for instance, Lissitzky’s horizontal skyscraper designs at the Machine-Age Exposition) remained mere plans because they were unbuildable. He went further in 1928 in ‘Architecture and Revolution – Revolutionary Architecture? Utopian Designs by Tatlin, Lissitzky, and Others’, where he dismissed the ‘mass action’ basis of Constructivism because no consensus could ever arise from the incipiently ‘amorphous’ and malleable crowd, and damningly concluded that ‘proletarian



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culture is an absurdity’.145 ‘Leftist’ architectural visionaries, such as Tatlin, Lissitzky, and Malevich, failed because they neither considered nor reached the mass, because they ‘are making plans which are based solely on esthetic speculation, and are therefore totally unfit for practical execution’ and ‘one should wonder whether such projects have any value beside a solely speculativeesthetic one, and whether these designs can be of use in meeting the housing shortage and the miserable living conditions of the Russian working class’.146 Furthermore, ‘Vesnin’s project for the Temple of Labour differs only in its dimensions, but absolutely not in its spirit from “bourgeois” architecture’.147 Ominously yet aptly, he argued that giant projects such as Tatlin’s ‘monstrous’ Monument could only come to realization with a slave workforce akin to the construction the Great Pyramids, unconsciously prefiguring the ‘shock brigades’ of coerced political prisoners during the Five-Year Plan.148 If van Doesburg’s theories were the principle source for Kiesler and Heap, fully expressed in the Constructivism of the International Theatre Exposition and the Machine-Age Exposition, then their non-political philosophies corresponded with his own distaste for political ideology. Van Doesburg’s ethos combined utopian thinking about form combined with achievable architectural aims, and he directed his praise towards architects who balanced visionary discourse with practicability, sociality with style. For example, in the June 1926 issue of De Stijl he attended to ‘the problem of lower-income housing’, and cited ‘the architect [Adolf] Rading in Breslau, an eminent theoretician in the field of decentralised city planning, and the young architect [Carl] Lüdecke in Hellerau’ as ‘forerunners’ in the industrialization of social housing construction.149 Lüdecke’s circular ‘siedlungen’, or housing estate, of repetitive rectilinear blocks with cellular units at Hellerau was formally contingent on function, economic and ergonomic, but also allowed ‘enough space for everything needed in comfort’.150 Both van Doesburg and Kiesler theorized space according to real living conditions. In ‘Defending the Spirit of Space’ from May 1926, van Doesburg bemoaned ‘functionalists’ who disregarded the maximized spatial needs of the occupants: ‘even an animal would feel constrained and unhappy in extremely constricted space. A human being with “modern nerves” would completely go to pieces in this constriction of space advocated by the functionalists.’151

Coda: from International Constructivism to the International Style In the United States the attack on functionalism was most fervently taken up at the 1932 Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, which was a landmark Museum of Modern Art show curated by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, featuring architects such as Le Corbusier, Gropius,

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Oud, Mies, and a smattering of Americans, including Hood and Frank Lloyd Wright, with greater favour granted to émigré architects such as Richard Neutra, William Lescaze, and Joseph Urban. In an accompanying book, the curators promulgated the notion of the ‘International Style’, which was in essence a matrix of Le Corbusier’s ‘L’Esprit Nouveau’ and ‘Neues Bauen’, albeit sacrificing sociality for stylistic imperatives. In his preface to the book, Alfred H. Barr Jr., the director of MoMA, stated that ‘the aesthetic qualities of the Style are the principal concern of the authors of this book [who] have made little attempt to present here the technical or sociological aspects of the style except in so far as they are related to problems of design’.152 Like van Doesburg, Hitchcock, Johnson, and Barr abhorred leftist functionalism. In the preface, Barr rejected Hannes Meyer, Gropius’s successor as Director of the Bauhaus from 1929, as a ‘fanatical functionalist’, celebrating instead ‘the most luxurious of modern German architects, Mies van der Rohe’.153 In the main text, Hitchcock and Johnson found functionalism to be acceptable in moderation but abjured Meyer and his ilk, for whom ‘it is an absurdity to talk about the modern style in terms of aesthetics at all’.154 Their ‘Harvard Circle’ colleague Lincoln Kirstein had derided Meyer at the 1930–31 Exhibition from the Bauhaus, Dessau, which he organized for the Harvard Society of Contemporary Art, as a ‘Swiss communist [who] was obsessed with the idea of Sachlichkeit, that is, the idea of extreme practicability, the minimum of construction and the maximum of functional potentiality’.155 The International Style apologists also disliked social housing projects. Hitchcock and Johnson wrote ‘too often in European Siedlungen the functionalists build for some proletarian superman of the future’.156 They were largely mute on the subject of Soviet architecture, and the sole Russian building in the book, an Electro-Physical Laboratory in Moscow by the Government architects Nicolaiev and Fissenko, had a formalist caption – ‘vertical and curved elements used with functional justification and aesthetic success’.157 The diminution of Soviet architecture in the International Style canon was not due to lack of information. Barr actually had extensive first-hand knowledge of Soviet culture from his trip to Russia over the winter of 1927 and 1928, and visited Ginzburg’s 1926 Dom Gostrak apartments – one of the few Soviet buildings in The International Style – when calling on Sergei Tretiakov – and also met the architect.158 Barr’s 1929 essay ‘Notes on Russian Architecture’ was the source of the term ‘International Style’. He observed that in Russia ‘one meets an extravagant and envious respect for American technical proficiency and a corresponding contempt for American architectural design’ (with the exception of Wright’s work).159 He cited work by ASNOVA and OSA as exemplary antidotes to the grim brutalism of the Lenin Institute, but found ASNOVA,



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excepting Lissitzky’s work, to be prone to excess ornament and ‘unfortunate heaviness’.160 OSA was ‘purer’, especially evident in chief architect Ginzburg’s work, which ‘belongs to that international style of which Le Corbusier, Gropius, and Oud are perhaps the finest masters’.161 Barr privileged those which corresponded to the tenets of the nascent International Style, praising Andrei Burov’s ‘Neues Bauen’ set designs for Sergei Eisenstein’s 1929 film The General Line as exemplary ­architecture – he met Burov, who ‘was delighted to find one of his esquisses illustrated in the catalogue of the Machine-Age Exposition in New York’.162 Barr saw ‘progress’ in the shift from ASNOVA’s 1923 foundational aim ‘to attempt to realize in architecture the principles of the USSR’ and ‘reciprocity between the architect-producer and the mass of proletariat-consumers’ towards Ginzburg’s position that ‘the final task of the new architect, the correlation of the exterior volumes and the grouping of architectural masses, their rhythms and proportions, depends upon [the] primarily utilitarian structural method’.163 Like van Doesburg, Barr also cited the impracticality of Soviet designers – the Dom Gostrak apartments ‘may be taken as the epitome of modern Russian building, indeed of much of modern Russia, for it demonstrates clearly a theoretical mastery of a problem which has been executed with remarkable technical incompetence’.164 His essays and diary betray an imbalanced interest in style over ideology, but were mostly impartial. In ‘The LEF and Soviet Art’, which was printed in transition in 1928, he wrote of the ‘Left Front’: ‘their spirit is rational, materialistic, their programme aggressively utilitarian. They despise the word “aesthetic”, they shun the bohemian implications of the word “artistic”. For them, theoretically, romantic individualism is abhorrent. They are communists.’165 Barr met LEF members, including Tretiakov and Rodchenko, and enthused about their attitude and output if not their politics. He summed up: the LEF is more than a symptom, more than an expression of a fresh culture or of post-revolutionary man; it is a courageous attempt to give to art an important social function in a world where, from one point of view, it has been prostituted for five centuries … The LEF is strong in the illusion that men can live by bread alone.166

Supplying Barr with copies of LEF, Tretyakov urged him to ‘found an American LEF’­– a more unlikely outcome is difficult to imagine.167 MoMA transformed International Constructivism into the International Style, by borrowing De Stijl’s stylistic universalism, sharing van Doesburg’s resistance to functionalism, but abandoning utopian dimension for a model that accommodated Western capitalism and lacked a social vision. The presentation of architecture at the Machine-Age Exposition also avoided Constructivism’s political rationale, but it was conceptually sympathetic to the Constructivist

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matrix of the artist, architect, and engineer. In the catalogue to the Museum of Modern Art’s 1934 exhibition Machine Art, Barr wrote that: The romantic attitude toward the machine reached its height in America about five years ago. The Machine-Age Exhibition [sic] … was an important pioneer effort which included fantastic drawings of the city of the future, “modernistic” skyscrapers, constructivists, robot costumes, theatre settings, and factories, together with some excellent machines and photographs of machinery.168

The machines at Machine Art were not, in any case, the giant turbines and plants of the Machine-Age Exposition, but an un-romantic selection of modest goods from laboratory equipment and hospital appliances, such as Petri covers and sputum bowls, to luxurious household wares and trinkets, such as pretzel bowls and cigarette lighters. The two The Little Review exhibitions may have sacrificed the revolutionary contingency of Constructivism, following van Doesburg’s model, but retained the space for a social vision that MoMA’s assemblage of machine commodities disavowed.

Notes 1. The Little Review had been founded in Chicago in 1914 by Margaret Anderson and was initially a literary journal with appended coverage of the arts. Heap, who was for many years Anderson’s lover, joined the magazine in 1916 and gradually introduced more modernist fine art in the early 1920s. 2. The First Working Group of Constructivists (1921), quoted in Alexei Gan, ‘From Constructivism’ (1922), trans. J. Bowlt, in S. Bann (ed.), The Tradition of Constructivism (New York: Viking Press, 1974), p. 35. 3. Alexander Vesnin, ‘Credo’, unpublished manuscript (1922), reprinted in Art into Life: Russian Constructivism, 1914–1932 (Seattle, WA: Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington and New York: Rizzoli, 1990), p. 68. 4. Gan, ‘From Constructivism’, p. 36 and p. 42. 5. M. Lavinsky, ‘Engineerism (Fragment of a Paper Read at INKhUK)’ (1922), Art into Life, p. 80. 6. The First Working Group of Constructivists, Gan, ‘From Constructivism’, p. 33. 7. Ibid, p. 42. 8. Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 227. 9. David Shterenberg, ‘Foreword to the Catalogue of the First Exhibition of Russian Art, Van Diemen Gallery, Berlin 1922’, trans. N. Bullock, in S. Bann (ed.), The Tradition of Constructivism, p. 70. 10. Lodder, Russian Constructivism, p. 230. 11. Ibid. 12. John Bowlt, ‘Art in Exile: the Russian Avant-Garde and the Emigration’, Art Journal (Autumn 1981), p. 218.



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13. Anatoli Lunacharsky, ‘Russkaia vystavka v Berline’, Iskusstvo I revoliutsiia (Moscow, 1924), p. 177, quoted in Bowlt, ‘Art in Exile’, p. 218. 14. Katherine S. Dreier, Western Art and the New Era: An Introduction to Modern Art (New York: Brentano’s, 1923), p. 110. 15. Christian Brinton, ‘Introduction’, in Exhibition of Russian Painting and Sculpture (New York: The Brooklyn Museum, 1923), non-paginated. 16. Dickran Tashjian, ‘“A Big Cosmic Force”: Katherine S. Dreier and the Russian/ Soviet Avant-Garde’, in J. Gross (ed.), The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 53. 17. Christian Brinton, ‘Introduction’, in The Russian Art Exhibition (New York: Grand Central Palace, 1924), non-paginated, quoted in Marie Turbow Lampard, ‘Sergei Konenkov and the “Russian Art Exhibition” ’, Soviet Union: Union Soviétique, 7:1–2 (1980), p. 72. 18. Stuart Davis to Katherine Dreier (15 April 1927), in Ruth Bohan, The Société Anonyme’s Brooklyn Exhibition: Katherine Dreier and Modernism in America (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982), p. 125. 19. Louis Lozowick, Modern Russian Art (New York: Société Anonyme, 1925), p. 60. 20. Louis Lozowick to Jane Heap (6/1/1926), Little Review Papers, Box 8, Folder 16, non-paginated. 21. See Louis Lozowick, ‘The Art of Nathan Altman’, The Menorah Journal (February 1926), pp. 61–4; ‘Eliezer Lissitzky’, Menorah Journal (April 1926), pp. 175–6; ‘Alexandra Exter’s Marionettes’, Theatre Arts Monthly (July 1928), pp. 514–19; ‘A Decade of Soviet Art’, Menorah Journal (March 1929), pp. 243–8; ‘The Soviet Cinema: Eisenstein and Pudovkin’, Theatre Arts Monthly (September 1929), pp. 664–75; ‘El Lissitzky’, transition (November 1929), pp. 284–6; ‘Theatre Chronicle: V. E. Meyerhold and His Theatre’, Hound and Horn (October–December 1930), pp. 95–105. 22. Louis Lozowick, Survivor from a Dead Age: The Memoirs of Louis Lozowick (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1997), p. 221. 23. Louis Lozowick, ‘Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International’, Broom (October 1922), p. 232. 24. Ibid, p. 234. 25. Louis Lozowick, ‘A Note on Modern Russian Art’, Broom (February 1923), p. 202. 26. Anatoli Lunacharsky, ‘Vstupitelnaya statya’ in G. Kaizer, Dramy (Moscow/ Leningrad, 1923), and ‘Teatr RSFSR’, pechat i revolyutsiya, no. 7 (1922), cited in Lodder, Russian Constructivism, p. 283. 27. Lozowick, ‘Tatlin’s Monument’, p. 234. 28. Lozowick, Modern Russian Art, p. 29. 29. Lozowick, Survivor, p. 227. 30. Lozowick, ‘A Note on Modern Russian Art’, p. 200. 31. Louis Lozowick, ‘A Decade of Soviet Art’, The Menorah Journal (May 1929), p. 248. 32. Ibid., p. 245. 33. Although the Archives of American Art dates this article to 1929, a moment when Lozowick had stopped making Machine Ornaments, in a letter to Heap,

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dated 9 November 1926, Lozowick stated that he had recently sent her an ‘article on machine ornament’ for publication in The Little Review. Louis Lozowick to Jane Heap (9 November 1926), Little Review Papers, Box 8 Folder 16, non-paginated. 34. Louis Lozowick, ‘Machine Ornament’ (1926–9), unpublished manuscript, Lozowick, Survivor, p. 283. 35. Lozowick, ‘Machine Ornament’, p. 284. 36. Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt, ‘Louis Lozowick: An American’s Assimilation of the Russian Avant-Garde of the 1920s’, in Gail Harrison Roman and Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt (eds.), The Avant-Garde Frontier: Russia Meets the West, 1910– 1930 (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press), pp. 241–70; Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt, ‘Louis Lozowick: From “Machine Ornaments” to Applied Design’, The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts (Spring 1988), pp. 40–57; Barbara Zabel, ‘Louis Lozowick and Urban Optimism of 1920s’, Archives of American Art Journal, 14:2 (1974), pp. 17–21. 37. Andrew Hemingway, The Mysticism of Money: Precisionist Painting and Machine Age America (Pittsburgh, PA: Periscope Publishing, 2013) p. 123. 38. Ibid., p. 128. 39. Ibid., p. 148. 40. Marquardt, ‘Louis Lozowick’, p. 50. 41. Ibid., p. 51. 42. Louis Lozowick, ‘El Lissitzky’, transition (Fall 1929), p. 285. 43. Genevieve Taggard, ‘The Ruskinian Boys See Red’, New Masses (July 1927), p. 18. 44. jh (Jane Heap),‘Independents, etc.’, The Little Review (Winter 1922), p. 22; photo of ‘Tatlin’s Tower’, opposite p. 48. 45. jh (Jane Heap), ‘Comments’, The Little Review (Spring 1924), p. 57. 46. jh (Jane Heap), ‘Machine-Age Exposition’, The Little Review (Spring 1925), p. 22. 47. Ibid. 48. Lavinsky, ‘Fragment’, p. 80. 49. Gan, ‘From Constructivism’, p. 40. 50. Heap, ‘Machine-Age Exposition’, p. 22. 51. Sima Ingberman, ABC: International Constructivist Architecture, 1922–1931 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), p. 4. 52. Ibid. 53. El Lissitzky and Ilya Ehrenberg, ‘The Blockade of Russia is Coming to an End’, Veshch/Gegenstand/Objet, 1–2 (1922), trans. S. Bann, reprinted in Bann (ed.), The Tradition of Constructivism, p. 54. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., p. 56. 56. A Short Review of the Proceedings’, ‘Statement by the Editors of Veshch/ Gegenstand/ Objet’, ‘Statement by the Stijl Group’, ‘Statement by the Constructivist Groups of Rumania, Switzerland, Scandinavia, and Germany’, ‘Statement by the International Faction of Constructivists’, De Stijl, 5:4 (1922), in Bann (ed.), The Tradition of Constructivism, pp. 58–69. 57. Ibid.



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58. ‘The Little Review is Immortal’, publicity notice, Little Review Papers, Box 4, Folder 1, undated, non-paginated. 59. Congress of International Progressive Artists: A Short Review of the Proceedings’ (1922), trans. N. Bullock, in Bann (ed.), The Tradition of Constructivism, p. 59. 60. Statement by the International Faction of Constructivists’ (1922), trans. S. Bann, in Bann (ed.), The Tradition of Constructivism, p. 69. 61. El Lissitzky, ‘Statement by the Editors of Veshch/ Gegenstand/ Objet’ (1922), in Bann (ed.), The Tradition of Constructivism, p. 63. 62. Ibid, pp. 63–4. 63. Hans Richter, ‘Statement by the Constructivist Groups of Rumania, Switzerland, Scandinavia, and Germany’ (1922), in Bann (ed.), The Tradition of Constructivism, pp. 66–7. 64. Alexei Gan, quoted in Lodder, Russian Constructivism, p. 238. 65. Ibid. 66. Theo van Doesburg, ‘Evolution of Modern Architecture in Holland’, The Little Review (Spring 1925). 67. Van Doesburg to Heap, undated, Little Review Papers, Box 6, Folder 22. The folder also includes a French version of the manifesto on a typescript with a De Stijl letterhead; translations from ‘De Stijl: Manifesto V’, in U. Conrad (ed.), Programs and Manifestoes on 20th Century Architecture (London: Lund Humphries, 1970), p. 66. 68. Susan Noyes-Platt, ‘Mysticism in the Machine Age: Jane Heap and The Little Review’, 20/1, 1:1 (1989), p. 19. 69. Bann, The Tradition of Constructivism, p. 115. 70. The exhibition was held at the Konzerrthaus in Vienna, 1924. 71. Frederick Kiesler, ‘Ausstellungssystem Leger und Träger’, De Stijl, 10:11 (1925), pp. 138–47. 72. Theo van Doesburg and Cornelis van Eesteren, ‘Toward a Collective Construction’, (1923), trans. S. Bann, in Bann (ed.), The Tradition of Constructivism, p. 117. 73. Frederick Kiesler, ‘Manifesto of Tensionism’ (1925), reprinted in Frederick Kiesler, Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and its Display (New York: Brentano’s, 1930), p. 48. 74. Louis Lozowick, ‘Gas: A Theatrical Experiment’, International Theatre Exposition, The Little Review (Winter 1926), p. 60. 75. Frederick Kiesler, ‘Debacle of the Modern Theatre’, International Theatre Exposition, p. 67. 76. Ibid, p. 72. 77. Ibid. 78. Kiesler, Contemporary Art, p. 50. 79. See ‘Constructivism Big Thing at Exposition’, New York Tribune, 26 February 1926; A Stage in Fourth Dimension’, Brooklyn Eagle, 16 March 1926. Frederick Kiesler Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 80. Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 295. 81. Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension, p. 373 and p. 379

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82. Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension, p. 469. 83. Theo van Doesburg, ‘Evolution of Modern Architecture in Holland’, The Little Review (Spring 1925), p. 50. 84. ‘Plans Laboratory of Modern Stage’, New York Times (15 March 1926), p. 19. 85. Ibid. 86. See Barnaby Haran, ‘Magic Windows: Friedrich Kiesler and Department Store Constructivism’, in John Welchman (ed.), Sculpture and the Vitrine (London: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 69–94. 87. Kiesler, Contemporary Art, p. 108. 88. ‘New Saks Fifth Avenue Window Sets Reflect Ultra in Display Background’, Women’s Wear Daily (24 March 1928), Frederick Kiesler Papers. 89. Kiesler, Contemporary Art, p. 67. 90. Ibid, p. 39. 91. Ibid. 92. Symon Gould, ‘The Film Arts Guild’, undated, non-paginated, Frederick Kiesler Papers. 93. ‘Film Guild Cinema’, New Masses (January 1929), p. 17. 94. Gould, ‘The Film Arts Guild’; Douglas Fox, ‘The Film Guild Cinema: An Experiment in Theatre Design’, Exhibitors Herald World (16 March 1929), p. 15. 95. Gladys Fabre, ‘A Universal Language for the Arts: Interdisciplinarity as Practice, Film as Model’, in Gladys Fabre and Doris Wintgens-Hötte (eds.), Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World (London: Tate, 2009), p. 55. 96. Fabre, ‘A Universal Language for the Arts’, p. 55; Hans Richter’s ‘Film Moment’, De Stijl, 6:5 (1923), pp. 65–66 with El Lissitzky, ‘Proun 1 C’, De Stijl, 5:6 (1922), pp. 81–82. 97. “International Exposition of New Systems of Architecture’, Little Review Papers, Box 2 Folder 5, undated, non-paginated. 98. Louis Lozowick to Jane Heap (6 February 1927), Little Review Papers, Box 8 Folder 16, non-paginated. 99. Invitation to ‘Machine-Age Exposition’ committee (18 March 1927), Little Review Papers, Box 2, Folder 9, non-paginated. 100. ‘International Exposition of New Systems of Architecture’. 101. Invitation to ‘Machine-Age Exposition’ committee. 102. Herbert Lippmann, ‘The Machine-Age Exposition’, The Arts (June 1927), p. 325. 103. ‘Machine-Age Exposition’, Little Review Papers, Box 2 Folder 9, undated, non-paginated. 104. Taggard, ‘The Ruskinian Boys See Red’, p. 18. See also Ralph Flint, ‘New York Art Notes’, Christian Science Monitor (31 May 1927), p. 7; E. B. White, The Talk of the Town, ‘Machine Age’, The New Yorker (21 May 1927), p. 13. 105. Lippmann, ‘The Machine-Age Exposition’, p. 325. 106. Machine-Age Exposition, supplement to The Little Review (1927), p. 34. 107. Enrico Prampolini, ‘The Aesthetics of the Machine’, The Little Review (Autumn and Winter 1924–25), pp. 49–51. 108. Alexander Archipenko, ‘Machine and Art’, Machine-Age Exposition, supplement to The Little Review (1927), p. 14.



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109. Enrico Prampolini, ‘The Aesthetic of the Machine’, Machine-Age Exposition, ­supplement to The Little Review (1927), p. 10. 110. Lozowick, Survivor, p. 113. 111. Louis Lozowick, ‘The Americanization of Art’, Machine-Age Exposition, p. 18. 112. Ibid. 113. Hemingway, Mysticism, p. 130. 114. Hugh Ferriss, ‘Architecture of this Age’, Machine-Age Exposition, p. 6. 115. Szymon Syrkus, ‘Architecture Opens Up Volume’, Machine-Age Exposition, p. 30. 116. ‘New Russian Architecture is Shown Here’, New York Sun (21 May 1927), p. 16. 117. ‘French Designs for Small Homes’, New York Times (22 May, 1927), p. 23. 118. ‘New Architecture Develops in Russia’, New York Times (29 May 1927), II:1. 119. Ibid. 120. Ibid. 121. Ibid. 122. Ibid. 123. Ibid. 124. Anne Blood, ‘The Russian Section of the “Machine-Age Exposition” (1927)’, The Burlington Magazine (October 2012), p. 697. In 1929, Brinton organized the ‘Exhibition of Contemporary Art of Soviet Russia: Painting, Graphic, Sculpture’ at the Grand Central Palace, and several other exhibitions through the 1930s including the ‘Exhibition of Russian Painting and Sculpture: Realism to Surrealism’ at The Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts in 1932, and ‘Art of Soviet Russia’ at the Pennsylvania Museum of Art in 1935 and at the American Russian Institute in 1936. 125. Nicolai Ladovsky, ‘The Psychotechnical Laboratory of Architecture: Posing the Problem’, Izvestiia Asnova, 1 (29 March 1926), reprinted in Catherine Cooke, Russian Avant-Garde: Theories of Art, Architecture, and the City (London: Academy Editions, 1995), p. 24. 126. Both quotes from Anatole Kopp, Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and City Planning, 1917–1955, trans. Thomas Burton (London: Thames and Hudson, 1967), p. 76. 127. Moisei Ginzburg, ‘Constructivism as a Method of Laboratory and Teaching Work’, Sovremennaja arhitektura, 6 (1927), reprinted in Cooke, Russian Avant-Garde, p. 121. 128. Louis Lozowick, ‘Soviet Painting and Architecture’, Joseph Freeman, Joshua Kunitz, and Louis Lozowick, Voices of October: Art and Literature in Soviet Russia (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1930), p. 290. 129. Ibid. 130. Cooke, Russian Avant-Garde, p. 49. 131. K. Paul Zygas, ‘OSA’s 1927 Exhibition of Contemporary Architecture: Russia and the West Meet in Moscow’, in Roman and Marquardt (eds.), The Avant-Garde Frontier, pp. 109–110. 132. Selim Khan-Magomedov, Alexander Vesnin and Russian Constructivism, trans. Dianne Cullinane (London: Lund Humphries, 1986), p. 117. 133. Cooke, Russian Avant-Garde, p. 24. 134. Quoted in Khan-Magomedov, Alexander Vesnin, p. 116.

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135. Catherine Cooke, ‘The Vesnin’s Palace of Labour: the Role of Practice in Materialising the Revolutionary Architecture’, in Neil Leach (ed.), Architecture and Revolution: Contemporary Perspectives on Central and Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 41. 136. El Lissitzky, Russia: An Architecture for a World Revolution, trans. Eric Dluhosch (Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1930; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), p. 32. 137. A. G. Chiniakov, Brat’iya Vesniny (Moscow, 1970), p. 85, quoted in Cooke, Russian Avant-Garde, p. 44. 138. El Lissitzky, Russia, p. 32. 139. Khan-Magomedov, Alexander Vesnin, p. 123. 140. Moisei Ginzburg, ‘Itogi i perspetktivy SA’ (Assessments and Perspectives of SA), Sovremennaja arhitektura, 4–5 (1927), quoted in Khan-Magomedov, Alexander Vesnin, p. 127. 141. Manfredo Tafuri, ‘The Disenchanted Mountain: The Skyscraper and the City’, in Giorgio Ciucci, Francesco Dal Co, Mario Manieri-Elia, and Manfredo Tafuri (eds.), trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta, The American City: From the Civil War to the New Deal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979), p. 409. 142. Margret Kentgens-Craig, The Bauhaus and America: First Contacts, 1919–1936 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 71. 143. Theo van Doesburg, ‘The Significance of Glass: Toward Transparent Structures’, De Stijl, 2:6 (June 1925), reprinted in On European Architecture: Complete Essays from Het Bouwbedrijf 1924–1931, trans. Charlotte I. Loeb and Arthur L. Loeb (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1990), p. 69. 144. Theo van Doesburg, ‘Architecture on Paper: the Trap of Romantic Constructivism’, De Stijl, 3:13 (October 1926), On European Architecture, p. 122. 145. Theo van Doesburg, ‘Architecture and Revolution – Revolutionary Architecture? Utopian Designs by Tatlin, Lissitzky, and Others’, De Stijl, 5:20 (September 1928), On European Architecture, p. 189. 146. Ibid., p. 192. 147. Ibid., p. 193. 148. Ibid., p. 193. 149. Theo van Doesburg, ‘Siedlung in Hellerau: Design for a Low-income City’, De Stijl, 3:6 (June 1926), On European Architecture, p. 96. 150. Ibid. 151. Theo van Doesburg, ‘Defending the Spirit of Space: Against a Dogmatic Functionalism’, De Stijl, 3:5 (May 1926), On European Architecture, p. 94. 152. Alfred H. Barr Jr., Preface, Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style (New York: W. W. Norton, 1932), p. 29. 153. Barr Jr., Preface, p. 30. 154. Hitchcock and Johnson, The International Style, p. 51. 155. Lincoln Kirstein, ‘Bauhaus: Introductory Note’, Catalogue of an Exhibition from the Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany (1931), The Arts Club of Chicago, reprinted in KentgensCraig, The Bauhaus and America, p. 236. 156. Hitchcock and Johnson, The International Style, p. 104. 157. Ibid, p. 237. 158. Alfred H. Barr Jr., ‘Russian Diary 1927–28’, October (Winter 1978), p. 39.



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159. Alfred H. Barr Jr., ‘Notes on Russian Architecture’, The Arts (February 1929), p. 106. 160. Ibid, p. 104. 161. Ibid, p. 105. 162. Barr Jr., ‘Russian Diary’, p. 34. 163. ASNOVA Manifesto and Moisei Ginzburg, quoted in ibid., pp. 104–5. 164. Ibid. 165. Alfred H. Barr Jr., ‘The LEF and Soviet Art’, transition (Fall 1928), reprinted in Alfred H. Barr Jr., Defining Modern Art: Selected Writings of Alfred H. Barr Jr. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), p. 138. 166. Ibid, pp. 140–1. 167. Barr Jr., ‘Russian Diary’, p. 46. 168. Alfred H. Barr, ‘Foreword’, Machine Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1934), non-paginated.

2 The mass and the machine: The New Playwrights Theatre and American radical Constructivism A New Masses Theatre For all that the American avant-garde followed cultural developments in the Soviet Union, there was little attempt to reproduce Constructivism in the visual arts as a politically revolutionary cultural strategy. However, a putative ‘American Constructivism’ did emerge in the theatre in the late 1920s, and it marked the clear and conscious reception and adaptation of Russian postrevolutionary theatrical innovations by directors, playwrights, set designers, and critics in the United States. According to the theatre critic Kenneth Macgowan, Marion Gering’s 1926 production of Georg Kaiser’s Expressionist play Gas (Figure 2.1), which featured a mechanical stage set by Louis Lozowick, was the ‘first true example of Constructivism in America’.1 However, it was the emergence that same year of a group called the New Playwrights Theatre (hereafter NPT) that marked the most concerted effort to realize a politically and aesthetically sympathetic version of theatrical Constructivism on the American stage. The revolutionary impetus of the NPT reflected the close involvement of the five original members – Mike Gold, Em Jo Basshe, John Howard Lawson, Francis Farragoh, and John Dos Passos – with the radical magazine New Masses. The NPT was the cultural hub to New Masses as the Provincetown Players had been to The Masses. Gold, who was New Masses editor from June 1928, called the NPT ‘A New Masses Theatre’, and therefore analogous to the magazine’s fusion of political radicalism and formal experimentation.2 The NPT produced nine plays in its brief existence between 1927 and 1929, all by members of the group, with the exception of Paul Sifton’s The Belt and Upton Sinclair’s Singing Jailbirds.3 Attacking both Broadway and the experiments of the art theatre, they called for a ‘machine age theatre’ to galvanize a mass audience through a riot of popular forms. Dos Passos explained this model in a Vanity Fair article:



the mass and the machine 55

2.1  Louis Lozowick, ‘Setting for Georg Kaiser’s Gas, Kenneth Sawyer Goodman Theatre, Chicago, 1926’.

The theatre I’d like to see … would have the intellectual and physical equipment necessary to justify the ways of the machine to me, would combine the qualities of high mass and a prize fight, of a vaudeville bill and a communist meeting in Madison Square Garden. It would deal funnily, tragically, and grandiosely with every phase of modern life, not afraid of sex or political propaganda, always treating individual people in their relation to the mass movements of industrial life. A theatre of crowds and machinery and abstract colors and sounds and emotions, unsolemn, noisy, religious, and lewd. It would wring horse-laughs, belly-laughs, and snickers, sobs, tears, and an occasional thought out of its audience, and send them home tired and happy, with at least a temporary feeling that somebody could offer a clue to the interminable humdrum.4

In essence, the NPT’s ‘machine age theatre’ was an American version of Soviet theatrical Constructivism, and was strongly indebted to the innovative productions of the director Vsevolod Meyerhold. As Gold explained ‘Constructivism is his invention; it is a technique for capturing the swift powerful movement of the Machine Age’.5 Constructivist machinolatry also permeated Basshe’s announcement of the NPT to the public in an article entitled ‘The Revolt on Fifty-second Street’ in the New York Times in February 1927 (in reference to the Fifty-second Street Theatre, where they were based before finding a permanent, cheaper home at the old Cherry Lane Playhouse on Commerce Street in Greenwich Village in December that year).6 Basshe told Times readers that: The contemporary spirit of the theatre – along with other artists – does not hide himself in a corner, hoping against hope for the return of the glories,

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colour, and pageant of the past. He stands shoulder to shoulder with the mentors of this our age: the Einsteins, Goethals, Curies, Michelsons, Edisons … He accepts their nuts, bolts, cranes; he listens to the tune played by their acetylene torches, cutting through steel, rock, bone; he trembles when their snoring engines shriek and pound away.7

He imagined a distinctly American brew of ‘flapper emotion’, ‘screeching advertisements’ and ‘Candy Kid’s escapades’, where ‘we may listen to the engineer of a three-ton truck playing obbligato to a chorus of Negroes singing the unforgettable spirituals’.8 Writing in the Daily Worker, Basshe couched the NPT in more starkly political terms and heralded a ‘coming workers theatre’ that would use the machine aesthetic to engage the popular power of the metropolitan masses: There is a union of dictatorship today: the Mass and the Machine. They go hand in hand. The rhythm is one … the proletarian theatre is the first to make use of this “character”… it will ask such artists as Louis Lozowick to bring his dreams of engines, of sewing machines, of tenement houses upon the stage … it will order from Bill Gropper his collection of mad mankind … it will insist that the playwright forget the impotent middle class, and devote his talents to the portrayal of the brothers and sisters of the machine, of the toilers of soil – the children of the future.9

In this chapter I argue that the NPT’s engagement with the Constructivist trope of the ‘mass-machine’ revealed the complex, even contradictory, attitudes of the group towards American modernity. Briefly, an optimistic Constructivist machine aesthetic coexisted uneasily with a more machinephobic Expressionist sensibility. In truth Expressionism and Constructivism were not strictly opposing tendencies in either the USSR or the USA, or Germany for that matter, but neither were they interchangeable. In Russia the Constructivist staging of German Expressionist plays by Kaiser and Ernst Toller witnessed the reconfiguration of the original texts into mass-machine spectacles that lampooned rather than celebrated individual angst. In contrast the NPT productions adapted the machine aesthetic to anti-capitalist plays that were less dialectical in their juxtapositions of the individual and the collective and of man and machine, and so the ‘mass-machine’ remained an unresolved paradox, a cipher of both the capitalist herding of workers and communist proletarian unity.

The theatre of The Masses The NPT served as an intensified modernist variant of a radical tradition, and as a New Masses theatre its semantic roots lay in the theatrical milieu around The Masses, the magazine that had defiantly expressed the radical energies of



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the 1910s. Founded by Piet Vlag in 1911 as ‘a monthly magazine devoted to the interests of the working people’, from 1912 The Masses became, under the editorship of Max Eastman, ‘a revolutionary and not a reform magazine’ that was aligned with the Socialist Party. In June 1913 The Masses met the masses in the Paterson Strike Pageant, where a cast of 1500, orchestrated by John Reed, paid tribute to the thwarted insurrection of the Industrial Workers of the World to an audience of 15,000 at Old Madison Square Gardens with sets by Robert Edmund Jones and backdrops by John Sloan. The programme stated that ‘the Pageant represents a battle between the working class and the capitalist class conducted by the Industrial Workers of the World, making use of the General Strike as the chief weapon. It is a conflict between two social forces – the force of labor and the force of capital.’10 Despite organizational problems, the Paterson Strike Pageant witnessed an ambitious attempt to create a mass spectacle and testimonial akin to the great French revolutionary festivals of the 1790s. The mass dominated the pageant in re-enactments that involved multisensory use of sounds and sights.11 The Paterson Strike Pageant was, as Elizabeth Gurley Flynn noted, ‘a beautiful example of realistic art’ and ‘splendid propaganda for the workers in New York’, and was not conceived as a modernist experiment but rather aimed to amalgamate the performers and the audience by creating a mass ritual around the strike narrative.12 In contrast, the productions by the Provincetown Players, the little theatre associated with The Masses, were small-scale affairs. Led by George Cram Cook, the Provincetown Players gathered together in 1915 and officially began performing the following September. With improvised sets by Jones, who had studied under Max Reinhardt and had designed the Paterson Strike Pageant, actors drawn from friends and associates, and original plays by Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, and Reed, staged in a former fish warehouse on a wharf in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the Provincetown Players battled what they saw as the commercialism and traditionalism of Broadway. They moved to New York in 1916, founding the Playwrights Theatre on MacDougal Street and allying themselves with The Masses. Initially, these plays, such as Glaspell’s Trifles, O’Neill’s Thirst, and Reed’s The Eternal Quadrangle, were ‘within the realm of Realism’, as Brenda Murphy puts it, and sought to convey ‘a believable illusion that what is taking place on the stage is an objective representation of the audience’s shared reality’.13 Unlike the fervent Realism of radical playwrights such as Edward Sheldon, whose 1909 play The Nigger was concerned with racial issues and 1911 work The Boss covered political and emotional strife during a strike, the polemical thrust of the Provincetown Players was couched in subtle writing and the aesthetically ambitious dramaturgy of the ‘New Stagecraft’, increasingly invoking the atmospheric intensity of Expressionism.14 Chiefly, O’Neill’s plays of this period, in particular The Emperor Jones of 1920 and The Hairy Ape of 1921,

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arose during a period of immersion in Expressionist theatre, although he later furiously denied any such influence.15

The emergence of American Expressionism Theatrical Expressionism arose in the 1910s when German playwrights, such as Kaiser, Toller, Leopold Jessner, and Arnolt Bronnen, developed a mode of theatre predicated on intense subjectivity conveyed in distorted, often portentous, dream-like episodes.16 Kaiser and Toller’s plays occupied a subgenre of Expressionist theatre that situated the angst of the individual within the volatile collectives that the industrial metropolis spawned. In Toller’s 1920 Masses and Man (Masse Mensch) and The Machine Wreckers (Die Maschinenstürmer) of 1922 and Kaiser’s From Morn to Midnight (Von Morgens bis mitternachts) and Gas, 1917 and 1918 respectively, German industrial modernity (albeit with a strongly American flavour) is a terrifying yet ineluctable condition that stimulates crises in the individual and mass revolt. For example, From Morn to Midnight concerns the lamentably regimented existence of ‘The Cashier’, a worker in a claustrophobic bank, who is an allegory of ‘the fragmentation of German middle-class identity in the context of capitalist alienation’.17 In the 1922–3 New York season the Theatre Guild staged From Morn to Midnight and Masses and Man, with sets by Lee Simonson, and in 1923 produced Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine, which was particularly redolent of From Morn to Midnight. It concerned the trials of Mr Zero, a department store clerk threatened with replacement by the eponymous machine, evoked in geometric sets by Simonson, which incorporated intensified sound effects, dramatic lighting, and outsized props on a backdrop that mixed distorted angularity with the regulated geometry of the American corporate metropolis. Mr Zero’s work plagues him with anxiety about his essential humanity, and he says to a colleague: ‘what do you think I am – a machine?’18 This sentiment permeated another American Expressionist play of 1923, Lawson’s Roger Bloomer, staged by the Equity Players at the Equity 48 Street Theatre, a work that signalled the emergence of an overtly radical American Expressionism and the beginnings of the NPT. A veteran of the ambulance corps and wartime comrade of Dos Passos, Lawson had remained in France and absorbed the Parisian cultural world although, as Julia A. Walker relays, he was initially truculent about the experimental theatre he had witnessed in Europe, which included ‘some Middle European Expressionist play’, as ‘the avant-garde plays were unsatisfactory because they seemed so remote from the savage reality of the streets’.19 Roger Bloomer was the story of a young man’s rebellion in a dour Iowa town praised by one reviewer as ‘by far the most complete and technically perfect example of dramatic Expressionism that has reached us yet’.20



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From the individual to the collective In 1925 the Theatre Guild produced Lawson’s Processional: A Jazz Symphony of American Life, a four-act play set in a West Virginia mining town on the Fourth of July in the shadow of a strike in which miners and soldiers have violently clashed. Processional marked Lawson’s shift from the Expressionist individual angst of Roger Bloomer towards a carnival of the collective, sound-tracked with jazz and riddled with vaudeville, and was effectively the blueprint for the NPT. The centrality of mass musical pageantry is established in Act I Scene I as the ‘Jazz Miners’, a jazz band with blackened faces, emerge from the rear of the auditorium and parade down to the stage ushering in a convoluted, ludicrous narrative. The anti-hero ‘Dynamite Jim’ is a miner who has escaped from prison for unspecified strike activities, and indulges in a spree of depravity in which he rapes a woman, called Sadie, and kills a soldier who had tried to stop the assault. Members of the Klu Klux Klan capture Jim and blind him for impregnating Sadie, whom they also plan to punish for immorality. In an unexpected and unpalatable twist, Jim redeems himself by rescuing Sadie and winning her heart. The narrative resolves cheerfully with their wedding procession, exiting the stage and marching through the audience to the accompaniment of the jazz band. The celebratory finale sees the disbanding of the Klan and the resolution of the strike in a peaceful reconciliation of capitalist boss and communist agitator, a conclusion that bespeaks the play’s implausibility and political simplicity. For all its literary demerits and dubious motifs (in particular the blacked-up actors and the rape), Processional was a crucial transitional moment in which the Expressionist legacy of the Provincetown Players entered the revolutionary ambit of Constructivism and marked a shift towards the radical theatre of the NPT. At this point, Mordecai Gorelik’s stage sets were more redolent of Precisionism or Neue Sachlichkeit than Constructivism, but the play was a participatory event that disrupted illusionism in a manner akin to Soviet practices. In his preface to the published version, Lawson remarked that he had intended to engage a working class audience and had: endeavoured to create a method which shall express the American scene in native idiom, a method as far removed from the older Realism as from the facile mood of Expressionism. It is apparent that this new technique is essentially vaudevillesque in character – a development, a moulding to my own uses, of the rich vitality of the two-a-day and the musical extravaganza.21

Dos Passos commented on the play that Lawson and Gorelik’s aim had been to abandon the proscenium, marshalling ‘burlesque, musical comedy, and vaudeville’, to ensure that audience would not be lulled into imagining an actual scene: ‘Processional is the first American play in our generation in which

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the convention of the fourth wall has been frankly and definitely abandoned. In other plays, the subterfuge of a dream has been used to placate the critics whenever the author felt he needed to be positively theatrical.’22 Lawson borrowed this technique of revolutionary populism and rejection of illusionism from the Soviet theatre, and despite its faults Processional marked the first missive of Meyerholdian Constructivism in America.

Meyerhold’s Constructivism After visiting Meyerhold’s theatre in 1925, Gold wrote an account of Soviet theatre in The Nation, in which he described how Meyerhold was the ‘leader of the young Russian theater.
 His twenty-fifth anniversary in the theater was celebrated
 while I was in Moscow, and hundreds of thousands of
 workers demonstrated in his honour, as if he were a great
 general or political leader.’23 As Huntley Carter, the first major chronicler of Soviet theatre, judged in 1924, ‘nowadays Meyerhold personifies communism’, but his theories and techniques predated the Revolution and emerged amidst the anti-Naturalist ethos of Symbolism.24 The Naturalist–Symbolist opposition was most firmly articulated by the Russian playwright Valery Briusov in his 1910 polemic ‘Against Naturalism in the Theatre’: ‘the creative urge is the only reality that exists on earth. Everything external is, in the poet’s words, “only a dream, a fleeting dream” … let your setting aim not at truth, but at the suggestion of truth.’25 Thus, to counter what he termed the oppressive ‘much’ of Naturalism, its distracting surfeit of detail, he argued that stage sets should be simple and free of ‘unnecessary truth’.26At the Moscow Art Theatre in the 1900s this battle of Naturalism versus Symbolism took place between star director Konstantin Stanislavsky, famed for pioneering techniques in obtaining convincing performances, and his art director Meyerhold, who had joined in 1898 as an actor. Initially loyal to Stanislavsky’s Naturalism, Meyerhold became increasingly immersed in Symbolism and in 1907 he called for a ‘stylised theatre’ that was ‘opposed to the techniques of illusion’.27 Meyerhold promised to dismantle naturalist conventions – such as footlights, proscenium, and miseen-scène settings – for, he argued, ‘the stylised theatre produces a play in such a way that the spectator is compelled to employ his imagination creatively in order to fill in those details suggested by the stage action’. The stylised theatrical production was a transformative event, shifting focus onto the audience and insisting upon greater engagement in reception by blurring distinctions between the action of the play and experience of the beholders. In the 1910s Meyerhold’s theatrical experiments were thematically and formally analogous to current Futurist trends, and gained intellectual underpinning through the discourse of Formalism, which aimed to stimulate the consciousness of the beholder through the assorted tricks and devices of ostranie



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(defamiliarization or estrangement). In ‘Art as Technique’ of 1917, Viktor Shklovsky opposed the concepts of habitualization, which corresponds with Naturalism, and defamiliarization which, according to the idea that ‘poetic imagery is a means of creating the strongest possible impression’, would shatter habitual patterns and instigate an intensified renewal of conscious experience.28 When the Revolution erupted in 1917, the Formalist/Futurist nexus of the theatrical avant-garde served the drive towards communism. Meyerhold joined the Bolshevik Party in August 1918, and that year produced Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Mystery Bouffe, deemed the ‘first Soviet play’.29 Thereafter, his stylistically revolutionary staging and acting methods were aligned with the aims of the Revolution, witnessing the germination of theatrical Constructivism, first at the RSFSR Theatre No.1 (Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic), a part of the Petrograd TEO (Theatrical Department) Narkompros (People’s Commissariat of Education, Narodnyi komissariat prosveshcheniya), headed by Anatoli Lunacharsky, and then as director of the Theatre of the Revolution from 1922 to 1924.30 As Konstantin Rudnitsky writes, ‘from this moment the artist was essentially banished from the theatre. In his place entered the engineer, the constructor’.31 Meyerhold’s twin theories of ‘Construction’ and ‘Biomechanics’ epitomized the Amerikanizm of Constructivism by translating the ergonomic production systems of Fordism and Taylorism into theatrical form. ‘Construction’ involved a provisional, mobile mechanical stage apparatus that converted the theatre into a factory, producing a Sovietized audience, whereas ‘Biomechanics’ called for the rationalization of movement, modelled on Taylor’s theories of labour efficiency, as an archetype of the new Soviet body. As Meyerhold explained ‘the methods  of  Taylorism may be applied to the work of the actor in the same way as they are to any form of work with the aim of maximum productivity’.32 It was a theatre of the machine aesthetic. Gold celebrated the Constructivist theatre as a ‘steel mill or factory’, an industrial cradle of the new proletarian society in which ‘machinery has been made a character in the drama. City rhythms, the blare of Modernism, the iron shouts of industrialism, these are the actors.’33 The first and most famous instance of Biomechanics and Construction in a stage play was Meyerhold’s production of Fernand Crommelinck’s The Magnanimous Cuckold in 1922 at the Nezlobin Theatre (Figure 2.2). The set by the Constructivist Liubov Popova was itself a machine – a wooden construction of platforms, steps, and rotating cogs standing free against the bare walls of the specially gutted theatre. Proscenium, wings, curtains, and all the residual conventions of theatre were thereby demolished. Meyerhold recalled in 1926 that ‘with the production we hoped to lay the basis for a new form of theatrical presentation with no need for illusionistic settings or complicated props, making do with the simplest objects which came to hand and transforming a spectacle

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2.2  James Abbe, ‘The stage of the Meyerhold Theatre a few moments before the beginning of a play’. Popova’s set design for The Magnanimous Cuckold, by Fernand Crommelynk, Vsevolod Meyerhold Theatre, Moscow. Gelatin silver print, 1928.



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performed by specialists into an improvised performance which could be put on by workers in their leisure time’.34 The play’s production coincided with Lozowick’s visit to Moscow, and as well as watching a performance he also viewed the actors rehearsing, both amazed and baffled by the staging techniques of The Magnanimous Cuckold yet celebratory of the physical dynamism and versatility of the performers.35 Americans also encountered Popova’s designs for The Magnanimous Cuckold and photos of the set at the International Theatre Exposition. Lawson later cited the importance of the numerous artifacts of Soviet experimentation at this show, which was held in February 1926 at Steinway Hall (Figure 2.3), for informing the NPT’s engagement with Constructivism. The International Theatre Exposition featured an enormous collection of 1500 theatre set designs, costumes, and props from seventeen countries and over 100 exhibitors, and the catalogue consisted of twenty-three articles by an international selection of playwrights, artists, and commentators, over seventy illustrations and photographic reproductions of plays, costumes, set designs, and film stills – from   Yakov Protazanov’s Aelita, Hans Richter’s Steigen-Fallen, and Viking Eggeling’s Vertical-Horizontal. The ethos of the show was Frederick Kiesler’s version of Constructivism, discussed in the previous chapter, which was more

2.3  International Theatre Exposition, New York, 1926.

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redolent of the utopic strands of International Constructivism than the Russian version. However, the Russian section was the largest display of Soviet cultural artifacts outside Russia to date and included all of the Constructivist theatres (the Meyerhold Theatre, the Theatre of the Revolution, and the Theatre Beresil from Kiev, which was extensively illustrated in the catalogue, and designs by Alexander Rodchenko, Alexandra Exter, Popova, the Stenberg Brothers, Isaac Rabinovitch, Nathan Altman, Nikolai Erdman, Varvara Stepanova, Vasily Federovsky, Alexander Vesnin, and Pavel Tchelitcheff). The Magnanimous Cuckold was also the template for the first American Constructivist stage set, which Lozowick designed for a 1926 production of Kaiser’s Gas at the Kenneth Sawyer Goodman Theatre in Chicago, directed by Marion Gering, a Russian émigré and former student of Meyerhold. With its dynamic machine aesthetic and multi-level sets, made of ladders, platforms, high-tension wires, cranes, and giant cogs, the staging of Gas was clearly conceived in direct relation to Popova’s designs, of which Lozowick had rare personal experience, and Soviet Constructivism in general.36 In an essay for the catalogue of the International Theatre Exposition entitled ‘Gas: A Theatrical Experiment’, Lozowick demonstrated his adherence to the aims of Meyerhold’s Constructivist theatre by celebrating ‘the audience as an active force’, which ‘is commonly neglected in the theatre, although, while a theatre is possible without decorations, texts or even actors an audience is its most consistent factor. And the theatre which draws on contemporary sources is most likely to possess potentially the widest audience.’37 The play was also appropriate because Gas had previously been produced in Russia, at the Bolshoi Dramatic Theatre in Petrograd in 1922, with sets by Yuri Annenkov, although it is unclear whether either Gering or Lozowick were familiar with this production despite the resemblance of the two sets. Lozowick argued that Kaiser’s plays were especially appropriate for the contemporary American theatre for their focus on heavy industry: the settings were to be the crystallization of a vision fashioned by the rigid geometric pattern of the American city; the verticals of its smoke stacks, the parallels of its car tracks, the squares of its streets, the cubes of its factories, the arcs of its bridges, the cylinders of its gas tanks.38 Gas was suitable material for the theatrical Americanism of Soviet Constructivism, and its ethos and aesthetic could serve as models for the NPT. However, the Constructivist adaptation of Expressionist plays was more nuanced and less homologous than it might now appear.

The antinomies of Expressionism and Constructivism Despite the Constructivist fixation with the machine and rationalized methods of production, a number of the plays were adaptations from the German Expressionist theatre, which mixed social machinephobia with aesthetic



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machinolatry, although the repertoire of the Theatre of the Revolution was mainly Russian.39 The paradoxical appeal of Toller and Kaiser’s work was, as Rudnitsky writes, that while ‘technology, industrialisation and the machine instilled fear in the Expressionist dramatists, for they perceived mechanisation as a means of depriving mankind of individuality, of turning him into a spineless, spiritless adjunct of the machine, a robot obedient to the capitalist boss … Soviet directors … regarded technology with admiration and hope since only industrialisation could lead the country out of devastation’.40 Despite its inherent mass-machine angst, Expressionist theatre also offered the Constructivists a ready body of revolutionary material that engaged with industrial modernity, examined the mechanisms of the society in revolt, and called for a large ensemble in an industrialized stage setting. As Edward Braun explains: What attracted Soviet directors was the left-wing Expressionists’ portrayal of the inhuman oppression of the individual by capitalist industrialism, and their representation, through the revolt of the individual, of the world revolution soon to come. However, the Expressionist hero with his vague, utopian dreams of the universal brotherhood of man cut a pitiful figure in a country which knew the reality of civil war, and he inspired few significant counterparts in Soviet drama.41

Ultimately, the appeal of Kaiser and Toller was the anti-capitalist ethos of mass revolt against the masters of the machine, more so than the crisis of the individual. Meyerhold’s staging of Toller’s plays redirected the machinephobia into mass-machine propaganda. Meyerhold’s Theatre of the Revolution performed Toller’s The Machine Wreckers in November 1922 and Masses and Man in January the following year. As a revolutionary playwright, Toller was an appropriate model to adapt as he wrote many of his plays during a lengthy prison sentence for sedition, following a 1919 trial for radical activities. The Machine Wreckers is an historical examination of early nineteenth-century Luddism in Nottingham, derived from Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the English Working Classes, and addressed the genesis of industrialization in England and the emergence of the working-class labour movement, although the narrative is pessimistic and concerns the betrayal of the workers who are misled into destroying the machines.42 Masses and Man is set in an oppressive contemporary industrial society with futuristic overtones, where ‘The Masses’ are a chorus presence that arises from the ‘abysses of the factories’.43 Dedicated ‘To the Workers’ and subtitled ‘A Fragment of the Social Revolution of the Twentieth Century’, Masses and Man was apposite for Constructivist theatre yet retained millennial, even spiritual, ramifications. As Toller understood it ‘proletarian art must ultimately rest on universal human interests’ and ‘can only exist where the creative artist reveals

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that which is eternally human in the spiritual characteristics of the working people’.44 The Theatre of the Revolution production, directed by Alexander Velizshev, put ‘new ideological stress-marks’ on the play and, for Rudnitsky, seems more like a conscious rebuttal of Expressionism than an adaptation.45 The set by Viktor Shestakov was Constructivist, consisting of ‘acting platforms’ on different levels connected by metal walkways, and the performance featured a sonic accompaniment of a metallic industrial racket and the visual embellishment of ‘dazzling beams of the searchlights, picking out the contours of the construction’.46 The affective measure of biomechanical and constructional staging combined with revolutionary coding ensured that the audience would side with ‘The Masses’. As Soviet critic Boris Alpers relayed, Meyerhold reversed the dynamic of the play and lionized ‘The Masses’ as an active agent of revolution: The masses take the platforms and bastions of the construction by storm, spreading over the stairs, splitting into separate groups, again gathering together into a whole, emphasising through their movements the meaning and character of the individual episodes in the social conflict that is being enacted. The mass scenes are the strongest part of the spectacle.47

In Meyerhold’s production the potent masses were the play’s real protagonist, a collective force fomenting and constituting the spectacular revolutionary event that would ignite fervour in the audience and generate the (self-) Sovietizing mass.

The impact of Proletcult Meyerhold’s Constructivism shared this adumbration of the masses with the Proletcult movement, which was another important model for the NPT’s proletarian machine aesthetic. Founded in 1917 by the revolutionary philosopher, Alexander Bogdanov, and Lunacharsky, playwright and director of Narkompros, Proletcult (an abbreviation of ‘Proletarskaya kultura’) was a truly mass organization, a federation of around 300 branches with 84,000 members and around 1.5 million followers, with its own workshops, magazines, and theatres. 48 Bogdanov proclaimed at the first All-Russian Proletcult Conference of September 1918 (reprinted in the journal Proletarian Culture) that ‘the proletariat must have its own class art. The spirit of this art is labour collectivism: it perceives and reflects the world from the point of view of the labour collective, expresses the link between its emotions and its will to struggle and create.’49 For both the Constructivists and Proletcult, the machine was a cipher of a collective future, as the ownership of the means of production by the proletariat, of the machine by the masses, was the foundational point of the new society. The Constructivist/Proletcult nexus had a concrete basis in the First Workers



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Theatre of the Moscow Proletcult, whose director was Meyerhold’s protégé Sergei Eisenstein. In Eisenstein’s essay ‘The Montage of Attractions’, which had an important bearing on his later film direction, he argued that Proletcult theatre involved the abolition of the ‘very institution of theatre as such and replacing it by a showcase for achievements in the field of the level of everyday skills of the masses’.50 In the Proletcult theatre, the performers and the mass were indivisible, and theatrical event was less a play than a participatory spectacle akin to a revolutionary festival or mass pageant. Eisenstein’s 1921 production of Jack London’s The Mexican at the Central Drama Studio-2 of the Moscow Proletcult, adapted by Boris Arvatov, included a real boxing match, music hall elements, and slapstick comedy.51 By the time Americans became fully aware of Proletcult it was no longer an autonomous body, after a December 1920 decree forced its absorption into Narkompros. The sole book on Proletcult, Eden and Cedar Paul’s Proletcult (a British socialist text published in New York in 1921), was heavy on rhetoric but slim on details. In an infamous 1921 polemic in The Liberator, the short-lived scion of The Masses, Gold enthused about Proletcult as ‘the religion of the new order’ without demonstrating any serious knowledge of the movement and imagining the masses as elemental forces in an apocalyptic, quasi-Transcendentalist realm of being. After his trip to the Soviet Union in 1925 Gold was clearly more familiar with Proletcult and other kinds of revolutionary theatre, although still prone to millennial hyperbole – his account in The Nation tells how ‘a world exploded’ and a ‘proletarian Apocalypse thundered’ against Stanislavsky’s ‘dead’ Moscow Art Theatre.52 He marvelled at the mass theatrical events: ‘And there are plays given by 40,000 proletarians in a city square, and gas-worker plays given at the gas factory, and other such experiments in mass-theater.’53 Gold’s fascination with the monumental proletarian event is evident in the short New Masses scenario Strike!: A Mass Recitation, which he introduced as an American example of the Soviet mass recitations that he had witnessed, enthusing that ‘Mass Recitation is one of the most powerful and original forms developed in the struggle for proletarian culture’.54 On one level Strike! was a revival of the Paterson Strike Pageant, but formally speaking Gold was not looking back to the 1910s but across to Russia (as the titular reference to Eisenstein’s 1925 film implies). He stated that there should be no stage sets, but rather an undecorated union hall would be suitable for Strike! as the aim was to draw the audience into the occasion so that ‘they become one with the actors, a real mass; before the recitation is over, everyone in the hall should be shouting: Strike! Strike!’.55 The necessarily curt narrative features recitations from ‘Directors’, various choruses of workers, individual strikers, and the allegorical figures of ‘Wealth’ and ‘Poverty’, and culminates with slogans shouted such as ‘the masses arise’ and ‘dawn for the workers’, which Gold indicated should be ‘sharply

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defined as a rifle shot. What Meyerhold calls “poster-declamations”’.56 Strike! was a New Masses strike pageant, shot through with Meyerhold’s Constructivism and the logic of Proletcult. Although merely an unrealized experiment in the form of Mass Recitation, Strike! encapsulated the ethos of the embryonic American proletarian theatre of the mid 1920s. It chimed with the shift from The Masses and The Liberator to New Masses, which was founded in 1925 (although appearing in print in early 1926), initially entitled Dynamo, to ‘interpret the activities of workers, farmers, strikers etc … in such a way as to bring out the general human and cultural significance of particular movements’.57 In 1926, Gold, Lawson, Dos Passos, Farragoh, Basshe, and Lozowick attempted to forge a proletarian theatre, and joined together in the Workers Drama League (WDL) to produce plays concerned ‘with the lives and problems of the workers themselves, their hardships, their strikes, their aspirations’.58 The WDL marked the first collaboration of the NPT members, although little evidence survives of its productions, such as the German proletarian playwright Kurt Wittfogel’s The Biggest Boob in the World, translated by Sinclair and directed by Gold. Gold wrote in The Nation that the WDL suffered from policy and personality clashes, as well as a lack of clarity concerning conceptual direction and ‘the immaturity of the new artistic direction’.59 The left-wing press ignored the WDL productions, and so the group disbanded in 1928, long after Gold et al. had left.60 Their exodus to the NPT reflected the need for a forum with greater artistic ambition than the WDL betrayed.

John Howard Lawson’s Loud Speaker as Constructivist jazz farce The first NPT play was Lawson’s Loud Speaker, which opened at the Fiftysecond Street Theatre on 2 March 1927 and ran for forty-two performances, stirring up a fair amount of controversy among the theatre press.61 The play featured a stage construction that designer Gorelik clearly based on Popova’s The Magnanimous Cuckold, following Lawson’s directions for: A constructed stage, assembled in a simple arrangement of a number of platforms and stairs, with articles of furniture suggesting the usage of the scene. The whole setting is permanent throughout. There are two practical slides, one right front beside the high platform, with landing place near centre of stage, and one left shooting off the stage.62

The play itself was a riot of music, politics, and farce, with action taking place on these various levels (Figure 2.4). Consistent with Processional, Loud Speaker mixed heavy handed polemics with a defiantly implausible narrative arc that follows the public meltdown of a state governor, an absurdist musical



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2.4  Setting for John Howard Lawson, Loud Speaker, 1927, in John Howard Lawson, Loud Speaker (The Macaulay Press: New York, 1927).

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extravaganza emulating the physical dynamism of Soviet theatre: ‘the set thus forms a complete circuit up, down and about the stage, capable of considerable variation in lighting, and purposely destined to allow a maximum of movement and farce action’.63 The story follows Harry U. Collins, a disillusioned gubernatorial candidate selling himself as ‘a plain business man, running for Governor on a businessman ticket, one hundred percent for law and order and Americanism’, and his family as they await the results of an election. Technology was therefore integral to the action, and a radio, telephones, and press cameras enhanced the machine aesthetic stage set. The action of the play was frantic, with various intruders to the house periodically bursting onto the stage, instigating slapstick chases all over the construction. As well as satirizing the political system, Lawson identified the politician as not just trapped in a political machine which he cannot control, but also himself a machine. At one point, Governor Collins’s neglected wife accuses him: ‘you’re getting to be more of a machine every day’.64 The pervasive machine aesthetic in the staging conflicted with the latent humanist anxieties about technology permeating the play, an overhang from Roger Bloomer, which pitted the fraught protagonist against standardized America. Although disapproving in their assessments of Lawson’s writing, critics admired the Constructivism of Gorelik’s stage designs for Loud Speaker. J. Brooks Atkinson wrote that ‘no half-way measures temper the scenic design: it is Constructivist to the last daub of red paint’.65 There were, however, questions concerning the appropriateness of Constructivism as a staging technique for this particular narrative (although it is worth noting that the Eisenstein’s Proletcult production of The Mexican suffered similar critiques about the relevance of a geometric backdrop for a boxing match).66 In New Masses, Bernard Smith felt that the play ‘was dictated by a desire to write a play for a Constructivist stage, but … Loud Speaker itself does not dictate Constructivism. In effect, the permanent, constructed set, supposed to facilitate freedom of movement, becomes a distraction. Here is an example of a technique grafted onto a play.’67 However, the stage set did enhance the vaudeville effect by creating a space where ‘on a high platform right, a little separated from the rest but in full view of the audience, a negro jazz orchestra sits throughout the performance, playing when the occasion demands it’.68 Lawson originally conceived Loud Speaker as ‘A Jazz Tragedy’ in 1924, morphing into ‘X Plus Y’ and ‘The Invisible Mob’ before its eventual title.69 In Processional, Lawson had pioneered the use of jazz as a ‘new technique is essentially vaudevillesque in character’, in a production that marked a transition from Roger Bloomer’s Expressionist sentiments to a Proletcult jazz pageant.70 Jazz functioned as a means of disrupting audience’s ‘escape from actuality’ by integrating their everyday experience, but also converting the show into a participatory event.71



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Yet for all this equitable mass-engaging rhetoric, Processional and Loud Speaker present racial attitudes that blithely ignore particularities of African-American culture. The jazz band in Processional were white actors blacked up, which probably increased the vaudeville effect by invoking minstrel shows, but this was hardly a racially progressive technique. The NPT’s address to AfricanAmerican experience was uneven. Basshe’s Earth, which followed Loud Speaker in February 1927, was a tale of blacks in the South during the Reconstruction that received praise from Harlem writer Eric Walrond for the ‘chiseled lyric beauty’ of its evocation of the ‘primary folk-experiences of the American Negro’, but had a cast made up entirely of white performers.72 The NPT production of Gold’s 1928 Hoboken Blues was similarly compromised. For this fantastical play that spans African-American poverty circa 1900 to the imagined ‘New Harlem’ of the 1950s, Gold insisted on a cast of black actors with white masks, but the production eventually featured only blacked-up white performers (Paul Robeson refused to play the lead character, Sam Pickens ‘the Black Rip van Winkle’ and future President of Hoboken, because the part called for a nonworking musical idler) and received a harsh review from Kenneth Fearing in New Masses.73 Loud Speaker at least engaged black performers, who were members of the New Negro Art Theater Dance Group and included Hemsley Winfield, one of first African-American ballet dancers, but provided them with cursory, practically insulting, parts.74 At the close of Act I of Loud Speaker ‘six negro politicians of exaggerated type’, a delegation from Harlem, ‘break into a wild jazz rhythm, laughing as they dance’, with only tenuous relevance to the already convoluted narrative.75 They also paid little heed to the black origins of jazz and its current trends in Harlem and New Orleans by employing white musicians and composers, such as Eugene L. Berton and Edward Eliscu, whose appreciation tended towards appropriation. Yet despite these crude, misguided racial attitudes, jazz was strategically appropriate for the NPT because above all it was the music of the masses. The NPT’s use of jazz in conjunction with a Constructivist stage set marked a further nuance of its reception of Meyerhold’s Theatre, by adapting a disruptive device of Soviet Amerikanizm for mass engagement back to the American setting. Later performances of The Magnanimous Cuckold featured Valentin Parnakh’s jazz band, and his production of the play DE (The Trust) used jazz prominently, albeit representing bourgeois America, to the extent that the Stenberg Brothers poster featured a minstrel-type figure.76 Constructivist ideologue Ossip Brik wrote in Novyi Lef in 1926 that jazz is ‘a new and necessary form of musical culture’ and enjoined a collective experience: ‘a jazz band is not suited to being received in isolation; it must be heard and felt. A jazz band presupposes not a sitting audience but an undulating crowd, whether at a dance or at another form of public merrymaking.’77 As Andrew Hemingway points out, in the United States jazz

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was an integral part of social milieu around New Masses and the sonic accompaniment to the visual machine aesthetic, as evident in Lozowick’s illustration for a ‘Spring Carnival’ poster presenting a faceless silhouetted flapper, robotic with her mechanomorphic dress, above a drum kit, and his Machine Ornament saxophone on a notice for a ‘New Masses Ball’.78 Jazz was the analogue of the machine, a modern American noise with a fast tempo that captured the clatter of the industrial workplace and the buzzing metropolis. The jazz in Loud Speaker was also a clarion on behalf of the masses, a blast from the ghetto fired at the ruling classes and cultural elites that amalgamated black and Jewish disaffections. S. Frederick Starr writes that the 1928 movie The Jazz Singer’s narrative of the Jewish immigrant exemplifies a nexus of Jewish and African-American jazz culture.79 Both Harlem and the Lower East Side were receptacles of diasporic migrations, urban centres made up of those who had fled poverty or hostile regimes. He cites Gold’s use of the term ‘Afro-Yiddish’ in his Daily Worker columns of the 1930s as proof of the Jewish communist empathy for jazz.80 It is significant, therefore, that Basshe’s two plays, Earth and The Centuries, addressed American society through black and Jewish experiences of the historical South and the tenements of the Lower East Side and used spirituals and Jewish folksongs respectively (and in the latter a machine noise is practically a character). Lawson’s musical directions for 1928’s The International, which assailed imperialism, combined all of these types of music by calling for a ‘musical score along modernistic lines with special emphasis on broken rhythms, machine noises and chanting blues’.81 To the sound of this modernist machine-jazz, the actors and two choruses (of eight women apiece, dressed as stenographers and communists in a cast of national stereotypes) gambolled around a stage construction, which Dos Passos designed to resemble ‘a futurist city, a mountain pile or a rough relief map’.82 If the Constructivist stage set complemented dialogue lines such as ‘the revolution will walk like a tractor across the earth’ and ‘The International is shaping men with the precision of a great machine’, then the narrative of the play was, like Loud Speaker, strangely truculent about technological modernity and woolly in its political analysis.83 In the Daily Worker, Sandor Garlin complained of the lack of proletarians in The International, found that the ‘world struggle for oil’ theme evaded ‘all the social and economic implications’, and bemoaned the unbelievable characters ‘obsessed with romantic conceptions of world revolution’.84 The chief problem besetting The International was, as a New York Times critic astutely noted, that despite ‘a vague background of Expressionism, a constructivistic stage setting, and jazz interludes … Mr. Lawson does not seem to be quite sure where he is going’.85 In other words, Lawson was trying to encompass too much as a polemicist but achieving too little as a playwright.



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Modernist machine-wrecking in Paul Sifton’s The Belt In contrast, Sifton’s The Belt was a more focused investigation of a specific American situation: industrial disputes in a Ford-type automobile plant. The narrative of resistance against the assembly line – the titular belt – certainly justified the mechanical stage set, which Remo Bufano designed with further settings by Dos Passos. The story concerns autoworker Jim Thompson, beaten down by ten years of unrelenting toil on the belt. On the tenth anniversary of his job, the paternalistic boss of the plant, a barely disguised parody of Henry Ford called simply the ‘Old Man’, arrives with reporters and a movie camera team, and ceremoniously rewards Jim with a medal, while brushing aside the latter’s complaints over losing his position as foreman because the rival Boston branch has outperformed his plant. While the occasion dazzles Jim’s wife, Flora, it enrages his daughter’s boyfriend, agitator and former belt worker Bill Vance, who fumes about such a scant reward for gruelling, dehumanizing labour. Vance’s discontent burns through the community and the belt workers at the plant erupt in a full-scale revolt of machine-wrecking, which the police quickly crush. During the production, stagehands gradually removed the walls of their house to reveal Bufano’s automated belt, with night shift workers grimly bantering against the clang of the factory (Figure 2.5). The stage notes called for the workers to ‘work monotonously, putting on parts, hammering, pushing drills’.86 As the action of the play intensifies the noise of the factory increases and as the revolt escalates jazz is introduced with the workers breaking into dance, rhythmically chanting ‘we ain’t gonna work no more’.87 The transition of machine noise and labour into jazz and dancing signifies the workers’ carnivalesque unfettering of the belt. The belt itself casts a constant pall over the characters’ lives, eroding Jim’s spirit while the neglected Flora compensates with flippant love affairs and futile dreams of material prosperity. It represents the power of Fordism to turn men into machines – Jim cries out in desperation to his wife ‘I’m not going to be a god-damn machine all my life’.88 The most vehement critique of the belt comes from Bill, who mocks the lure of ‘eight hours, car, jazz, hooch, women’, and rages that the belt workers are ‘just damn machines’, especially Jim whose years of loyalty and endurance have made him ‘the Iron Man’.89 Citing the workers’ exhausted apathy, Bill claims that ‘it’s The Belt that makes them get this way’, and describes it as an omnipotent and unrelenting force (‘the Goddamned everlasting BELT!’).90 Not only does the belt enslave and dehumanize the worker, it also renders him passive, sapping his vitality and draining his libido. Similarly, the workers’ sexual lives have become mechanized. One of Bill’s tirades concerns this issue: ‘You don’t know how to handle a woman. She ain’t a machine. You can’t turn a switch and start her loving you and turn it

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2.5  Ralph Steiner, Paul Sifton’s The Belt, 1928, Theatre Arts Monthly (December 1927), p. 909.

off when you please. She’s a human being. She figured she married a man and when he turns into a machine she raises hell.’91 Sifton’s investigation of the factory’s control over workers’ entire lives, including their sexual relations, is comparable to Antonio Gramsci’s 1930 essay ‘Americanism and Fordism’. In a more complex examination of the assembly line, Gramsci wrote that a ‘new type of man is demanded by the rationalisation of production and work cannot be developed until the sexual instinct has been suitably regulated and until it too has been rationalised’.92 With specific reference to the machinations of the Ford Motor Company in enjoining temperance from both alcohol and promiscuity, Gramsci argued that although this behaviour stemmed from the private sector it could yet become the ideology of the state, and was a significant component of ‘Americanism’. Yet Gramsci’s nuanced espousal of Americanism confronted fascism in Italy, with its dangerous technologist classicism, and the assembly line did not destroy the worker’s mind or spirit, but allowed for a ‘complete state of freedom’, which the industrialists needed to control through ideological strategies such as extensive educational programmes: They have understood that a “trained gorilla” is just a phrase, that “unfortunately” the worker remains a man and even that during his work he thinks



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more … and not only does the worker think, but the fact that he gets no immediate satisfaction from his work and realises that they are trying to reduce him to a trained gorilla, can lead him to a train of thought that is far from conformist.93

In The Belt, Bill’s incitement to riot stems from the animalization and mechanization of the workers on the belt as ‘just a lot of goddam mules’, as industrial beasts of burden that break off their chains in revolt, but Sifton’s vision abjures the liberatory potentiality for the assembly line that Gramsci asserted.94 The central paradox of The Belt was that despite the industrial aesthetic of the Constructivist stage set, the machine in reality appears more as a horrible enslaving device, a symptom of the devaluation of humanity in technological modernity. The Belt therefore captures the ambivalence of the NPT towards the machine as simultaneously enslaver of, and inheritance for, the proletariat. Reviews of The Belt noted residues of Expressionist theatre’s tremulous machinephobia. Frank Vreeland wrote that Sifton ‘has doubtless read his George Kaiser thoroughly’ in penning this ‘raucous yelp at Henry Ford & Co’.95 Brooks Atkinson also observed the Expressionist tenor of Sifton’s play, which was ‘of the revolutionary colour that flamed abroad in the works of Toller a few years ago’.96 The invocation of Toller was especially t­renchant – behind the NPT’s Constructivist aesthetic there lingered the residual Expressionist horror of technology of Masses and Man and The Machine Wreckers. In The Machine Wreckers, a young worker attempts to halt the Luddite destruction, but Meyerhold’s restaging inverted the narrative so that the mass became the protagonist, diminishing woes of the individual. However, unlike the Soviet Constructivists’ heralding of the hegemony of the mass in their reframing of Expressionist plays, the revolt in The Belt was the outbreak of an anarchic, incoherent mob rather than the galvanized revolutionary proletariat. Daily Worker critic T. J. O’Flaherty argued that the machine-wrecking narrative was archaic and belonged to ‘the old days when the workers were foolish enough to believe that the machine was the cause of their economic trouble, that it was industrial inefficiency instead of the private ownership of the productive machine [that] did them out of their jobs’.97 The theme of machine-­wrecking in The Belt was barely on-message for the emergent Cultural Revolution in which machinolatry, and the almost religious veneration of Fordism and Taylorism, enjoyed renewed vigour as the collectivization of agriculture and the industrialization programmes took precedence over the concerns of the individual. Tantalisingly, the Daily Worker reported in 1928 that, according to William Gropper, Meyerhold was planning to stage both The Belt and Lawson’s Processional, and while no evidence of these productions exists, if they occurred it is probable that Meyerhold would have reframed The Belt in a similar manner

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to Constructivist adaptations of Toller’s plays.98 The themes of The Belt would certainly have required some careful negotiation in the Soviet Union of the Five Year Plan. In New Masses, E. A. made a pertinent point that ‘right now Russia is installing modern industrial plants of her own. Are the horrible things that The Belt does to minds and bodies of workers inevitable? Or is there a difference between high pressure production in socialist Russia and in Henry Ford’s Detroit?’99

The New Realism of John Dos Passos’s Airways Inc. The Daily Worker was considerably more congratulatory about Dos Passos’s Airways Inc., which was the final NPT production, opening in February 1929 at the Grove Street Theatre. A. B. Magil commended Airways Inc. as the best NPT play because ‘it has been written, unlike certain other New Playwrights offspring, with intelligence, clarity, and discipline’, and didn’t ‘titillate pseudorevolutionary sensibilities by irrelevant singing of the International or waving of red flags’, and if it did not directly concern class war, then it was ‘a play of personal frustration against the background of the class struggle’.100 Airways, Inc. was a departure from Dos Passos’s earlier play, The Moon is a Gong, produced in 1926 at the Cherry Lane Playhouse, which had been a jazz extravaganza in the vein of Lawson’s Processional, albeit a less critically lauded one that even Lawson found wanting.101 However, Dos Passos ignored Lawson’s recommendation that he should leap across ‘the horrible gap between the art theatre and the people’s theatre, between a planned design and the red stuff of entertainment’ and forsook both Constructivist jazz farce and Expressionist machinephobia for a more concentrated analysis of a synecdochic American family.102 The sets were pared down and less obviously Constructivist, yet still eschewed the proscenium and fourth-wall conventions (for example, a living room was simply implied by two short panels at a right angle with sparse furnishings against the bare brick of the theatre wall), although the final scene features a multi-level platform. Airways Inc. also witnessed a diminution of the techniques that characterized NPT productions, such as the aural disruption of machine noise and jazz, fantastical scenarios, and vaudeville farce for a more Realist narrative, albeit with an implausibly busy plot. Featuring a suicide, a strike, a plane crash, and an electrocution, Airways Inc. maintained the eventful, exaggerated action that characterized NPT productions. A New York Telegram critic wrote that ‘the plot is complex, involved and disposed to go off on frequent tangents, but the theme throughout is one of class conflict and clash of social viewpoints’.103 Nevertheless, after the experiments of The International and Hoboken Blues most critics preferred this version of modernist Realism.104 Airways Inc. was arguably the most politically complex NPT play and this was due to Dos Passos’s examination of the collective.



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As many critics observed, Dos Passos’s 1920s work increasingly panned out from individual psychology to scrutinize an assembled network of characters in a microcosm of class struggle in America. Set in a dilapidated American suburb, the narrative concerns the disintegrating Turner family during a strike at the local mill. The family house is situated between a building site and a wreck, reflecting the twin evils of speculation and poverty addressed in the play, and in the opening lines a real estate man says to his colleague: ‘This, sir, is the model city of the future. You can see behind these streets of low-priced, artistic one family houses the sterner buildings of the Hartshorn Mills, the Swastika Refrigerator Company, the Universal Electric Plant.’105 The first act is dominated by erstwhile aviation engineer Cyrus ‘Dad’ Turner, a broken man whose ‘Turner’s Rotary Alcohol Engine’ has been ignored by the industry, and the Professor, a Hungarian émigré and former revolutionary, whose bitter reminiscences accompany the former’s dejected monologues. As Dad Turner relives his maltreatment as a young inventor and his failure to get rich, the Professor remembers his betrayal to the authorities by his closest comrade. While the youngest son Edison, or Eddy, and his sometime girlfriend Edna represent the amoral, directionless hedonist and cynical flapper respectively, and the eldest son Claude is the careerist managerial clerk whose humanity had been beaten from him in a soulless job, daughter Martha is the moral conscience of the household, thanklessly struggling to hold everything together while simultaneously forgoing her desire for a career. Her paramour, a Jewish radical called Walter Goldberg, is the spokesman for the strikers at the mill, and is routinely vilified by Martha’s brothers. In contrast, the second son, Elmer, is a recordbreaking aviator, a local Lindbergh whose blossoming relationship with greedy investors is about to make him a fortune. As Edmund Wilson wrote, ‘with great ingenuity, Dos Passos had assembled on a single suburban street-corner representatives of most of the classes and groups that go to make up our society’.106 In the Daily Worker, Gold stated that ‘in Airways, Inc., John Dos Passos attacks boldly the major problem of our Age and our America – namely, the class war. This is the play of the American workers awakening to class consciousness’.107 Airways Inc. attempts to address class struggle through the lives of the characters, and avoids the Expressionist malaise of the individual against the machine by focusing the attention on multiple protagonists, in a manner that is consistent with stylistic innovations in Dos Passos’s novels. Gold saw the play as an important transitional towards the multi-layered social landscape of his trilogy USA: ‘Here Dos Passos first sounded a note of proletarian faith and action. The American chaos could be conquered, and flight was no longer his answer to the cruelty men have done with the help of Machines.’108 Unlike The Belt, the mass is not an escalating, sublime force of rebellious slaves but operates as an organized striking lobby, although the hysteria of the action and the author’s

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antipathy towards mainstream American society led David Aaron to conclude that ‘Dos Passos did not distinguish capitalism’s official representatives from the unprotesting multitudes unfortunate enough to have been born under the system and too stupid to oppose it’.109 There were echoes of Dos Passos’s youthful anarchistic revolt evident in his anti-war, anti-machine, and anti-American protest against ‘Science and Industrialism’ in Harvard Monthly: Has not the world today somehow got itself enslaved by this immense machine, the Industrial system? Millions of men perform labor narrowing and stultifying even under the best conditions, bound in the traces of mechanical industry, without ever a chance of self-expression, except in the hectic pleasures of suffocating life in cities. They grind their lives away on the wheels, producing, producing, producing.110

The latter sentence is the same machinephobic sentiment that recurs in Sifton’s The Belt (Granville Hicks wrote that the young Dos Passos felt that ‘industrialism was a mistake and civilisation was on the wrong road’).111 Imbibing the avantgarde machinolatry of the mid-to-late 1920s, Dos Passos increasingly facilitated the machine in the multi-character metropolitan panorama of the 1925 experimental bestseller Manhattan Transfer and the atomized analysis of the nation that constituted the USA trilogy. Gold argued that Dos Passos’s pioneering collage form in Manhattan Transfer successfully represented the industrial, metropolitan masses: ‘Dos Passos had set himself the giant task of picturing a whole great modern city. Such vastness and complexity could not be suggested in the conventional novel. He built a book, then, in which there are no heroes or heroines, but more than a hundred characters caught in the city whirlpool.’112 In the first two instalments of USA – The 42nd Parallel and 1919 – Dos Passos extended the experiment by enlarging his scope from the city to the entire nation.113 Cowley called 1919, the second part of the USA trilogy published in 1932, ‘the first American collective novel’, suggesting that Dos Passos had changed from a Harvard ‘esthete’ into a ‘collectivist’.114 Written in the interim between Manhattan Transfer and The 42nd Parallel, the play Airways, Inc. was arguably the first step towards a ‘collectivist’ critique of America, but it wasn’t necessarily a Sovietized vision. Hicks made the important point that while Dos Passos travelled to the Soviet Union in 1928 ‘he came to communism only by an American route, and his observations in the Soviet Union seem to have had little influence, one way or the other, on his thinking’.115 He was not perhaps as enamoured with Soviet communism as Gold or Lawson, and his writings about Russia were modernist travelogues that were equivocal about aspects of Russian life, including the role of the secret police.116 However, in the NPT’s short-lived publication



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Theatre 1929, Dos Passos elaborated a theory of ‘New Realism’ which he used to describe Meyerhold and Proletcult, and this term may also be applicable to his own work of this time. In this essay he detailed the varieties of Soviet theatre, which he divided into ‘Pre-Revolutionary Theatres’ and ‘Revolutionary Theatres’, critiquing the persistence of the former in the Naturalism of the Moscow Art Theatre, the fripperies of the State Opera as old-fashioned, and the stylized ‘Ritz’ of the Kamerny. Dos Passos used the term New Realism to describe the ‘Revolutionary Theatres’: the Theatre of the Trade Union, Theatre of the Revolution, Proletcult, and The Meyerhold Theatre.117 In 1925, Dos Passos had appeared to abandon Realism when championing Lawson’s Processional in a Vanity Fair article ‘Is the “Realistic” Theatre Obsolete?’ because ‘the movies have made the theatre of the transparent fourth wall unnecessary and obsolete, just as photography has made obsolete a certain form of painting. The camera and screen can transport the audience into circumstances, in the ordinary sense, real.’118 His use of the term New Realism may derive from, but certainly corresponds with, Fernand Léger’s 1926 article ‘A New Realism – the Object’ which describes how the cinematic medium transforms objects through close-ups and enlargements and reveals their hitherto unseen reality. Léger’s concept is redolent of the ‘Radical Formalism’ of Dziga Vertov’s ‘Camera Eye’ polemics, in which Formalist defamiliarization cohered with the facticity of the photographic apparatus. Dos Passos’s New Realism was not Stanislavskiian Naturalism, which was ‘too illequipped to deal with the material of modern life’, but involved the disruptive effect of Constructivism through technological means: ‘an adaptation of the movie screen worked in three dimensions, plus the auditorium … a series of effects that will make the audience participate directly in the tragedy’.119 His paradigm of New Realism was the Theatre of the Revolution’s production of a play called The Man with the Portfolio which was ‘from a writer’s point of view … one of the best play’s now running in Moscow’.120 The play integrated film into the production, a technique that Dos Passos called an ‘adaptation to the stage of the camera eye’ in an early use by the author of the term that described short experimental sections of USA.121 In USA the ‘Camera Eye’ refers to a sequence of stream-of-consciousness autobiographical passages interspersed within the text, one of four devices alongside ‘Newsreels’, biographical sketches, and short fictional pieces that disrupt the flow in what Dos Passos called a ‘four-way conveyor system’, prompting Michael Denning to term the ‘Camera Eyes’ and ‘Newsreels’ an ‘aesthetic Taylorism, a divided and rationalised labour’.122 As Juan Suarez points out, the ‘Camera Eyes’ and ‘Newsreels’ echo the cinematic Constructivism of Vertov’s Kino Pravda (Cinema News) and Kinoks (Cinema Eyes) and constitute a form of literary documentary.123 The Camera Eye purports to be the unmediated,

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automatist self, in contrast to the collective Newsreel, but both are akin to the Soviet notion of Factography (see Chapter 4). Although the production did not explore the movie projections as a staging device, the New Realism of Airways Inc. lay in a collective, fragmented scenario interspersed with Camera Eye interludes, in a setting that retained fourth wall disruptions but avoided excessive theatricalism. However, Dos Passos disagreed with Eisenstein’s view that ‘Meyerhold had carried the theatre as far as it was possible to take it in every possible direction and that the theatre was dead for the modern world’, having been supplanted by the cinema as the truly mass form.124 He extended this analysis in a New Republic article of the following year, in which he argued that as industrialization intensifies the alienation of the individual the need for group activities becomes paramount, and the Russian theatre offered a participatory, circus-like experience that contrasted with the sideshow dupery of the American stage.125 As he did not follow the trajectory of the technologism of Eisenstein’s Constructivism towards privileging the cinema over the theatre, his Camera Eye invoked photographic facticity rather than a literal strategy for integrating photography or film into his practices. In 1928 he had argued that ‘the theatre has to compete with other centers of mass-life’, but New York’s stages peddled a fantasy world in denial of the Machine Age: ‘it’s as if you built a perfectly equipped up to date operating room in a hospital and then called in a Cherokee medicine man instead of a trained surgeon to carve up the patients’.126 The juxtaposition of the faith healer with the surgeon is redolent of a passage in Walter Benjamin’s classic 1937 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility’: ‘magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into the web.’127 However, unlike Eisenstein and Benjamin, who saw the mass fomenting as collectivized experts through film’s factographic promise, Dos Passos retained faith in the necessity of the live event, and the affective power of reciprocal relations between performance and congregation, be it jazz, vaudeville, or sport. Dos Passos’s theatrical work consisted of just one more play, the unproduced Fortune Heights of 1934, and his New Realism would emerge fully in his more celebrated work as a novelist. In April 1929, he resigned from the NPT, and the others left one by one before the theatre closed down several weeks later. An article in the New York Times stated that ‘lack of support and various labor factions were given for the dissolution of the group’ – critical disapproval, public disinterest, internecine quarrels, a sense of political ineffectualness, not to mention principal benefactor Otto Kahn’s withdrawal of funds and the subsequent lack of money, were responsible.128 In the July issue of New Masses, Gold printed Erwin Piscator’s post-­mortem on the recently expired Prolet-Bühne of Berlin, stating in



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an ‘Editorial Note’ that it ‘might well have been written by one of the directors of the New Playwrights’.129 Piscator’s rueful consideration that ‘perhaps we began too noisily and cut off all possibility of political or artistic compromise once we were underway’ certainly matches the NPT’s trajectory.130 Like the NPT, the Prolet-Bühne never reached its intended audience, and even its greater potential audience, the 16,000 workers who supported the theatre, was insufficient. The following month Dos Passos cited Piscator’s article as exemplary when he asked New Masses readers ‘Did the New Playwrights Theatre Fail?’ (he thought so largely because the group had not cohered). He hoped that despite failure the efforts of the NPT would make the plight of the next political theatre easier, for ‘the time for half way measures in ideas or methods has gone, if indeed, it ever was’.131

Coda: proletarian theatre after the New Playwrights During the Depression, there was understandably a larger audience for a socially engaged theatre. The NPT declined just as the international workers movement was emerging, and its American Constructivism was a product, albeit an idiosyncratic and unloved one, of the 1920s, being conceived before the Great Depression that catalysed the more numerous and militant workers theatre groups of the 1930s. Their nearest comrade group was ARTEF (Arbeter Teater Farband, Workers’ Theatre Union), which despite forming in 1925 did not perform publicly until the 1928 Mass Play and Ballet of the Russian Revolution, a mass event staged by several communist groups at Madison Square Gardens to an audience of 20,000.132 Subsequent plays, such as Sholem Aleichem’s comedy Ristokratn (Aristocrats) of 1929, Shmuel Godiner’s Jim Kooperkop (1930), and Fulye Cherner’s 1930 In Roysh fun Mashinen (In the Whirl of Machines), might have varied in critical and commercial success but spoke to the experiences of a core audience made up of Russian-Jewish immigrants. ARTEF’s stage arrangements avoided the experimentation of the NPT, although Jim Kooperkop featured set designs by Boris Aronson, a Russian-born artist who had studied with Exter.133 Having kindled support in its early years, ARTEF prospered in the mid 1930s and moved to Broadway until the end of the decade. The proletarian theatre that arose in the early 1930s was as much a consequence of the Cultural Revolution and the proletarianism of the Third Period line as the Wall Street Crash. As editor of New Masses, Gold led a shift from experimentation towards a more direct mode that ‘goes after a kind of flesh and blood reality, however crude, instead of the smooth perfect thing that is found in books’.134 Intellectual and aesthetic sophistication were no longer requirements – the new proletarian writer ‘is a Red but has few theories. It is all instinct with him.’135 Gold’s proletarian model was defiantly prosaic, exemplified by his 1930 semi-autobiographical novel Jews without Money, a work that was

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frank, sentimental, accessible, and happily free of the characteristics of so-called bourgeois culture. The Workers’ Laboratory Theatre exemplified this model of proletarianism by coupling disinterest in stylistic finery with ‘a direct, terse, hard hitting phraseology, a machine gun repetition, a sharp, type analysis with no individual characterisation, and a climax often ending in mass demonstration’.136 Their one act play Unemployment, an ‘American vaudeville and Russian Blue Blouse technique’, typified the bluntness of their material: 1 WORKER: I am hungry 2 WORKER: My family is hungry 3 WORKER: I want to work 4 WORKER: I want a job 5 WORKER: Won’t somebody give me a job? … CAPITALIST: There isn’t anyone can have a better yacht than I … what’s that damn noise out there? SERVANT: Master, it is the unemployed complaining.137

The Capitalist replies ‘Unemployed complaining? What have they got to complain about?’ The point of these exercises was to foster proletarian creativity and consciousness by involving worker playwrights and actors, and while even sympathetic critics found the performances rather childish, the worker theatre movement was enterprising in its use of minimal resources and purposeful in its clear address to unemployment. V. J. Jerome’s ‘Art is a Weapon’, published in Workers Theatre in June 1931, provides a rationale for this literalism of proletarian theatre. In response to a capitalist’s claim that ‘… ART is a weapon in the fight for my interests’, a worker replies: ‘we do not play for your and our entertainment, we play because participation in the class struggle is your and our duty. We show the exploitation of the workers, we show the way out, we show the only way out – organised mass action.’138 The radicalized mass was central to The Belt Goes Red, which was a 1930 dance production coordinated by Edith Segal, leader of The Red Dancers, for the Lenin Memorial pageant at Madison Square Gardens. Derived from Sifton’s The Belt and directed by Basshe, it represented a development and deviation from the productions of the NPT. Like Gold et al., Segal came from the Lower East Side’s Jewish ghetto and gravitated to the communist movement in the late 1920s, visiting the Soviet Union in 1930. The Belt Goes Red was the finale on a programme that featured speeches and testimonials. It was also a participatory event that occurred outside the theatre context, and included a march from Union Square to Madison Square Gardens followed by singing ‘The International’ before the ceremonial welcoming and oath-swearing of new Party members. This event was both a revival of earlier mass spectacles, such as the Paterson Strike Pageant, and an American version of Soviet revolutionary



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festivals. The narrative abandoned the individual and family drama of The Belt and took the collective revolt of the workers as its theme, converting the play into a propagandist mass pageant in a manner akin to Meyerhold’s revision of Expressionism. In essence, The Belt Goes Red denuded The Belt’s latent Expressionist individualism and humanist trauma of the machine. The scenes consisted of: 1. The Belt (dance group) 2. American Federation of Labor Convention 3. Revolt (dance group) 4. Organisation! 5. Strike (dance group) 6. From the USSR 7. Memorial March (dance group) 8. Towards Struggle!139

In this performance, the dancers Sovietize the belt in a ritualistic celebration of the Revolution, which through the ‘From the USSR’ sequence connects the narrative to the Lenin Memorial Day and provides the contingency that The Belt lacked. If The Belt was a 1920s machine aesthetic cri-de-coeur against the machine, then The Belt Goes Red was an expression of Five Year Plan machinolatry. As Segal recalled: ‘Through that line came a bolt of red, Turkey red material, which I bought on Canal Street, a whole roll … each [dancer] touched or held the red scarf, the red bolt, and they surrounded the machine which they had built. They took it because they had built it.’140 In 1929 Sifton and his wife Claire wrote The Break, an unrealized scenario for a mass performance, and also collaborated on the play Midnight, which was produced in 1931 by the Theatre Guild. Their play 1931 was an early production of the Group Theatre, which was led by Harold Clurman and operated for ten years with greater critical and commercial success than the NPT.141 Furthermore, Clurman found the NPT productions ‘undisciplined, amateurish, lyrical, frivolous’, and in contrast developed a taut, realist idiom that combined a pared down stage sets (Gorelik and Donald Oenslager designed for the Group) with powerful, naturalistic performances.142 The Group Theatre originated from a 1929 Theatre Guild production of a Soviet play by V. Kirchon and A. Ouspensky entitled Red Rust. Like Gold and Dos Passos, Clurman visited the Soviet Union and wrote a diary, unpublished until the 1980s, in which he detailed his experiences of the Russian theatre as he saw it in May 1935. As Dos Passos had done several years previously, he attended Meyerhold’s training workshops and marvelled at the subtlety and elasticity of the exercises. He celebrated Meyerhold’s ‘extraordinary theatrical genius’ on the basis of a revived production of The Magnanimous Cuckold, where the appropriateness of the ‘ultrastylisation’ matched the content ‘that could not be communicated in

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any other way’ and belonged to ‘a hungry, stark time when, despite physical deprivation and amidst all the grimness and hunger, people wanted to laugh and be boisterous’.143 Yet Clurman’s greatest emotional response was to a production at the Moscow Art Theatre of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, in which ‘the reality is personal, immediate, normal, and, as Lee [Strasberg] once put it, “like bread”.’144 The Group Theatre aimed to emulate the Moscow Art Theatre’s powerful performances via Strasberg’s training, whereby actors prepared with painstaking rehearsals involving improvisation and elaborate psychological exercises based on ‘affective memory’ to create an emotional engagement with the character. These techniques were derived from Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre, and became known as the Stanislavskiian method, or ‘method acting’. The contrast between Gold’s 1925 tirade against Stanislavsky and Clurman’s tribute to the director ten years later might therefore signal a paradigm shift in the American radical theatre and its relationship with Soviet counterparts. For Clurman, ‘the premises of the Stanislavsky system are unalterably correct’ as the emotional force of Naturalist performances made political messages effective by being affective, and Naturalism simply needed rethinking as a current strategy; ‘a change of ideology of the acting … a change of object’ (the transition of radical theatre from Expressionism and Constructivism towards Naturalism was evident in the production of Paul and Claire Sifton’s 1931).145 In short, after the NPT’s antipathy towards Stanislavsky, the Group Theatre developed a viable modernist political theatre by reviving Naturalism to engage audiences of the Depression directly and without gimmickry.

Notes 1. Kenneth Macgowan, ‘Stagecraft Shows Its Newest Heresies: International Theatrical Exposition to Display Models of Constructivist and Cubist Scenery From Europe’, The New York Times Magazine (14 February 1926), p. 23. 2. Michael Gold, ‘A New Masses Theatre’, New Masses (November 1927), p. 23. 3. The entire repertoire: John Howard Lawson, Loud Speaker (March 1927), Em Jo Basshe, Earth (February 1927), Francis Farragoh, Pinwheel (February-March 1927, a Neighbourhood Playhouse production that was not technically an NPT work), Paul Sifton, The Belt (October 1927), Basshe The Centuries (November 1927), Lawson, The International (January 1928), Mike Gold, Hoboken Blues (February 1928), Upton Sinclair, Singing Jailbirds (January 1929), John Dos Passos, Airways Inc. (February 1929), and Mike Gold, Fiesta (September 1929, a Provincetown Playhouse production). 4. John Dos Passos, ‘A Machine Age Theatre’, Vanity Fair (June 1928), p. 64. 5. Michael Gold, ‘Loud Speaker and Other Essays’, New Masses (March 1927), p. 6.



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6. ‘New Playwrights Theatre Find New Home in Greenwich Village’, Daily Worker (26 August 1927), p. 4. 7. Em Jo Basshe, ‘The Revolt on Fifty-Second Street’, New York Times (27 February 1927), VIII, p. 2. 8. Basshe, ‘The Revolt on Fifty-Second Street’, p. 2. 9. Em Jo Basshe, ‘Theatre, Mass, and Machine’, Daily Worker (19 March 1927), p. 8. 10. ‘Program of the Paterson Strike Pageant’, in Brooks McNamara, Jessie Ashley, F. Sumner Boyd, Mabel Dodge, William D. Haywood, John Reed and Margaret H. Sanger, ‘Paterson Strike Pageant,’ The Drama Review: TDR, 15:3 (Summer, 1971), p. 62. The Pageant consisted of six episodes that charted the course of the strike and its violent suppression, culminating in a ceremony of oath-swearing led by Socialist leaders Carlo Tresca, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and IWW leader ‘Big’ Bill Haywood. Unfortunately, the Pageant was expensive and required bailing out from the strike fund to the tune of $600, thus negating any fund-raising value and provoking the conservative media to slur the organizers with the charge of pilfering. 11. See Bill Haywood, ‘The Pageant’, excerpt from Bill Haywood’s Book (1929), in McNamara et al. ‘Paterson Strike Pageant’, p. 64. 12. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, ‘The Truth About the Paterson Strike’, from a speech by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn to the New York Civic Club Forum, 31 January 1914, McNamara et al. ‘Paterson Strike Pageant’, p. 70. 13. Brenda Murphy, The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 55. 14. Ira A. Levine, Left-Wing Dramatic Theory in the American Theatre (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan, UMI Research Press, 1985), p. 2. 15. Barrett H. Clark, Eugene O’Neill: The Man and His Plays (New York: Robert M. McBride and Company, 1929), p. 125. 16. Bert Cardullo and Robert Knopf (eds.), Theater of the Avant-Garde 1890–1950: A Critical Anthology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 207. 17. David F. Kuhns, German Expressionist Theatre: The Actor and the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 219. 18. Elmer Rice, The Adding Machine, in Seven Plays by Elmer Rice (New York: Viking Press, 1950), p. 19. 19. John Howard Lawson, unpublished autobiography, cited in Julia A. Walker, Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre: Bodies, Voices, Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 189. 20. John Corbin, ‘Roger Bloomer’, New York Times (11 March 1923), X, p. 1. 21. John Howard Lawson, ‘Preface’ to Processional: A Jazz Symphony of American Life in Four Acts (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1925), p. v. 22. John Dos Passos, ‘Is the “Realistic” Theatre Obsolete?’, Vanity Fair (May 1925), p. 114. 23. Michael Gold, ‘Theater and Revolution’, The Nation (11 November 1925), p. 537. 24. Huntley Carter, The New Theatre and Cinema of Soviet Russia (London: Chapman and Dodd, 1924), p. 51. 25. Valery Briusov, ‘Against Naturalism in the Theatre’ (1910), reprinted in Cardullo and Knopf, Theater of the Avant-Garde 1890–1950, p. 76.

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26. Briusov, ‘Against Naturalism in the Theatre’, p. 73 and p. 76. 27. Vsevolod Meyerhold, ‘The Stylized Theatre’ (1907), in E. Braun (ed. and trans.), Meyerhold on Theatre (London: Eyre Methuen, 1969), p. 60. 28. Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’ (1917), in Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reiss (eds.), Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 8. 29. Jonathan Pitches, Vsevolod Meyerhold (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 30. 30. Pitches, Vsevolod Meyerhold, p. 30. 31. Konstantin Rudnitsky, Russian and Soviet Theatre: Tradition and the Avant-Garde, trans. Roxanne Permar (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), p. 92. 32. Vsevolod Meyerhold, ‘Biomechanics’ (1922) in Braun, Meyerhold on Theatre, p. 197. 33. Gold, ‘Theater and Revolution’, p. 536. 34. Vsevolod Meyerhold, ‘The Magnanimous Cuckold’ (1926), in Braun, Meyerhold on Theatre, p. 205. 35. Louis Lozowick, ‘V.E. Meyerhold and his Theatre’, Hound and Horn, 4:1 (October–December 1930), pp. 97–9; Louis Lozowick and Joseph Freeman, ‘The Soviet Theatre’, in Joseph Freeman, Joshua Kunitz, and Louis Lozowick, Voices of October: Art and Literature in Soviet Russia (New York: Vanguard Press, 1930), pp. 197–8. 36. Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt, ‘Louis Lozowick: From “Machine Ornaments” to Applied Design’, The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts (Spring 1988), p. 44. 37. Louis Lozowick, ‘Gas: A Theatrical Experiment’, International Theatre Exposition, The Little Review (Winter 1926), p. 60. For an in-depth reading of Lozowick’s designs for Gas, see Andrew Hemingway, The Mysticism of Money: Precisionist Painting and Machine Age America (Pittsburgh, PA: Periscope Publishing, 2013), pp. 115–21. 38. Lozowick, ‘Gas: A Theatrical Experiment’, p. 60. 39. Alongside The Magnanimous Cuckold, other seminal productions by Meyerhold include Sergei Tretiakov’s Earth Rampant (1923), Alexander Ostrovsky’s The Forest (1924), and Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector (1926). 40. Rudnitsky, Russian and Soviet Theatre, p. 100. 41. Braun, Meyerhold on Theatre, p. 189. 42. N. A. Furness, ‘Toller and the Luddites: Fact and Symbol in “Die Maschinenstürmer”’, The Modern Language Review, 73:4 (October 1978), p. 848. 43. Ernst Toller, Masses and Man, in Ernst Toller and Hermann Kesten, Seven Plays by Ernst Toller (London: Bodley Head, 1935), p. 127. Apart from the barely fleshed-out protagonist, Sonia, the people in the play are anonymous generic types and as such are listed simply as ‘The Woman’, ‘The Priest’, and ‘The Nameless One’, an ominous revolutionary activist who leads the strike that results in the imprisonment of the main characters (Toller wrote Masses and Man in two nights in 1919 in the Niederschoenenfeld prison in a ‘dark cell’ where ‘my mind was tortured with visions of faces, daimonic faces, faces tumbling over each other in grotesque somersaults’). Ernst Toller, ‘The Author to the Producer, October, 1921’ in Toller and Kesten, Seven Plays by Ernst Toller, p. 111.



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44. Toller, ‘The Author to the Producer, October, 1921’, p. 112. 45. Konstantin Rudnitsky, Meyerhold the Director, trans. G. Petrov (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1981), p. 354. 46. Rudnitsky, Meyerhold the Director, p. 100. 47. Boris Alpers, Teatr Revolyutsii (Moscow, 1928), pp. 49–50, cited in Rudnitsky, Meyerhold the Director, p. 100. 48. Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society Between Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 55–6; James C. McClelland, ‘Utopianism versus Revolutionary Heroism in Bolshevik Policy: The Proletarian Culture Debate’, Slavic Review (September 1980), pp. 403–25. 49. Alexander Bogdanov, ‘The Proletariat and Art’, Proletarian Culture, 5 (1918), cited in Brandon Taylor, Art and Literature under the Bolsheviks, Volume One: The Crisis of Renewal 1917–1924 (London: Pluto Press, 1991), p. 43. 50. Sergei Eisenstein, ‘The Montage of Attractions’, Sergei Eisenstein, ‘The Montage of Attractions’, Lef (June/ July 1923), reprinted in Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (eds.), The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896–1939, trans. Richard Taylor (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988), p. 87. 51. Lars Kleberg, Theatre as Action (London: Macmillan, 1993), p. 80. 52. Gold, ‘Theater and Revolution’, p. 536. 53. Ibid., p. 537. 54. Michael Gold, ‘Strike!: A Mass Recitation’, New Masses (July 1926), p. 19. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. ‘Prospectus for Dynamo’ (March 1925), cited in Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt, ‘New Masses and John Reed Club Artists, 1926–1936: Evolution of Ideology, Subject Matter, and Style’, The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, 12 (Spring 1989), p. 58. 58. Ben Blake, The Awakening of the American Theatre (New York: Tomorrow Publishers, 1935), pp. 10–11. 59. Gold, ‘Theater and Revolution’, p. 536. 60. Levine, Left-Wing Dramatic Theory, p. 66. 61. Faragoh’s Pinwheel, produced by the Neighborhood Playhouse in February 1927, was technically the first foray by an NPT member after its formation, but was not considered a group production. For Loud Speaker reviews, see: John Anderson, ‘Loud Speaker’, New York Evening Post (4 March 1927), p. 8; J. Brooks Atkinson, ‘The Play’, New York Times (3 March 1927), p. 27; Gilbert Seldes, ‘The Theatre’, The Dial (May 1927), p. 436. 62. John Howard Lawson, Loud Speaker (New York: The Macaulay Company, 1927), p. 15. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid., p. 33. 65. Brooks Atkinson, ‘The Play’, p. 27. 66. David Zolotnitsky, ‘The Mexican, as Visualised by Sergei Eisenstein’, trans. A. Genf and Natalia A. Egunova, in ‘Professor David Zolonitsky: A Festschrift’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 4:1 (1995), p. 2.

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67. Bernard Smith, ‘Machines and Mobs’, New Masses (March 1928), p. 23; John Anderson, ‘Loud Speaker’, New York Evening Post (4 March 1927), p. 8. 68. Smith, ‘Machines and Mobs’, p. 16. 69. Jonathan Chambers, Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and the American Theatre, 1923–1937 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), p. 96. 70. Lawson, ‘Preface’ to Processional, p. v. 71. Ibid., p. ix. 72. Eric Walrond, ‘Introduction’, Em Jo Basshe, Earth (New York: The Macaulay Company, 1927), p. xiii. 73. Kenneth Fearing, ‘Hoboken Blues’, New Masses (April 1929), p. 27. 74. For a detailed account of Hemsley Winfield, see John O. Perperner III, AfricanAmerican Concert Dance: The Harlem Renaissance (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001), pp. 25–55. 75. ‘To the strains of a political march enter six negro politicians of exaggerated type, with from right, with wax faces, each carrying an enormous floral wreath in shape of horseshoes, stars, etc., each with the words, “Harry U. Collins is a good man”. These they deposit in a circle around Collins’. Lawson, Loud Speaker, pp. 74–6. 76. S. Frederick Starr, Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 50–2. 77. Ossip Brik, ‘Dzhaz-band’, Novyi Lef, 6 (1927), p. 11, quoted in Starr, Red and Hot, p. 64. 78. Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926–1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 13. 79. Starr, Red and Hot, p. 100. 80. Ibid. 81. John Howard Lawson, The International (New York: The Macaulay Company, 1928), p. 7. 82. Ibid., p. 8. 83. Ibid., p. 83 and p. 88. 84. Sender Garlin, ‘Lawson Play an Ingenuous Drama of Revolution’, Daily Worker (16 January 1928), p. 4. 85. ‘The International Full of Realism’, The New York Times (16 January 1928), p. 24. 86. Paul Sifton, The Belt (New York: The Macaulay Company, 1927), p. 67. 87. Ibid., p. 178. 88. Ibid., p. 18. He informs the Old Man how his son Ralph, on medical leave from the plant, ‘broke down’ like a malfunctioning machine. Ibid., p. 36. 89. Ibid., p. 62 and p. 72. 90. Ibid., p. 131 and p. 73. 91. Ibid., p. 131. 92. Antonio Gramsci, ‘Americanism and Fordism’ (1930) in Selections from Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 297. 93. Ibid., p. 310. 94. Sifton, The Belt, p. 62.



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95. Frank Vreeland, ‘Hitting the Auto Industry in The Belt’, New York Telegram (20 October 1927), p. 12. 96. J. Brooks Atkinson, ‘Troubles in the Crank Case’, New York Times (20 October 1927), p. 33. 97. T. J. O’Flaherty, ‘A Labor Play’, Daily Worker (24 October 1927), p. 4. 98. ‘Meyerhold’s Theatre to Produce The Belt and Processional’, Daily Worker (13 January 1928), p. 4. 99. E. A., ‘The Belt’, New Masses (November 1927), p. 3. 100. A. B. Magil, ‘Airways Inc. is Best Play Produced by New Playwrights’, Daily Worker (23 February 1929), p. 4. 101. John Howard Lawson, ‘Wanted: A Showman’, New Masses (June 1926), p. 20. 102. Ibid., p. 20. 103. A. G., ‘Play by Dos Passos at Grove Street’, New York Telegram (27 February 1929), p. 12. 104. Stephen Rathbun, ‘Airways, Inc.’, New York Sun (21 February 1929), p. 10; William G. King, ‘Airways, Inc’, New York Post (21 February 1929), p. 14; Richard Watts Jr., ‘Airways, Inc. Given by New Playwrights at the Grove Street’, New York Herald Tribune (21 February 1929), p. 19. 105. John Dos Passos, Airways Inc. (New York: The Macaulay Company, 1928), p. 10. 106. Edmund Wilson, ‘John Dos Passos and the Social Revolution’, The New Republic (17 April 1929), p. 256. 107. Notice for Airways, Inc, in the Daily Worker (20 February 1929), p. 4. 108. Michael Gold, ‘The Education of John Dos Passos’, English Journal, 22 (February 1933), p. 95. 109. Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left (New York: Avon Books, 1961), p. 362. 110. John Dos Passos, ‘A Humble Protest’, Harvard Monthly (June 1916), reprinted in D. Pizer (ed.), John Dos Passos: The Major Nonfictional Prose (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, 1988), p. 34. 111. Granville Hicks, ‘The Politics of John Dos Passos’, The Antioch Review, 10:1 (Spring 1950), p. 87. See also V. F. Calverton, ‘Left-Wing Literature in America’, English Journal, 20:10 (December 1931). 112. Gold, ‘The Education of John Dos Passos’, p. 93. 113. Ibid., p. 95. 114. Malcolm Cowley ‘John Dos Passos: The Poet and the World’, The New Republic (27 April 1932), pp. 303–5 and ‘Afterthoughts on Dos Passos’, The New Republic (9 September 1936), p. 34, reprinted in Andrew Hook (ed.), Dos Passos: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974), p. 76 and p. 80. 115. Hicks, ‘The Politics of John Dos Passos’, p. 91. 116. See the section of ‘Russian Visa’ entitled ‘Terror’ about his visit to a terrified Englishman in Moscow, John Dos Passos, ‘Russian Visa’ (1928), In All Countries (London: Constable, 1934), in Travel Books and Other Writings (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 2003), pp. 309–11. 117. John Dos Passos, ‘Moscow Theatres’, Theatre 1929, 1:2 (January 1929), pp. 5–6. 118. Dos Passos, ‘Is the “Realistic” Theatre Obsolete?’, p. 114. 119. Dos Passos, ‘Moscow Theatres’, p. 7. 120. Ibid.

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121. Ibid. 122. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997), p. 170. 123. Juan A. Suarez, ‘John Dos Passos’s USA and Left Documentary Film in the 1930s: The Cultural Politics of “Newsreel” and “The Camera Eye”’, American Studies in Scandinavia, 31 (1999), p. 45. 124. John Dos Passos, ‘Did the New Playwrights Theatre Fail?’ New Masses (August 1929), p. 13. 125. John Dos Passos, ‘The New Theater in Russia’, The New Republic (16 April 1930), pp. 239 and 237. 126. Dos Passos, ‘A Machine Age Theatre’, p. 64. 127. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1937), in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. H. Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1999), p. 227. 128. ‘New Playwrights Abandon Productions’, New York Times (26 April 1929), p. 29. 129. ‘Editorial Note’ to Erwin Piscator, ‘The Social Theatre’, New Masses (July 1929), p. 14. 130. Ibid. 131. Dos Passos, ‘Did the New Playwrights Theatre Fail?’, p. 13. 132. Edna Nahshon, Yiddish Proletarian Theatre: The Art and Politics of the ARTEF, 1925– 1940 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), pp. 43–4; A. B. Magil, ‘ARTEF Theatre Opens’, New Masses (December 1931), p. 26. 133. ‘Sketches and Scenes from Unser Theater’, Theatre Arts Monthly (February 1926), p. 131. 134. Michael Gold, ‘Go Left, Young Writers’, New Masses (January 1929), p. 3. 135. Gold, ‘Go Left, Young Writers’, p. 4. 136. Hallie Flanagan, ‘A Theatre is Born’, Theatre Arts Monthly, July 1931, p. 914. 137. Ibid., pp. 913–14. Flanagan omitted the punch line, which is quoted here from Blake’s book, which also reproduced this scene. Blake, The Awakening of the American Theatre, p. 19. Founded 1923, the Blue Blouse groups (there were five) were named after the shirts worn by cast and crew in Meyerhold’s The Magnanimous Cuckold, and were a versatile touring political cabaret that used music and dance in lively political sketches. See Frantisek Deak, ‘“Blue Blouse” (1923–1928)’, The Drama Review: TDR (March 1973), pp. 35–46. 138. V. J. Jerome’s ‘Art is a Weapon’, Workers Theatre (June 1931), reprinted in Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl, and Stuart Cosgrove, Theatres of the Left 1880–1935: Workers’ Theatre Movements in Britain and America (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), p. 302 and p. 305. 139. ‘Program for the Lenin Memorial Meeting’ (1930), reproduced in Ellen Graff, Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928–1942 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 30. 140. Quoted in Graff, Stepping Left, p. 31. 141. Alongside the NPT, Segal’s Red Dancers, and the Group Theatre, Hallie Flanagan was the theatre artist most indebted to Soviet theatrical culture and visited the Soviet Union twice in the 1920s, which she reported on in several articles for the Theatre Guild Magazine. In 1930 she founded the Experimental



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Theatre of Vassar College and the 1931 production of Can You Hear Their Voices? inaugurated a form of agitational documentary, Flanagan also staged several worker theatre plays at Vassar and attempted, unsuccessfully, to use the occasion as a fund-raising exercise. Flanagan’s later role in the decade as the director of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Theatre Project witnessed the incorporation of Living Newspaper into a state-financed project that ironically collided with the authorities with the production of a radical musical about class struggle, Marc Blitzstein’s 1937 The Cradle will Rock, which revived some of the energetic musical revolt of the NPT. See Lynn Malley, ‘Hallie Flanagan and the Soviet Union: New Heaven, New Earth, New Theater’, in Choi Chatterjee and Beth Holmgren (eds.), Americans Experience Russia: Encountering the Enigma, 1917 to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 31–49. 142. Harold Clurman, The Fervent Years: The Story of the Group Theatre and the Thirties (London: Dennis Dobson, 1946), p. 19. 143. Harold Clurman, ‘Soviet Diary I’ (1934), in Marjorie Loggia and Glenn Young (eds.), The Collected Works of Harold Clurman: Six Decades of Commentary on Theatre, Dance, Music, Film, Arts, and Letters (Tonbridge: Applause, 1994), p. 14. 144. Ibid., p. 10. 145. Harold Clurman, ‘From a Soviet Diary’, New Masses (6 August 1935), p. 537; Paul and Claire Sifton, 1931 (1931), reprinted in The “Lost” Group Theatre Plays, Volume 1 (New York: the ReGroup Theatre Company, 2012).

3 Kino in America: Soviet montage and the American cinematic avant-garde

Alongside the radical Constructivism of the New Playwrights Theatre, the American avant-garde’s most sympathetic engagement with Soviet revolutionary culture was in cinema. If the innovations of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s Constructivist theatre stimulated the NPT, then the development of cinematic montage by his protégé Sergei Eisenstein, alongside Lev Kuleshov, Dziga Vertov, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Alexander Dovzhenko, had an analogous impact upon American avant-garde cinema. The Soviet film principles of the ‘cine eye’ and montage also derived from Constructivism, as types of a filmic ‘faktura’ that combined shots into the dialectical sequences of a Sovietized syntax that would, like theatre productions, posters, and utilitarian objects, catalyse a new citizenry for the new society. Montage was the clarion of an experimental cinema movement that espoused the spiritual machine discourse discussed in the two previous chapters, but around the turn of the 1930s radicalized in response to the emergent Depression. In Experimental Cinema, a shortlived magazine that ran from 1930 to 1934, montage developed from a machine aesthetic myth into the standard in a cinematic battle against Hollywood, which to its editors and contributors represented capitalism’s ideological manipulation of the masses. In 1931 the editors joined forces with the Workers Film and Photo League (hereafter ‘the League’), a group whose umbilical link to the Comintern ensured that its emulation of Soviet cinema was at least on message. In this chapter, I examine the discourse on Soviet kino in America and some filmic responses and analogies. It should be noted at the outset that American radical filmmakers never came close to producing a film that would rival Eisenstein’s Strike! or Dovzhenko’s Earth in terms of aesthetic, narrative, or political sophistication. The films I consider are short experiments that indicate suggestions of a radical, avant-garde cinema more than a successful realization. Although the Soviets enjoyed meagre budgets compared to their



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Hollywood counterparts, they benefited from state support, whereas American radical filmmakers had pitiful funds at their disposal and struggled to sustain a viable movement. American and Soviet radical filmmakers were comrades of the international communist movement, and were organizationally linked through Workers International Relief, a Comintern-affiliated body that funded numerous concerns including the League and Mezhrabpom-Russ, the Soviet studio that produced Pudovkin’s Storm over Asia and The End of St. Petersburg. The League’s adaptation of montage was a modest yet militant cultural emanation of the Comintern in the United States. The coalition of filmmakers around the League and Experimental Cinema experienced profound disagreement about filmmaking strategies and theories that led eventually to a schism in the mid 1930s concerning the types of films to produce. One wing of the movement – represented by Tom Brandon and Leo Seltzer – believed in the maximizing of scant resources through newsreel production, and favoured cheaply produced veristic films that served as a witness to marches and demonstrations, therefore presenting the events from the perspective of the participants rather than that of the police or bosses, which they believed the commercial newsreel companies showed. The other lobby, which included Ralph Steiner, Leo Hurwitz, and Irving Lerner, were primarily experimental filmmakers who sought to balance polemic with artistry in terms of advanced camerawork and dramatized narratives rather than blunt informational missives. In 1934, the latter filmmakers seceded to form Nykino (New York Kino) and made a handful of ambitious, if provisional, short films that suggested the possible form of a sustained American radical film movement. Many of these figures were involved in the government-sponsored productions of the New Deal, receiving that crucial funding, and helped shape the great era of documentary filmmaking in the latter half of the decade. Before considering the American responses to Soviet montage, I will first examine a Constructivist encounter of two camera eyes in New York.

A camera eye montage: The Man with a Movie Camera at the Film Guild Cinema Soviet cinematic montage emerged from the crucible of Constructivism outlined in the previous chapters. While not all of its progenitors were affiliated with the Constructivist groups (Eisenstein and Vertov were, Kuleshov, Pudovkin, and Dovzhenko were not) the theorization of associative editing was consonant with Constructivism.1 In 1922, Constructivist ideologue Alexei Gan wrote in the magazine Kino-Fot that ‘cinema is a technological phenomenon. It and only it, however much “people” have obstructed it, has honestly and truthfully captured a whole series of the greatest moments of the proletarian October Revolution,

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the Civil War and the titanic efforts of the labour front.’2 From the Futurist days of the 1910s, Russian avant-garde members such as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Meyerhold widely discussed the possibilities of film, and argued that the theatre could not compete with this new medium. After the Revolution there was little money for film production. In 1919 Anatoli Lunacharsky, the head of Narkompros, the People’s Commissariat of Enlightening, admitted that the regime was too poor to make any serious films, but asserted that cinema is a ‘visual clarion’ that could simultaneously educate and entertain the masses.3 In 1922, Lenin directed that the film industry, to be supervised by Narkompros, should produce both entertaining and educational films, while proceeding carefully with the latter for fear of stifling support for the Revolution through counter-effective propaganda. He wrote that ‘films of a propagandistic and educational character should be tried out on old Marxists and literary men, so that we do not repeat the sad mistakes that have occurred several times in the past, when propaganda achieves the opposite effect to that intended’.4 Starved of funds, from 1922 organizations such as Goskino (the official state cinema) and VUFKU (All Ukrainian Photo and Cinema Directorate), and groups like FEKS (Factory of the Eccentric Actor) and Vertov’s Kinoks, sought ways of producing dynamic and entertaining imagery with a limited budget. Vertov’s solution to producing films in a financial crisis was especially resourceful. When the Futurist Denis Kaufman reinvented himself as Dziga Vertov, or ‘spinning top’, he defined the character of a dynamic filmmaking practice. Vertov was one of the earliest filmmakers of the Revolution, joining the Moscow Cinema Committee in 1918 to make a newsreel series called ‘Cine Week’, which led to producing short films about the agit-trains and the events of the Civil War during 1919. From 1922, Vertov led a small newsreel outfit called ‘Kino-Pravda’ (Cine-Truth), which invoked Lenin’s newspaper Pravda, as one of the ‘Soviet of Three’, which also consisted of Mikhail Kaufman, his cameraman brother, and editor Elizaveta Svilova (whom Vertov married in 1923). The members of the Soviet of Three were ‘kinoks’ – kino (cine) and oki (eyes) – which referred to the camera’s veristic recording capabilities in showing everyday life in the new Bolshevik society. As Jeremy Hicks explains, Kino-Pravda no. 1 of June 1922 ‘sets the tone for Vertov’s newsreels in its sharply rhetorical style, downplaying the registering of events and instead editing together shots taken at different times to construct an argument’.5 Vertov assembled these unstaged documents of Soviet life into a propagandist news bulletin. In this sense, the construction of Kino-Pravda was akin to faktura’s assemblage of core technological materials, and analogous to Gustav Klutsis’s early photomontage work. Vertov developed the theory of ‘Kino-Glaz’ (Cine-Eye), which was the first manifestation of cinematic Constructivism. The Soviet of Three announced



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its operations in ‘We: A Version of a Manifesto’ in Kinofot magazine in 1922 (although updating an unpublished manifesto of 1919), which celebrated cinema as the ideal medium for fostering a ‘new man’, a reconfigured citizen born of the ‘poetry of the machine, propelled and driving; the poetry of levers, wheels, and wings of steel; the iron cry of movements; the blinding grimaces of red hot steam’.6 In pioneering this ‘perfect electric man’, kino, with its machine eye, would inspire the machinist, the tractor driver, and the engineer to love their labour.7 Vertov proposed a new language, which prioritized the connective elements of the film, its ‘intervals’, over the scenes per se, and variously likened the filmmaker to an inventor, an engineer, and an architect, constructing an unprecedented filmic archetype of ‘blueprints in motion’.8 If Kinok productions assembled newsreel fragments into Kino-Pravda, then the arrangement of these intervals, the montage of the shots, would catalyse ‘ostranie’, the Formalist principle of ‘defamiliarization’ that obliterated habits of looking, by revealing the new facts of Soviet life. Constructivism called for the abandonment of previous modes for an unprecedented machine culture, and just as Meyerhold attacked all pre-revolutionary theatrical work, including Konstantin Stanislavsky’s Naturalism at Moscow Art Theatre, and Gan railed against ‘art’, the Soviet of Three asserted: ‘we proclaim the old films, based on the romance, theatrical films and the like, to be leprous’.9 For the Kinoks, the camera had its own subjectivity – it was a mechanical mind, a conjunction of man and machine. In 1923, the Soviet of Three published ‘The Cine Eyes: A Revolution’ in the Constructivist journal Lef, in which the camera uttered: ‘I am the cine eye. I am the mechanical eye. I the machine show you the world as only I see it.’10 With its ‘mechanical eye … rejecting the deployment of the human eye’, the camera’s perceptive superiority to embodied sight was not a dehumanizing vision, because the ‘cine-eye pilot’ directed the lens towards human social life. The montage of unstaged intervals of ‘life-as-it-is’ and ‘life-caught-unawares’ served the construction of a new post-humanist, but recalibrated, human Soviet reality for the ‘perfect electric man’.11 When printed in Lef, this principle tallied with the Constructivist programme of the magazine, and indeed Alexander Rodchenko collaborated with the Soviet of Three by providing intertitles for Cine-Pravda, a textualimage hybrid which Gan called ‘a screen word. A talking cinema that talks in cinema language. A title like an electric flex, like a conductor, through which the screen feeds on shining reality.’12 In 1924, Rodchenko designed a poster for the extended ‘newsreel in six parts’ Kino Glaz, which positioned a disembodied eye within a photomontage over a geometric background with architectonic text – the poster, in effect, created a Constructivist nexus of photography, film, typography, and design. The Soviet of Three produced several films during the mid 1920s, including

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A Sixth Part of the World (1926) and The Eleventh Year (1928), but the first film to be screened in the United States was The Man with a Movie Camera (1929). The premiere of the film at the Film Guild Cinema, a building designed by Frederick Kiesler, marked an important moment in the reception of Constructivism in America. The design of the projector, screen, and auditorium were also conceived according to the Constructivist camera eye logic. If The Man with the Movie Camera was the paradigm of cinematic Constructivism, then the Film Guild Cinema was itself Constructivist. The screening of the film therefore witnessed the overlaying of two camera eyes – representing the Russian and International variants of Constructivism. The Man with the Movie Camera was the crystallization of the Kinok ­programme – a feature-length paean to Soviet daily life, filmed in Kiev, Moscow, and Odessa, that showed ‘life-as-it-is’ through a dazzling range of cinematic devices, such as dissolves, super-impositions, and stop-motion animation. Vertov conceived the film as symphonic (he composed a soundtrack and analogized vision and sound through the interlinked ‘cine eye’ and ‘radio eye’ tropes) and in the narrative arc of a Soviet day, factors such as work and leisure, human and machine, and old and new are dynamically integrated as intervals in a sequence defined by a shifting metronomic pace and repeated themes. As with Meyerhold’s theatre, the fourth wall between viewer and performance is demolished. The film constantly stresses its status as a filmed entity, just as Meyerhold’s plays opposed illusionism, and insists upon its fundamental reality. The film opens with titular cameraman, Mikhail Kaufman, superimposed at work atop a camera in a metonymic motif, followed by a montage of shots showing the preparation of the auditorium, including the projector loading the reels and automatist chairs unfolding for the arriving audience. The film proper progresses from the languid, eerie street scenes of the sleeping city into a carnival of workers manning whirring machines, and disporting bodies exercising and dancing against a backdrop of the city’s mechanical pulsations. The audience in the auditorium watches itself Sovietizing in a harmonic conjunction of man and machine, amalgamated by the camera’s optical revolution, which is signalled in the closing superimposition of the dilating shutter and human eye (Figure 3.1). Vertov wrote that ‘this complex experiment … frees us, in the first place, from the tutelage of literature and the theater and brings us face to face with 100 percent cinematography. Secondly, it sharply opposes “life as it is”, seen by the aided of the movie camera (kino-eye), to “life as it is”, seen by the imperfect human eye.’13 In September 1929, The Man with a Movie Camera was on show, with the title Living Russia, at the Film Guild Cinema in New York, a venue boasting its own ‘cine-eye’.14 An advertisement for the opening night in February 1929 in New Masses announced:



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3.1  The Man with a Movie Camera (1929, USSR). Directed by Dziga Vertov. The First 100% Cinema —unique in design— —radical in form— —original in projection— conceived—executed by FREDERICK KIESLER.15

Symon Gould had founded the Film Arts Guild in 1925 as the ‘nucleus for the propagation of a little cinema movement’, and commissioned the Film Guild Cinema to show films that were largely ignored by the mainstream. Gould claimed that it was ‘a structure directly inspired by the innate ­necessities of the cinema and embodying revolutionary principles of architectural formations, both exterior and interior’.16 The ‘Neues Bauen’­design (discussed in Chapter 1) witnessed Kiesler’s De Stijl affiliation, evident in the axonometric signage, geometric frontage, and the continuity of exterior and interior. The exterior of the cinema was indebted to De Stijl architect J. J. P. Oud’s Rotterdam Café de Unie, and the cinema’s frontage advertised the Modernism, European-ness, or artistry of the films. The cinema was lavishly fitted out, with bespoke furniture by Kiesler and Ilonka Karasz, to the tune of $450,000.17 The internationalism of

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the cinema and its ethos of hand-made quality over the profit motive serving the tastes of a connoisseur audience (opening night guests included D. W. Griffiths, George Gershwin, and John Dos Passos)  were  evident in an  ­inaugural programme that featured a selection of short films – including Stella Simon’s Hande, a ballet of hands made in Germany in 1927, Nikolai Cikovsky’s animated colour short The Frog Princess, Melville Webber and James Sibley Watson’s The Fall of the House of Usher, Charlie Chaplin’s early short 1 A.M. – followed by a feature, in this case another Soviet film, a VUFKU production entitled Two Days. The Film Guild Cinema’s chief innovation was a device that Kiesler termed the screenoscope. Films were projected onto a screen inside an ocular wooden diaphragm that mirrored the camera lens but also substituted the proscenium curtain (Figure 3.2). This shutter-like device opened and closed the films, and could adjust the screen size and shape. Many of the critics who reported on the opening night compared the auditorium to the interior of a giant camera – one

3.2  Frederick Kiesler, Film Guild Cinema with Screenoscope, New York, 1929.



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said that ‘picture yourself a dwarf inside a giant camera, for that is what the auditorium of this theatre most resembles’.18 The ‘camera eye’ was inscribed in the design of the cinema – Kiesler wrote that ‘our age is an optical one. The rapidity of events and their brief duration require a receding apparatus that can register as speedily as possible. It is the eye. The speed of light waves exceeds all other waves. The film is the flying machine of the camera.’19 The screenoscope also featured two 50-feet black screens on the side-walls and an enormous silver screen running along the entire ceiling. Films could be projected from 38 points, including the six-sided ‘projectorscope’ booth at the rear, creating ‘a gallery of light stations encircling the auditorium and sending rays in all directions’. The multiple screens were never used in this way. If a fully immersive three-dimensional ‘virtual reality’ film was not available, then the closest example, Abel Gance’s Napoleon, a split-screen proto-cinerama epic of 1927, was ironically on show at the same time at the Fifty-Fifth Street Playhouse, home of the rival Art Cinema League. The most apposite film for the screenoscope’s ocular aperture was, of course, The Man with a Movie Camera. Reviewers of The Man with a Movie Camera did not mention the screenoscope, so it is probable that it was already no longer in use. Mordaunt Hall in the New York Times complained that ‘Dziga Vertov does not take into ­consideration the fact that the human eye fixes for a certain space of time that which holds the attention’, and expressed a preference for Walter Ruttmann’s similar but less frenetic 1926 film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City.20 This ‘kaleidoscopic stream’ was ‘somewhat confusing’, a view shared by Motion Picture News’s Raymond Ganly, who derided a ‘title-less newsreel embellished with trick photography’.21 Ganly did, however, acknowledge that Vertov’s stated aim to create ‘an international cinema language’ was ‘worthy’.22 Vertov’s notion of ‘an authentically international absolute language of cinema – ABSOLUTE KINOGRAPHY’ that was distinct from literary and theatrical conventions bore strong resemblance to the De Stijl credo of a universal international style, emblematized by Kiesler’s designs and the notion of ‘100% cinema’. If The Man with a Movie Camera’s symphonic spectacle of the Soviet everyday collapsed film and viewer through the transformative agency of the camera eye, then the screenoscope radically realigned the viewer within a multi-dimensional, multi-sensory immersive filmic experience. The merging of the screenoscope and auditorium, the correlating axonometric interior and exterior designs, and the experimentation of the programme were symbiotic elements that accorded with Kiesler’s Tensionist theory of complete continuity as a transformative agent. He explained that the ‘screenoscope’ was conceived: so that the spectators can be immersed in the drama they are watching … take for instance a war play, such as What Price Glory or The Big Parade. The cannons

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and trucks could appear to be passing down the sidewalks, the airplanes would be flying overhead, and the story would be underway on the stage screen. It is possible to split a picture into many parts in this manner and give an incredible realistic effect.23

It is tempting to imagine the multiple layers of The Man with a Movie Camera similarly projected on the walls and ceiling of the cinema, intensifying the viewer’s already fragmentary experience. The combination of the screenoscope’s ocular shutter and the metaphoric camera eye of the film might have been a supreme moment of Constructivist Amerikanizm – the cine-eye of the ultimate montage panegyric dilating within the lens-like screenoscope in an auditorium modelled on the camera apparatus, within a futuristic cinema in the capital city of modernity. Yet equally it marked a collision of interests­­: if Vertov’s film represented the last great salvo of Russian Constructivist invective, then Kiesler belonged to the more arbitrary genus of International Constructivism. The dialectical force of Vertov’s montage mobilized filmic tricks to reveal the dynamic congruence of the Revolution and the camera as analogues, performing an indexical binding to the Soviet now that was established through constant attention to the apparatus, the process, and the audience. When reviewing a screening of The Man with a Movie Camera at the Stuttgart Film und Foto exhibition, Siegfried Kracauer divined in the camera eye’s self-reflexivity ‘a new form of Romantic irony. Like the Romantic who ironically questions his creations, Vertov again and again penetrates the seemingly self-contained collective realm. The cinema eye fulfils, one might say, a metaphysical function for him. It probes beneath the surface, dispels any sense of certainty, and brushes against the underside of daily routine.’24 Kiesler’s residual Romanticism drew more from the mystical variants, and the screenoscope instilled a fourth-dimensional miasma that befogged the revolutionary predicate of disruption from absorption. Indeed Kiesler imagined an immersive, escapist experience; he wrote, ‘the spectator must be able to lose himself in an imaginary, endless space even though the screen implies the opposite’.25 This absorbed viewer calls to mind Kracauer’s trope of distraction, where the sensory overload of the Gesamtkunstwerk quality of Berlin’s movie palaces took on an autonomous quality which mirrored the anarchic and atomized nature of modernity for the masses, although this potentially revolutionary effect was rendered reactionary through the coherence of the programme, the films, and the architecture into a ‘pseudo-totality’.26 The description was more applicable to the Roxy, the ‘Cathedral of the Motion Picture’ built on West 50th Street in 1927 at a cost of $12 million with over 6000 seats, whereas the Film Guild Cinema was a niche concern for 485 attendees, serving up experimental films for a ‘little cinema’ audience with a taste



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for international Modernism across the arts. If Vertov’s Kinoks and Kiesler’s screenoscope were analogous but eventually incompatible Constructivist camera eye manifestations when conjoined at the Film Guild Cinema, then the ideological impetus of this institution, and the American experimental film movement in general, opposed the commercialism of the mainstream, and in particular Hollywood. In the United States, the ‘little cinema’ movement and the radical resistance to Hollywood coalesced at the turn of the decade, and while depoliticized, Kiesler’s fourth-dimensional cinema was coextensive with De Stijl – it was an avant-garde construction. The Film Guild Cinema was presented in New Masses as consistent with the magazine’s revolutionary remit; evident in the advert that somewhat inaccurately announced the opening as ‘an all Soviet program’, by listing Two Days and a forthcoming showing of Yakov Protazanov’s Aelita, a 1924 futuristic Martian dystopian polemic. The combination of Louis Lozowick’s illustration of Aelita, an atypical multi-­character figural scene with compressed geometric composition that invoked Alexandra Exter’s Constructivist sets for the Martian realm, with Kiesler’s spare De Stijl graphic arrangement of long orthogonal and diagonal rectangles in the advert cohered into a rhetorical manifesto connecting New Masses communism, Soviet cinema, and American avant-garde practices. Furthermore, a short article by the novelist Theodore Dreiser entitled ‘Dreiser on Hollywood’ aligned the cinema with an anti-Hollywood sensibility (and repeated his views in an opening night address). Apart from America: The only other country which is seriously interested in developing the inherent possibilities of the screen is Russia. In other words, Russia refuses to adapt stage technique for its cinema but is trying to develop a new technique which is “cinema” as opposed to “theatre”. And the Film Arts Guild as I see it, has been quick to recognize the superiority of this method as opposed to the American money method.27

In 1933, Dreiser reiterated his attack in a statement in Experimental Cinema in which he denounced Hollywood’s capitalist underpinnings, manifested in a promilitarist and anti-worker agenda, and commended the magazine’s dedication to both Soviet film and the labour movement, in furthering Americans engagement with ‘the idea of class vs. class’.28

Experimental Cinema and Eisenstein’s montage Among American cultural forums, Experimental Cinema most explicitly attempted to amalgamate the avant-garde film movement with both Soviet cinema and revolutionary politics. The magazine’s editorial credo was montage, but it did not begin as a radical concern. The magazine was the mouthpiece of a small

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group of amateur filmmakers called the Cinema Crafters of Philadelphia, led by Lewis Jacobs, who funded the magazine by working for a newsreel company.29 The Cinema Crafters belonged to the world of little magazines such as The Little Review and transition, and indeed expressed a similar machine aesthetic. If The Little Review’s 1927 Machine-Age Exposition catalogue (see Chapter 1) recalibrated the Constructivist conversion of the artist into producer by venerating a mystical engineer, then Experimental Cinema likewise presented montage as a sublime technological wonder. In the first issue, which appeared in February 1930, an editorial announced that ‘Experimental Cinema as the advance guard of a new motion picture art believes it will be the nucleus of a profound and vital new force toward the creation of a worldwide cinema ideology’.30 David Platt’s opening article ‘The New Cinema’ connected cinematic experimentation to the machine aesthetic: ‘the boundless potentialities of the new cinema of the future with its explorations into the legends and myths of the new age of the machine’.31 In the magazine’s second issue, Platt echoed the Machine-Age Exposition’s cosmic Constructivism by proclaiming a ‘spiritual monism’ that celebrated ‘Machinery, Bridges, Automobiles, Zeppelins, Dynamos, the Cinema’ as ‘more important for our ideology than the literature, painting or music of the day desperately struggling in a cul de sac and most of which exalts negative values entirely outside modern life’.32 Montage was the cinematic carrier of this machine lore, and served as a doctrine of modernist film. The first issue was subtitled ‘Form and Montage Number’ and in ‘Principles of the New World Cinema’, Seymour Stern proclaimed that ‘MONTAGE IS THE FULFILLMENT OF THE IMAGE-IDEA THROUGH THE FILM IN DYNAMIC AND VISUAL FORM’.33 Montage was no mere editing technique but an agent of a mechanical divinity: ‘words freighted with the Mosaic thunder of law! Words rich in explicit injunctions of unity, universe-logic, universe-necessity, universemajesty, that few will apprehend and fewer find possible of attainment … Out of such words will emerge the images that will conquer man.’34 Despite the hyperbole, Experimental Cinema did have a practical dimension in its opposition of Soviet montage to Hollywood. Redolent of Dreiser, Stern attacked the ‘the lunacy of the Hollywood tradition’ and argued that Soviet montage would aid the ‘complete emancipation from the tyranny of the former world-conquering Hollywood film-methods’.35 The cover of the first issue, and four of the five covers in all, reproduced a still from an Eisenstein film – in this case, a scene from Ten Days that Shook the World (1927) of soldiers bearing arms that conveyed the vanguardism of the magazine. Eisenstein in particular was the lodestar for Experimental Cinema and his early films, Strike!, The Battleship Potemkin (both 1925), and Ten Days were synonymous with montage. For Americans, Potemkin was the paradigm Russian film.36 Although



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Protazanov’s 1925 Breaking Chairs was the first official Soviet film release in America, just three days before Potemkin, the Film Arts Guild had privately screened the latter in September, before its public premiere in December 1926 as Armoured Cruiser Potemkin.37 Joseph Freeman tartly commented that Potemkin ‘started what some American critic has ironically called the “cult of the Russian film”’.38 Americans subsequently viewed Potemkin as the original montage film, but Eisenstein did not invent the technique. In developing his version of montage, Eisenstein grafted the experiments of Kuleshov with his own Constructivist rationale of ‘attractions’. Kuleshov had first experimented with associative editing in 1918 – the so-called ‘Kuleshov Effect’ juxtaposed newsreel images, such as a child’s coffin or a half-naked woman, with a shot of the actor Ivan Mozzhukhin’s impassive face, which seemingly altered mood according to the juxtaposed scene. In 1924, Kuleshov directed The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, which grafted American slapstick to Soviet propaganda to produce a comic satire of Western anti-Sovietism, demonstrating his concept of cinematic ‘Americanism’, which was based on the principle that Russians preferred foreign films and that American detective films were the most popular.39 He noted that American films evinced ‘cinema specificity’ rather than ‘theatricality’, as scenes were constructed specifically for the film without imitating theatre conventions.40 American films proved that ‘the essence of cinema lies in composition, the change of one filmed fragment to another’, and thus: we must look for the organizational basis of cinema, not in the confines of the filmed fragment, but in the way these fragments relate to one another … This kind of method is technically known as “American shots” and joining together the fragments that constitute the film is called MONTAGE. Genuine cinema is a montage of “American shots” and the essence of cinema, its method of achieving maximum effect, is montage.41

By American shots, he meant D. W. Griffiths’s 1915 Birth of a Nation, which had enlivened single scenes with close-ups, different angles on the action, and acceleration of pace through proliferation of edits. Conversely, Eisenstein critiqued Americanism, albeit acknowledging the debt to Hollywood directors such as Griffiths and Charlie Chaplin, and disassociated montage from American cinema, as ‘America has not understood montage as a new element, a new opportunity’ and its films were merely ‘honestly narrative’.42 As a member of the avant-garde, Eisenstein was more combative than Kuleshov, and his filmmaking melded revolutionary politics and experimental techniques. Following the mutiny that was a pivotal event of the eventually thwarted 1905 revolution, Potemkin opens with Lenin’s tribute to proletarian solidarity and cohesion: ‘the strength of working class is organization. Without

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organization the proletariat is nothing. Organized it is everything. Being organized means unity of action, the unity of practical activity.’43 These films echoed the triumph of the collective over the individual in Constructivist theatre. Freeman wrote that ‘Potemkin was an epic whose hero was no individual, but the mass; whose action moved not in the domain of private life but in history; and whose technique – stark, economical, monumental – was commensurate with its theme’.44 As we saw in the previous chapter, Eisenstein emerged from the ‘mass-machine’ discourse of Meyerhold’s Constructivist theatre, contributing to The Magnanimous Cuckold’s production, and was also involved with Proletcult, producing Jack London’s The Mexican. As Paxton Hibben put in The Nation, ‘Eisenstein is a pupil of Meyerhold, and a modern of the moderns’.45 Eisenstein’s version of montage derived from theatrical Constructivism – his 1923 Lef article ‘The Montage of Attractions’ concerned Proletcult rather than cinema. He articulated a binary division within Proletcult whereby his own and Boris Arvatov’s ‘agitational theatre of attractions = left wing’ opposed the Workers’ Theatre of the Proletcult Central Committee’s ‘figurative-narrative theatre = right wing’.46 The agitational tendency drew from mass culture including, but not specifically, film: ‘the school for the montageur is cinema and, principally, music-hall and circus’.47 Examining shock techniques for activating audiences rather than lulling them through illusion, Eisenstein asserted the importance of flashpoints in a production that he termed ‘attractions’: ‘an attraction … is an aggressive moment in theatre, i.e. any element of it that subjects the audience to emotional or psychological influence, verified by experience and mathematically calculated to produce specific emotional shocks in the spectator in their proper order within the whole’.48 Strike! contains many such attractions. Lozowick explained that Eisenstein’s attractions purposed to ‘do conscious violence to the spectators’ established habits, and direct their emotions into desired channels’.49 Eisenstein stitched discrete sequences of film together to maximize the impact of the narrative, most notably the juxtaposition of soldiers storming a tenement and hurling an infant from the balconies with the slaughter of a cow in an abattoir. Freeman wrote that ‘Eisenstein’s aim was to … stir the spectator to state of pity and terror which would unconsciously and automatically be transferred to the shooting of the strikers’.50 If Strike! was not screened in America, then the attractions of Potemkin were too much for the censors, who cut two of its most crucial, but brutal, scenes: the close-up of the maggot-ridden meat that sparked the mutiny and the slaying of a mother on the Odessa steps.51 American responses to Potemkin celebrated Eisenstein’s technique as a giant leap forward in cinematic art. William A. Barrett, writing in the National Board of Review Magazine, embraced the film’s veristic power in capturing the ‘spirit of revolution’: ‘reality as it swiftly occurs appears to have been caught and



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photographed, and likewise its foundation. In this regard no other motion picture but the newsreel has approached Potemkin, and the film leads to a reconsideration of the cinema as an art and to a new evaluation of its architectonics.’52 In the New York Times, Mordaunt Hall ignored the ‘applause … from prejudiced persons’ to enjoy Eisenstein’s ‘excellent conception of rhythm’.53 Liberal and communist publications were less squeamish about the politics of Potemkin. In The New Republic, Evelyn Gerstein similarly praised Eisenstein’s ‘musician’s feeling for tempo; his rhythms throughout are amazing, flexible, trenchant, cumulative’, but ‘now that the Russians have captured the cinema there is no end to what they may do’.54 The Daily Worker expectedly championed the film’s politics and technique, but also reported on a controversy surrounding its reception.55 It reported a spat between William A. Johnston, who had criticized the film in Motion Picture News as ‘Bolshevik propaganda, and a poor picture’, and Gould of the Film Arts Guild who sharply defended Potemkin as ‘blazing with vitality and refusing to record history in the hokumized, lovey-dovey manner of some of our pseudo-historical films’.56 Experimental Cinema’s fixation with Eisenstein’s montage initially mirrored Gould’s apolitical championship. Jacobs wrote in the first issue that ‘Potemkin was the beginning of aesthetic form in the cinema’, the moment that ‘cinema became aware of its individuality’, but did not mention its all-important revolutionary message.57 While a still from Ten Days featured on the first issue’s cover, in ‘The New Cinema’ Platt was ambiguous about the relevance of Soviet culture for American film: Today, particularly in America, at a time when there is everywhere desire to escape the perils of a mechanical age, at a time when it has become almost fashionable to fall back into traditional positions, beaten paths off the main road, without even attempt at analysis or positive statement of the problems of mechanism as to their social, political or psychological elements, and in this sense, the humanism of those who look back to New England for authority, is as far away from the actual problems of the American scene as the humanitarianism of those who look forward to the USSR for a point of reference.58

Montage was an element in the ‘force’ of the ‘motion picture machine’. The reproduction of Pudovkin’s ‘Film Direction and Film Manuscript’ article in the first two issues of Experimental Cinema reflected a technical rather than ideological rationale. However, there were indications of an alignment. Stern’s ‘Principles of World Cinema’ opposed the innovations of Soviet cinema to Hollywood’s ‘stagnation’ as an exemplar of successfully utilizing film as ‘an instrument of capturing the mass-mind’, and anticipated that ‘the full realisation of these principles will approximate the highest degree of attainment in Eisenstein’s [unrealised] film-interpretation of Marx’s Capital’.59

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The left turn in Experimental Cinema Although the first two issues of Experimental Cinema presented Soviet montage as a distillation of the machine aesthetic and, paradoxically, a hand-crafted corrective to Hollywood’s mass production, there were rumblings of the partisan debates that would soon dominate the developing radical film movement. Yet it was the contributions of the critic Harry Alan Potamkin that most strongly indicated the radical turn of Experimental Cinema and the drive towards creating a film movement that was fully sympathetic to the USSR’s revolutionary films. Although the lone communist contributor, Potamkin would exert considerable influence over the politicization of the magazine’s discourse on Soviet kino. A published poet and film critic for Hound and Horn, New Masses, and Close-Up, Potamkin was a prolific, and unflinching, commentator, whose radicalized film writing was curtailed by his untimely death in 1933 – as Russell Campbell puts it, he was ‘undoubtedly the only U.S. film critic ever to be accorded a Red funeral (though not a Party member, he was so honored “because of his revolutionary activity in the workers’ struggles”)’.60 Unlike his peers at Experimental Cinema, Potamkin’s writings on Soviet film were incipiently politicized, and his critique of the apoliticism of the Russophile film audience was unforgiving. In the first issue of Experimental Cinema, Potamkin attacked a book by the co-editor of Close-Up, the Swiss-based but English-run film magazine, rounding on Winifred Bryher’s 1929 Film Problems of Soviet Russia, and by extension the apolitical cult of Russian films.61 Founded in July 1927, Close-Up typified the ‘little cinema’ movement’s espousal of Soviet film by celebrating its formal innovations over its revolutionary contingency – Orlton West’s ‘Russian Cutting’ and Ralph Bond’s ‘This Montage Business’, for example, merely discussed the technical and aesthetic aspects of montage.62 Potamkin’s contention was that Close-Up separated Soviet filmmaking from its political basis, and Bryher’s book merely defended the art of the films against charges of propaganda.63 He argued that this diminution of propaganda implicitly pacified the ‘Russian attack’, whereas the ‘Russian idea is dangerous, decidedly dangerous, to the prevailing acceptations’, as ‘the dangerous idea creates the dangerous, or heroic, structure – ultimately’.64 If Potamkin argued that Soviet films and the Russian Revolution were intractable, he was a Formalist in the Russian sense, concerned with form rather than narrative because ‘form is the conception constantly informing the structure’, and that the ‘approximation’ or ‘attainment’ of form was its aim and achievement.65 His cinematic Formalism was apposite to Soviet directors in presenting montage as embedded with ‘the social-revolution, the criticism of the bourgeoisie, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the ultimate of collectivism, the re-education of the mass and the individual in the mass, the conquest of the



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egocentric mind’.66 Montage was not appealing despite the propaganda – it was the agent of the ‘Russian social idea’. Potamkin identified a similar process of aesthetic abstraction in Experimental Cinema subsequently, which, somewhat perversely, he expressed in a Close-Up critique of its rival’s editors as ‘film novitiates’. He derided Jacobs et al. as ‘young mystified mystics who have not been able to direct pertinent arrows toward even the periphery of Hollywood’.67 His words seemingly struck home as when the third issue appeared in February 1931 – the delay attributable to chronic budgetary problems – Experimental Cinema had supplanted mysticism with militancy (Figure 3.3). Jacobs wrote: Experimental Cinema will … grow with the strengthening of the revolutionary labor movement in America with which its lot has been cast. We will correct the errors of our inexperience in our struggle against the reactionary film and for workers’ movies in America. We are pledged to work hand in hand with those who see in the cinema a class weapon which must be exposed and employed by the working class.68

An editorial statement explained that ‘an intensification and clarification of policy which will bring Experimental Cinema into close relationship with the labor movement in America’.69 Jacobs now presented Eisenstein’s montage, in a short prelude to a reproduction of Eisenstein’s ‘The Cinematographic Principle and Japanese Culture’, in overtly political terms: The plastic means toward profound effects and the nucleus of every subsequent film intelligence … a mighty style and a form that evolves and corresponds with the complexity and precision of the triumphant proletariat, the first to dominate the film’s organic problem and the most able to saturate its structure with the programme of the revolutionary social substance.70

No longer the outlet of ‘cinema crafters’, Experimental Cinema was now affiliated with two nascent radical film groups, the Workers Film and Photo League and American Prolet-Kino. In a short piece entitled ‘Workers Films in New York’, the editors now saw Soviet film in political terms: There has been a proletarian revolution in Russia. The Soviet Union has created a cinema that has taught us the fraud and vulgarity of film productions in our country. The Soviet cinema is the cinema of a class that has achieved its historical task in conquering power. Its films are class films, just as the American film is that of a class in power – a reactionary class doomed to destruction.71

They expressed solidarity with the USSR and the American workers film movement, stating that ‘the movie must become our weapon’.72 In doing so they invoked the League’s slogan that the camera was ‘a weapon’ in the class struggle.73 The League emerged in January 1931 out of the Workers Camera

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3.3  Experimental Cinema, 1 (February 1930), cover.

League, a small still photography group, and, alongside Potamkin, numbered Tom Brandon, Sam Brody, Leo Seltzer, Lester Balog, and Robert Del Duca. Potamkin wrote the League’s manifesto, which appeared in Workers Theatre in July 1931, avowing to counter the ‘part the movie plays as a weapon of reaction’ and to ‘encourage, support, and sustain the left critic and the left moviemaker who is documenting dramatically and persuasively the disproportions in our present economy’.74 As well as producing films to advance the worker’s



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cause, the League would more generally oppose ‘class abuse and censorship’ and the ‘invidious portrayal of the foreign-born worker, the Negro, the oriental, the worker generally’.75 The League also aimed to foster ‘the education of the workers and others in the part the movie plays as an instrument for social purposes – in the USSR’.76 In a list of complaints, Potamkin opposed critics who ‘talk about the Soviet film without investigating its history, understanding its social impetus or observing its direction?’77 In ‘Workers Films in New York’, Experimental Cinema reiterated these points in a summary of the League’s aims: ‘to struggle against and expose the reactionary film; to produce documentary films reflecting the lives and struggles of American workers; to spread and popularize the great artistic and revolutionary Soviet productions’.78 The League disseminated Soviet films through its relationship with Workers International Relief (WIR), which supplied copies of silent movies such as Potemkin and Mother and current films such as Cannons and Tractors and Red and White, which would be shown at WIR’s West 21st Street headquarters and in improvised cinemas to strikers and rural workers. The League was technically an American branch of the worker film and photography movement sponsored by WIR, an organization founded by the German communist Willi Münzenberg – a self-made publishing mogul who had risen through the Comintern’s Youth International and one of the proponents of the Spartakist uprising – in Berlin in 1921 to generate aid for the Volga famine, which had close links with the Comintern. Hans Gruber writes that beyond famine relief WIR’s ‘lasting effect was the creation of the framework for an international and seemingly suprapolitical organization that could be used to further the cause of international communism’.79 As a leading German communist with strong Soviet ties, Münzenberg developed WIR into a formidable international institution that served the USSR but remained autonomous, and oversaw a movement that by 1931 had over 100,000 members in 932 organizations, with activities ranging from social work to summer camps.80 Münzenberg created a formidable propaganda machine through a publishing wing, running magazines such as the satirical Der Eulenspiegel, the daily newspaper Berlin am Morgen (Berlin in the Morning), and the illustrated magazine Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ, Workers Illustrated News), which contained essays, fiction, and pioneering photomontage work by John Heartfield. WIR’s film concerns were also extensive, disseminating Soviet films internationally and from 1924 through film production. Beginning with relief-focused films such as Hunger in Soviet Russia, before shifting to more general propaganda pieces such as William Kruse’s The Fifth Year (1923) – a documentary about the ameliorative effect of American bought tractors that was screened in Chicago, WIR funded companies included MezhrabpomRuss, which produced Pudovkin’s Mother (1926) and The End of St. Petersburg (1928) and Nikolai Ekk’s The Road to Life (1931), and Prometheus-Filmgesellschaft, a

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Germany distribution organization that also made films such as Phil Jutzi’s Mother Krause’s Journey to Happiness (1929) and Stefan Dudow and Bertolt Brecht’s Kuhle Wampe (1932).81 In this respect, the League was an American outrider of the cultural wing of the Comintern, but in practice WIR supplied limited tangible support and so the filmmakers were necessarily resourceful. Brody described how the League was chronically underfunded: We shot 35mm silent, using cut rate “shortends” and beat-up old Eyemo and De Vry hand cameras plus the “portable” De Vry and Acme projectors. We raised money through membership dues, bazaars, and affairs. Even with the financial support of our mother organization, the Workers’ International Relief, it was always an uphill struggle.82

As such, the League marshalled its resources carefully by producing newsreels of revolutionary activity, such as strikes, hunger marches and anti-fascist demonstrations, in necessary emulation of Vertov’s Kino Pravda model. Formed in the escalating Depression, the League had plenty of material to cover. If films such as National Hunger March (1931) served mainly to chronicle an important event and offered little editorial intervention, the America Today series (1932–4), of which only one episode survives, featured some rudimentary montage. The film juxtaposes police violence towards protestors against the acceptance of a Nazi Emissary, Hanns Weidemann, in New York in 1933, with President Roosevelt repealing the Volstead Act’s prohibition of alcohol cut with shots of Mussolini, Hitler, and a battleship discharging its guns. The blunt but undeniably militant message is underscored by an intertitle that asserts ‘fascism and militarism are their answer to mass unemployment and starvation’.83 This theme was continued in Bonus March (1932), which followed the Hoover administration’s hammering of the Bonus Expeditionary Force. The bonus marchers consisted of about 20,000 Great War veterans demonstrating for an advance payment of bonuses, ‘adjusted compensation certificates’, that were due in 1945.84 On 28 July 1932, police killed two veterans while attempting to evict the Bonus Army from its encampment at Anacostia Flats in Washington. Following President Hoover’s call for order, General Douglas MacArthur attacked the bonus marchers with cavalry, tanks, and infantry, armed with bayonets and tear gas, burning down and flattening the camp.85 Seltzer spliced his shots of the subsequent devastation with commercial newsreels of the eviction, and Balog produced an effective anti-war montage, which jumped from bodies in no-man’s-land to homeless ex-servicemen asleep on New York streets, to emphasize the extent of the state’s betrayal of the veterans. The purpose of the League’s newsreels was to act as a witness to the events from the worker’s viewpoint, unlike commercial newsreel companies that showed the perspective of the authorities. In Ford Massacre (1932), Detroit League member Joseph



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Hudyma filmed the brutal attack on strikers at the Ford Motor Company plant by armed police and militia that resulted in the deaths of four of the strike leaders. William Alexander aptly concludes upon Hudyma’s improvised filming of the smoke-filled pandemonium and panic: ‘the power of the film is not derived from the camerawork but from the grim events themselves’.86 In sum, the League preferred the low-cost newsreel’s indexical power as a witness to the medium experimentation that the Cinema Crafters had celebrated – this would be the basis of a schism in the League. American Prolet-Kino, the other worker film group, had greater aesthetic if more unrealistic ambitions than the League. Further information appeared in Spring 1931 in a short-lived magazine called The Left, in which Stern presented ‘A Working Class Cinema for America?’ calling for ‘new forms’ and ‘new methods of montage’ to counter the ‘vampires that have sucked intelligence and kino-sense out of the brains of the American proletariat’, and advocated ‘rehabilitating the kino-sense of the mass-eye: to copulate with decinematized masses in order to infuse new filmic life into them’.87 He produced a manifesto for a political cinema: A cinema of bread-lines and starvation in the streets A cinema of police clubbings and a reign of terror A cinema of screaming against fascist developments in the USA A cinema smashing lynch-law and gangster-law A cinema attacking with supreme fury, vehemence and passion the mightiest and most vicious capitalism, the most brutal class-exploiting “society”, the world has ever known …

Naturally, montage was the basis of Stern’s proposed American kino: New montage-forms for typically American raw-material imagery. Synthetic montage. Synthetic imagery.88

In detailing American working-class cinema, Stern situated the League in the ‘Kino-Pravda’ model, whereas American Prolet-Kino would draw from Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Dovzhenko by forsaking newsreels for a ‘highly calculative construction’ based on ‘reconstructed reality’, producing an ‘agitation-film on a large scale’ derived especially from Eisenstein’s version of montage.89 Given the League’s funding problems, Stern conceded that ‘obstacles are many’ for American Prolet-Kino.90 American Prolet-Kino represented aesthetic ambition in contrast to the practicality of the League. The League was proven correct in as much as Stern’s attempts were thwarted through insufficient funds – American Prolet-Kino’s sole film, the 1933 short Black Dawn, contains some effective editing but lacks a strong social narrative. Under the auspices of the Los Angeles branch of the League, Stern produced a documentary about exploited fruit-pickers that afforded an

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opportunity for realizing American Prolet-Kino’s aims. Yet in the Daily Worker, ‘Lens’ (League member Brody’s soubriquet as film critic) rounded on Stern for ‘squandering a small fortune’ by dwelling on cantaloupes instead of the workers, and wasting 18,000 feet of film. Lens joked bitterly that ‘“Cantaloupes at sunset” was the characterization of Sidney Howard, an eyewitness to the carnage’.91 The response in Experimental Cinema was that the League’s production-manager was ‘relentlessly opposed to making the film a creative effort’.92

Montage experiments The editors of Experimental Cinema overcame lack of funds by drawing up montage scenarios for potential rather than planned films. In his article in The Left, Stern argued that ‘Capitalist America is wealthy, very wealthy, in image-symbol material for the future dialectic film’ and exemplified with a montage sequence that was ‘CLASS in character’: millionaire (capitalist) thug prize fighter brainless, sweet-faced middle-class girl “impartial” liberal dinosaur.93

This somewhat inelegant litany concludes in the synthetic ‘dinosaur’, an allegory of ‘Capitalist America’. In the second instalment of ‘Principles of the New World Cinema’ in Experimental Cinema, Stern’s ‘Section of a Continuity’ was a montage exercise based in a dystopian city riven with class struggle, as ‘Cossack-police’, pummel strikers at the foot of the City Hall skyscraper.94 Stern exemplified how associative edits of ‘Flash Close-Ups’ and ‘Sharp Close-Ups’ of a policeman coshing a striker with a ‘mob-stick’ and the fare-register on a streetcar revealed the unholy alliance of state and capital. In a nod to Eisenstein, the concluding shot is an ‘attraction’, featuring an ‘advancing street-car with the dead body. Like a giant Machine-Moloch.’95 Likewise, Lewis Jacobs’s ‘Highway 66: Montage Notes for a Documentary Film’, which appeared in the February 1933 issue, was so associative that it bordered on free verse.96 Being a ‘documentary’, Jacobs’s scenario addressed contemporary America: —Limp cities alike in their escapes and conquests —Concordant traffic —Dumb hordes long out of work —Prowling.97



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Jacobs alone surely knew how the following shots would eventually appear as topical footage: —The undulation of a calve or breast

calling for a hand to plumb and survey —It’s greek fecundity! —Faces —Prolix and Stained —In format vigilant —Pouched in decay —Caloried —Sticky with time —Rapt and furrowed.98

He was likely suggesting atmospheric effects, so that images such as ‘The city swallows the sun/ men hack God into bread’ would indicate the tragic drama of a bread-line in Manhattan. Unlike Stern’s continuity experiment, Jacobs partially realized his montage scenario. ‘Highway 66’ belonged to a projected four-part documentary entitled As I Walk, of which one section was completed in 1933. Opening with the title scrawled on a trash can lid, Footnote to Fact is an eight-minute dramatized documentary that intersperses everyday scenes of New York of the Depression with the suicide by gas inhalation of a young woman in a bed-sit.99 Jacobs amalgamated the dramatic narrative, newsreel footage of demonstrations and hoboes milling around on the Bowery, and scenic and abstract shots of the city together in a manner redolent of Soviet montage. The integration of newsreel provided veracity, and aligned the film with League productions. A jobbing cameraman by trade, Jacobs had travelled to Kentucky and Alabama for the League in 1931 to cover the Scottsboro case, and Alexander writes that the League used the footage that Jacobs made in New York for As I Walk during lunch breaks while working for a film trailer company for its own productions.100 On the other hand, the film bore resemblance to city films such as Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s Manhatta (1921), Robert Flaherty’s 24$ Island (1925), and most notably Jay Leyda’s A Bronx Morning (1931). Leyda, a young photographer and poet from Dayton, Ohio, arrived in New York in 1930 to work as Ralph Steiner’s assistant, an association that led him to join the League.101 Although he would eventually become America’s leading expert on Russian film, his familiarity with contemporary Soviet cinema at this stage was limited – his later encyclopaedic knowledge stemmed from studying under Eisenstein in Russia from 1933 to 1936. In 1932, Leyda had already contacted the Mezhrabpom Kino-School in Moscow, writing that ‘because there is no cinema school in America, I have worked independently, filming

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and finishing my own pictures, of both an experimental and documentary nature’.102 On arrival in Moscow, Leyda showed A Bronx Morning to Eisenstein and consequently joined the latter’s course in film direction. Between 1933 and 1936, Leyda worked with both Eisenstein and Vertov, in the process achieving an unparallelled experience and knowledge of Soviet filmmaking. A Bronx Morning shows facets of the daily lives of the working class in the borough, blending together without jarring juxtapositions. A cinematic journey into and around the Bronx, the film observes minor details on a bright summer’s morning, the area snatched in glimpses through defined light and shadows. With its jumpy editing, cropped figures, light effects, angular and aerial perspectives, shots from a train on the elevated railway and a tram, close-ups of curious shop displays, billowing washing lines, birds in flight, and newspapers gliding on the breeze, it belongs to the city documentary genre, exemplified by Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a City, László Moholy-Nagy’s Berliner-Stilleben (1926), Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera, Alberto Cavalcanti’ s Rien Que Les Heures (1926), and Jean Vigo and Boris Kaufman’s A Propos de Nice (1931). A Bronx Morning is, however, a city sonata rather than a symphony, offering a brief, fragmentary close-up of a locality in the metropolis. People and objects are atomized and interchangeable, rendered equivalent in the close-ups, lighting abstractions, and angular camera perspectives. Vladimir Petric writes that this ‘particularity’ of A Bronx Morning is closer to Vertov’s ‘method of isolating characteristic details from an environment and giving them new cinematic relevance through the succession of images’, than to Ruttmann’s Berlin, which uses montage in a more symphonic manner.103 Leyda later cited the influence of Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera, the first Soviet film that he saw in New York (presumably at the Film Guild Cinema), on A Bronx Morning.104 Noting its languid pace and straight photography, rather than Vertov’s trickery, Petric rightly argues that the film owes more to Mikhail Kaufman’s Moskva, which was also screened at the Film Guild Cinema.105 Despite this connection, the relation of Leyda’s film to Soviet cinema remains problematic. For example, the representation of work is not presented as a comment on labour but as visually striking motion. Without a guiding principle, the montage here was potentially undialectical as there was little antagonism in the juxtaposition of shots to create a complex synthesis. Leyda’s and Jacobs’s films drew from Soviet cinema and operated on the nexus of revolutionary and avant-garde filmmaking encapsulated by Experimental Cinema. There remained a relationship of sorts with League newsreels. Steiner, on the other hand, was a League member who seemingly had no interest in newsreel production. Steiner’s actual camera work for the League was probably minimal – Alexander suggests that he recorded the 1931 May Day celebrations, with assistance from Irving Lerner, but no substantiating footage survives. His



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motivations for joining the League are obscure, but I disagree with Alexander’s and Campbell’s appellation of apolitical to describe a filmmaker who spent much of the 1930s involved in radical cultural groups. Also, while Steiner was admittedly apolitical prior to 1931, his photographs had appeared in New Masses since 1927 and he already moved in circles that encompassed the radical left. However, his primary interests were in film experimentation and instruction, evident in regular screenings of his early films at the League and later at the Harry Alan Potamkin Film School.106 These ‘pattern films’, such as H2O (1929), Surf and Seaweed (1930), and Mechanical Principles (1930), predated his politicization and were abstractions that differed considerably from newsreels but nonetheless reveal analogies with Soviet film. Petric terms H2O a ‘montage study of the patterns of light and shadow reflected on water’.107 The film consists of twelve minutes of increasingly abstract shots of water flowing from pipes and pumps, with several ‘chapters’ devoted to the patterns of ripples and the effects of sunlight on water, including reflections of objects, such as reeds and posts. At various points the close-up focus, obtained with a 12-inch lens, creates images that Jere Abbott soundly described as ‘animated Chinese brush work’.108 In the February 1930 issue of Close-Up, an unnamed reviewer relayed that Steiner had personally screened the film for him and had denounced ‘trick’ camera work.109 The reviewer wrote that ‘if Mr. Steiner refers to aimless virtuosity, he is quite justified in his opposition to such devices as multiple exposure, direct use of the negative, prismatic distortion, truncation by angle, etc.’ and H2O ‘is a good example of the direct method photographer’s film’.110 H2O exemplified ‘the American attitude’ and fitted ‘into the American practice easily, since it asks not for the non-literal eye, but for the sharpening of the literal eye’.111 If Steiner ‘literally’ filmed water through the camera, then this ‘literal eye’ is comparable to Vertov’s veristic ‘cine eye’, although the latter viewed social relations beyond the limits of the human eye, whereas the ‘literal eye’ merely recorded objects in a direct manner (in the next chapter I will discuss Steiner’s still photography, which appeared in such diverse contexts as the Machine-Age Exposition in New York in 1927 and the 1929 Film und Foto show in Stuttgart, which featured The Man with a Movie Camera on the poster, in relation to the New Vision and Soviet ‘radical Formalism’). Soviet films such as Pudovkin’s The End of St. Petersburg and Viktor Turin’s Turksib (1929) featured multiple shots of light on water, but such abstractions were commonplace in Soviet films, and in each case there was a union of montage, abstraction, and propaganda, whereas Steiner’s abstraction was closer to ‘cinema pur’. H2O, Surf and Seaweed, and Mechanical Principles were shown in March 1931 at the ‘Music and Films’ evening of the Fourth Season of Copland-Sessions concerts at the Broadhurst Theatre on West 44th Street, with especially commissioned

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music from Marc Blitzstein and Colin McPhee, alongside Cavalcanti’s La P’tite Fille. If Surf and Seaweed reiterated H2O’s aquatic content, then Mechanical Principles is a short machine aesthetic experiment. The film was shot at the Science Museum in New York, after Steiner had witnessed an exhibition of wooden mechanical devices known as ‘eccentrics’, which each performed a particular movement. The entire eleven minutes of Mechanical Principles are devoted to these repetitive mechanical operations. Like H2O, the camera holds a static view on the sequence of changing machine parts. The gears shift and click in and out of position, the cogs rotate in alternate directions, pistons pump, and levers turn. The machines operate with fine and complex precision, but without purpose – the ‘eccentrics’ are functionless machines devised for their own mechanics alone. The focus is close-up, and the sole indicator of the world outside of these mechanical movements is a plain two-dimensional background, the wall on which the several ‘eccentrics’ were affixed. As the film progresses from shots of slow moving levers, wheels, and pistons, to frantic spinning discs and cogs, it appears to accelerate. M. F. Agha attended the Copland-Sessions night and reported that ‘the mechanical actors became more human and were enveloped in a sort of mathematical humour. The audience actually laughed at the antics of one of them – a mean metallic dingus which was grasping a helpless bolt by the head!’112 The eccentrics are anthropomorphic, and sometimes resemble small insects or miniature robots. If Steiner’s emphasis was comic, then these ‘machines’ are also archaic. The technology here seems antiquated, as this is not the ‘stateof-the-art’ gleaming steel of an actual machine but a collection of wooden models – ‘eccentric’ devices fashioned and assembled by hand, like relics of the first machine age, also suggesting the ‘hand-made’ nature of the amateur film as opposed to Hollywood’s assembly line production. The mechanical focus on the wooden machines also has an ironic register in its precise rendering of the grains of wood in the ‘eccentrics’ – the precision highlights their non-industrial nature. Abbott, who reviewed the Copland-Sessions night for Creative Art in 1931, found the machines disappointing, arguing that ‘it was unfortunate that the models lacked a certain reality it being obvious that wood had been used in place of steel’.113 Joel Zuker sees the focus on ‘woodenness’ to be part of a general process of abstraction, and writes that ‘thus any possibility of a ‘political statement’ is ‘effaced by the film’s formal strategies’.114 Potamkin wrote in 1929 that the machine made the ideal subject for radical filmmakers: There is no more insistent experience in our lives than contact with machine. It is with us from waking until sleeping, and, while we sleep, is still at work. Of all the things that move, none is more assertive than the machine. It is most



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logical, therefore, that the machine should force itself upon the eye of another machine, whose function it is to construct and present motion. The machine is, for this reason, a basic subject matter I recommend to the serious moviemaker, whether he choose a press, derrick, steam shovel or locomotive.115

If the machine itself was a logical subject for the camera’s machine eye, then Steiner’s film superficially corresponds, yet there is perhaps a somewhat less adulatory engagement with the machine aesthetic in Mechanical Principles. In Soviet films, the machine was a whirring assemblage of metal parts, an intrinsically industrial device, whereas Steiner’s machines were useless wooden exercises in mechanical movement – Steiner shared more with the Dadaism of Ballet Mécanique’s makers, and indeed later shared a bill with Man Ray. Despite what Zuker vaguely terms the ‘Constructivist reverberations’ of Mechanical Principles, it is incompatible with Soviet film propaganda.116 The main technical difference is in the editing of the film, which was a self-confessed weak point in Steiner’s practice, and specifically in the absence of montage. Scott Macdonald goes too far in stating (in relation to H2O), that ‘one could argue that the increasing focus on composition, rather than montage … demonstrates what Steiner may have seen as the perceptual limitations inherent in the dependence on editing that characterized Eisenstein’s work’.117

Eisenstein in America Steiner later recalled that he had met Eisenstein, with Frigori Alexandrov, and Eduard Tisse, when they visited New York in 1930. At a welcoming party held by Genevieve Taggard, Eisenstein had shocked Communist Party members by ignoring their ‘convoluted, pretentious kinds of questions’ and demanding instead to be given a tour of New York’s brothels. Steiner offered to drive them in his convertible to the Rose Danceland in Harlem in lieu of a brothel, but as it was too early in the evening took them to Wall Street to ‘drive through those canyons’.118 According to Steiner, ‘they were absolutely amazed’. 119 Steiner left the group after ‘we found some blacks to take them to Harlem’.120 Eisenstein’s behaviour in the United States contributed to a larger controversy, which drew in Experimental Cinema and dominated its final issues. Lured to America by $3000 per week from Paramount and the chance to use the latest sound technologies, Eisenstein’s sojourn was ultimately fruitless and his contract was severed after six months. An adaptation of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy failed to materialize because Eisenstein’s preference for unknowns over stars conflicted with Hollywood marketing. Furthermore, antiCommunists publically labelled him a ‘Red Dog’.121 A temporary reprieve came from Sinclair who helped to secure funds and Eisenstein’s visa extension,

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allowing him to travel to Mexico to make a film about its revolutionary past. Strains in the relationship between Sinclair and Eisenstein soon followed, due in part to Sinclair’s discomfort with Eisenstein’s homosexuality and on-set unreliability during the making of ¡Que Viva Mexico!. This four-chapter dramatization of Mexico’s history, from the earliest Indian civilization to the ­contemporary  Republic, chimed with Potemkin and Ten Days, but sadly was never completed. Sinclair impounded Eisenstein’s rushes, passing them to Sol Lesser, a Hollywood director, who butchered the film into Thunder over Mexico. Eisenstein’s situation grew more precarious when a furious Stalin commanded his return in 1932. In 1979 Alexandrov finally produced a faithful version from Eisenstein’s outline, which had appeared in Experimental Cinema in 1934.122 Experimental Cinema first covered the ¡Que Viva Mexico! controversy in 1931, in Stern’s accusatory ‘Hollywood Bulletin’, which reported on the censorship of Soviet films.123 By 1933 the luckless ¡Que Viva Mexico! production was the battleground for a revolutionary war against capitalist Hollywood, and stills appeared on the fourth issue’s cover and in seventeen reproductions inside, alongside two articles on the film, a piece by Eisenstein, and a statement by Dreiser.124 Dreiser’s statement repeated his Film Guild Cinema tirade, casting the magazine against ‘Big Business Hollywood with, its frenzy for money and sex’ and by extension ‘capitalism, which runs Hollywood’.125 An editorial statement claimed that Experimental Cinema attacked Hollywood on behalf of ‘working classes and oppressed the nationalities’.126 Five articles in this issue covered Hollywood’s ideological fealty to the bourgeoisie and its racism, including the Cuban radical J. M. Valdes-Rodriguez’s ‘Hollywood: Sales Agent of American Imperialism’, which conflated Hollywood’s practices to the abuses of acquisitive American corporations in Latin America. In 1934, the fifth and final issue of Experimental Cinema also used ¡Que Viva Mexico! on the cover and printed Eisenstein’s scenario with a rebarbative introduction from Stern. A ‘Manifesto on “Que Viva Mexico”’ attacked the ‘definite fascist implications’ of Thunder over Mexico and demanded the delivery of 200,000 feet of footage to Eisenstein for completion of the film.127 The editors aligned the magazine with ¡Que Viva Mexico!: ‘a signal attempt to put into practice the editorial policies and theories by which the editors of Experimental Cinema have sought to ensure the intellectual and creative integrity of their magazine’.128 Nailing its colours to the mast of a sinking ship, the magazine expired after this final issue. Harry Geduld and Ronald Gottesman argue that Experimental Cinema’s attack on Sinclair helped damn the  film by fuelling the antagonism (Sinclair wrote to Dreiser that the consensus in Hollywood was that Stern was ‘utterly rash, immature, and dishonest’).129 As Edmund Wilson noted, the production of ¡Que Viva Mexico! was ‘an ironic and tragic fiasco’.130



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Coda: a Pie in the Sky of an experimental, radical cinema The final issue of Experimental Cinema includes a touching survey of avant-garde film in the USA. ‘Experimental Cinema in America’ collated the League and its members Leyda, Steiner, and Jacobs, amateur pioneers Watson and Webber, independent directors Henwar Rodakiewicz and Jo Berne, satirical documentary auteur Irving Browning, the lyrical Herman Weinberg, and abstractionists Joseph Schillinger and Mary Ellen Bute (marking an early appearance in print of this lynchpin of post-war American experimental cinema).131 In actuality, American avant-garde cinema was increasingly partisan and these experimental and newsreel tendencies of the League were splintering, coinciding with the demise of Experimental Cinema. There was growing dissatisfaction with League productions, noted by Mike Gold in the Daily Worker: ‘our Film and Photo League has been in existence for some years, but outside of a few good newsreels, hasn’t done much to bring this great cultural weapon to the working class. As yet they haven’t produced a single reel of comedy, agitation, satire or working class drama.’132 The masses had inevitably ignored the League’s fitful and futile class war against Hollywood. In 1934, Steiner, Hurwitz, and Lerner seceded from the League to form Nykino, tired of the austerity of the newsreels policy. The newsreel lobby of Brandon, Brody, and Seltzer cited economics and the power of evidence, but Steiner found this mode aesthetically and therefore politically ineffective, arguing in an article entitled ‘Revolutionary Movie Production’ that ‘there can be no good propaganda without good art’.133 He revealed his frustrations to Leyda about the League’s simplistic approach in training filmmakers at the Harry Alan Potamkin Film School: ‘They are now despite my best effort to block them off from it about to start by making a film on Waste on Want in New York City. I wanted them to start by making a few shots of some simple action taken with the idea of cutting them together in different ways to show the action from different points of view, but Brandon with his usual steam roadrolling and by brandoning me as a “perfectionist” has the class about to make a film before they know how to make a shot.’134 The divisions in the League, its necessary distinction from the projected format of the abortive American Prolet-Kino, and the corresponding secession of Nykino, partly reproduced the heated opposition between Eisenstein and Vertov. In 1926, Vertov’s ‘The Factory of Facts’ accused Eisenstein of ‘a simple borrowing of the external style of the Cine-Eye’ in making ‘played’ films  – in essence superficially representing facts through fiction – and posited ‘an archive of non-played films’, a type of bare documentary.135 The familiarity of Americans with these debates is uncertain – a feature on Vertov in the final issue of Experimental Cinema mentioned no antagonisms, and neither did Potamkin’s

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‘The Montage Film’ essay for Movie Makers in 1930 articulate differences.136 Potamkin’s description of The Man with a Movie Camera as a ‘documentary montage-film’ and of Eisenstein’s ‘mass-documentary legalism’ and ‘intensive editing’ seem interchangeable.137 It is hard to imagine Potamkin finding much merit in the League’s pedestrian versions of Vertov’s Kino-Pravda newsreels; furthermore, Brandon et al. forsook the furious invention of the Kinoks’ late 1920s films. Even so, Potamkin judged Vertov a lesser figure than, for example, Dovzhenko, whose ‘Arsenal renders … [The Man with a Movie Camera] …obsolete’ because it offers ‘a kino where at last thought and poetry and philosophic meaning are active’.138 Potamkin, the ideologue of the League, was clearly unheeded in his favouring of film form: ‘Eisenstein’s ideal of cinema has been the synthesis of the documentary, the abstract and the dramatic … Potemkin has been called the perfect film, and rightly, with its own category of frontal attack’, and the atrocity on the Odessa steps succeeded because of ‘constructing rather than merely recording’.139 This was precisely the ambition of Nykino, which emerged unfortunately months after Potamkin’s death. Its first film, a sadly lost anti-war short based on a Bertolt Brecht sketch entitled Café Universal, brought censure from League members; Steiner bemoaned that ‘I have fought to the death a party line ending since it would be nothing to do with the film proper’.140 A dramatized work, Café Universal was a collaboration between Nykino and the Group Theatre, marking a continuation of a relationship begun in 1931 when Steiner produced Panther Woman of the Needle Trades. This dramatic experiment was devised by Mary Hughes with Yiddish Theatre and Group Theatre star Morris Carnovsky playing God, and featured geometric sets, reminiscent of Boris Aronson’s Constructivist designs for the Bronx Unser Theatre, and Expressionist ‘Caligari-esque’ lighting.141 As discussed in the previous chapter, Harold Clurman launched the Group Theatre in 1929, with pared down productions of plays such as Sidney Kingsley’s Men in White and Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty that aimed for emotional directness and intellectual clarity. Steiner lent them his studio as an evening practice space and sat in on rehearsals, becoming a Group Associate, listed on letterheads. He was a frequent visitor to the Brookfield Center, its summer training retreat in Connecticut, and was attracted to its collective ethos and as much as its theatrical innovations. Clurman and his acting director Lee Strasberg strongly admired Soviet theatre, and especially the theories and techniques pioneered at Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre (which toured the USA several times in the 1920s). Stanislavsky’s system of character development around the principle of ‘affective memory’ was geared towards heightening the veracity of the performance. Strasberg, Elia Kazan, and J. E. Broomberg co-authored an ‘Outline for an Elementary Course in Acting’ in New Theatre in Spring 1935, coinciding with



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the release of Pie in the Sky, strongly modelled on Stanislavsky’s teachings. These exercises begin with the principle of ‘action as basis’ in which they stated that ‘a person is always in action’ and that ‘there is always a justification for the action’.142 Students were encouraged to observe actions and particularly handling of objects, and to explain and exhibit motivations through improvised performances. They stated that ‘the actor’s establishment of the object is necessary … by way of handling an object, a person expresses thoughts and feelings’.143 In 1935, these techniques were in evidence in Pie in the Sky. As Ray Ludlow said in his review in New Theatre of a screening at the New School for Social Research: ‘Partly by accident and partly by design, Pie in the Sky does and important thing. It explores, for the first time in American cinema, the application to the screen of the acting technique elaborated by Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theatre. That technique, along with others deriving out of it, has been used with striking results by the leading left theatres, including the Group Theatre, the ARTEF, and the Theatre of Action.’144 Pie in the Sky ultimately resembles a Group Theatre acting workshop. After a brief prologue in which two hoboes miss out on a slice of pie at a Bowery mission, the protagonists wander into a junkyard where they stave off hunger by clowning around with whatever discarded implements they find, in a satirical assault on American society, culture, and especially religion. The film was made in two stages. The main action was filmed first, and consisted of improvised performances by Kazan and Elman Koolish in a Long Island junkyard. Steiner and Kazan then added the scripted prologue about the titular pie, which served to anchor and explain the free improvisations. The film concludes with a pie that turns out to be a mirage, followed by a rapid montage of impromptu silliness about Christianity. It is possible to consider the break of Nykino from the League in terms of Third Period proletarianism morphing into Popular Front anti-fascism. At one point, an intertitle states ‘God! O Father Cacklin’, in reference to Father Coughlin, whose radio sermons were racist red-baiting tirades. The title may derive from the Industrial Workers of the World song, by socialist martyr Joe Hill, but there is none of the sloganeering that typified League productions. If the League saw film as a ‘weapon of the class struggle’, then Pie in the Sky is a cinematic bang-flag gun. If Zuker and Alexander deem the film apolitical, I suggest that rather than sloganeering content, its radicalism lies in its experimental technique, a combination of a critique of documentary with free improvisation. Seeing the fellow traveller Steiner as the main author, Zuker and Alexander underplay Communist Party member Kazan’s role. Furthermore, Kazan claimed that he was part of a communist cell in the Group Theatre, directed towards radicalizing its programme, and was simultaneously a member of the Theatre of Action, a group formally known as the

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Workers Laboratory Theatre, which Steiner cited as a model for filmmakers in ‘Revolutionary Movie Production’. Kazan later recalled the rudimentary and impromptu production in an interview. He said: ‘Ralph and I would discuss a scene. I’d set up the camera and then he would photograph and I acted. In a sense I directed the performances and he directed the photography. It had the freedom that you can only get with improvised films. I never forgot that, the fact that on the location spot you can make anything up.’145 Kazan and Koolish perform improvised gags with objects on the tip. Koolish fashions pretzels out of wire. Kazan finds a mannequin torso – an intertitle says ‘We’ve found a visitor … Mae West’ – and then canoodles with it, a memory of a now unlikely sexual life meeting the fantasy projection onto the unattainable movie siren, chiming with one of Steiner’s best known photographs – Trash – which suggests that the cycle of movie production is so fast that posters of film novelties that exploit erotic desires in formulaic narratives rapidly become refuse. Subsequently, the improvisation shifts when Kazan discovers a car chassis, and the pair bounce on the bare seat springs, pretending to drive like kids imagining a movie car chase that ends in a feigned crash, signified by Steiner’s whirling of the camera. Like the mannequin, the car is also a torso, a commodity only available to them in its discarded form as junk. The American scene is now the repository of commodities, resourcefully recalibrated by the desperate twosome – on the junkyard, improvised object analysis invokes the emotional memories of the dispossessed. Zuker claims that ‘Steiner is not attacking the Machine Age (stressing man’s alienation from nonorganic forms), but rather, he is suggesting the warmth of the men’s relationship with the car’.146 This seems inexact, because the wrecked or abandoned car, like ruined factories or derelict houses, was a ubiquitous allegory of Depression America. It’s notable, therefore, that in Pie in the Sky the second car skit involves the door of a Welfare Department van – lumping government welfare with Christian charity as equally spurious. The film’s conjunction of state, church, and commodity culture coalesces into a pointed anti-capitalist invective – on the post-apocalyptic wasteland of what Wilson called the ‘American Earthquake’, two hoboes ridicule the lifestyle denied them, and increasingly unavailable to millions of Americans. As Campbell says, ‘Pie in the Sky was, for all its tomfoolery, a hard-hitting film’.147 Café Universal and Pie in the Sky were conceived critically against the League’s newsreel strategy. Steiner argued in ‘Revolutionary Movie Production’ that ‘if the film is eventually to be a powerful weapon in the class struggle, film groups must learn to speak effectively through the medium of film rather than with words’.148 Steiner repudiated montage, which the League considered the essential revolutionary form – the editing of Pie in the Sky avoids such associative tricks, and combines carefully photographed shots into a developmental arrangement,



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playing with timing and focus rather than contrast. Steiner argued that although League newsreels superficially provided stronger evidence, they were in fact highly constructed, based on aesthetic decisions in filming or selection of film stock and in montage’s syntactical assemblage. He wrote: The erroneous idea that the effectiveness of the shots does not matter so much since through montage (the manner of putting them together) they could be made effective has weakened us too long. The skill necessary to handle expertly the elements of the documentary form can only be acquired from laboratory work designed to educate and develop producers in this field.149

Pie in the Sky was conceived in dialogue with newsreel, as a dramatic technical experiment in which the camera witnesses improvised performances. Zuker even calls it an ‘“expositional” documentary about Group Theatre exercises’.150 The film shows unscripted improvisations (although we might note David Curtis’s suggestion that the improvisation ‘develops too smoothly to be completely spontaneous, the shots [seem] too well-rehearsed)’.151 However, allowing for such suspicions, Pie in the Sky offers a record of improvisatory invention as a corrective to the newsreel’s supposed transparency. Fellow Nykino member Paul Strand told Milton Brown that ‘stimulated by the Group Theatre, [Nykino] had been brought into contact with the theories and methods of Stanislavsky and found them useful in trying to work out some of the problems of film which they had been running into in the documentary form’.152 The meeting of the ‘New Realism’, of the Group Theatre and the reconfigured documentary camera of Nykino was experimental in the best sense – the type of analytical laboratory experiment that the League’s newsreel policy had vetoed. Pie in the Sky drew ultimately from neither Vertov nor Eisenstein but Pudovkin, whose theories and films were well familiar to Nykino. Potamkin argued that ‘Pudovkin improved the conception of the individual when he superseded the pantomimist with the type, and at the same time prevented the film’s being monopolized by the mass-documentary legalism of Eisenstein’.153 Pie in the Sky indicated a sophisticated photographic mentality without platitudes, akin to the camera eye motifs in John Dos Passos’s contemporaneous USA trilogy, which conjoined emotional memory with acuteness of observation. The complexities and contradictions of the camera eye are the subject of the following chapter on still photography

Notes 1. Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (New York: Collier Books, 1960), p. 170. 2. Alexei Gan, ‘The “Left Front” and Cinema’, Kino-Fot, 5 (10 December 1922), in Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (eds.), The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema

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in Documents 1896–1939, trans. Richard Taylor (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988), p. 77. 3. Anatoly Lunacharsky, ‘The Tasks of the State Cinema in the RSFSR’, Kinematograf. Sbornik statei (Moscow, 1919), reprinted in Taylor and Christie (eds.), The Film Factory, p. 47. 4. V. I. Lenin, ‘Directive on Cinema Affairs’ (17 January 1922), reprinted in Taylor and Christie (eds.), The Film Factory, p. 56. 5. Jeremy Hicks, Dziga Vertov: Defining Revolutionary Film (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), p. 7. 6. ‘We: A Variant of a Manifesto’, Kinofot, 1 (1922), in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (London: Pluto Press, 1984), pp. 8–9. 7. Ibid., p. 8. 8. Ibid., p. 9. 9. Ibid., p. 7. 10. Dziga Vertov, ‘The Cine Eyes: A Revolution’, Lef, 3 (June/ July 1923), Taylor and Christie (eds.), The Film Factory, p. 93. 11. Ibid. 12. Alexei Gan, ‘The Thirteenth Experiment’, Kino-Fot, 5 (10 December 1922), in Taylor and Christie (eds.), The Film Factory, p. 79. 13. Dziga Vertov, ‘The Man with a Movie Camera’, unpublished theses for an article (1928), in Vertov, Kino Eye, p. 85. 14. The Man with a Movie Camera may have been premiered at the cinema in May 1929 with the title Moscow Today. The retitling and some of the (admittedly scant) details of the review suggest that this could have instead have been a screening of Mikhail Kaufman’s 1927 film Moscow, but a New York Times review specifically notes that Moscow Today’s original title was The Man with a Cinematograph. See ‘“Moscow Today” Hailed’, New York Times (13 May 1929), p. 32. 15. Film Guild Cinema advertisement, New Masses (January 1929), p. 17. 16. Symon Gould, ‘The Film Arts Guild’, undated, non-paginated, Frederick Kiesler Papers. 17. Douglas Fox, ‘The Film Guild Cinema: An Experiment in Theatre Design’, Better Theatres Section of Exhibitors Herald-World (March 1929), Frederick Kiesler Papers. 18. Ibid. See also: Jimmy Holmesdale, ‘At the Film Guild Cinema – “Two Days”’, New York World, (5 February 1929); ‘New Film Guild Cinema Built on Modernistic Lines Opens Tonight’, Exhibitors Daily Review (1 February 1929); both Frederick Kiesler Papers. 19. Frederick Kiesler in Meyer Levin, ‘Building a Cinema Theatre’, New York Evening Post (2 February 1929), Frederick Kiesler Papers. 20. Mordaunt Hall, ‘Fleeting Glimpses of Russia: Living Russia or The Man with the Camera’, New York Times (17 September 1929), p. 36. 21. Ibid.; Raymond Ganly, ‘Man with the Camera: No Appeal for American Fans’, Motion Picture News (26 October 1929), p. 31. 22. Ganly, ‘Man with the Camera’, p. 31. 23. Kiesler, ‘Building a Cinema Theatre’.



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24. Siegfried Kracauer, ‘The Man with a Movie Camera’, Frankfurter Zeitung (19 May 1929), reprinted in Yuri Tsivan (ed.), Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties (Germona: La Giornate del Cinema Mutuo, 2004), p. 358. 25. Kiesler, ‘Building a Cinema Theatre’. 26. Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces’, Frankfurter Zeitung 70:167 (4 March 1926), trans. Thomas Y. Levin, New German Critique, 40 (Winter 1987), p. 96. 27. Theodore Dreiser, ‘Dreiser on Hollywood’, New Masses (January 1929), p. 17. 28. Theodore Dreiser, ‘A Statement by Theodore Dreiser’, Experimental Cinema, 4 (February 1933), p. 3. 29. The group consisted of Jacobs, Jo Gerson, and Lewis Hirshman, and produced a number of short experimental pieces including Transition (1927), Mobile Composition No. 1 (1928), and The Story of a Nobody (1930). An advertisement for the News Reel Laboratory in Philadelphia appeared in the first issue of the magazine. Experimental Cinema, 1 (February 1930), opposite p. 24. 30. ‘Announcement’, Experimental Cinema, 1 (February 1930), verso. 31. David Platt, ‘The New Cinema’, Experimental Cinema, 1 (February 1930), p. 1. 32. David Platt, ‘Focus and Mechanism’, Experimental Cinema, 1:2 (June 1930), p. 3. 33. Seymour Stern, ‘Principles of the New-World Cinema’, Experimental Cinema, 1 (February 1930), p. 17. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., p. 15. 36. Russian films appeared sporadically in the United States before the Revolution, and were ‘marketed as “Russian art films” … to capitalize on the fame of the Moscow Art Theater’. Tony Guzman, ‘The Little Theatre Movement: The Institutionalization of European Art-Films in America’, Film History, Volume 17 (2005), p. 263. The first Soviet film to be shown in America was Alexander Sanin’s 1919/20 feature Polikushka – it was brought to New York in 1923 by Vladimir Nelidoff, an émigré former ship’s crewmember masquerading as the film’s director, and shown privately without permission, although it was officially released in America in 1927. Between 1926 and 1936, 184 Soviet films were released in the United States (by contrast, 956 American films were released in Russia in the same period), despite the fact that the United States government did not formally recognize the Soviet Union until 1933. Vladimir K. Petric, ‘Soviet Revolutionary Films in America (1926–1935)’, PhD thesis, New York University, 1973, pp. 26–8. 37. Ibid, p. 31. 38. Joseph Freeman, ‘The Soviet Cinema’, in Joseph Freeman, Joshua Kunitz, and Louis Lozowick, Voices of October (New York: Vanguard Press, 1930), p. 225. 39. Lev Kuleshov, ‘Americanism’, Kino-Fot (August 1922), Taylor and Christie (eds.), The Film Factory, p. 72. 40. Ibid, p. 73. 41. Ibid. 42. Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Béla Forgets the Scissors’, Kino (20 July and 10 August 1926), Taylor and Christie (eds.), The Film Factory, p. 149. 43. Quoted in Mike O’Mahony, Sergei Eisenstein (London: Reaktion, 2008), p. 62.

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44. Freeman, ‘The Soviet Cinema’, p. 223. 45. Paxton Hibben, ‘The Movies in Russia’, The Nation (11 November 1925), p. 540. 46. Sergei Eisenstein, ‘The Montage of Attractions’, Lef (June/ July 1923), Taylor and Christie (eds.), The Film Factory, p. 87. 47. Ibid., p. 88. 48. Ibid., p. 87. 49. Louis Lozowick ‘The Soviet Cinema: Eisenstein and Pudovkin’, Theatre Arts Monthly (September 1929), p. 670. 50. Freeman, ‘The Soviet Cinema’, p. 222. 51. ‘Historical Scenes in Potemkin Censored by N.Y. Board of Review’, Daily Worker (7 December 1926), p. 4. 52. William A. Barrett, ‘First Thoughts on Potemkin’, National Board of Review Magazine, 1:6 (November 1926), p. 5. 53. Mordaunt Hall, ‘An Old Russian Mutiny, New York Times (6 December 1926), p. 28. 54. Evelyn Gerstein, ‘Potemkin’, The New Republic (20 October 1926), pp. 243–4. 55. ‘Movie Notes – “Potemkin”’, Daily Worker (11 December 1926), p. 7. 56. ‘Soviet Movie Critic Flayed by Guild Head: Gould Exposes Editor of Picture News’, Daily Worker (18 December 1926), p. 1. 57. Lewis Jacobs, ‘The New Cinema: A Preface to Film Form’, Experimental Cinema, 1 (February 1930), p. 14. 58. Ibid. 59. Stern, ‘Principles of New World Cinema, Part One’, p. 24. 60. Russell Campbell, ‘Potamkin’s Film Criticism’, Jump Cut, 18 (August 1978), p. 23. 61. Harry Alan Potamkin, ‘Film Problems of Soviet Russia’, Experimental Cinema, 1 (February 1930), p. 3. 62. Orlton West, ‘Russian Cutting’, Close-Up, June 1929 and R. Bond, ‘This Montage Business’, Close-Up, November 1929, reprinted in James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Laura Marcus (eds.), Close-Up, 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism (London: Cassell, 1998), pp. 277–8 and 279–80. 63. Potamkin, ‘Film Problems of Soviet Russia’, p. 3. 64. Ibid, p. 4. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. Harry Alan Potamkin, ‘Film Novitiates, Etc.’, Close Up, 3:5 (November 1930), p. 319. 68. Editor’s Note, Experimental Cinema, 3 (February 1931), p. 34. 69. ‘Statement’, Experimental Cinema, 3 (February 1931), p. 3. 70. Lewis Jacobs, ‘Eisenstein’, Experimental Cinema, 3 (February 1931), p. 4. 71. ‘Workers Films in New York’, Experimental Cinema, 3 (February 1931), p. 37. 72. Ibid. 73. Samuel Brody, ‘The Movies as a Weapon Against the Working Class’, Daily Worker (20 May 1930), p. 4. 74. Harry Alan Potamkin, ‘Film and Photo Call to Action’, Workers Theatre (July 1931), Lewis Jacobs (ed.), The Compound Cinema: The Film Writings of Harry Alan Potamkin (New York: Teachers College Press, 1977), p. 585.



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75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid., p. 583. 78. ‘Workers Films in New York’, p. 36. 79. Helmut Gruber, ‘Willi Münzenberg’s German Communist Propaganda Empire, 1921–1933’, The Journal of Modern History, 38:3 (September 1966), p. 285. 80. Ibid. 81. Vance Kepley Jr., ‘The Workers’ International Relief and the Cinema of the Left’, Cinema Journal, 23:1 (Autumn 1983), p. 10. 82. Tony Stafford, ‘Samuel Brody Interview: The Camera as a Weapon in the Class Struggle’, Jump Cut, 14 (1977), p. 28. 83. Intertitle, America Today, Leo Seltzer and Lester Balog for Workers Film and Photo League, 1931–3. Available on a two-reel collection of WFPL films at the Film Department, Museum of Modern Art, New York. 84. Michael E. Parrish, Anxious Decades: America in Prosperity and Depression, 1920–1941 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), p. 258. 85. One infant died from tear gas. The events caused national outrage. Ibid, p. 260. 86. William Alexander, Film on the Left: American Documentary Film From 1931 to 1942 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 33. 87. Seymour Stern, ‘A Working-Class Cinema for America?’, The Left, 1:1 (Spring 1931), pp. 69–70. 88. Ibid, p. 70. 89. Ibid. Stern’s preferment was explained by an advertisement for American ProletKino in the back pages of The Left, which claimed status as ‘the first film-producing organization of the American working-class’ and listed Stern’s Hollywood address for correspondence – in short, he was American Prolet-Kino. 90. Ibid. 91. Lens, ‘Flashes and Close-Ups’, Daily Worker (17 January 1934), p. 5. 92. ‘Notes on Activities of Experimental Cinema During 1933’, Experimental Cinema, 5 (February 1934), verso. 93. Ibid., p. 73. 94. Seymour Stern, ‘Principle of the New-World Cinema, Part II: The Film as Microcosmos’, Experimental Cinema, 3 (February 1931), p. 31. 95. Ibid., p. 34. 96. Charles Wolfe, ‘Straight Shots and Crooked Plots: Social Documentary and the Avant-Garde in the 1930s’, in Jan-Christopher Horak (ed.), Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde 1919–1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), p. 253. 97. Lewis Jacobs, ‘Highway 66: Montage Notes for a Documentary Film’, Experimental Cinema, 4 (February 1933), p. 40. 98. Ibid. 99. The film was thought to have been lost in 1940, but was unearthed in the 1990s. It is available on the seven-DVD boxset Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film, 1894–1941 (New York: Image Entertainment, 2005). 100. Alexander, Film on the Left, p. 16. 101. A Bronx Morning was produced during the summer of 1931, and was funded

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by working as Steiner’s assistant, as well as photographic work for Arts Weekly and Vanity Fair, and occasional art dealing. See Jay Leyda, ‘Note on a Bronx Morning’, non-paginated, Box 21 Folder 21, Jay Leyda Papers, Tamiment Labor History Library, New York University (JLP). 102. Leyda to Mezhrabpom Kino-School [sic] (16 January 1932), Box 3 Folder 37, JLP. 103. Petric, ‘Soviet Revolutionary Films in America’, p. 436. 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid., pp. 433–4. 106. Named in honour of the lynchpin of the American political cinema after his death in 1933, the Harry Alan Potamkin Film School ran from late 1933 to 1934. Steiner taught filmmaking techniques there. Other lecturers included Jacobs, Hurwitz, Platt, Seltzer, and Barton Yeager. Lack of funds and the lecturers’ strong political views meant that the school was short-lived. See Alexander, Film on the Left, pp. 50–2. 107. Petric, ‘Soviet Revolutionary Films in America’, p. 427. 108. Jere Abbott, ‘Films and Music’, Creative Art (April 1931), p. 283. 109. ‘“H2O”’, Close-Up (February 1930), p. 165. 110. Ibid., pp. 165–6. 111. Ibid., p. 166. 112. M. F. Agha, ‘Ralph Steiner’, Creative Art (January 1932), p. 39. 113. Abbott, ‘Films and Music’, p. 283. 114. Ibid. 115. Harry Alan Potamkin, ‘The Magic of Machine Films’, Movie Makers (November 1929), reprinted in Jacobs (ed.), The Compound Cinema, p. 74. 116. Joel Zuker, Ralph Steiner: Filmmaker and Still Photographer (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Press, 1978), p. 140. 117. Scott Macdonald, ‘Ralph Steiner’, Jan-Christopher Horak (ed.), Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945, (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), p. 209. 118. Zuker, Ralph Steiner, p. 31. 119. Ibid. 120. Ibid. 121. Edmund Wilson, ‘Eisenstein in Hollywood’ (1931), in The American Earthquake (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), p. 398. 122. S. M. Eisenstein and V. G. Alexandroff, ‘Que Viva Mexico’, Experimental Cinema, 5 (1934), pp. 5–13, and p. 52 123. Seymour Stern, ‘Hollywood Bulletin: Eisenstein in Mexico’, Experimental Cinema, 3 (February 1931), p. 22. 124. Agustin Aragon Leiva, ‘Eisenstein’s Film on Mexico’, Experimental Cinema, 4 (February 1933), p. 5. 125. Theodore Dreiser, ‘A Statement by Theodore Dreiser’, Experimental Cinema, 4 (February 1933), p. 3. 126. ‘Editorial Statement’, Experimental Cinema, 4 (February 1933), p. 1. 127. ‘Manifesto on “Que Viva Mexico”’, Experimental Cinema, 5 (February 1934), p. 14. 128. ‘Notes on Activities of Experimental Cinema During 1933’, Experimental Cinema, 5 (February 1934), verso.



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129. Upton Sinclair to Theodore Dreiser (5 September 1932), in Harry M. Geduld and Ronald Gottesman (eds.), Sergei Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair: The Making and Unmaking of Que Viva Mexico! (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970), p. 355. 130. Wilson, ‘Eisenstein in Hollywood’, p. 404. 131. Experimental Cinema in America’, Experimental Cinema, 5 (February 1934), p. 54. 132. Michael Gold, ‘Change the World!’, Daily Worker (5 November 1934), p. 7. 133. Ralph Steiner, ‘Revolutionary Movie Production’, New Theatre (September 1934), p. 24. 134. Ralph Steiner to Jay Leyda (29 December [1934?]), p. 1, JLP. 135. Dziga Vertov, ‘The Factory of Facts’, Pravda (24 July 1926), in Taylor and Christie (eds.), The Film Factory, pp. 150–1. 136. Simon Koster, ‘Dziga Vertoff’, Experimental Cinema, 5 (February 1934), pp. 27–8; Harry Alan Potamkin, ‘The Montage Film’, Movie Makers (February 1930), in Jacobs (ed.), The Compound Cinema, pp. 70–1. 137. Harry Alan Potamkin, ‘The Future Cinema: Notes for a Study’, Pagany (Spring 1930), in Jacobs (ed). The Compound Cinema, p. 63; Harry Alan Potamkin, ‘Eisenstein and the Theory of Cinema’, Hound and Horn (July 1933), in Jacobs (ed.), The Compound Cinema, p. 438. 138. Harry Alan Potamkin, ‘“A” in the Art of the Movie and Kino’, New Masses, December 1929, Jacobs (ed.), The Compound Cinema, p. 456. 139. Harry Alan Potamkin, ‘Eisenstein and the Theory of Cinema’, Hound and Horn, July 1933, Jacobs (ed.), The Compound Cinema, p. 437. 140. Ralph Steiner to Jay Leyda (29 December [1934?]), JLP. 141. Steiner also made Dance Film in 1931, a co-production with C. Adolph Glassgold, starring Sophia Delza. Steiner also worked as cameraman on Harbor Scene (1932), Granite/The Quarry (1932), G3 (1933). Horak’s Lovers of Cinema also lists City Film (1927), People Playing Croquet (1929), and Silo (1929) as Steiner productions (p. 379). Of all these films, only Panther Woman of the Needle Trades seems to have survived. 142. Elia Kazan, J. E. Bromberg, and Lee Strasberg, ‘Outline for an Elementary Course in Acting’, New Theatre (Spring 1935), in The Drama Review: TDR, 28:4, The Group Theatre special issue (Winter 1984), p. 36. 143. Ibid., p. 37. 144. Ray Ludlow, ‘Pie in the Sky’, New Theatre (May 1935), p. 19. 145. Michael Ciment, Kazan on Kazan (London: Secker and Warburg, 1973), p. 17. 146. Zuker, Ralph Steiner, p. 202. 147. Russell Campbell, Cinema Strikes Back: Radical Filmmaking in the United States 1930–1942 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982), p. 136. 148. Steiner, ‘Revolutionary Movie Production’, p. 22. 149. Ibid. 150. Zuker, Ralph Steiner, p. 210. 151. David Curtis, Experimental Cinema: A Fifty-Year Evolution (New York: Delta, 1971), p. 55. 152. Campbell, Cinema Strikes Back, p. 134. 153. Harry Alan Potamkin, ‘Pudovkin and the Revolutionary Film’, Hound and Horn (April–June 1933), in Jacobs (ed.), The Compound Cinema, p. 423.

4 Camera eyes: the worker photography movement and the New Vision in America

In contrast to the prolific commentary in the United States on Soviet cinematic montage, there was negligible coverage of Russian still photography. There was limited critical discourse on Soviet photographic developments in the United States, and ironically, given the photograph’s feted reproducibility, Russian photography was perhaps the most obscure of the post-revolutionary cultural forms. Stranger still, given the fetishization of cinematic montage by the American radical left, photomontage was seldom used as revolutionary propaganda, beyond the production of a handful of images that show little of the verve of the Russian poster maestro Gustav Klutsis or the German satirist John Heartfield. If American radical photographic culture of the late 1920s and early 1930s was sporadic and marginal, in contrast with Soviet and German models, then it was nonetheless seminal, prefiguring the great era of documentary work of the later 1930s. If American commentary on Soviet photography was diminished, there were correspondences between Americans and Russians in less direct ways. There was a palpable connection under the auspices of Workers International Relief, the organization that produced the communist illustrated magazine USSR in Construction, whereby American and Russian ‘worker photographers’ belonged to the same international communist network. ‘Worker photography’ involved the adoption of the camera as a ‘weapon in the class struggle’, by which working-class photographers would wrest this modern means of visual production from the bourgeoisie, whose dominance rested partly on control of the mass media. The ‘worker photography’ movement constructed a ‘counter-media’ of magazines and newspapers on a global basis, with its largest concentrations in Germany and Russia, where the communist movements were most numerous. In practice, actual communication between American, German, and Soviet worker photographers was minimal, and technical, aesthetic, or theoretical



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commonalities were also variable. Yet, in less tangible ways there were corollaries between American and Soviet photographers, such as in the strong aesthetic and thematic consonance of their photographs, especially where the subject was industrial or urban. In this regard, American and Russian leftist modernists were variants of the ‘New Vision’, a term associated with the Bauhaus photographer László Moholy-Nagy that addressed the avant-garde preoccupation with the ‘camera eye’, which identified photographic experimentation with new rational supra-human optics. A cluster of paradigmatic New Vision photographers appeared in the February 1930 issue of Experimental Cinema, discussed in the previous chapter, in a list that included ‘Edward Weston, Brett Weston [featured in an industrial photograph of Armco], Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, El Lissitzky, Ralph Steiner, Charles Sheeler, and Hans Finsler’.1 These photographers appeared at the 1929 Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart, an event that involved substantial contributions from Moholy-Nagy, and was the apex of the New Vision. However, differing contexts of dissemination and display delimited such ­consonances – for example, the ideological connotations of a photograph of a factory alter if the image appears in a communist or corporate forum. To consider this factor, I examine the case of Margaret Bourke-White, an American commercial photographer who travelled to the USSR in the Five Year Plan, producing a photo-book entitled Eyes on Russia, photo-essays for Fortune and New York Times, while also appearing in USSR in Construction. Therefore, I argue in this chapter that while there were limited concrete interrelations between American and Soviet still photographers, they operated in several interlinked, but politically discrete, networks that encompassed both the avant-garde and worker photography.

The worker photographer movement in the United States Around the turn of the decade, New Masses ran a series of short articles about a nascent worker photographer movement that was gathering momentum in the emerging Depression. In January 1930, an announcement concerning the ‘All-American Photo Exhibit’ heralded a Workers Camera Club show, and invited images of ‘industrial and farm life, natural scenes, workers homes, labor sports, machines, engines, and pictures of individual workers at their tasks’.2 More details appeared in February 1930 when Frances Strauss relayed responses to the Fourth Annual Photo Exhibit of the Japanese Workers Camera Club in New York, a group of amateurs largely working in menial  ­service  jobs,  formed  in 1925 and led by F. Kitamara, ‘whose mutual interest in the revolutionary  labor movement’ stimulated the production of ‘class struggle propaganda’.3 Their works, which are seemingly lost, included images of:

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proletarian life and class struggle. They picture scenes of May Day, demonstrations of food workers, laborers at construction work, a shoemaker at work, a factory, fisherman, etc. Class consciousness is the theme of photographs bearing the titles: “Sabotage”, “Movement”, “Workers”, “Speed-up”, “Exploitation”, “Red Day”, “Mobilization to Work”, etc.4

The article contrasted these images favourably with photographs by Californian comrades ‘relaxing under a more gentle climate’ of ‘water, storm, the changing seasons of the year, nature in its variety of moods. One of the photographers even probes abstractions with photos called “line-study”, “design”, and “still life”.’5 In other words, the author asserted a dichotomy between activist and aesthetic modes that differentiated responsible and irresponsible practices. The former mode was clearly the basis of a subsequent call to worker photographers in the November 1930 issue of New Masses, from the Labor Defender Photo Group that was part of International Labor Defense, an organization with ties to the Communist Party and Workers International Relief (hereafter WIR) that produced Labor Defender, a magazine with photographs on the aforementioned themes. Based at the same 7 East 14th Street address, the Labor Defender Group and the Japanese Workers Camera Club shared facilities and eventually merged into the Workers Film and Photo League (hereafter ‘the League’) in early 1931. The ‘Worker-Photographers’ notice stated: ‘in addition to supplying the Labor Defender, Daily Worker, Labor Unity, and the revolutionary press at large with photographs of demonstrations, picket lines, evictions, etc.’ the group now offered ‘a regular photo exchange abroad’ with the Berlin-based Der Arbeiter fotograf.6 Operating under the WIR umbrella, these American radical photographic groups were comrades of the many organizations of the international worker photographer movement, of which the principle organs were Der Arbeiter ­fotograf (The Worker Photographer) and AIZ (Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung, Workers Illustrated News), a pivotal communist magazine that enjoyed a significant circulation of 500,000 (probably because it ‘steered clear of the tired party jargon of the day’ and integrated photographs, photomontages by Heartfield, fiction, essays, and sports coverage).7 The foundational event of the worker photographer movement was a call in the March 1925 issue of AIZ, the magazine founded by WIR’s founder, the communist publishing mogul Willi Münzenberg, to initiate, as Jorge Ribalta notes, ‘a proletarian media power to counter the dominance of the bourgeois press’.8 Subsequently, the Vereiningen der Arbeiter-Fotografen Deutschlands (German Association of Worker Photographers) founded Der Arbeiter Fotograf, publishing images from groups in cities across Germany.9 In the early 1930s, worker photographer groups sprang up in several countries including Holland, Great Britain, and the United States, as well as the Soviet Union, following Münzenberg’s appeal ‘to correspond intensively and make



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personal contact with actual and potential working-class photographers in all important countries’ and ‘to put different branches in touch with one another and especially to develop links between the German and Soviet branches’.10 Together they constituted an international network of comrade photographers marshalling the potentially contradictory co-demands of photographic facticity and revolutionary propaganda.11 The New Masses notice concerning the Labor Defender Photo Group’s liaison with Der Arbeiter fotograf therefore demonstrated direct lines of communication between American worker photographers and the international movement. Adjacent to the ‘All-American Photo Exhibit’ article in New Masses in January 1930 was a brief notice concerning a ‘Tina Modotti Exhibit’ in Mexico, which praised her as a ‘gifted worker-photographer’ and anticipated a good selection of her work at the exhibition.12 The piece referred to a recent show at the National Library, a retrospective promoted as ‘The First Revolutionary Photographic Exhibition In Mexico’. An avowed internationalist, Modotti was not strictly an American photographer because she was Italian-born, arriving in the USA in 1913 aged 16 and just nine years later leaving for Mexico. Learning photography under the tutelage of Californian modernist photographic pioneer, Edward Weston, and setting up a studio in Mexico City, her radicalization developed after their romantic separation and his return to the USA. From 1927 her work began appearing in the Mexican communist magazine El Machete, AIZ, Labor Defender, Daily Worker, and New Masses. The ‘Tina Modotti Exhibit’ notice in the latter explained how ‘simply and beautifully she has made a documentary record of working class life in Mexico – at work, at play, their poverty, the hovels they live in’.13 If Modotti’s role as a revolutionary chronicler of the dignity of the Mexican dispossessed emerged after her departure from the USA, then the American radical press widely discussed her work and she was one of the few photographers, alongside Steiner, to feature on the front of New Masses, appearing on four covers between 1928–9. Her allegorical image on the October 1928 issue of a sombrero with a hammer and sickle resting on the rim emblematized her fealty to the Mexican communist movement (Figure 4.1). Modotti’s articulation of the popular spirit of the working class through significant facets, such as the synecdochic hands of a washerwoman or the typewriter of her Cuban revolutionary lover Julio Antonio Mella, demonstrated her communist sympathies, which were increasingly controversial in Mexico. When Mella was shot dead in January 1929 she narrowly escaped being sentenced for his murder. Her close-up profile portrait of Mella, notably comparable to Weston’s image of the Mexican colonel Galvan firing a pistol, appeared on the cover of Labor Defender in February 1929. In 1930 Modotti fled to Berlin, where she contributed photographs to Der Arbeiter Fotograf but greeted the Exhibition of Worker Photographers with some evident reserve, as a letter to Weston attests:

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4.1  Tina Modotti, New Masses (October 1928), cover. Even the type of propaganda pictures I began to do in Mexico is already being done here; there is an association of “worker-photographers” (here everybody uses a camera) and the workers themselves make those pictures and have indeed better opportunities than I could ever have, since it is their own life and problems they photograph. Of course their results are far from the standard I am struggling to keep up in photography, but their end is just the same.14

Unlike these photographers, Modotti was a professional whose work bore residual traces of Californian Pictorialism in its sensuous surfaces and occasionally blurred focus. Dispirited with her dissonance from worker photographers, by 1932 Modotti had all but abandoned photography and travelled to Moscow for a no less-fraught career as a Comintern envoy-cum-spy (before her untimely death in mysterious circumstances in Mexico City in 1942). Modotti’s work of



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the late 1920s diverged from the emergent worker photographer movement in the United States because her technical skill and aesthetic sophistication offered more nuanced political analysis than the prosaic images of strikes and hard times that filled the pages of Labor Defender. A more incisive American worker photographer movement emerged in December 1930 when the Labor Defender Photo Group and the Japanese Workers Camera Club amalgamated with radical filmmakers to form the League. As detailed in the previous chapter, the League’s slogan was ‘the camera is a weapon in the class struggle’.15 Russell Campbell writes that ‘the goals of the photo section were to provide militant workers (and the unemployed) with the skills to create photographic records of the class struggle, to assure a flow of illustrations for radical publications, and to help publicize the work of the WIR, the ILD [International Labor Defense], and other communist organizations’.16 In June 1931, a New Masses feature on the League stressed its umbilical link to WIR in Berlin and announced an international conference on ‘The Proletarian Photo’ as distinct from bourgeois photography: ‘It is to be understood that workerphotographers intending to exhibit with the American section are to concentrate on the photo of class-struggle and proletarian life. No bourgeois portraiture, nudes, landscapes, still lifes will be exhibited.’17 This rebuke to the above-cited Californian photographers potentially encompassed works by Modotti on display at her retrospective, as described in Frances Toor’s Mexican Folkways review, where early photographs of ‘flowers, exquisite glasses, and an intricate weaving of telegraph lines’ appeared alongside overtly revolutionary images of the Mexican working class.18 Termed a ‘worker-photographer’ by New Masses, Modotti’s symbolic fragments of Mexican bodies and revolutionary allegories were strongly divergent from the direct reportage of League photographers. League photographs sacrificed pictorial niceties for an emotive and ­attention-grabbing activist mode with its own bluntly provisional aesthetic. Leo Seltzer took many of the League’s photographs, capturing mass demonstrations and brutal police responses from the perspective of the worker in the middle of the crowd, unlike the press photographers who generally observed events from behind police lines. Seltzer’s account of his still photography was brusque – indicating that he viewed it as less important than his film work. His role as the main League photographer began when he arrived to mend some wiring at the headquarters: For a few months I had a camera and was doing still photography. We used to cover all sorts of demonstrations and whatever was happening, strikes, picket lines and so on. Then there was a hunger march in 1931. A movie camera was put in my hands and I was told to go out and shoot, probably because there was no one else available, or perhaps because I used to bring in rather unusual still photographs.19

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The aim was not to produce aesthetically charged images but to supplement the League’s newsreels – Seltzer recalled, ‘I took quite a lot of photographs as well as movies, and these could be sold to the newspapers to get a few bucks. A lot of times we’d know about a picket line or something that was going to happen. We could scoop the press, and that’s what made our photos valuable.’20 Like the newsreels, the photographs have the blunt, impromptu quality of improvised reports. Although more iconographically literal than Modotti’s work, his photographs nonetheless offer greater compositional interest than the illustrations in Labor Defender. Of the extant images, there are several photographs of tenants protesting against eviction, forlorn evictees, and a street preacher declaiming against lynching that demonstrate technical and aesthetic acumen in presenting a sharp political narrative through straightforward framing and composition, as well as an eye for emotional drama through capturing memorable facial expressions. Rent Strike, Upper East Side, New York City exemplifies League photography at its most effective (Figure 4.2). The sharp framing of the shot coupled with the heavy line of crude ornamental masonry concentrate the main focal point, the banner, which proclaims a direct political message, ‘STRIKE!! AGAINST HIGH RENT’, while above it a dark-skinned working class woman leans, seemingly pleading, from her apartment window. If Seltzer’s photography lacked the symbolic complexity and techical skill of Modotti’s work, then it nonetheless offered a clear and direct attack.

4.2  Leo Seltzer, ‘Depression 1933. Rent Strike, East Harlem, New York City’.



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Avant-garde and amateurism Worker photography experienced the same bind as other forms of proletarian culture – such as the workers theatre movement or proletarian literature – in that it rarely offered a satisfactorily defined alternative to so-called bourgeois or professional work. As Erika Wolf notes, even Soviet worker photography editors did not evade this problem. The foundation of the magazine Sovetskoe foto in April 1926 aimed to bring photography to the masses, and featured support of Anatoli Lunacharsky, the People’s Commissariat of Enlightening, in an article on ‘Our Culture and Photography’, and the editorial involvement of Alexander Rodchenko. In ‘Attention to Photo Amateurism!’ LEF member Vitalii Zhemchuznyi linked worker photography with the camera’s veristic capabilities: ‘photography is a technical representational medium, which allows us to precisely, documentarily capture the surrounding reality’.21 From 1926 the Moscow Province Council of Trade Unions held shows of worker ­photography – the second exhibition, held in May 1927, vetoed professional photographers.22 However, Wolf explains that: While trade unions, Sovetskoe foto, and ODSK [Obshchestvo druzei sovetskogo kino, The Society of Friends of Soviet Cinema] initially sought to develop authentic worker photography in the USSR, the vast majority of Soviet images published and exhibited abroad as representatives of worker photography were the work of professional photojournalists from the very outset.23

Therefore, Soviet ideologues only put forward ‘professional proletarian’ photography for international dissemination in Der Arbeiter fotograf ‘due to the poor technical and material qualities of Soviet amateur work’, even after Sovetskoe foto changed its name to Proletarskoe foto (Proletarian Photography) in 1931.24 If the ROPF (Rossiiskogo ob’edineniia proletarskikh fotoreporterov, or Russian Association of Proletarian Photo Reporters) consisted of ‘white-collar professionals whose proletarian credentials were dubious’, then their works erroneously appeared in Der Arbeiter fotograf, AIZ, and USSR in Construction as indicative of a worker photographer movement that had collapsed the divide between professionalism and amateurism.25 For example, a photo-story about the working and home lives of a Moscow family called the Filippovs appeared in different formats in September 1931 in AIZ as ‘24 Hours in the Life of a Moscow Worker Family’ and in December that year in Proletarskoe foto with a slightly modified title.26 This high-profile project was overseen by the AIZ’s lynchpin, Heartfield, and featured a professional photo editor (Lev Mezhericher) from a photo agency (Soiuzfoto), and two photojournalists (Max Al’Pert and Arkadii Shaikhet), to ensure a quality threshold. By the early 1930s, Soviet worker photography had two main opposing blocs,

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consisting of the avant-garde October Association, numbering Rodchenko and Boris Ignatovitch, versus the reportage of ROPF, which included Al’Pert and Shaikhet. According to October’s rubric of Factography, a cross-media term for describing photographic and textual reporting, photography was: ‘a perfect medium for affecting the broad masses, photography is an especially important weapon on the front of the Cultural Revolution. By recording facts that are socially oriented and are not staged, we can both simulate and reveal the struggle for socialist culture.’27 Formed in 1928, October brought together the Constructivists Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Alexei Gan, Varvara Stepanova, and Sergei Eisenstein. The origins of October lay in the Constructivist journal Lef, which incorporated photography when it reemerged as Novyi Lef in 1926. The factographic idea rested on the interlinked premises that the camera recorded facts, and that it also provided hitherto unseen perspectives that would transform human vision, amalgamating the Formalist basis of Constructivist faktura with photography and textual reportage. In Novyi Lef, Rodchenko’s angular, oblique viewpoints combined with typographic experiments and single colour planes to produce contiguous, montaged photo-essays. The Formalist principle of defamiliarization manifested in the application of extreme aerial viewpoints, angularity, and close-ups that greatly abstracted the photographed objects (Figure 4.3). In a 1926 article entitled ‘What the Eye Does Not See’ in Sovetskoe Foto, the formalist ideologue Ossip Brik asserted: We must break out beyond the customary radius of the normal human eye, we must learn to photograph objects with the camera outside the bounds of that radius, in order to obtain a result other than the usual monotony. Then we will see our concrete reality rather than some kind of theatre prop, and we will see it as it has never been seen before.28

He wrote in relation to Rodchenko’s abstracted photographs of a Moscow house in Novyi Lef that ‘the results proved extremely interesting: that familiar object (the house) suddenly turned into a never-before-seen structure, a fire escape became a monstrous object, balconies were transformed into a tower of exotic architecture’.29 The facticity of the camera revealed the object precisely in a way that recalibrated habits of vision, presupposing new patterns of sociality. In a Novyi Lef article in 1928 entitled ‘Against the Synthetic Portrait, for the Snapshot’, Rodchenko wrote that ‘the photograph presents a precise moment documentarily’ and ‘by means of a photograph or other documents, we can debunk any artistic synthesis produced by one man or another’.30 October situated the factographic tendency within the emergent context of worker photography: ‘photography will play an enormous role in the formation of a proletarian art by displacing the dead techniques of the old spatial arts and serving the ideological requirements of the proletariat’.31



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4.3  Alexander Rodchenko, ‘Sentry of the Shukov Tower’, 1929. Gelatin silver print.

As Margarita Tupitsyn demonstrates, by the end of the decade Novyi Lef Formalism was falling foul of the official view. October pointedly asserted itself as a Cultural Revolution organization: In the very near future October has the primary aim of organizing and instructing groups of proletarian photo-workers who will then be able to record the growth of the Five Year Plan and collective farm construction – and who will also be able to attract the best photo-workers from the rank and file workers’ photo clubs.32

Despite such statements of allegiance, October was under staunch attack from ROPF, and in May 1931 the two groups faced off in rival photographic displays at Gosizdat. ROPF’s members were not rigidly opposed to formal experimentation, and claimed that ‘we are not entirely against “unusual points of view” and the slanted position of the camera at the moment of exposure. Yet we maintain that such an arrangement has nothing in common with a

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4.4  Max Alpert, ‘Workers travelling to the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Combine construction site’, 1930.

creative method.’33 Shaikhet and Al’Pert, for example, largely avoided the close-ups or abstractions that typified Rodchenko’s work (Figure 4.4). Tupitsyn explains that ROPF’s orthogonal, conventional ‘photo-picture’ contrasted with October’s ‘photo-still’, offering a cogent and familiar totality rather than the splintered shocks of Constructivist fragmentation.34 ROPF shared October’s fetishization of facts but judged Novyi Lef Formalism to be a dangerous model for amateur  photographers because it betrayed adherence to the Western avant-garde: The source nourishing the creation of the “leftists” is the Western decadence represented by fashionable bourgeois photographers, especially Moholy-Nagy and his imitators. There, in the West, this group of photographers wants to depart from surrounding reality (this is characteristic of all types of contemporary bourgeois art) and is utterly absorbed in the world of “things used to good effect” by them – the world of material and form … In Soviet conditions this



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4.5  László Moholy-Nagy,’ Rinnstein (Gutter)’, 1925. Gelatin silver print.

imitation of Western fashions, the departure from deeply delving dialecticalmaterialist analyses of events occurring around us in favour of a mechanistic gliding across the surface.35

ROPF made the understandable claim that the formal verisimilitude of October photographers to Moholy-Nagy’s work corresponded with an analogous bourgeois mentality whose formalism superficially skimmed over facts (Figure 4.5). ROPF argued that the influence of ‘Moholy-Nagy and his ­imitators’ positioned October as ‘servant to the bourgeoisie’.36 ‘MoholyNagy’  was a­ pparently the insult of choice in Soviet photographic discourse, and October also claimed that ‘we are against the aesthetics of abstract, “leftist”  ­photography like Man Ray’s, Moholy-Nagy’s, etc.’.37 Soviet photographers, in other words, were keen to partition their work off from the New Vision.

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Film und Foto and the New Vision Both October and ROPF were resistant to assimilation within the New Vision, of which Moholy-Nagy was the principal ideologue. Although useful in its delineation of the conceptualization of photographic innovation, the term ‘New Vision’ is, as Christopher Phillips points out, slightly anachronistic and misrepresentative of Moholy-Nagy, having emerged in the USA to describe modes of photography, despite its origins as the 1930 English title of his book Von Material zu Architektur (From Material to Architecture) of 1929.38 The usefulness of the term lies in its combination of inclusivity, innovation, and the utopian notion of the camera eye. However, it’s tempting to substitute ‘Bauhaus Photography’ for ‘New Vision’, as Moholy-Nagy’s theories developed at the Bauhaus and were coterminous with the balanced utopianism and commercial expediency that typified the school’s interdisciplinary, vocational machine aesthetic. When Moholy-Nagy replaced Johannes Itten as professor of painting in 1923, the Bauhaus marked a shift from Expressionism to Constructivism. Before joining the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy was an editor of MA, the Hungarian avant-garde magazine, and contributed widely to the culture of International Constructivism, maintaining communications with Lissitzky. He was therefore part of the postwar movement that opposed nationalism and economic inequality, insisting instead upon the collapse of boundaries between arts, removal of hierarchies, and the exploration of new forms and techniques. Moholy-Nagy collaborated with Walter Gropius on the Bauhausbücher series, which included Vassili Kandinsky’s Point Line and Plane (1926), Oskar Schlemmer’s The Theatre of the Bauhaus (1925), and his own camera eye polemic Painting, Photography, Film (1925). Painting, Photography, Film synthesized MoholyNagy’s thoughts on and experiments in these media since 1922–3, and constituted a Constructivist manifesto on the camera’s possibilities, expanding on his 1922 De Stijl article entitled ‘Production/ Reproduction’ where he argued that ‘we must turn to media which have up to now only been used for reproductive purposes, and try to open them up to productive ends’.39 He did not teach photography at the Bauhaus – instead running the Metal Workshop and Preliminary Course – but with his wife Lucia, a less celebrated but arguably more gifted photographer, he developed a photographic mode based on unrelenting formal experimentation, in which the Bauhaus was both a thematic analogue and literal subject. The book proposes a new visual order predicated on the camera eye: The camera has offered us amazing possibilities, which we are only just beginning to exploit. The visual image has been expanded and even the modern lens is no longer tied to the narrow limits of our eye; no manual means of representation (pencil, brush, etc.) is capable of arresting fragments of the world seen like this.40



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Moholy-Nagy’s position is notably similar to that of Rodchenko or Brik, but the contingency to communist publications such as Novyi Lef or Sovetskoe foto was absent, so that the New Vision is politically untethered, or as Abigail SolomonGodeau puts it, the ‘armed vision’ of radical formalism is ‘disarmed’.41 The crystallizing moment of the New Vision, for Solomon-Godeau the paradigm moment of radical formalism’s depoliticization, was the international Film und Foto (hereafter ‘FIFO’) exhibition in Stuttgart in 1929, organized by the Deutscher Werkbund, an exhibition that also was the most important nexus of Russian photographers with their Western counterparts.42 It consisted of fourteen galleries with 940 images by photographers from several countries, including America and Russia, and screenings of films at the KönigsbauLichtspiele, including Eisenstein’s Ten Days that Shook the World, René Clair’s Entr’ acte, and Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera. The Werkbund’s business manager and principle curator Gustav Stotz detailed the camera eye premise in an accompanying article: A new optic has developed. We see things differently now, without painterly intent or impressionistic sense. Today things are important that earlier were hardly noticed: for example shoe lasts, gutters, spools of thread, fabric, machines, etc. They interest us for their material substance, for the simple quality of the thing-in-itself; they interest us as the means of creating spaceform in surfaces, as the bearers of the darkness and the light (the darkness and the light – basic forms of photography).43

The New Vision ethos of FIFO was attributable to Moholy-Nagy’s role as the exhibition’s theoretical lynchpin – especially evident in his curation of a thematic overview called ‘Where is Photographic Development Going?’ about photography’s history and varied applications in the first gallery. The theme of the exhibition was the camera eye, as evident in the FIFO poster consisted of a still from The Man with a Movie Camera featuring a sharp up-tilted shot of Mikhail Kaufman aiming the titular device, with a striking red typeface by Jan Tschichold, the author of the landmark 1928 polemic on The New Typography – a book that Victor Margolin notes influenced the exhibition’s ethos of ‘applied photography’.44 This concept appeared in Franz Roh’s essay ‘Mechanism and Expression’ in Foto-Auge/ Oeil et Photo/ Photo Eye: 76 Photoes of the Period, an accompanying publication he co-edited with Tschichold, which culminated in a ‘camera eye’ montage from Vertov’s film.45 Lissitzky was in charge of the Russian submission, collaborating with N. Kaufman, a critic who wrote a catalogue essay, Eisenstein, and Vertov, who delivered a lecture called ‘What is the Cine Eye?’ in Hanover. Alongside Lissitzky’s work, images by Rodchenko, Klutsis, and Ignatovitch were on display – avant-garde rather than worker photography per se. Lissitzky’s 1924 geometric self-portrait photomontage,

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The Constructor, with its laying of the hand with compass over the artist’s eye, appeared on the cover of Foto-Auge, further linking the exhibition’s camera eye mentality to Constructivism. Solomon-Godeau writes that by the time of FIFO ‘various constitutive elements of Soviet work had been absorbed and, depending on the particular practice involved, transfigured’.46 Her account of the dilution of revolutionary potency in the abstraction from Soviet contingency largely indicts ‘Moholy’s championship of photography [which], like that of his contemporaries, had finally more to do with the widespread intoxication with all things technological than it did with a politically instrumental notion of photographic practice’.47 The critique echoes a harsh review of the show by Walter Nettlebeck in Der Arbeiter fotograf of the ‘sense and nonsense’ of New Vision photography: The goal (of photography) must be to express the motive in its most exact and persuasive form. When this goal requires a distorted perspective, there must always be the aim to justify the means. But the aim lies neither in the things themselves. It is based in the interests of the proletarian class.48

In Der Arbeiter fotograf Edwin Hoernle specified ‘Das Auge des Arbeiters’ (The Working Man’s Eye), a ‘proletarian eye’ to reveal the absence working class life in ‘bourgeois pictures, whether “artistic” or vulgar, [that] reflect the cult of leisure and idleness’.49 Unlike October, neither Moholy-Nagy nor Stotz conceptualized these photographic innovations in political terms. The New Vision was politically amorphous and broadly encompassed photographers such Sheeler and Albert Renger-Patzsch, whose commissioned images of factories and commodities were counterpoised to worker photography. There were points of difference within the New Vision, and Herbert Molderings, for example, distinguishes between the ‘Non-Objectivity’ of Moholy-Nagy, whereby applied photography derives from the process of negation and reconstruction initiated in abstract painting, and the ‘New Objectivity’ of Renger-Patzsch, a more generic modernist fixation with industrial objects and surfaces (Figure 4.6). Molderings’s view revisits Bertolt Brecht’s dismissal of Renger-Patzsch, which Walter Benjamin used to define Moholy-Nagy’s multi-disciplinary production against the celebration of commodities in ‘creative’ photographs.50 Benjamin rejected Renger-Patzsch’s photography as ‘the true face of this kind of photographic creativity is the advertisement or association’, and ‘its logical counterpart is the act of unmasking or construction’ in Moholy-Nagy’s Constructivist production.51 Benjamin’s resistance to commercialism was problematic, because Moholy-Nagy’s photographic ethics were closely informed by developments in commercial publishing, especially American advertising culture. He wrote in 1927:



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4.6  Albert Renger-Patzsch, ‘Flatirons for Shoe Manufacture’, 1928. Gelatin silver print. As in so many other vital areas of modern life, the Americans, thanks to their freedom from traditional constraints, are ahead of Europe in their use of photographs for advertising. Their healthy instinct, their uninhibited feeling for life in the present, their material, tactile-haptic disposition (their preference for “tangible” facts), long ago led them to use photographs of merchandise in their advertisements.52

Moholy-Nagy often undertook commercial commissions, and in 1931 he received an honourable mention at the Exhibition of Foreign Advertising in New York.53 However, despite championing Moholy-Nagy, Benjamin’s position

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corresponds with October, some of whose members also derided advertising. In 1931 Klutsis’s ‘The Photomontage as a New Kind of Agitation Art’ in the October publication Izofront: Class Struggle on the Front of Spatial Arts attacked the ‘advertising/ Formalist’ approach of Rodchenko, Anton Lavinsky, and Lissitzky, because it ‘has its origins in American advertising’ and is ‘widely used by Western Dadaists and Expressionists’.54 Most of these figures – Moholy-Nagy, Renger-Patzsch, Sheeler, Rodchenko, and Klutsis – were on show at FIFO, which was the seminal staging post of the transnational camera eye discourse yet also, in Solomon-Godeau’s view, a depoliticized presentation of new photographic techniques and styles. The show brought together disparate photographers – such as Edward Steichen, Man Ray, and Ignatovitch – whose commonalities were inevitably superficial. However, although there is some substance in her claim that the American wing of the New Vision was politically diminished compared to Soviet radical Formalism, this argument underplays both the chronological precedence of American practices and their radical connections. For example, Solomon-Godeau contrasts the modernist Formalism of ‘Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, et al.’ with that of visually similar Russian photographs. She distinguishes between the ostranie of Russian Formalism, which aimed to defamiliarize the beholder through affective registers, and the rarified, disinterested aestheticism of the American version: Deriving ultimately from Kantian aesthetics, Anglo-American Formalism insisted above all on the autonomy, purity, and self-reflexivity of the work of art. As such it remained throughout its modernist permutations an essentially idealist stance. Such concepts, as well as related notions of immanence and transcendence, with the parallel construct of the promethean artist, were, however, anathema to the Russian Formalists.55

One problem here is the reductive appraisal of Strand, a former student of the reformist photographer Lewis Hine, whose Machine Age analysis ‘Photography and the New God’, which appeared in the Dadaist magazine Broom in 1922, balanced Stieglitzian aestheticism with a social dimension in humanizing the machine.56 Strand’s abstract experiments predated Rodchenko’s by several years, and furthermore his photographic rationale radicalized over the 1930s, although his resonant portraits of people and places aimed for sustained contemplation rather than the jolts of defamiliarization. However, the bifurcation of Russian and American variants of the New Vision is considerably more problematic in relation to Steiner. Photographs from the mid 1920s by Steiner, Moholy-Nagy, and Rodchenko are often formally near identical, but importantly divergent in terms of specific content and contexts of production and display. In her dissertation on Steiner, Carol Payne notes the distinction that Moholy-Nagy and the European



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4.7  Ralph Steiner, ‘Typewriter Keys’, 1922. Photograph.

avant-garde ‘saw the promise of socialism in the new metropolises and mechanized technology’, while ‘American artists, on the other hand, more often reflected – and implicitly endorsed – the predominantly capitalist milieu of their nation’.57 Yet, as discussed in the previous chapters, the avant-garde machine aesthetic engaged with Constructivism in more complex ways than derivation and dilution, especially at the 1927 Machine-Age Exposition, which displayed Soviet architectural designs alongside American machines, a glass skyscraper, and a special section of Steiner’s photographs. In The Arts, Herbert Lippmann wrote that Steiner’s photographs of ‘high-tension wiring and typewriter keys’ exemplified that ‘photographs although static can look more dynamic than machinery itself when stationary’58 (Figure 4.7). As this comment suggests, Steiner’s machine aesthetic photography was the epitome of the American New Vision. A commercial photographer trained at the vocational Clarence H. White School, Steiner pursued a commercial career throughout the 1920s, producing Christmas gifts and ‘housekeeping kits’ for The Woman’s Home Companion and

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4.8  Ralph Steiner, ‘Gas Tank’, 1926–27. Photograph.

The Delineator (he was a staff photographer at both magazines), socks for The New Yorker, belts for Vogue, movie stars for Vanity Fair, theatre actors and stage sets for Theatre Arts Monthly. As he relayed, ‘art directors were impressed by the great depth of sharpness of my photographs’59 (Figure 4.8). In 1926, a piece entitled ‘Photography in America’ in Das Kunstblatt feted Steiner, alongside fellow White alumnus Paul Outerbridge Jr., for the clarity and sharpness of his photographs: Precision work. Exact representation of form. No pictorial romanticism. Unconditional involvement with technique. Pushing technical possibilities to the utmost. Clear picture architecture. Emphasis on plastic values. Concerned interest in the form world of every day surroundings. Through close-ups things take on a new aspect.60

Such statements situate Steiner within the New Vision discourse detailed by Moholy-Nagy. Unlike Moholy-Nagy, Steiner’s statements on photography were scant, and in a short monographic piece of 1932, Vanity Fair Art Director Mehmet Agha admitted:



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It is very difficult to write about Ralph Steiner especially if a romanticized biography is expected. His life seems to be as pure and deprived of anecdotes as the career of a private in a Bavarian regiment who send this short curriculum vitae to his colonel: “I was born in 1899 and joined the army”. Steiner was born in 1899 and joined the photographic profession.61

Yet Steiner orbited the radical left before he joined the League in 1931. Typewriter Keys was reproduced in New Masses, with one of Lozowick’s Machine Ornaments, to accompany the review of the Machine-Age Exposition (he later photographed Lozowick in an industrial setting). In 1929, his photo Mexico in Revolution appeared on the magazine’s frontage, and implicitly follows Modotti’s earlier cover both as Mexican-themed image and as a rare photographic reproduction. Through the context of display of New Masses, a tentative link existed between Steiner and his Russian counterparts. Another photograph, Trash, which appeared in the FIFO catalogue, could have anti-capitalist overtones – exposing consumerism’s fickleness via the close equation of new commodities with the detritus of old ones – but is really more attributable to his fascination with signage, evident in other photographs and his abortive film project Signs. More importantly, such points of connection, however slight, between avantgarde practices and the international worker photography groups were developing, as were degrees of differentiation.

Still photography in Experimental Cinema A specific example of this fragile yet tangible politics by association was evident in the February 1931 issue of Experimental Cinema, which I discussed in the previous chapter as marking the alliance of avant-garde and radical filmmakers. Printed adjacent to an article on ‘Workers Films in New York’ about the League is a translation of ‘Soviet Photography’ by the Russian critic and cameraman Grigorii Boltiansky, who had written the catalogue introduction for the ‘Ten Years of Soviet Photography’ exhibition of 1928. It is a rare expert treatise on the subject in the American press – the connection is underscored by the statement in the former piece that ‘American workers are learning from their Soviet brothers that the film must be used as a weapon in the class struggle’.62 Frustratingly, this brief article names neither individual photographers nor photographic organizations, thus neglecting factional disputes, but nonetheless presents an acute distillation of the themes of Soviet photography. He wrote: The events and facts of the Revolution provided Soviet photographers with new, fascinating and rich documental material. Social-economic conditions and cultural-political circumstances and the extraordinary effective value of

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this material stimulated photographic thought to the mastery of this new subject matter, hence the search for new forms determined by the new theme  … Soviet actuality itself provided the themes in infinite variety, for Soviet photography.63

Boltiansky was referring to the Soviet discourse of Factography in his delineation of ‘documentary or “chronicle”’ photography as the ‘most characteristic form’. Although this description ignored the rival positions of Soviet photographic groups, it nonetheless chimed with the League’s accompanying aim ‘to produce documentary films reflecting the lives and struggles of the American workers’. 64 Elsewhere in the February 1931 issue, J. Lengyel discussed Viktor Turin’s non-fiction Turk-Sib film as emblematic of a new tendency predicated on the ‘Soviet fact’: ‘it is the step from the film-play to film-reality. From a finished picture of reconstructed reality to the reality of fact and deed.’65 The necessity of facticity for recording Soviet industry was also evident in Turin’s own article on ‘The Problem of the New Film Language’ in which he stressed that ‘actual occurrences’ in Turk-Sib represented ‘our central theme [which] is the manifestation of socialism, the daily life of our Union’.66 Curiously, rather than providing a portfolio of worker photography to correspond with these ideas, Experimental Cinema printed a three-page profile of Edward Weston. While appearing a non-sequitur, some justification resides in the possibly tenuous claim that: ‘the quality of his work is a permanent message to future proletarian technicians, both of the still and of the film camera, against the bourgeois “technique” of American photography that is even today, in spite of Soviet camera accomplishments, a befuddled standard to a great part of the world.’67 The disparity is compounded by the juxtaposition of a photo of the Sovkino studio under construction and Weston’s anthropomorphic Pepper (Figure 4.9), a photograph that hardly invokes sociality, although on the following pages alongside another pepper and a close-up of ropes and kelp is the famous image of the doomed Galvan firing a pistol, albeit uncaptioned. However, a discursive conjunction exists in the comment that Weston’s ‘honest eye’ precludes ‘unhealthy artificialism of design’.68 Weston’s ‘Statement’ is a brief manifesto of his photographic philosophy that bridges formalism and facticity with machine aesthetic overtones that bear some comparison with Vertov’s ‘cine-eye’ polemic: 1931 – today – the tempo of life accelerated – with airplane and wireless as speed symbols – with senses quickened – minds cross-fertilized by intercommunication and teeming with fresh impulse. Today – photography – with capacity to meet new demands, ready to record instantaneously – shutter co-ordinating with the vision of interested impulse – one’s intuitive recognition of life, to record if desired, a thousand impressions



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4.9  ‘Edward Weston’, Experimental Cinema, 3 (February 1931).

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in a thousand seconds, to stop a bullet’s flight, or to slowly, surely, decisively expose for the very essence of the thing before the lens. Recording the objective, the physical facts of things, through photography, does not preclude the communication in the finished work, of the primal, subjective motive. AN ABSTRACT IDEA CAN BE CONVEYED THROUGH EXACT REPRODUCTION: photography can be used as a means.69

Weston’s adjacent photograph of Galvan, which appeared at FIFO and in the catalogue, was not intentionally affiliated with revolutionary consciousness, and through formal analogy with peppers and kelp his head resembles a gnarly fence post, an equivalent object in a chain of ‘things in themselves’.70 In this regard, he was equivalent to Renger-Patzsch whose book die Welt ist Schön was initially entitled Dingen, or ‘Things’, inviting Benjamin’s charge of reification. Weston articulated a camera eye mode that anticipated the ‘F/64 Manifesto’, which accompanied a group exhibition of his Californian acolytes at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco in early 1932.71 Taking their name from the aperture, quite literally the camera eye, Group F/64 argued for photography as an art medium, reproducing a position first proposed by Stieglitz thirty years previously in a string of articles that heralded the formation of the Photo Secession. Whereas Stieglitz had championed photographers ‘using the camera instead of a brush or a pencil as a means of individual artistic expression’, then ‘the members of Group F/64 believe that Photography, as an art-form, must develop along lines defined by the actualities and limitations of the photographic medium, and must always remain independent of ideological conventions of art and aesthetics that are reminiscent of a period and culture antedating the growth of the medium itself.’72 Sociality was invisible to such medium specificity – F/64 photographic Formalism largely ignored the social facts of the Depression. Weston saw no necessary political dimension to his photography, noting in his diary that: In the back is an ad for next issue of Experimental Cinema … in which I am announced a feature, and titled “Left-wing American photographer”. I simply roared with laughter! I had been adopted – Seymour [Stern], so intensely earnest, would have been hurt by my mirth. But I was not laughing at his cause,  – a cause so many would die for … Politically, my convictions are unformed, excepting to realize, to know, that a change should take – evolution or revolution – I leave it to those who have given it a life study. For me evolution offers a stronger base for a unified future.73

Weston also contributed a review for The Left of the Annual of American Photography, a magazine that he characterized as ‘certainly “red!” – politically red – almost entirely politics’.74 Despite such disavowals, the chain of associations



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in Experimental Cinema that occurred through its editorial alignment of Weston, Turin, the League, and Soviet photographers provided a new political context for the images – equally, the F/64 show rendered the same photographs pure photography. The magazine’s argument that Weston had ‘produced a mass of photographs which have had revolutionary consequences in expanding the powers and developing the dynamic of the still-camera’ might not be so fanciful, but nonetheless remains precarious in its total reliance on editorial anchorage.75

The absence of photomontage One of the most mysterious features of the nexus of American New Vision and worker photography is the near absence of photomontage, a key method of radical publications, in particular AIZ and USSR in Construction. Weston’s banal response to Moholy-Nagy’s experiments at FIFO may be indicative of the resistance of American photographers to those kinds to technical experimentation. He wrote, simply, ‘it only brings a question – why?’76 Amid the photograms, x-rays, photomontages, and double exposures, the photographs by Americans on display were uniformly ‘straight’ photographs. The expatriate Man Ray was the sole exception. Despite the early experiments of Francis Bruguière and Alvin Langdon Coburn, few photographers in the United States of the late 1920s veered from ‘straight’ photography. Sally Stein has attempted to solve the mystery of the paucity of photomontage in America in the interwar period. While plentiful in advertising and publishing, photomontage was seldom used by still photographers or artists, either as an aesthetic or political strategy.77 Stein justly considers Hugo Gellert’s What’s it All About? from the July 1928 issue of New Masses, as ‘an obvious first experiment in which the American ingredients are overpowered by a foreign recipe’.78 Sifting through such scattered artifacts, she concludes vaguely that the eschewal of photomontage was due to differing perceptions of spatial dynamics in Europe and America. Imagining a ‘correspondence between the American cult of the straight photograph and a rather nostalgic, agrarian view of private property and bourgeois individualism’, she writes that: By the twentieth century, the two-dimensional matrix could barely indicate the dense vertical development of metropolitan centers – one reason why Europeans frequently adopted montage to signify urbanism. But in a country where physical expansiveness still served as an enduring source of national pride – where, consequently, the plight of destitute farmers was far more common a visual symbol of national crisis than the plight of industrial ­workers – the unaltered, “natural” rectilinear photograph presented in and set off by the orderly structure of the grid graphically articulated the space and strength of liberal individualism.79

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While the American straight image represented an ordered American ‘mindset’, European photomontage evinced dynamism and fragmentation. Of course, Stein’s binary evades the jagged angularity of photographs by Steiner, Sheeler, et al., and their similarity to straight photographs by Moholy-Nagy and Rodchenko. More importantly, straight photography and montage were not opposed in the context of experimental cinema in America, an area that Stein does not consider. Indeed, for the editors of Experimental Cinema and the filmmakers of the League cinematic montage was synonymous with the dynamism of socialism, and the films produced by this coterie were montages of straight cinematographic shots – but the magazine ignored photomontage. The League did produce one notable photomontage, which appeared in New Theatre in 1934, a cluttered but effective tableau of photographs by Seltzer and presumably other members, which also appeared in a 1935 volume edited by M. Lincoln Schuster called Eyes on the World, which I shall consider below. Like Gellert, the unknown author of the photomontage opted for density of images, rather than the sharp, economic splicing of Klutsis or Heartfield. Straight photography was ubiquitous within the matrix of avant-garde and radical photographers in America, whereas photomontage was scant, and the explanation may lie in the abhorrence of the photographic trickery of late Pictorialism. Weston produced an essay on ‘America and Photography’ for the FIFO catalogue, which pilloried the ‘technical tricks and mawkishness’ of nineteenth-century photographers that were ‘in direct contradiction to photography’.80 He attacked one photographer for retouching work – ‘why photograph at all then!’ – as ‘lies’ and argued that the camera was ‘capable of revealing more than the eye sees’.81 In other words, photomontage was merely a continuation of photographic ‘Impressionism’, the blurry sentimental imitation of painting.82 In 1931, Steichen further explained this American resistance to photomontage: The modern European photographer has not liberated himself as definitely. He still imitates his friend, the painter, with his so called “Photo-montage”. He has merely chosen the modern painter as his prototype. We have gone well past the painful period of combining and tricking the banal commercial photograph – too far past it to be seriously tempted again into imitating even the brilliant technique or ideas of the Dadaists, or the Futurists by combining various and sundry photographs by pasting and retouching.83

More sympathetic to photomontage, but no less adherent in his practice, was Walker Evans, who in a review of several photo-books in the magazine Hound and Horn rounded on Pictorialism as exemplary of ‘peculiar dishonesty of vision of its period’ and ‘the art photographer, really an unsuccessful painter with a bag of magic tricks’.84 He was equally censorious about Steichen, whom he casted as a repugnant commercialist expressing:



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Money, understanding of advertising, special feeling for parvenu elegance, slick technique, over all which is thrown a hardness and superficiality that is the hardness and superficiality of America’s latter day, and has nothing to do with any person. The publication of this work carries an inverted interest as reflection of the Chrysler period.85

Yet if Evans was revolted by the amenability of Steichen’s photography to advertising, then he also dismissed Renger-Patzsch’s work for its blankly scientific nature. He saw it as a ‘photomethod’ that merely presented photography as a better way of recording the world than painting.86 If for Renger-Patzsch the world was beautiful, then Evans praised the editors of Foto Auge who ‘call the world not only beautiful but exciting, cruel, and weird’, while reproducing ‘…a photo of a corpse in a pool of blood because you like nice things’.87 Quoting a large section of Roh’s essay ‘Mechanism and Expression’, Evans called Foto Auge an ‘important and nervous book’ whose editors ‘knew where to look for their material, and print examples of the news photo, aerial photography, microphotography, astronomical photography, photomontage and the photogram, multiple exposure and the negative print’. Yet it was his assessment of the German photographer August Sander’s Antlitz der Zeit (Face of Our Time) that was most revealing, as Evans discussed Sander’s ‘type studies’: ‘this is one of the futures of photography foretold by [Eugène]Atget. It is a photographic editing of society, a clinical process; even enough of a cultural necessity to make one wonder why other so-called advanced countries of the world have not been examined and recorded.’88 In a similar vein, and also writing in 1931, Benjamin described the work as ‘a training manual’ in a society given to ‘sudden shifts of power’ and increasingly in thrall to Naziism.89 What Evans and Benjamin shared was a belief in the forensic and archival promise of the camera eye – which for the latter corresponded with Moholy-Nagy’s frenzied experimentation – and identified the power in relaying and comprehending information. Such photographic instruction was also key to worker photography, as evident in Hoernle’s aforementioned notion that the ‘“proletarian eye” must be trained’ to counter bourgeois false representations or negations by omission of the working class. Somewhat politically inexact, Evans himself orbited the worker photography movement in America, but remained purposefully apart, stating in a letter to League member Jay Leyda how: ‘I got angry with them because they used my name as sponsor after I had declined the honor with reasons. Very foolish of them to antagonize that way.’90 However, Evans and his contemporaries of the emergent documentary movement, including his later colleagues at the Resettlement Administration and peers at the Photo League, stuck universally with single, purportedly unadulterated, straight images transmuted into largely orthagonal photo-essays. The American impulse towards the straight image was firmly evident in Lincoln Kirstein’s Photography Exhibition of November 1930, which was a

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remodelling of FIFO. The majority of prints on display at Kirstein’s show were, for logistical reasons, by American photographers. Alongside Evans and Steiner, these included Stieglitz, Strand, Sheeler, Bourke-White, Edward Weston, Berenice Abbott, and Sherril Schell. Foreign photographers, such as Moholy-Nagy, Cecil Beaton, and George Hoyingen-Heune, were represented through reproductions from magazines. Kirstein’s knowledge of FIFO stemmed from Foto Auge, which as Hound and Horn editor he had commissioned Evans to review, as he acknowledged in his brief introduction to the catalogue, and he aped the former exhibition by including x-rays, aerial, astronomical, and press photographs.91 He also decried Pictorialism and emphasized the immediacy and facticity of the photograph: photography exists in the contemporary consciousness of time, surprising the passing moment out of its context in flux, and holding it up to be regarded in the magic of its arrest. It has the curious vividness and unreality of street accidents, things seen from a passing train, and personal situations overheard or seen by choice – as one looks from a window of one skyscraper into the lighted room of another forty stories high and only across the street.92

In 1933, Kirstein assembled an exhibition of Evans’s photographs of Victorian architecture in the first photographic exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and provided an introductory note stating that: Photography is in essence a scientifically accurate process for the reproduction of objective appearances, a stationary magic that fixes a second from time’s passage on a single plane. Its greatest service is documentary. Walker Evans’s photographs are such perfect documents that their excellence is not assertive.93

These two brief definitions from Kirstein acutely explained the fixation with the single image in the nascent documentary idiom as an antithesis to Pictorialism, and correspond with the camera eye Formalism of F/64.

The camera eye on Russia The American version of the New Vision, as indicated in the photography of Weston, Steiner, and Evans, diverged from both Moholy-Nagy and his Soviet opponents at theoretical and political levels, although all of these figures produced analogous images that included close-ups and angular and aerial viewpoints, often of representative facets of modernity. In an accompanying note to a 1931 exhibition entitled ‘Photography by Three Americans: Margaret BourkeWhite, Ralph Steiner, Walker Evans’ at the John Becker Gallery in New York, Agha wrote that it ‘was born from a desire to create a means of perfect objective recording of the unadulterated visual truth’ but ‘never was superficially truthful; never recorded, but always interpreted, in the sense which seemed at



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that moment to be the most imbued of the inner truth’.94 The judgement was sharp because it indicated the provisional nature of the style and the contingency of photographic viewing, and by implication the necessity of training. His assessment of Steiner’s ‘purely photographic technique’ and ‘the objectively recording’ Evans, one of those ‘glorified reporters’, fixed upon the former’s selfreflexivity and the latter’s facticity – encapsulating between them the American New Vision slowly morphing into the documentary movement. His discussion of Bourke-White, however, centred upon a different type of photographer who ‘is thoroughly contemporary but some would hesitate to call her modern’.95 Agha summed up the factors that made Bourke-White one of America’s leading commercial photographers: Her subjects are mostly mechanical and therefore, modern, but her very personal attitude is that of an industrial romantic. There is a great deal of literary pathos about her factory chimneys and her machinery is rather sentimental. Such an attitude, however, has its sociological justification and is equally apt to enchant the American executives and the Bolshevik officials – enthusiasts of the “industrial plan”.96

In other words, Bourke-White was suffusing images of technology with Pictorialist sensibilities creating myths of industry which, as Agha noted, appealed to technocrats both in America and Russia. Indeed, Bourke-White’s photographs of the Soviet Union of the Five Year Plan, made during successive trips between 1930 and 1932, appeared in both USSR in Construction and Fortune, the two leading photographic magazines for industrial imagery, representing communist and capitalist expressions respectively. Bourke-White’s work of the early 1930s fits curiously within above-described photographic discourses and practices. Having studied at the Clarence White School before commencing a successful commercial career, her closest corollary was Steiner, who also shifted between corporate, avant-garde, and revolutionary circles. Bourke-White came to prominence in the late 1920s as a leading industrial photographer, feted for her innovative images of the furnace at Otis Steel in Cleveland, which the company published as The Story of Steel. Her reputation as America’s leading photographic ‘industrial romantic’ was evident when 200-ton Ladle, Otis Steel Company was entitled The Romance of Steel for Cleveland Museum of Art exhibition. After the photograph won the first prize photography award, Henry Luce, the Time Inc. Publisher, used her Otis Steel photographs for the ‘prepublication dummy’ edition of his new magazine Fortune. In chronicling American and international industry for a business elite, Fortune was generously illustrated and Bourke-White was its photographic lodestar, producing numerous portfolios of plants, mills, and factories from its February 1930 first issue onwards. These images present an industrial idyll of

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machines and commodities in a unique idiom that balances the sharp angularity of New Vision photography with the hazy tones of Pictorialism, rendering the subjects simultaneously ultramodern and ancient; a reassuringly romantic myth of plenty as the want of the Depression escalated. Sharon Corwin writes that ‘with its pictures of industry and manufacture, Fortune proposed an image of modern America – ordered, productive, and visually seductive – that big business needed in the midst of the economic impotence and chaos of the Depression’.97 Yet Luce conceived of Fortune as a ‘log book’ and ‘critical history’ of ‘twentieth-century industrial civilization’, and in the March 1930 issue he personally reported on the trials of everyday American workers in the South Bend, Indiana, with photographs by Bourke-White.98 If Fortune’s technophile patrician ethos underlay Bourke-White’s impetus for travelling to Russia to witness rapid industrialization in a ‘land of embryo industry’, as she wrote in Eyes of Russia: Things are happening in Russia, and happening with staggering speed. I could not afford to miss any of it. I wanted to make pictures of this astonishing development, because, whatever the outcome, whether success or failure, the effort of 150,000,000 people is so gigantic, so unprecedented in all history, that I felt that these photographic records might have some historical value. I saw the Five Year Plan as a great drama being unrolled before the eyes of the world.99

In his foreword to the book, Maurice Hindus observed this mixture of ‘photographic records’ with ‘great drama’ in stating that ‘she recorded in her photographs not only the physical appearance of the Five Year Plan but also its romantic appeal’.100 The balance of drama and documentary is further evident in a Fortune portfolio entitled ‘Soviet Panorama’, where a simple introductory note states ‘many photographs have come out of the new Russia. But not until last summer had the swiftly-changing Soviet scene been surveyed by a photographer who was both reporter and artist.’101 As Agha suggested, Bourke-White’s photographs appealed to American and Soviet technocrats alike, and indeed the Vice Commissar of Railways, Leonid Petrovich Serebriakov, saw a potential ‘great service to the Soviet Union. They are just what Russia needs’, subsequently organizing payment of her expenses and access to industrial and agricultural locations.102 Her initial motivation for travelling to the USSR was consistent with Fortune’s technophile journalism and bore little trace of political sympathy, as Hindus relayed in his foreword: ‘she does not rhapsodize over the political and social virtues of the plan. She is hardly aware of these virtues.’103 In her autobiography she recalled that ‘to me, politics was colourless beside the drama of the machine’ and ‘it was only much later that I discovered that politics could be an absorbing subject, with a profound effect on human destiny’.104 As a Time reviewer of Eyes on Russia noted, she quickly



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developed a qualified admiration for the Plan: ‘starting as their photographer she soon became their comrade’ as ‘the spirit of the proletariat was irresistible; but industrial idealism, sauced with scarce goods and inefficient service, she found hard to swallow whole. Living on cold canned beans, on “hard” trains that gave her few transports, she loved the Great Experiment with a grain of salt.’105 In 1930, Bourke-White’s interest in the Soviet Union lay in its rapid industrialization and the attendant machinolatry. She remembered that: Machine worship was everywhere; it permeated even the classic Russian ballet. Little girls with gear wheels in gold or silver painted on their chests danced Machine Dances. The people were worshipping at new shrines with the fervour of religious zealots. It was as though they needed to replace their religion­­­– which was being taken away from them step by step. They looked upon the coming of the machine as their Saviour; it was the instrument of their deliverance.106

The most deified machine of the Five Year Plan was the tractor, because it served practical needs for the vast agricultural populace, and ‘Traktorizatsiia’, or ‘Tractorization’ symbolized the union of industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture.107 Machine and Tractor Stations were the ideological hubs of collectivization, whereby kolkhoz (collective farm) members received technical and political instruction. In Alexander Dovzhenko’s Earth and Eisenstein’s The General Line (both 1929) the tractor is practically a character – a cipher of the Plan that shapes the narratives as the machine transforms rural life. In Red Bread, Hindus’s 1931 account of collectivization, Bourke-White’s photograph of a tractor at State Farm No. 2 has the sloganeering caption ‘The Russians regard the tractor as the chief conquering weapon of the Kolkhoz’ in the front against resistant peasants, evident in the slogan ‘the enemy of the tractor is our class enemy’.108 In Eyes on Russia, Bourke-White describes another photo of a tractor (Figure 4.10) taken on the same day: Silhouetted against the sky, majestic in the morning, was that new God of Russia, the Tractor. Evenly and regally it travelled the horizon. The black earth turned beneath its disks. A procession of tiny clouds followed it overhead. It seemed that the tractor drew the whole firmament after it, earth and sky giving reverence to this new divinity.109

Two kolkhoz members pose heroically adjacent to the machine rolling over the horizon, under a billowing sky that dominates the picture, expressing the sublime power of collectivization. If Moholy-Nagy called for ‘Unprecedented Photography’, the propulsive newness of the camera eye, then Bourke-White’s photographs often seem ‘precedented’, invoking fin-de-siècle landscapes by the romanticist ethnographer Edward S. Curtis and the Pictorialist Clarence White. As Gary Saretzky writes, ‘by 1930, Bourke‑White had long eschewed soft focus

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4.10  Margaret Bourke-White, ‘State Farm No. 2’, 1930. Gelatin silver print.

lenses, but some elements of Pictorialism still are evident in Eyes on Russia’, and revealing more her ‘Pictorialist past than the modernist present’.110 It is therefore at some remove from Rodchenko’s aim for ‘never-before-seen’ objects. Yet, as Agha had indicated, this presentation of collectivization appealed to Russian ideologues of the Plan. As Hindus put it: ‘more than any Soviet poster that I have seen do these photographs dramatize the importance of the tractor on the Russian land. I can well imagine the Soviets reprinting them in millions and sending them all over the country to adorn the offices of collective farms and village Soviets.’111 Such dissemination did not occur, but some of her photographs did appear in USSR in Construction, a feat not achieved by other Americans, including members of the League who were organizationally linked within the WIR network. USSR in Construction offered a parallel communist perspective on industrialization to Fortune’s managerial slant, equally fetishizing machines but conversely stressing the Soviet citizen’s integral place in the process through photo-essays that collated images of factories, workers, and their housing, in contrast to the American magazine’s typical separation of workplace and home. Bourke-White’s inclusion in USSR in Construction likely stemmed from her meeting with one of the editors, Artashes Khalatov, the President of Gosizdat (the State Publishing House of the USSR). As a result she claimed that Russian technocrats differed from American counterparts because they ‘consider the artist an important factor in the Five



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Year Plan, and the photographer the artist of the machine age … thus I had come to a country where an industrial photographer is accorded the rank of artist and prophet’.112 She detailed her encounter with a group of Russian photographers in a chapter entitled ‘Some Ideas about Photography’, which relays that a ‘popular illustrated weekly’ magazine editor arranged for her to give a talk to editors, artists, and ‘photo-correspondents’ (possibly contributors to USSR in Construction or Sovetskoe Foto) about ‘the art of photographing the machine’.113 Echoing Weston’s above comments, she explained to them that photography ‘should be used for what it is’, which for her part was ‘for portraying the power and force of industry’.114 She also stated that ‘a picture refreshes us as it gives us a chance to see the world in a new way’, and stressed that ‘concrete should have the texture of concrete … and steel should possess the very essence of steel’; concepts that were consistent with the New Vision discourse.115 The attendees were apparently more interested in worker photography in the USA, asking ‘“what were American photographers doing? Did the workers form photographic clubs? Did their photographs portray the class struggle? Did their clubs further the victorious uprooting of capitalism?”’ By her own admission, her ability to reply was limited, as while she was in contact with New Masses by 1933 it is unlikely she had read the slim literature on worker photography.116 Bourke-White’s photographs of Tractorstroi, the Stalingrad tractor plant, differ considerably from contemporaneous photographs by Seltzer for the League, who concentrated on the dispossessed, but they do glorify Soviet workers. Unlike photographs by Rodchenko and Al’ Pert, or Vertov’s films, there is little pretence of capturing a moment of ‘life-as-it-is’. For example, her image of workers assembling a tractor is not simply staged but manifestly theatrical. Rather than stumbling upon scenes of industry, she cast her protagonists and had them pretend to work: ‘I searched through the far corners of the factory and in the forge shop found my man. A long body, tough boots, full handsome features, and Stokowskian shock of hair. I led him to my camera, and he fell into the central role almost without instruction, with a natural sense of drama’, evident in the worker’s brooding expression117 (Figure 4.11). The subjects were innate ‘self-actors’ because ‘Russians are a naturally dramatic people’ unlike self-conscious Americans.118 The photograph is therefore contrary to the factographic rationale, and equally to ROPF’s proletarian facticity. The theatricality of the scene is doubly strange in the USSR in Construction version in a piece on Tractorstroi, a different shot minus the background figures, in which the blatant retouching of the protagonist’s face makes the image yet more staged and causes him to look like an uncanny mannequin – an inadvertently alarming waxy automaton rather than a real worker. Appearing in Eyes on Russia, Fortune, and USSR in Construction (albeit modified), the presentation of Bourke-White’s Tractorstroi worker depended on the

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4.11  Margaret Bourke-White, ‘A New Tractor’, 1930. Gelatin silver print.

editorialization. The workers and their attire besides, her images of Russian and American factories were often interchangeable. An American journalist remarked about Eyes on Russia that Bourke-White’s ‘brilliant studies in masses, angles, and mechanistic light and shade was rosier than the facts warrant and most of her pictures of machinery might just have well have been taken in any capitalistic plant for Fortune magazine’.119 If USSR in Construction and Fortune represented opposing political standpoints, then the photographs within them were not markedly dissimilar – the difference lay in the arrangement of the images. ‘Soviet Panorama’, her Fortune portfolio, positioned individual, framed photos in orthogonal placements of image-text boxes with terse commentary. Saretzky writes that in ‘Soviet Panorama’ the captions ‘were detailed and specific, emphasizing the industry rather than the worker’ – Bourke-White’s labelling in Eyes on Russia of an emotional Krasnaya Talka ‘self-actor’ as The Woman



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who Wept for Joy became Pattern in Thread, focusing on commodity production.120 Fortune’s prioritization of industry was manifest in an informative caption on Soviet textile production that implicitly emphasized American superiority by stating ‘in spite of this tremendous production, it is not very difficult to find or buy sufficient clothes in the city’, although in the country ‘the peasants are wellclothed’.121 In contrast, in a story about Krasnaya Talka, USSR in Construction montaged the photos and text to underscore the article’s emphasis on the harmony of workers and machines.122 USSR in Construction, like Novyi Lef, AIZ, and to a lesser extent Proletarskoe foto, differed from Fortune by montaging photographic and textual reports in contiguous photo-essays that espoused the rhetoric of factography. But were Soviet photographs of the Five Year Plan more factual than Bourke-White’s? After all, if factographic template was the newspaper, then the editorial hand of the montageur provided propagandist narratives that fitted official directives. The most troubling case was Rodchenko’s 1933 USSR in Construction essay on the White Sea–Baltic Canal project, a story that represented the nadir of Factography by eviscerating the brutal facts of the thousands of political prisoners who perished during the project. Wolf states pointedly that ‘the collection of facts casts aside truth; emphasis is given to the factual, regardless of historical validity’.123 Although frequently attacking the artifice of October, ROPF photographers were also prone to invention, as the aforementioned 1931 photo story about a Moscow family called the Filippovs, which appeared in AIZ and Proletarskoe foto, with slightly different titles, demonstrated. This roseate view of Moscow workers’ lives was so inaccurate that ‘as at the Filippovs’ was a byword for editorial mendacity.124 In this regard, Bourke-White, October and ROPF were provided ‘photographic records’ of the Five Year Plan that pleased its ideologues by withholding any unflattering facts.

Coda: Eyes on the World On her return journeys to the Soviet Union in 1931 and 1932, Bourke-White engaged increasingly with its society, producing images of infants at school and workers at leisure as well as industrial scenes. While industrial imagery, such as her studies of Magnitogorsk, remained prevalent, she was less preoccupied with the machine, and her series of six illustrated articles in the New York Times in 1932, on themes such as ‘Where the Worker Drops the Boss: In Soviet Russia the Man Behind the Machine is More Important than the Man Who Directs His Operations’, showed a much stronger engagement with Soviet social life than Eyes on Russia.125 This greater emphasis on the Soviet people was also evident in several photos included in Louis Fischer’s 1932 book Machines and Men in Russia, where the author argued that for Russians ‘the machine merely serves as a means

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to human well-being … there need be no conflict between men and machines’.126 Introducing a 1934 portfolio that featured images from all three trips, she wrote: What makes Soviet Russia the new land of the machine are the new social relations of the men and women around the machine, the new man – young shock brigadier on construction or bearded peasant coming from farm to factory – and with him, on an equal footing, the new woman operating drill presses, studying medicine and engineering – are integral parts of a people working collectively towards a common goal … I chose those which show these men and women rather than their machines.127

Arguably, her photography shifted towards a more direct reportorial mode that reduced the legacy of Pictorialism and minimized the machinolatry. There is more consonance with the matter-of-fact photography of ROPF, although dramatization lingers in a clearly staged photo of workers pulling a tree at Magnitogorsk that is reminiscent of Ilya Repin’s 1870–3 epic realist painting Barge Haulers on the Volga. If Bourke-White’s fascination with the Soviet Union was shifting from Fortune’s technocracy towards worker photography, then she was increasingly liaising with the left in America, becoming sufficiently involved for FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to place her in the Group A category in 1941 and the House Un-American Activities Committee to cite her thirteen times in 1944, without making a formal indictment.128 There were some definite instances of alignment with the communist movement and worker photography. In 1932, a lobby exhibition of her Russian photographs accompanied a performance of John Wexley’s union play Steel at a fund-raiser for Daily Worker and the Workers School.129 In April 1934, an exhibition accompanying the League’s ‘First Motion Picture and Costume Ball’ featured her work alongside photos by Steiner, Irving Browning, Abbott, and worker photographers.130 By this point, she was sufficiently engaged with the League to appear on its letterhead as a sponsor. In 1935, her photographs of the Soviet Union appeared in Eyes on the World, a photo-book by Max Lincoln Schuster, the publisher of Eyes on Russia, which also included the League’s photomontage Workers of the World Unite! Eyes on the World was the latest addition to a series of topical and historical photo-books, which also included Bourke-White’s Eyes on Russia, Laurence Stallings’s The First World War, and Charles Cross’s A Picture of America. A section called ‘Eyes on Russia’ positioned her recent images of the Soviet Union alongside Sovfoto agency images, including a USSR in Construction photograph by Al’Pert of the Bobriki Chemical Plant.131 However, the section featured another American photographer, called James Abbe, who had also visited the Soviet Union but, unlike Bourke-White, had taken covert photographs that showed the privations of the Plan. A theatre and film star photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair,



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Abbe first travelled to Moscow in 1927–8 to photograph Meyerhold, Eisenstein, Vertov, and many others for photo-stories on ‘Moscow’s Hollywood’ for London Magazine (disproving Bourke-White’s claim to be the first American allowed to photograph the Soviet Union).132 In 1932 he photographed Stalin, illuminated by window light beneath a portrait of Marx, and attended the opening of the Dnieperstroi dam.133 His portrait of Stalin appeared in ‘Eyes on Russia’, as did a covert photo of ‘Members of Russia’s secret police resting outside the Kremlin Walls’, accompanied by a headline montage about ‘the most drastic “blood purge” Russia has known since 1917’.134 Abbe also illicitly photographed the funeral of Stalin’s wife, Moscow homelessness, and dejected passengers waiting a week for a train. Scraping through a GPU border search by flashing the Stalin portrait, Abbe published these images in the British Sunday Chronicle as ‘Forbidden Pictures from Moscow’.135 Many of these photographs appeared in his 1934 book I Photograph Russia, including a view of the miserable dwellings of Dnieperstroi workers, which contrasted strongly with the idealized Filippov photo-story136 (Figure 4.12). ‘Eyes on Russia’ assembled photographs by Bourke-White, Abbe, and Russian photographers to show the different sides of the Soviet experiment– it diverged therefore from the bias of USSR in Construction and the sober condescension of Fortune. Eyes on the World examined world events over 1934 and early 1935, aiming for an objective report on the Depression in America, the

4.12  James Abbe, ‘Workers Home at Dnieperstroi Dam’, 1932. Gelatin silver print.

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rise of fascism in Europe, and lighter themes such as developments in popular culture. As editor, Schuster aimed to ‘provide a photographic record of historyin-the-making’, an analogous ethos to Luce’s editorial conception of Fortune.137 Eyes on the World diverged from Fortune’s restrained reporting on industry by integrating text (including newspaper headlines and bulletins) and photographs in a manner closer to AIZ and USSR in Construction, although without either the revolutionary politics or avant-garde formal strategies. An editorial note stated that ‘the book was planned and integrated AS A WHOLE’, emphasizing the contiguity of the fragments, albeit in a manner closer to commercial newsreels than Kinoks.138 Bourke-White herself referred to Schuster’s editorial arrangement as ‘montage’ in a review of Eyes on the World in The Nation, which she defined as ‘a new method of communication’ that ‘gives us a vivid picture of the year as a whole, classified and edited’.139 Furthermore, Eyes on the World was a ‘good anti‑fascist book’, for its account of the Nazi bombardment of the Karl Marx housing estate, but also due to its expansive Popular Front non-partisan commentary.140 Mixing together Bourke-White’s, Abbe’s, and Al’Pert’s discrete images of the Soviet Union; press photographer Charles Jacobs’s potent scenes of American homelessness and the League’s polemical photo-montage; and photographic journalism from around the globe, Eyes on the World represented a multi-faceted ‘camera eye’ view on dramatically changing times. Eyes on the World was a curious photo-journalist precursor of the photo-books of the later 1930s that constituted the full emergence of American documentary photography. You Have Seen Their Faces of 1937, by Bourke-White and her husband Erskine Caldwell, was an important early contribution to this genre, albeit one marred by mendacious captions and sly use of a remote shutter button to capture and implicitly mock the unguarded, ‘life-as-it-is’ expressions of America’s rural poor. More substantial were the books derived from the output of the Historical Section of the Resettlement Administration and subsequently the Farm Security Administration, such as Archibald Macleish’s Land of the Free (1938) and Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor’s American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (1939). These studies combined Fortune’s topical and historical chronicling with the restorative liberal agenda of the New Deal to create an extensive archive of American society (the exception was Richard Wright’s combative 12 Million Black Voices (1941)). The other strand of documentary photography was the Photo League, which emerged from the defunct League in 1936, refitting the former institution’s Third Period worker model for the expanded field of the Popular Front, a more diffuse social photography that eventually succumbed to the Red Scare in 1951 (Bourke-White’s League affiliation carried through to the latter group in terms of talks and public support). In important respects, this documentary culture of the late 1930s developed from the fragmented radical photography of the early years of the Depression, and instances such



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as the Photo League’s over-emphasis on emiseration in its Harlem Document or Arthur Rothstein’s controversial wandering steer’s skull played out the contradictions of facticity that had beset worker photographers, in America and internationally, to a larger audience. The camera eye was a predicate of documentary – John Grierson’s famous maxim concerning the ‘creative treatment of actuality’ depended upon the indexicality of photographic media.141 The liberal coding of the Farm Security Administration’s Historical Section, the propaganda of the Photo League, and the assertive Americanist narratives of photo-essays in Fortune and Life magazines, were all exemplary of creative interference bedevilling documentary’s claim to facticity. Couched within the rhetoric of information and entertainment, these photographic artefacts served ultimately to manipulate a mass audience. The League, and the worker photography movement in general, directly presented the camera as a weapon in the class struggle. According to this reasoning, its bullets were facts – the social truths of class exploitation shot back at the bourgeoisie. Except that, in the specific case of Soviet photography, these facts were selective or, worse, were outright lies that used the camera eye as an agent of control – the pulsing, hyperkinetic revolutionary force of Factography stilled to re-emerge as a terrifying form of surveillance, emblematized in the roving monitors in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. For a brief moment in the mid 1920s to early 1930s, the camera eye was the cipher of a network of photographers, filmmakers, and publishers that operated on global lines of communication, aiming to show the world as it is, with a view to its transformation.

Notes 1. ‘Experimental Cinema’, Experimental Cinema, 2 (June 1930), inside front cover. 2. ‘All-American Photo Exhibit’, New Masses (January 1930), p. 20. 3. Frances Strauss, ‘Workers Photo Exhibit’, New Masses (February 1930), p. 20. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. ‘Worker-Photographers’, New Masses (November 1930), p. 20. 7. Helmut Gruber, ‘Willi Münzenberg’s German Communist Propaganda Empire 1921–1933’, The Journal of Modern History, 38:3 (September 1966), p. 287. 8. Jorge Ribalta, ‘Introduction’, in Jorge Ribalta (ed.), The Worker Photography Movement (1926–1939): Essays and Documents (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte, Reina Sofia, 2011), p. 12. 9. Ibid. 10. Willi Münzenberg, ‘Tasks and Objectives of the International Photographer Movement’, Der Arbeiter-Fotograf (May 1931), in Ribalta (ed.), The Worker Photography Movement, p. 112. 11. See Barnaby Haran, ‘Camera Workers’, Review of Jorge Ribalta (ed.), The

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Worker Photography and Mason Klein and Catherine Evans (eds.), The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936–1951, Oxford Art Journal (October 2012), pp. 469–73. 12. ‘Tina Modotti Exhibit’, New Masses (January 1930), p. 20. 13. Ibid., p. 20. 14. Tina Modotti to Edward Weston (23 May 1930), in Elena Poniatowska, Tinisima (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2006) p. 174. 15. See Frank Ward, ‘The Camera as a Weapon on the Class Struggle’, manuscript (1934), reprinted in Ribalta (ed.), The Worker Photographer Movement, pp. 334–5. 16. Russell Campbell, ‘America: the (Workers’) Film & Photo League’, in Terry Dennett and Jo Spence (eds.), Photography/ Politics One (London: Photography Workshop, 1979), p. 94. 17. ‘Workers Films and Photos’, New Masses (June 1931), p. 22. 18. Frances Toor, ‘Exhibition of Tina Modotti’s Photographs’, Mexican Folkways (October–December 1929), p. 195. 19. Russell Campbell, ‘Leo Seltzer Interview: “A Total and Realistic Experience”’, Jump Cut, 14 (1977), pp. 25–7, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/ JC14folder/SeltzerInt.html. Accessed September 2015. 20. Ibid. 21. Vitalii Zhemchuznyi, ‘Attention to Photo Amateurism!’, Sovetskoe foto (April 1926), quoted in Erika Wolf, ‘The Soviet Union: From Worker to Proletarian Photography’, in Ribalta (ed.), The Worker Photography Movement, p. 36. 22. Wolf, ‘The Soviet Union’, p. 37. 23. Ibid., p. 44. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., p. 43. 26. ’24 Hours in the Life of a Moscow Worker Family’, AIZ (September 1931), pp. 749–67, and ‘A Day in the Life of a Moscow Worker Family’, Proletarskoe foto (December 1931), pp. 21–44, in Ribalta (ed.), The Worker Photographer Movement, pp. 131–47. See also, Erika Wolf, ‘“As at the Filippovs”: The Foreign Origins of the Soviet Narrative Photographic Essay’, in ibid., pp. 124–30. 27. ‘Program of the October Photo Section’, Izofront: Class Struggle on the Front of Spatial Arts (1931), trans. John E. Bowlt, in Christopher Phillips (ed.), Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940 (New York: Aperture, 1989), p. 283. 28. Ossip Brik, ‘What the Eye Does Not See’, Sovetskoe foto, 2 (1926), trans. John E. Bowlt, in Phillips (ed.), Photography in the Modern Era, p. 220. 29. Ibid. 30. Alexander Rodchenko, ‘Against the Synthetic Portrait, for the Snapshot’, Novyi Lef, 4 (1928), trans. John E. Bowlt, in Phillips (ed.), Photography in the Modern Era, pp. 239 and 241. 31. ‘Program of the October Photo Section’, p. 284. 32. Ibid., p. 285. 33. ‘Declaration of the ROPF (Russian Association of Proletarian Photo Reporters) Initiative Group, Proletarskoe foto (October 1931), in Ribalta (ed.), The Worker Photographer Movement, p. 69.



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34. Margerita Tupitsyn, The Soviet Photograph, 1924–37 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 67. 35. ‘Declaration of the ROPF’, p. 68. 36. Ibid. 37. ‘Program of the October Photo Section’, p. 284. 38. Christopher Phillips, note, in Phillips (ed.), Photography in the Modern Era, p. 82. 39. László Moholy-Nagy, ‘Production/ Reproduction’, De Stijl, 5:7 (July 1922), in Phillips (ed.), Photography in the Modern Era, p. 80. 40. László Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film (Dessau: Bauhausbücher, 1925), trans. Janet Seligman (London: Lund Humphries, 1969), p. 7. 41. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘The Armed Vision Disarmed: Radical Formalism from Weapon to Style’, in Richard Bolton (ed.), The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 86–107. 42. Ibid., p. 91. 43. Gustav Stotz, Das Kunstblatt (May 1929), cited in Beaumont Newhall, ‘Photo Eye of the 1920s: The Deutsche Werkbund Exhibition of 1929’, in David Mellor (ed.), Germany: The New Photography, 1927–1933 (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978), p. 78. 44. Victor Margolin, The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917–1946 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 156. 45. Franz Roh, ‘Mechanism and Expression: the Essence and Value of Photography’, FotoAuge/ Oeil et Photo/Photo Eye: 76 Photoes of the Period (Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag Dr. Fritz Wedekind, 1929), facsimile edition (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), p. 18. 46. Solomon-Godeau ‘The Armed Vision Disarmed’, p. 90. 47. Ibid., p. 95. 48. Walter Nettlebeck, ‘Sinn und Unsinn: der “Modernen” Fotographe’, Der ArbeiterFotograf, 3 (1929), cited in Margolin, The Struggle for Utopia, p. 158. 49. Edwin Hoernle, ‘The Working Man’s Eye’, Der Arbeiter-Fotograf, 7 (1930), in Ribalta (ed.), The Worker Photography Movement, p. 109. 50. Walter Benjamin, ‘A Small History of Photography’ (1931), trans. Edmund Jephcott and K. Shorter, in One-Way Street and Other Writings (London: Verso, 1997), p. 255. 51. Ibid. 52. László Moholy-Nagy, ‘Photography in Advertising’, Photographische Korrespondenz, 9 (September 1927), trans. Joel Agee, in Phillips (ed.), Photography in the Modern Era, p. 92. 53. R. Green Harris, ‘Further News of the Week’, New York Times (8 March 1931), VIII, 12:4. 54. Gustav Klutsis, ‘The Photomontage as a New Kind of Agitation Art’, Izofront: Class Struggle on the Front of Spatial Arts (1931), in Margarita Tupitsyn (ed.), Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina: Photography and Montage After Constructivism (New York: International Center of Photography, 2004), pp. 237–8. 55. Solomon-Godeau, ‘The Armed Vision Disarmed’, p. 84. 56. Paul Strand, ‘Photography and the New God’, Broom, 3:4 (November 1922), pp. 252–8.

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57. Carol Payne, ‘Interactions of Photography and the Mass Media, 1920–1942: The Early Career of Ralph Steiner’, PhD thesis, Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 1998, p.136. 58. Herbert Lippmann, The Machine-Age Exposition’, The Arts (June 1927), p. 325. 59. Ralph Steiner, A Point of View (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), p. 9. 60. ‘Photographie in Amerika’, Das Kunstblatt, X (1926), p. 447, translated version from Newhall, ‘Photo Eye of the 1920s’, p. 83. 61. M. F. Agha, ‘Ralph Steiner’, Creative Art, 10 (January 1932), p. 35. 62. ‘Workers Films in New York’, Experimental Cinema, 3 (February 1931), p. 37; Tupitsyn, The Soviet Photograph, p. 39. 63. G. Boltiansky, ‘Soviet Photography’, Experimental Cinema, 3 (February 1931), p. 37. 64. Ibid., p. 37. 65. J. Lengyel, ‘Turk-Sib and the Soviet Fact’, Experimental Cinema, 3 (February 1931), p. 21. 66. Viktor Turin, ‘The Problem of the New Film Language’, Experimental Cinema, 3 (February 1931), p. 12. 67. ‘Edward Weston’, Experimental Cinema, 3 (February 1931), p. 13. 68. Ibid. 69. Edward Weston, ‘Statement’, Experimental Cinema, 3 (February 1931), p. 14. 70. Ibid., p. 12. 71. The seven photographers were Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, van Dyke, John Paul Edwards, Henry Swift, and Sonya Noskowiak. Four non-members were invited. Consuelo Kanaga, Preston Holder, Brett Weston, and Alma Lavenson. 72. Alfred Stieglitz, ‘Modern Pictorial Photography’, The Century Magazine, 64 (October 1902), in History of Photography, 15:2 (Summer 1991), p. 85. 73. Edward Weston, ‘20 March 1931’, in Nancy Newhall (ed.), The Daybooks II, California (Rochester, NY: George Eastman House, 1973), p. 210. 74. Ibid. 75. ‘Edward Weston’, p. 15. 76. Edward Weston in Nancy Newhall (ed.), The Daybooks I, Mexico (Rochester, NY: George Eastman House, 1973), p. 190. 77. An almost isolated instance of photomontage on public display was the 1932 Murals by American Painters and Photographers exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, which featured blown-up photomontages by Berenice Abbott, Charles Sheeler, Thurman Rotan and George Platt Lynes. See Murals by American Painters and Photographers (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1932). 78. Sally Stein, ‘“Good Fences Make Good Neighbours”: American Resistance to Photomontage Between the Wars’, in Matthew Teitelbaum (ed.), Montage and Modern Life, 1919–1942 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 135. 79. Ibid., p. 189. 80. Edward Weston, ‘Amerika und Fotografie’ (1929), in Gustav Stoltz (ed.), Film und Foto (Stuttgart 1929), reprint edition, trans. R. Haran (New York: Arno Press, 1979), p. 13. 81. Ibid.



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82. Ibid. 83. Edward Steichen, ‘Commercial Photography’, R. L. Leonard (ed.), Annual of American Design 1931, American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen (AUDAC) (New York: Ives Washburn, 1931), p. 159. 84. Walker Evans, ‘The Reappearance of Photography’, Hound and Horn (October– December 1931), in Alan Trachtenberg (ed.), Classic Essays on Photography (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), p. 185. 85. Ibid., p. 186. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid., p. 187. 88. Ibid., p. 188. 89. Benjamin, ‘A Small History of Photography’, p. 252. 90. Walker Evans to Jay Leyda (22 November 1933), Box 3 Folder 33, Jay Leyda Papers, Tamiment Library, New York University. 91. Lincoln Kirstein, ‘Introductory Note’, Photography Exhibition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Society of Contemporary Art, 1930), non-paginated. 92. Ibid. 93. Lincoln Kirstein, ‘Walker Evans’ Photographs of Victorian Architecture’, Museum of Modern Art Bulletin (December 1933), p. 4. 94. M. F. Agha ‘Photography’, Photographs by Three Americans: Margaret Bourke-White, Ralph Steiner, Walker Evans (New York: John Becker Gallery, 18 April to 8 May 1931), verso. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid. 97. Sharon Corwin, ‘Constructed Documentary: Margaret Bourke-White from the Steel Mill to the South’, Sharon Corwin, Jessica May, and Terri Weissman, American Modern: Documentary Photography by Abbott, Evans, and Bourke-White (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), p. 115. 98. Henry Luce, ‘Preface to Fortune’ (1929), cited in Alan Brinkley, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010) p. 153; ‘The Unseen Half of the South Bend’, Fortune, (March 1930), pp. 52–7, and 102–4. 99. Margaret Bourke-White, Eyes on Russia (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931), pp. 22–3. 100. Maurice Hindus, ‘Foreword’, in ibid., p. 13. Saretzky relays that Hindus and Bourke-White were lovers in 1930 (and after World War II). Gary D. Saretzky, ‘Margaret Bourke‑White, Eyes on Russia’, The Photo Review, 28:3–4 (Summer and Fall 1999), p. 5. 101. Margaret Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), p. 61. 102. Bourke-White, Eyes, p. 39. 103. Hindus, ‘Foreword’, p. 14. 104. Bourke-White, Portrait, p. 90 and p. 92. 105. ‘Soviets by Camera’, Time (14 December 1931), p. 56. 106. Bourke-White, Portrait, p. 95. 107. See Matt F. Oja, ‘Traktorizatsiia As Cultural Conflict, 1929–1933’, Russian Review, 51:3 (July 1992), pp. 343–62.

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108. Maurice Hindus, Red Bread (New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1931), opposite p. 336; Joshua Kunitz, Dawn Over Samarkand: The Rebirth of Central Asia (New York: International Publishers, 1935), p. 205. 109. Bourke-White, Eyes, p. 97. 110. Saretzky, ‘Margaret Bourke‑White’, p. 8. For Pictorialism in Bourke-White’s work, see also John Stomberg, ‘A “United States of the World”, Industry and Photography Between the Wars’, in K. Sichel (ed.), From Icon to Irony: German and American Industrial Photography (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1995), p. 19. 111. Hindus, ‘Foreword’, p. 15. 112. Bourke-White, Eyes, p. 42. 113. Ibid., p. 63. 114. Ibid., pp. 64–5. 115. Ibid., p. 64. 116. Ibid., p. 65. 117. Ibid., p. 126. 118. Ibid., p. 56 119. ‘In the Camera’s Eye’, The Saturday Review of Literature (5 November 1934), p. 255. 120. Saretzky, ‘Margaret Bourke‑White’, p. 8. 121. ‘Soviet Panorama’, Fortune (February 1931), p. 63. 122. ‘Krasnaya Talka’, USSR in Construction, 2 (1930), p. 5. 123. See Erika Wolf, ‘The Visual Economy of Forced Labour: Alexander Rodchenko and the White Sea-Baltic Canal’, Valerie Kivelson and Joan Neuberger (eds.), Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 168–74. 124. Wolf, ‘“As at the Filippovs” ’, p. 124. 125. See Margaret Bourke-White, ‘Silk Stockings in the Five-Year Plan’, New York Times (14 February 1932), pp. 4–5; ‘Making Communists of Soviet Children’, New York Times (6 March 1932), pp. 4–5; ‘Nothing Bores the Russian Audience’, New York Times (13 March 1932), pp. 8–9; ‘Where the Worker Can Drop the Boss’, New York Times (27 March 1932), pp. 8–9; ‘A Day’s Work for the Five-Year Plan’ (22 May 1932), pp. 8–9; ‘A Day in a Remote Village of Russia’, New York Times (11 September 1932), p. 7. 126. Louis Fischer, Machines and Men in Russia (New York: Harrison Smith, 1932), p. xii. 127. Margaret Bourke-White, Margaret Bourke-White’s Photographs of USSR, with an Introduction by the Artist (New York: Argus Press, 1934), non-paginated. 128. See Robert E. Snyder, ‘Margaret Bourke-White and the Communist Witch Hunt’, Journal of American Studies, 19:1 (April 1985), pp. 5–25. 129. Vicki Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White: A Biography (London: Heineman, 1986), p. 135. 130. ‘First Annual Motion Picture and Costume Ball’ (27 April 1934), Film and Photo League folder, Margaret Bourke-White Papers, Syracuse University. 131. However this Sovfoto photograph does not appear on the cover or in the issue of USSR in Construction, which lists Al’ Pert as principal photographer. M. Lincoln Schuster, Eyes on the World: A Photographic Record of History in the Making (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935), p. 161.



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132. See Bobo van Dewitz and Brooks Johnson (eds.), Shooting Stalin: The ‘Wonderful’ Years of Photographer James Abbe (1883–1973) (Göttingen: Steidl and Cologne: Museum Ludwig Köln, 2005), pp. 36–40. 133. ‘Stalin Faces Lens on “5-Minute Plan”; Poses for a New Englander in Virtually First Reception to Any Photographer. But Mind is on Sowing He Begs Camera Men to “Do It as Quickly as Possible” —”Like a Yankee Farmer on Sunday,”’, The New York Times (13 April 1932), p. 10. 134. Schuster, Eyes on the World, pp. 170–1. 135. ‘Forbidden Pictures from Moscow, Sunday Chronicle (9 April 1933), p. 6. A page scan appears in van Dewitz and Johnson (eds.), Shooting Stalin, p. 203. 136. James Abbe, I Photograph Russia (New York: R. M. McBride, 1934), p. 85. 137. Schuster, Eyes on the World, pp. ix and 6. 138. Schuster, ‘A Suggestion’, Eyes on the World, non-paginated. 139. Margaret Bourke-White, ‘Portrait of a Year’, The Nation (31 June 1935), pp. 135–6. 140. Bourke-White to Markoosha [Mrs. Louis] Fischer (16 July 1935), Fischer folder, MBW Papers. Margaret Bourke-White, ‘An Artist’s Experience of the Soviet Union’ (1935), Matthew Baigell (ed.), Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers from the First American Artists’ Congress (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1985), pp. 85–6. 141. Forsyth Hardy (ed.), Grierson on Documentary (London: Faber and Faber, 1946), p. 11.

Epilogue: red train journeys

However little one may know Russia, what one learns is to observe and judge Europe with the conscious knowledge of what is going on in Russia. This is the first benefit to the intelligent European in Russia. But, equally, this is why the stay is so exact a touchstone for foreigners. It obliges everyone to choose his standpoint. Admittedly the only real guarantee of a correct understanding is to have chosen your position before you came. In Russia, above all, you can only see if you have already decided … Only he who, by decision, has made his dialectical peace with the world can grasp the concrete. But someone who wishes to decide “on the basis of facts” will find no basis in the facts. Walter Benjamin, 19271

This book has concerned the transnational exchanges between the American and Soviet avant-gardes, specifically addressing the generative dissemination of Constructivism in the United States across several media. In this concluding section, I consider this relationship in terms of the intensification of cultural politics by looking at the reports of visitors to the USSR in the early 1930s. I examine the accounts of American avant-garde members who travelled to the Soviet Union during the first Five Year Plan, looking specifically at the poets E. E. Cummings and Langston Hughes. The responses of Cummings and Hughes were almost exactly opposite to one another: the former’s horror equalled the latter’s praise. Yet both figures were enmeshed within the pages of Literature of the World Revolution, the communist organ of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers, which was from 1932 called International Literature, in ways that betray the complex cultural politics that accompanied the pilgrimage to the land of the Bolsheviks. In the summer of 1931, Cummings undertook a five-week journey through Russia, which included a lengthy stay in Moscow and brief visits to Kiev and Odessa, during which time he kept a diary that he subsequently developed into



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Eimi, an experimental travelogue that was published in 1933. The book records mostly banal episodes – Cummings passed the time wandering the streets, grappling with Soviet bureaucracy, attending the theatre, arguing (often drunkenly) with Western communists and fellow-travellers, calling on various acquaintances and contacts, and visiting a model prison. In a letter to the literary magazine Contempo, Cummings asserted that ‘Eimi’s source equals on-the-spot scribbled hieroglyphics’, claiming ‘that, through my subsequent deciphering of said hieroglyphics, not one situation has been revalued; not one situation has been contracted or expanded; not one significance has been warped; not one item has been omitted or inserted’.2 Despite this claim to facticity, Eimi was no mere visitor’s chronicle but a polemic against the Soviet Union as the ‘unworld’, an oppressive society founded on pure negativity and populated by ghosts. Cummings based Eimi (Greek for ‘am’) loosely on Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Eimi tells the story of a journey to Hell – if Russia was the ‘Inferno’, then the outward destinations of Constantinople and Paris were respectively ‘Purgatorio’ and ‘Paradisio’. However, as Lisa Nunn suggests, this reference was a form of ‘scaffolding’, a convenient if superficial metaphor to convey the central message of the book, that the Soviet Union was evil.3 The allusion to Dante evoked the referential games of recent modernist literature, evident in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Ezra Pound’s Cantos, and Cummings’s own 1922 work The Enormous Room, which used John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress as a rough source. In Eimi, Cummings mobilized a batallion of Modernist literary devices, including atomized characters, a carnival of grotesques, preoccupation with the scatological and the obscene, fragmented dialogue, streams of consciousness, broken sentences, conjoined words, words broken by punctuation marks, typographic experimentation, repetition, interspersed poetry, nicknames, neologisms, quotations of advertisements, slogans, lists, menus, and timetables. Eimi represented a shift from the tentative experimentation of The Enormous Room, where Cummings had revelled in caricatural descriptions of the hapless souls lurking in the faecal gloom of La Ferté, the holding prison in Southern France where he had been incarcerated for several months during World War One on the fictitious charge of espionage. The style of Eimi also reflected changes in his poetry during the 1920s, as Cummings moved from the meandering Elizabethan whimsy of Tulips and Chimneys of 1923 to a personalized idiom, which mixed formal innovation with the vulgarisms of the street, through advertisement quotations and slang, in collections such as & [AND] of 1925, is 5 of 1926, and W [ViVa] of 1931. Given his avowed faith in unbridled experimentation and aesthetic idiosyncrasy, it is unsurprising that Cummings’s chief opposition to the Soviet Union was its uniform negation of the individual. While no revolutionary, Cummings shared an anarchistic scepticism towards government, and was a modernist bohemian libertarian miles apart from the conservative ‘Red Scare’ lobbies.

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Yet he was not alone amid progressive circles in his condemnation of the Soviet Union. The first significant dissenting reports from visitors came from two victims of the Red Scare, the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. Goldman’s My Disillusionment in Russia of 1922 and Berkman’s diary, published as The Bolshevik Myth in 1925, covered their two-year stay following their deportation from America in 1919. Their growing concern over the direction of the Revolution was brought into sharp relief by the suppression of the mutiny at Kronstadt in March 1921 – Berkman mournfully recorded in his diary: March 17. – Kronstadt has fallen today. Thousands of sailors and workers lie dead in its streets. Summary execution of prisoners and hostages continues. March 18. – The victors are celebrating the anniversary of the Commune of 1871. Trotsky and Zinoviev denounce Thiers and Gallifet for the slaughter of the Paris rebels.4

The anarchists’ disappointment in the Soviet Union was perhaps inevitable – after all, their model of revolution advanced a society without a state. Goldman wrote that it was the ‘State idea’ that ‘killed off the Russian Revolution and it must have the same result in all other revolutions, unless the libertarian idea prevail’.5 By 1935, she was claiming simply that ‘there is no communism in Russia’, arguing that an autocratic form of state capitalism had merely replaced Tsarism, and that the citizens were effectively wage slaves.6 There were also critics of Soviet suppressions of individual liberty from within the socialist movement, such as former The Masses editor Max Eastman whose 1934 book Artists in Uniform expressed sympathy with the USSR but strongly opposed Stalin’s increasingly draconian treatment of actual or perceived dissenters. Eastman attacked the pronouncements of the 1930 Kharkov Congress on a point by point basis, in particular repudiating the notion that ‘art is a class weapon’, defending individualism while opposing the ‘soldierly work’ ethos of ‘collectivized’ expression, and most vehemently rejecting the principle of proletarian culture.7 Eastman’s qualification of Soviet literature was nuanced in relation to Cummings, whom he cited as exemplary of the kind of solipsistic, politically ignorant artist whose ‘inflexible integrity of vision and speech’ would prosper in contrast to proletarianism’s unrelenting dumbness. If he accepted Cummings’s derisive assessment of the Soviet Union as a ‘vicariously infantile Kingdom of Slogan’, he urged that ‘there are other truths that could be seen as precisely and said as brilliantly by those who believe in the future of Soviet Russia, and of the world’.8 For Eastman, Cummings’s assessment of the Soviet Union’s destruction of individualism was acute, but fatally motivated by the asocial insouciance of libertines who ‘care half as much about the future of social life’ as the purportedly misguided artists of the left.9

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Cummings’s interest in the Soviet Union before 1931 was seemingly limited, and his comments were scant and inconsequential – best summed up in the juvenile names of Russian characters, ‘Olga Jerkhov’ and ‘Dimitri Fukk’, in his 1930 comic novella A Book Without A Title. In Eimi, he brushes off inquiries concerning his motives for visiting ‘je suis venu en Russie; parce que je ne le sais pas moi-même’.10 He claimed that it was just ‘plain downright curiosity: that very greatest of all the virtues’; this curiosity was probably roused by reports from friends such as John Dos Passos and Louis Aragon.11 Travelling on a ‘without-party’ visa (brokered by Dos Passos) that spared him the official tourist programme of factories and farms, Cummings limited his account to the Soviet Union largely to urban areas and offered scant insight into the industrial and agricultural transformations of the Five Year Plan.12 In Eimi the Soviet Union enslaves its citizens, and robs them of their essential humanity so that they resemble the shuffling zombies of George Romero’s 1978 film Dawn of the Dead rather than the enthusiasts of the Red Dawn shown in Bourke-White’s photographs. In Eimi, the Soviet Union is purely negative – life is ‘nonlife’, meat is ‘nonmeat’, and the train is a ‘nontrain’.13 As he encountered the city of ‘Moscowless’, Cummings described ‘a new realm, whose inhabitants are made of each other’.14 These citizens were ‘eachotherish’, strange ghostlike forms without definition that disintegrate and merge together into a terrifying mass. In Eimi, the passage that most forcefully states the negation of individualism in the Soviet Union is the section concerning the visit to Lenin’s Mausoleum. Cummings described the throng waiting to look on the embalmed leader: facefacefaceface handfinclaw foothoof (tovarich) es to number of numberlessness(un -smiling).15

They move: All Toward the grave)of himself of herself(all toward the grave of Themselves)all toward the grave of Self.16

Cummings scoffed at the body on display, which seemed to him less convincing than a Coney Island waxwork. If Lenin was the Antichrist of the unworld, then the droves of Russian pilgrims were subhumans, satanic creatures, devoid of definition in a gruesome ‘eachotherish’ procession, filth-strewn and formless:

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‘with dirt’s dirt dirty dirtier with others’ dirt with dirt of themselves dirtiest waitstand dirtily never smile shufflebudge dirty pausehalt smilingless’.17 There is a contradiction in Cummings’s appraisal of the Soviet Union: if he truly despised communism as a system of enslavement, why then did he villify its slaves? It is worth comparing Eimi with Maxim Gorky’s ‘The City of the Yellow Devil’, a 1906 account of a trip to New York, which also involves a disenchanted visitor grappling with a strange city (ironically, Cummings spent most of his time in Russia trying and eventually failing to gain an audience with Gorky). Gorky observed the city from the ocean liner that brought him: From this distance the city seems like a vast jaw, with uneven black teeth. It breathes clouds and puffs like a glutton suffering from his obesity. Entering the city is like getting into a stomach of stone and iron, a stomach that has ­swallowed several million people and is grinding and digesting them.18

Here ‘a cold and evil force labours unseen’, the power of gold, the ‘yellow devil’, drives the New Yorkers on a hideous treadmill.19 He wrote: Grimly and monotonously it operates this stupendous machine, in which ships and docks are only small parts, and man an insignificant screw, an invisible dot amid the unsightly, dirty tangle of iron and wood, the chaos of steamers, boats and barges loaded with cars.20

The lugubrious citizens maunder about the streets in the shadows of the sickly yellow light that emanates from skyscraper windows. The New Yorkers seemed expressionless to Gorky, their ‘freedomless energy’ pulsed by the unrelenting Yellow Devil. The sooty, turbulent city teemed with filthy people: ‘they swarm in the filthy gutters, rub up against one another like flotsam in a turbid stream; they are tossed and whirled by the force of hunger, they are animated by the acute desire for something to eat’.21 Everyone in the city is ‘enslaved’ by ‘the vile wizardry’ that ‘lulls their souls, makes them flexible tools in the hands of the Yellow Devil, the ore out of which he smelts unceasingly the Gold that is his flesh and blood’.22 Both Cummings’s and Gorky’s accounts manifest the fantastical extrapolations of the shocked and alienated literary tourist in a bewildering environment. In both cases, the authors projected their abhorrence of the underlying social order onto the city and its citizens. Cummings divined in Soviet communism the same horror that Gorky had found in America’s capitalist modernity. Yet Gorky’s account revealed compassion – he pitied rather than hated the Americans, reserving his anger for the barbarism of their bondage. For Cummings, the Russian people embodied the evil of their enslavement and became indistinguishable from their predicament. Gorky’s text concerns the tragedy of New York’s victims, lingering on the poverty of the miserable many



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and the deluded self-satisfaction of the affluent few, whereas Cummings’s sole tragic figure is the artist, an abstract individual, and not the apparently doomed Russian people. Yet both convey the respective social systems as impervious and dehumanizing machines. Cummings cited the American engineer as the ‘master of the machine, Soviet russia’s god’ and the machine as ‘20th century man’s covered wagon’.23 In Eimi, Cummings frequently denounced the Machine Age, and imagined the USSR as a dangerous, unstoppable machine. Crossing a square opposite the Lenin Institute in Moscow, Cummings found a striking metaphor for the Soviet Union while witnessing a ‘rickety automobile street-sprinkler’ randomly spraying passers by: some get drenched, some merely spattered; and all are threatened, several escape’, [although] ‘not 1 scurrier, however, registers anything approximating indignation … I actually feel (at that moment) how perfectly the far famed revolution of revolutions resembles a running amok streetsprinkler, a normally benevolent mechanism which attains – thanks(possibly)to some defect in its construction or (possibly) to the ignorance or (probably)playfulness of its operator – distinct if spurious loss of unimportance; certain transient capacity for clumsily mischievous behaviour … very naturally whereupon occur trivial and harmless catastrophes.24

Cummings presented the new society as a rogue machine of dubious ­purpose – mindlessly, perhaps malevolently, inflicting a banal form of terror upon the citizenry. Cummings’s Modernist machinephobia is most evident in Eimi in his assault on Aragon’s epic poem The Red Front, which ironically Cummings translated for publication in Literature of the World Revolution, bringing him into the discursive arena of the international communist movement. The translation was a gesture of thanks to Aragon, a friend from his Parisian sojourn who had written him letters of introduction for his stay in Moscow. One of these letters was for Lili Brik, sister of Aragon’s wife Elsa Triolet, the one-time muse of both Ossip Brik and Vladimir Mayakovsky, and model for photomontages by Alexander Rodchenko. Cummings recalled a conversation with Lili Brik about Aragon’s stay in Russia: ‘To me he was enthusiastic; although I’ve heard he didn’t have an easy time here –’,25 to which she replied: ‘It was in Paris he didn’t have an easy time (she corrects). His former associates, those idle aesthetes of the Latin Quarter, resented the fact that our friend had turned communist.’26 Aragon had returned from 1930 Second International Congress of Revolutionary Writers at Kharkov convinced that dialectical materialism was the ‘sole revolutionary philosophy’ and revolution the true purpose of Surrealism.27 An incendiary epic invoking extreme political violence, The Red Front was the first fruit of Aragon’s intensified political commitment and was written while the author was still in Russia. When Cummings’s version appeared in print in October 1931, the

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reception in Paris was incendiary, and Aragon soon faced a five-year prison sentence for inciting political violence. The so-called ‘Aragon Affair’ marked the writer’s final departure from the Surrealists – although André Breton had rallied a petition of support, he nonetheless dismissed The Red Front as ‘a poem of circumstance’.28 By May 1932, the situation had cooled with the pardoning of Aragon by Albert Lebrun, the new French president. Cummings followed these events nervously, concerned mostly that the furore would result in visa problems when he next visited Paris. In Eimi, Cummings discussed The Red Front, a form of counter-­propaganda by mimicry. Cummings named the poem ‘choo-choo’, mocking Aragon’s metaphor of the Soviet Union as an unstoppable train, as evident in the poem’s crescendo: It’s the train of the red star which burns the stations the signals the skies SSSR October October it’s the express October across the universe SS SR SSSR SSSR SSSR SSSR. 29

This was Cummings’s sour response: (and now, comrades, we come to this paean’s infantile climax: now the language, fairly wetting its drawers, begins achugging and apuffing – “all aboard!” the paeaner now ecstatically cries – “everybody jump on the red train!” (alias, N.B., the bandwagon) – “nobody will be left behind!” (and of course Prosperity is just around the Corner) – U-S-S-R, choo-choo-choo-choo(your name’s in the paper)wake up and dream.30

He used this motif to condemn the Soviet Union: USSR a USSR a night – USSR a nightmare USSR home of the panacea Negation haven of all (in life’s name) Deathworshippers hopper of hate’s Becausemachine (U for un – S for self S for science and R for – reality) how it shrivels: how it dwindles withers; how it wilts diminishes, wanes, how it crumbles evaporates collapses disappears – the verily consubstantial cauchemar of premeditated NYET.31

Whereas in Aragon’s poem ‘USSR’ was the propulsive train engine of modernity, here it was a signifier of dissipation into negativity. The Soviet Union therefore inspired Cummings’s opposition to leftism. Before the publication of Eimi his Ballad of an Intellectual, which was published in Americana in 1932, identified a key target of this counter-propaganda:

or as comrade Shakespeare remarked of old All That Glisters Is Mike Gold’



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(but a rolling snowball gathers no sparks and the same holds true of Karl the Marks).32

In Eimi, Cummings railed against all forms of radicalism and liberalism: O Millikan, O Marx! – Page by all means a certain Mr Cosmic Ray, Mary mother of Joshua ben Lenin ben Joseph ben Franklin ben Stalin ben Roosevelt ben Big Ben ben Big Stick ben Evolent ben Lightningrod.33

Yet until Eimi, Cummings was still a laudable figure for the left. In April 1933, the Marxist poet and critic Isidor Schneider championed The Enormous Room, writing that ‘Mr Cummings, at present, avoids the revolutionists. But in his affirmation as an artist he joins hands with them in their affirmation as revolutionists. And in the society which they will establish his book at last finds its agreeing public.’34 However, in an introduction to the 1932 edition of The Enormous Room, Cummings had declared that his forthcoming book would denounce the Soviet Union as a ‘more enormous room’.35 Schneider’s response would eventually arrive in 1935, in a furious review of the volume No Thanks (named so after its rejection by fourteen publishers) for New Masses, entitled ‘E. (i.o.u.) Noncummings’. Schneider made a piquant reference to Eimi: ‘unlife and non-men are laid out in this poetry as they packed the morgue-like vaults of his Hearstian Russian Diary’.36 In a stirring broadside to modernist poetry, he proclaimed: The culture of capitalism is dying varied deaths. Where it does not disappear through sheer neglect, where it does not run for the last sacrament to the church like T. S. Eliot, where it does not starve itself to death before the urns of tradition like Allen Tate, it gyrates to death in the St. Vitus dance of hysterical individualism.37

In the final analysis, Cummings’s work was antiquated, belonging to the bohemian enclave of Greenwich Village and the Paris excursion, during those irresponsible years lost in ‘hazes of gin and bobbed-hair mysticism’.38 Cummings was perhaps unable to grasp that he had travelled to the Soviet Union with his own preconceptions and prejudices, and did not acknowledge how for its supporters the new society functioned as a counterpoint to the USA and its inherent divisions. Writing in International Literature in 1933, the black American poet Langston Hughes enthused that ‘in Moscow, the balance is all in favor of the negro’.39 A leading member of the African-American cultural movement retrospectively known as the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes gravitated towards communism in the early 1930s, alongside his occasional collaborator, the painter Aaron Douglas, joining a lineage of black leftists that included fellow poet Claude McKay and the cultural figurehead W.  E.  B.  Dubois (who both visited the USSR). Hughes travelled to Moscow on the pretext of

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contributing to a film with the working title Black and White, orchestrated by Mezhrabpom, the Workers International Relief production company, about ‘the class struggle in America, the exploitation of the Negro people through the days of slavery to the present, and the growing recognition of the necessity for solidarity between the Negro and White worker’40 that ended in ignominious failure. Hughes nonetheless remained in Moscow for several months over 1932–3, and also visited Soviet Central Asia, recording his observations in two articles for International Literature and a short book entitled A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia, published by the Co-Operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R. in 1934. His most trenchant observations concerned the disparity that he perceived between American and Russian treatment of black people. He reported the case of Robert Robinson, the black Jamaican who was attacked by white Americans in the canteen at Tractorstroi – his persecutors were immediately expelled from the country.41 There were many other black comrades working in the USSR, not just in factories – Hughes celebrated Wayland Rudd at Meyerhold’s Theatre, Emma Harris singing and speaking for International Red Aid, black participants at the Mezhrabpom film studios and in the Kharkov Opera.42 Cummings recorded seeing a black man in Moscow, and revealed the worst of his ingrained prejudice when he spoke of ‘a very black nigger a real coon not stuffed not a ghost he might have stepped out of Small’s paradise’.43 Such attitudes had stifled black writers’ careers in America – Hughes noted that Moscow was the first city he’d lived in where a black writer could make a living, and not have work turned down for being too controversial or for exceeding the unofficial quota of black writers. He argued that ‘stories that show Negroes as savages, fools, or clowns, they will often print’, but conversely intelligent, nonpatronizing commissions for black writers arose but occasionally, and an author ‘can’t live on blue moons’.44 Hughes had travelled to Russia with a party of twenty-two black Americans to work with Vsevolod Pudovkin and Nikolai Eck on Black and White, a project which was eventually cancelled. In Central Asia, Hughes observed ‘socialism tearing down the customs of ages: veiled women, concubinage, mosques, Allahworship, and illiteracy disappearing’.45 He recorded that in Tashkent a handful of black Americans were working at a Machine and Tractor Station.46 Hughes conflated the Soviet cultural, political, and military campaigns in Central Asia with the black communist contribution on the basis that they faced similar foes: In the Northern industrial cities hundreds of thousands of Negro and white workers, unemployed, walk the streets in the shadows of the skyscrapers, hungry. Ford turns his machine guns on them in Detroit; and in Washington the army is called out against them. And in the churches, the bosses pray and



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the ministers are one in denouncing communism – and calling on God – like the mullahs of Bukhara when the Emir ruled.47

This equation of the easy mobility and equal rights of black Americans in Russia with the Soviet technological revolution was underscored by Hughes’s translation in International Literature of a fragment of Aragon’s Magnitogorsk, a poem that cited the great power of the steel works as a symbol of the Soviet Union: The agitator comrade from the Komsomols in the dusk of the village re-tells in one breath the modern legend Marx, October and Lenin the taking of the Winter Palace the commissars of Baku Kolchak and his sister the famine and all at once and all at once he explains what is being smelted he explains the world he explains what will be Magnitogorsk, Magnitogorsk Do you hear Magnitogorsk.48

Unlike Cummings, Hughes’s translation of Aragon’s poetry was an act of mutual political solidarity with the Soviet experiment. If Aragon had brought The Red Front to its incendiary culmination with the motif of the USSR as a powering train, then Hughes found that the actual experience of Soviet train travel epitomized his unprecedented feeling of equality: Now I am riding South from Moscow and am not Jim-Crowed, and none of the darker people on the train with me are Jim-Crowed, so I make a mental note in the back of my mind to write home to the Negro papers: “There is no Jim Crow on the trains of the Soviet Union”.49

For Hughes, the ‘red train’ of the USSR was an emblatic counterpoint to the segregated carriages that exposed America’s compromised principle of liberty. Besides translating Aragon’s poetry, Cummings and Hughes shared a common history by living in Paris in the early 1920s, although their experiences revealed the fundamental disparities of their backgrounds. Hughes travelled to Europe as a seaman on a steamship and paid for his Parisian excursion by working in the kitchens of Le Grand Duc, an American nightclub in Montmartre, the hub of the black Parisian community that specialized in jazz and was frequented by expatriates. While Hughes washed dishes, Cummings enjoyed the champagne fuelled life of a rentier, sending giddy missives back

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to America – in one instance, he reported on the power of Josephine Baker’s dancing in The Chocolate Dandies revue as ‘a mysteriously unkillable Something, equally nonprimitive and uncivilized or, beyond time in the sense that emotion is beyond a­ rithmetic … and [during the intermission] we still find ourselves remembering the jungle’.50 In other words, Cummings’s jest that ‘the much misunderstood metropolis of Paris (France) is at present two cities’ (occupied by simpatico Americans or vulgar tourists) was deeply inadequate and indicative, as Eastman had observed, of a brilliant but decadent attitude.51 A polar opposition of these two American travellers to Russia may seem facile – c­ ontrasting Cummings, the wealthy Harvard educated white, with Hughes, the poor southern black whose poverty denied him a university education, risks blaming or apologizing for their backgrounds and disavowing agency. Yet their views of Russia were divergent in respect of different experiences of America that corresponded with disparities of privilege and racial inequality. Looking at America from Moscow, Hughes wrote: You never miss the water till the well runs dry. Those who ought to know, tell me that you never really appreciate Moscow until you get back to the land of the bread lines, unemployment, Jim Crow cars and crooked politicians, brutal bankers and overbearing police, three per cent beer and the Scottsboro case.52

For Hughes, this was the proof of the validity of Soviet communism, yet his conclusions rested on partial evidence. From the perspective of a strictly mediated guided tour with highly selective information, the accuracy of Hughes’s vision of Russia and Central Asia was restricted by Soviet censorship and his own political agenda. In fairness, he would have encountered little to contradict his assessment that black Americans were thriving in the Soviet Union. His paradigmatic representation of the Stalingrad engineer Robert Robinson was unfortunate. Robinson was an expert toolmaker working for the Ford Motor Company when visiting Soviet officials recruited him with the lure of an increased salary, a car, and free travel back and forth to America.53 The publicity that followed his racist assault by white American workers at Tractorstroi enhanced his status and so Robinson was selected as a delegate of the factory for propaganda work aimed at recruiting American, especially black, workers to the Party. When Hughes met him in 1932, he was seemingly content with his life in Russia – Robinson, for his part, remembered his conversations with the writer warmly.54 During 1933, he started to notice fellow Tractorstroi workers disappearing – later discovering that these were victims of the first purges – but despite feeling increasingly terrified he nonetheless decided to accept, albeit reluctantly and fearfully, his election as a member of the Moscow Soviet.55 Time magazine reported this development in an article entitled ‘Russia: Black Blank’ which



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dubiously announced how ‘Nowhere else in the world is a Negro so pampered as in Russia. Last week that coal-black protégé of Joseph Stalin, Robert Robinson, was elected, somewhat to his surprise, to the Moscow Soviet’, concluding that this ‘was elegant propaganda amongst US Negroes’.56 Robinson’s adoption of Soviet citizenship compromised his freedom to return to the USA, which he belatedly hoped to do as, he recalled in 1988, that ‘I had made my fateful decision at a time when disappearances were increasing but could not yet be considered epidemic. That soon changed.’57 From then on, there was a constant fear that the secret police … would come knocking on the door in the middle of the night. No one could feel safe. Since I was now a Soviet citizen, I knew I was as vulnerable as the next person. I did not think being a member of the Moscow Soviet afforded me any protection … a day did not go by that I did not ask myself what kind of hell I had gotten into. No longer a US citizen, I could not go home.58

Indeed, it took Robinson forty years to defect from the Soviet Union, but, having been interrogated, he did at least escape the purges. Less fortunate was Lovett Fort-Whiteman, whom Hughes also met, describing a ‘Negro teacher’ at the ‘the Moscow school for children of English speaking parents’ whose ‘field is chemistry, physics, and biology. He has lived in Moscow for more than five years, is married and intends to be a permanent resident.’59 One of America’s earliest black communists, Fort-Whiteman travelled to Russia in 1924 for the Fifth Congress of the Third International, where he addressed an audience that included Stalin and Ho Chi Minh, albeit contravening the official Soviet line by arguing American blacks were ‘not discriminated as a class, but as a race’.60 He concluded that ‘the negroes are destined to be the most revolutionary class in America, but communist propaganda among the negroes is hampered by the lack of publicity carrying a special appeal’.61 A contentious figure who contradicted the Soviet-endorsed thesis of an autonomous ‘black belt’ African-American nation in the southern United States, promulgated by Harry Haywood at the Sixth Congress in 1928, Fort-Whiteman settled in Moscow that year for a fellowship in ethnology at Moscow University.62 Like Robinson, he was drawn into the Black and White debacle – Hughes recalled in ‘Moscow and Me’ that the hale and hearty ‘Comrade Whiteman didn’t look anything like/ A motherless chile/ A long ways from home’.63 By 1934, he too was ready, though unable, to leave the Soviet Union, but years of outspokenness and association with Trotskyism saw him victimized as a ‘counter-revolutionary’, and subsequently fleeing to a safer existence in Central Asia.64 However, in 1937 Fort-Whiteman was arrested and sent to a gulag in Kolmya, Siberia, where he died two years later of malnourishment and maltreatment.65 Thus Hughes’s cheerful depictions of black Americans casting off the

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shackles of segregation by riding freely on trains and driving tractors in Tajikistan, one of the Soviet Union’s newest republics, bear profoundly tragic irony. Ultimately it was Cummings, rather than Hughes, who provided the more reliable assessment of the Soviet Union, albeit one attributable to intuition rather than evidence – Dos Passos wrote in 1946 (himself having abandoned his former radicalism) that Cummings’s estimation of the USSR in Eimi was ‘shrewd odd annoyingly sound’.66 Yet, for all Cummings’s possible defects as a witness – such as his incipient racism, disinterest in data, and quasi-aristocratic worldview – there was some force in his opposition to those who either glossed over or refused to see that the emerging tyranny in the Soviet Union. Many of the figures discussed in this book were attracted to socialism’s claim to social justice, especially as the Depression grew and the once prosperous America seemingly lay in ruins, stimulating interest in the apparent miracle underway in Russia. However they became unfortunately allied with a murderous regime that represented a grotesque distortion of socialism’s true promise of fundamental equality. Their avoidance of the enveloping terror as merely a rumour spread by political enemies stemmed from a refusal to allow that the Revolution may have failed in its core principle of liberating Russians, and that the opportunity to construct a truly equitable society in Russia was fading. Rather than censuring American radicals for doublethink or selective enlightenment, my aim here has been to examine the projections they made onto the Soviet Union without offering judgement. From the early 1920s to the middle 1930s the Soviet Union crystallized the utopian dreams of the radical wing of the American avant-garde of fashioning new models of societal organization based on social justice in opposition to capitalist barbarism. If these good intentions ultimately pathed the wrong road, then we need not devalue the motivations and rationales of these figures during their progress. The miserable purging of the Constructivists Vsevolod Meyerhold, Gustav Klutsis, and Alexei Gan, the mysterious death of Willi Münzenberg, the sad detail of Fort-Whiteman’s demise in a Siberian gulag, neither negate nor render obsolete the social dreaming of these and other communists of the period and thereafter. The Americans who defended the persecution of their Russian counterparts – such as Joshua Kunitz in New Masses – demonstrated a fatal lack of empathy for the hapless victims of shifting ideological lines, but their cultural observations and ideas do not deserve blanket condemnation and dismissal.67 The complex nexus of the American and Soviet avant-gardes in this period involved the altruistic contributions of artists and writers whose primary aims were constructive and benevolent. To an extent, these figures were visionaries because they imagined that revolutionary Russia was constructing a magnificent future for humanity, but they were not soothsayers and could not predict the disastrous direction that the Soviet regime would take. Before this sorry



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development, the interchange of the American and Soviet avant-gardes was experimental, both politically and creatively. There remains much to glean from these exploratory dialogues between the American and Soviet avantgardes, in which the Red Dawn was shot through ever-distorting mirrors.

Notes 1. Walter Benjamin, ‘Moscow’ (1927), trans. Edmund Jephcott and K. Shorter, in One-Way Street and Other Writings (London: Verso, 1997), p. 177. 2. E. E. Cummings, ‘Letter to Editors’, Contempo (21 February 1933), p. 2. 3. Lisa Nunn, ‘Cummings in Context: Eimi’, Spring (October 1998), p. 140. 4. Alexander Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth (Diary 1920–1922) (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925), p. 302. 5. Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (London: The C. W. Daniel Company, 1922), p. 257. 6. Emma Goldman, ‘There Is No Communism in Russia’ in American Mercury (April 1935), in Alix Kates Shulman (ed.), Red Emma Speaks: The Selected Speeches and Writings of the Anarchist and Feminist (London: Wildwood House 1979), p. 359. 7. Max Eastman, Artists in Uniform: A Study of Literature and Bureaucratism (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1934), p. 9. 8. Ibid., p. 29. 9. Ibid. 10. E. E. Cummings, Eimi (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1933), p. 65. All grammatical and spelling idiosyncrasies are as presented in the book. 11. Cummings, Eimi, p. 301; Dos Passos travelled to Russia in 1928, and over the next decade produced some accounts of his journey that were more favourable than Cummings, but not entirely celebratory. See John Dos Passos, ‘Rainy Days in Leningrad’, New Masses (February 1929) and ‘Russian Visa’, In All Countries (London: Constable, 1934) in Travel Books and Other Writings (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 2003). 12. Richard S. Kennedy, Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings (New York: Liveright, 1980), p. 308. 13. Strangely, Russian women rather than men were ‘nonmen’ – apparently devoid of the feminine attributes of the Western woman, although, given Cummings’ complete misogyny, attractive young women avoided such categorization. 14. Cummings, Eimi, p. 21. 15. Ibid, p. 240. 16. Ibid, p. 241. 17. Ibid, p. 240. 18. Maxim Gorky, ‘The City of the Yellow Devil’ (1906), in The City of the Yellow Devil: Pamphlets, Articles and Letters About America (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), p. 9. 19. Ibid, p. 8. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid, p. 14.

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22. Ibid, p. 17. 23. Ibid., p. 206. 24. Ibid., pp. 106–7. 25. Ibid, p. 64. 26. Ibid. 27. Cited in Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, trans. R. Howard (London: Penguin, 1973), p. 176. 28. André Breton, ‘The Poverty of Poetry: The Aragon Affair Before Public Opinion’, in ibid., p. 303. 29. Louis Aragon, ‘The Red Front’ (1931), trans. E. E. Cummings, reprinted in George J. Firmage (ed.), E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised (New York: October House, 1965), p. 273. 30. Cummings, Eimi, p. 143. 31. Ibid, p. 413. 32. E. E. Cummings, ‘Ballad of an Intellectual’ (1932), in Firmage (ed.), E. E. Cummings, p. 279. 33. Cummings, Eimi, p. 52. This was a rare reference to Stalin. Lenin was deemed the Antichrist instead, perhaps due to the convenience of the death-cult metaphor. 34. Isidor Schneider, ‘The Enormous Room’, Contempo, 3:8 (5 April 1933), p. 5. Schneider was author of Comrade Mister, a 1934 collection of proletarian poetry. He was an avant-gardist in the 1920s. 35. E. E. Cummings, ‘Introduction’ to The Enormous Room (1922) (New York: The Modern Library, 1932, London: Penguin, 1968), p. 8. 36. Isidor Schneider, ‘E. (i.o.u.) Noncummings’ New Masses (25 June 1935), p. 26. 37. Ibid, p. 27. 38. Ibid, p. 26. 39. Langston Hughes, ‘Negroes in Moscow: In a Land Where There is No Jim Crow’, International Literature, 4 (October 1933), quoted in Christopher C. De Santis (ed.), The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: Volume Nine: Essays on Art, Race, Politics and World Affairs (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2002), p. 67. 40. Komsomolskaya Pravda, 147, cited in Joy Gleason Carew, Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), p. 118 41. Hughes, ‘Negroes in Moscow’, p. 68. 42. Ibid, p. 69. 43. Cummings, Eimi, p. 338. 44. Langston Hughes, ‘Moscow and Me’, International Literature, 3 (July 1933), De Santis (ed.), The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, p. 61. 45. Ibid, p. 63. 46. Hughes, ‘Negroes in Moscow’, p. 80. 47. Hughes, A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia (Moscow: Co-Operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., 1934), in De Santis (ed.), The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, p. 87. 48. Louis Aragon, ‘Magnitogorsk’, trans. Langston Hughes, International Literature, 4 (October 1933), p. 83. 49. Hughes, A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia, p. 73.



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50. E. E. Cummings, ‘Vive la Folie!’, Vanity Fair (September 1926), in Firmage (ed.), E. E. Cummings, p. 162. 51. E. E. Cummings, ‘Conflicting Aspects of Paris’, Vanity Fair (August 1926), in ibid., p.159. 52. Hughes, ‘Moscow and Me’, p. 63. 53. Robert Robinson, Black on Red: My 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union (Washington, DC: Acropolis Books, 1988), p. 29. 54. Ibid., pp. 320–1. 55. Ibid., p. 96. 56. ‘Russia: Black Blank’, Time (24 December 1934), p. 21. 57. Robinson, Black on Red, p. 113. 58. Ibid., p. 116. 59. Hughes, ‘Negroes in Moscow’, p. 69. 60. Lovett Fort-Whiteman, listed by party name Comrade (James) Jackson, in ‘Discussion on National and Colonial Question’, Twenty-First Session, July 1st 1924, Fifth Congress of the Communist International: Abridged Report of Meetings Held at Moscow June 17th to July 8th 1924 (London: The Communist International, 1924), pp. 200–1. 61. Ibid., p. 201. 62. Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), p. 66. 63. Hughes, ‘Moscow and Me’, pp. 56–7. 64. Gilmore, Defying Dixie, p. 153. 65. Ibid., p. 154. 66. John Dos Passos, Untitled Piece on E. E. Cummings, The Harvard Wake, 5 (Spring 1946), p. 64. 67. See Joshua Kunitz, ‘The Shostakovich Affair’, New Masses (9 June 1936), pp. 15–17.

Bibliography

Archival sources

Anthology Film Archives, New York, NY. E. E. Cummings papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Frederick Kiesler papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, New York, NY. Jay Leyda and Si-lan Chen Leyda papers, 1913-1987, Tamiment Library, New York University, New York, NY. Little Review papers, 1914–64, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, WI. Louis Lozowick papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, New York, NY. Louis Lozowick papers, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY. Joshua Kunitz papers, Columbia University, New York, NY. Margaret Bourke-White papers, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY. Museum of Modern Art film and photography departments and research library, New York, NY. Museum of the City of New York photography collection, New York, NY. Walker Evans Archive, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.

Published sources

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Index

ABC 25 Abbe, J. 164–6, 165 Agha, M. F. 116, 148, 156, 157, 158, 160 Aleichem, S. 81 All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR 38 Alpers, B. 66 Al’Pert, M. 137, 138, 140, 140, 161, 164, 166 Altman, N. 15, 22, 28, 64 Americanism 2, 5, 8, 64, 70, 75, 103 Américanisme 2 Amerikanismus 4 Amerikanizm 2, 4, 36, 38, 61, 71, 100 American Prolet-Kino 107, 111, 112, 119, 127n.89 American Society for Cultural Relations with Russia 38 Amtorg Trading Corporation 38 Anderson, M. 46n.1 Annenkov, Y. 64 Aragon, L. 177, 179, 180, 183 Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ) 109, 132, 133, 137, 153, 163, 166 Archipenko, A. 12, 13, 35, 36 Aronson, B. 4, 81, 120 ARTEF 80 Arvatov, B. 67, 104 ASNOVA (Association of New Architects) 38, 39, 44, 45 avant-garde 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 19, 21, 24, 28, 30, 39, 54, 58, 61, 78, 92, 94, 101, 103, 114, 119, 131, 137, 138, 140, 142, 143, 146, 147, 149, 154, 157, 166, 174, 186, 187

Balog, L. 108, 110 Barr, A. H. 44–6 Basshe, E. J. 19, 54, 55, 56, 68, 71, 82 Earth 71, 72 The Centuries 72 Bauhaus 1, 25, 28, 39, 42, 44, 131, 132 Bauhausbücher 142 Benjamin, W. 80, 144, 145, 152, 155, 174 Berkman, A. 176 Berlin am Morgen 109 biomechanics 2, 61, 66 Blitzstein, M. 91n.141, 116 Bogdanov, A. 66 Bolshevik Party 2, 61, 94, 157, 174, 176 Bolshoi Dramatic Theatre 64 Bourke-White, M. 131, 156-163, 164, 165, 166 Brandon, T. 93, 108, 119, 120 Brecht, B. 4, 110, 120, 144 Brik, L. 15, 179 Brik, O. 11, 15, 71, 138, 143, 179 Brinton, C. 13, 14, 38, 51n.124 Brody, S. 108, 110, 112, 119 Bronnen, 58 Brooks Atkinson, J. 70, 85 Broom 4, 15, 22, 26, 146 Bryher, W. 106 Bufano, R 73 Burliuk, D. 13, 14 Burov, A. 45 Carter, H. 60 Cavalcanti, A. 114, 116 Chaplin, C. 98, 103 Chicago Tribune Tower 41

208

index

Cikovsky, N. 98 Cinema Crafters of Philadelphia 102 Close-Up 106-107, 115 Clurman, H. 83, 84, 120 Comintern 92, 93, 109, 110, 134 communism 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 11, 24, 26, 40, 41, 44, 55, 56, 59, 60, 61, 72, 78, 81, 82, 93, 101, 105, 106, 109, 117, 121, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 143, 157, 160, 164, 174, 175, 176, 178, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186 Communist Party of the United States of America 82, 117, 121, 132 Congress of International Progressive Artists 22 Constructivism 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 11–46, 54, 55, 56, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 70, 71, 72, 75, 76, 79, 80, 81, 84, 92, 93, 95, 95, 96, 100, 102, 104, 142, 144, 147, 174 Constructivist Congress 22 Cook, G. C. 57 Cowley, M 3, 78 Crommelinck, F. 61 Cubism 25, 37 Cummings, E. E. 174-186 Eimi 175-181, 186 Dada 4, 11, 17, 25, 26, 117, 146, 154 Daily Worker 56, 72, 75, 76, 77, 105, 112, 119, 132, 133, 164 Davis, S. 14 Davringhausen, H. 18 Del Duca, R. 10 Der Arbeiter Fotograf 132, 133, 137, 144 Der Eulenspiegel 109 De Stijl 24, 25, 26, 27, 32, 42, 43, 142 De Stijl 11, 25, 26, 27, 30, 31, 32, 45, 97, 99, 101 Delgass, B. W. 38 Demuth, C. 14, 35 Deutscher Werkbund 143 Disk 25 Doesburg, T van 11, 14, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 32, 35, 42-46 Dokucheyev, N. 39 Dos Passos, J. 6, 19, 54, 58, 59, 68, 72, 73, 76-81, 83, 98, 123, 177, 186 Airways Inc. 76-81 Fortune Heights 80 Manhattan Transfer 78 The Moon is a Gong 76

USA 77, 78, 79, 123 Dovzhenko, A. 92, 93, 111, 111, 159 Arsenal 111 Earth 159 Dreier, K. 4, 13, 14, 26 Dreiser, T. 101, 102, 117, 118 Duchamp, M. 5, 13, 30 Dudow, S. 110 Dynamo 19, 68 Eastman, M. 57, 176, 184 Eesteren, C. van 26, 49 Eggeling, V. 28, 63 Ehrenberg, I. 24 25 Eisenstein, S. 4, 11, 15, 67, 70, 80, 92, 93, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 111, 112, 113, 114, 117, 118, 119, 120, 123, 143, 159, 165 ¡Que Viva Mexico! 118 Strike 67, 102, 104, 143 Ten Days that Shook the World 105 The Battleship Potemkin 102, 103, 104, 105, 109, 118, 120 The General Line 45 Ekk, N. 109 Eliscu, E. 71 Equity Players 58 Erdman, N. 28, 64 Evans, W. 154–6, 157 Exhibition of Contemporary Architecture 39 Experimental Cinema 92, 93, 101–17, 108, 118, 119, 149–53, 151, 154 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes 4, 27 Expressionism 13, 25, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 64, 65, 66, 70, 72, 75, 76, 77, 83, 84, 120, 142, 146 Exter, A. 11, 15, 28, 35, 64, 81, 101 Factography 80, 138, 150, 163, 167 Farragoh, F. 19, 54, 68 Pinwheel 87n.61 fascism 74, 110, 111, 118, 121, 166 Federal Theatre Project 91n.141 FEKS (Factory of the Eccentric Actor) 94 Ferriss, H. 37 Film Associates Inc. 34 Film Guild Cinema 32, 33, 93–101, 114, Film und Foto 4, 131, 142, 143 First Exhibition of Russian Art 12–15, 24 First Workers Theatre of the Moscow Proletcult 66



index 209

First Working Group of Constructivists 11, 12, 13 Five-Year Plan 6, 43, 76, 83, 131, 139, 157, 158, 159, 160, 163, 165, 167 Flaherty, R. 113 Flanagan, H. 91n.141 Fordism 2, 61, 73, 84 Ford Motor Co. 84, 111, 184 Formalism 3, 39, 60, 61, 79, 95, 106, 115, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 146, 150, 152, 156 Fortune 131, 157, 158, 160, 161, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167 Fort-Whiteman, L. 185 Freeman, J. 5, 104 functionalism 39, 42–5 Futurism 3, 11, 25 Gabo, N. 12, 13, 14, 22, 35 Gan, A. 11, 12, 24, 26, 31, 39, 40, 93, 95 Gance, A. 99 Gellert, H. 153, 154 Gering, M. 54, 64 Ginzburg, M. 39, 41, 44, 45 Glaspell, S. 57 Gold, M. 5, 6, 9, 54, 55, 60, 61, 67, 68, 71, 72, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 119 Hoboken Blues 71, 76 Jews Without Money 81 Strike! A Mass Recitation 67–8 Goldman, E. 176 Golz, G. 41 Gorelik, M. 59, 68, 70, 83 Gorky, M. 178 Gosizdat (State Publishing House of the USSR) 139, 160 Gould, S. 32, 97, 105 Gramsci, A. 74 Granofsky, N. 23 Grierson, J. 167 Gropius, W. 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 142 Gropper, W. 5, 56, 75 Grosz, G. 18 Group F/64 152, 153, 156 Group Theatre 6, 83–4, 120, 123 Gurley Flynn, E. 57, 85n.10 Hall, M. 99, 105 Harry Alan Potamkin Film School 115, 119, 128n.106 Haywood, W. 57, 85n.10

Heap, J. 10, 11, 15, 22–8, 32–7, 43 Heartfield, J. 109, 130, 132, 137, 154 Hindus, M. 158, 159, 160, 171n.100 Hitchcock, H-R. 43, 44 Hood, R. 37, 44 Hound and Horn 106, 154, 156 Hudyma, J. 110–11 Hughes, L. 174, 181–6 Hurwitz, L. 93, 119, 128, 128n.106 Ignatovitch, B. 138, 143, 146 Impressionism 12, 25, 154 Industrial Workers of the World 57, 121 INKhUK (Institute of Artistic Culture) 11, 12 International Exposition of New Systems of Architecture 32–4 Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik 27 International Literature (Literature of the World Revolution) 174, 179, 181, 182, 183 International Theatre Exposition 10, 11, 27, 28, 33, 43, 63, 63, 64 Jacobs, L. 102, 105, 107, 112, 113, 114, 119, 125n.29, 128n.106 Footnote to Fact 113 ‘Highway 66: Montage Notes for a Documentary Film’ 112–13 jazz 2, 5, 19, 59, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 76, 80, 183 Jessner, L. 58 Johnson, P. 43, 44 Jones, R. E. 57 Kaiser, G. 28, 36, 54, 55, 56, 58, 64, 65, 75 Kamerny Theatre 38, 79 Kandinsky, V. 13, 30, 142 Kaufman, M. 94, 96, 124n.14, 143 Moskva 114 Kenneth Sawyer Goodman Theatre 28, 55, 64 Keppler, F. L. 37 Kiesler, F. 4, 27–34, 29, 33, 43, 63, 63, 96–101, 98 City in Space 27, 30, 31 Film Guild Cinema (see separate entry) Saks Fifth Avenue designs 29, 31 Space Stage 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 Kino-Fot 93 Kirstein, L. 44, 155, 156 Klutsis, G. 11, 94, 130, 143, 146, 154, 186

210

index

Koolish, E. 121 Kracauer, S. 100 Kruse, W. 109 Kuleshov, L. 92, 93, 103 The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks 103 Kunitz, J. 5, 186 Labor Defender 132, 133, 135, 136 Lavinsky, M. 12, 24 Lawson, J. H. 19, 54, 58, 59, 60, 63, 68–72, 75, 76, 78, 79 The International 19, 72 Loud Speaker 68–72, 69 Processional 59, 60, 68, 70, 71, 75, 76, 79 Roger Bloomer 58, 59, 70 Le Corbusier 32, 37, 39, 43, 44, 45 LEF (Left Front) 45, 95, 104, 138 Lef 95, 104, 138 The Left 111 Léger, F. 19, 28, 35, 79 Lenin, V. I. 82, 83, 94, 103, 177, 181, 183 Lerner, I. 93, 114, 119 Leyda, J. 113, 114, 119, 127n.101, 155 A Bronx Morning 113–14 The Liberator 5, 67, 68 Lippmann, H. 34, 35, 147 Lissitzky, E. 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 30, 32, 39, 41, 42, 43, 45, 131, 138, 142, 143, 146 Proun 16, 17, 17, 19, 32 The Little Review 10, 15, 22–34, 35, 36, 46n.1, 102 Little Review Gallery 24, 32 Living Newspaper 91n.141 London, J. 67, 104 The Mexican 67, 104 Lord and Taylor department store 19, 20, 22, 36 Lozowick, L. 3, 4, 5, 6, 14–22, 18, 21, 22, 23, 28, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 54, 55, 56, 62, 63, 64, 68, 72, 101, 104, 149, 182 Lord and Taylor designs 19, 20, 22, 36 Machine-Age Exposition poster 21, 23, 34, 35 Machine Ornaments 16, 17, 18, 18, 19, 21, 35, 36, 72, 149 setting for G. Kaiser’s Gas 28, 36, 54, 55, 64 Luce, H. 157, 158 Lüdecke, C. 43

Luddism 65, 75 Lunacharsky, A. 2, 11, 13, 15, 24, 61, 66, 94, 137 Lurçat, A. 37 Machine-Age Exposition 4, 10, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 27, 30, 34–42, 43, 45, 46, 102, 115, 117, 119 Machine Art (exhibition) 46 Malevich, K. 12, 15, 43 Man Ray 13, 131, 141, 146 Marx, K. 105, 165, 181, 183 Marxism 7, 94 The Masses 5, 54, 56, 57, 67, 68 Matchabelli, N. 30 Mayakovsky, V. 11, 15, 61, 94, 179 Mella, J. A. 133 Melnikov, K. 38, 39, 42 Meyer, A. 42 Meyer, H. 4, 26, 39, 44 Meyerhold, V. 2, 11, 28, 55, 60, 61, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 71, 72, 75, 79, 80, 83, 92, 94, 95, 96, 104, 165, 182, 186 Modern Architecture: International Exhibition 43–4 Modern Russian Artists 13–14 Modotti, T. 133–6, 149 Moholy, L. 142 Moholy-Nagy, L. 14, 28, 114, 131, 140–4, 141, 146, 148, 153, 154, 155, 156, 159 Berliner-Stilleben 114 Mondrian, P. 25, 27, 32 Moscow Architectural Society 40 Moscow Art Theatre 38, 60, 67, 79, 84, 95, 120, 121 Münzenberg, W. 109, 127, 132, 186 Museum of Modern Art 43–6, 156 Narkompros (People’s Commissariat of Enlightening) 2, 11, 61, 66, 67, 94, 137 National Board of Review Magazine 104 Naturalism 60, 61, 79, 83, 84, 95 Neoplasticism 27 Neue Sachlichkeit 18, 36, 44, 59 Neumann, J.B. 4 New Economic Policy 6, 9, 20 New Masses 5, 6, 19, 31, 35, 54, 56, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 76, 80, 81, 96, 101, 106, 115, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 149, 153, 161, 186 New Negro Art Theater Dance Group 71



index 211

New Playwrights Theatre 6, 19, 54, 57, 58, 76, 81 New Theatre 120, 121, 154 New Vision 131, 141, 142-149, 153, 156, 157, 158, 161 Nezlobin Theatre 61 Novyi Lef 71, 138, 139, 140, 143, 163 Nykino 93, 119, 120, 121, 123 October Association 137–42, 144, 146, 163 O’Neill, E. 57 OSA (Society of Contemporary Architects) 39, 44, 45 Oud, J. J. P. 32, 44, 45, 97 Ouspensky, P. 30 Parnakh, V. 71 Paterson Strike Pageant 57, 85n.10 Paul, E. and C. 67 Pevsner, A. 12, 35 Picasso, P. 14, 28 Pinwheel 21 Piscator, E. 80, 81 Platt, D. 102, 105, 128n.106 Popova, L. 11, 13, 14, 20, 28, 30, 40, 61, 62, 63, 64, 68 design for The Magnanimous Cuckold 28, 30, 61, 62, 62, 63, 64, 68 Potamkin, H. A. 106, 107, 108, 109, 116, 119, 120, 123 Praesens 25 Prampolini, E. 35, 36 Prolet-Bühne 80, 81 Proletcult 3, 66, 67, 68, 70, 79, 104 Proletarskoe foto 137, 163 Protazanov, Y. 28, 63, 101, 103 Aelita 28, 63, 101 Prometheus-Filmgesellschaft 109–10 Provincetown Players 28, 54, 57, 59 Pudovkin, V. 15, 92, 93, 105, 111, 115, 123, 182 Mother 109 Storm Over Asia 93 The End of St. Petersburg 93, 109, 115 Purism 37 Rabinovitch, I. 18 Radiator Building 37 Rading, A. 43 Red Dancers 82-83 The Belt Goes Red 82-83 Reed, J. 57

Renger-Patzsch, A. 144, 145, 146, 152, 155 Reinhardt, M. 57 Rice, E. 58 Richter, H. 25, 28, 32, 63 Rietveld, G. 25, 26, 39 Rivera 4 Robeson, P. 71 Robinson, R. 182, 184, 185 Rodchenko, A. 11, 12, 14, 15, 20, 28, 45, 64, 95, 137, 138, 139, 140, 143, 146, 154, 160, 161, 163, 179 ROPF (Russian Association of Proletarian Photo Reporters) 137–42, 161, 162, 164, Roosevelt, F.D. 1, 110, 181 Roxy cinema 101 RSFSR Theatre No.1 61 Russia 2 Russian Art Exhibition 14 Ruttmann, W. 99, 114 Berlin: Symphony of a Great City 99, 114 Saks Fifth Avenue department store 29, 31 Schlemmer, O. 28, 142 Schneider, I. 181 Schwitters, K. 14 Scriabin, A. 30 Segal, E. 82–3 Seiwert, F. 14 Seltzer, L. 93, 108, 110, 119, 128n.106, 135, 136, 136, 154, 161 Shaikhet, A. 137, 138, 140 Sheeler, C. 113, 131, 144, 146, 154, 156, 170n.77 Manhatta 32, 113 Shklovsky, V. 61 Shterenberg, D. 12, 15, 16 Shvidkovskki, A. 41 Sifton, C. and P. 83, 84 1931 83, 84 Midnight 83 The Break 83 Sifton, P. 54, 73–6, 78, 82, 83, 84 The Belt 73–6, 74 Simon, S. 98 Simonson, L. 58 Simultaneism 25 Sinclair, U. 54, 68, 117, 118 Sloan, J. 57 Smith, B. 70 Société Anonyme 13, 14

212

index

Soviet Union 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12, 15, 24, 26, 38, 39, 45, 54, 56, 67, 76, 78, 79, 82, 83, 105, 106, 107, 109, 131, 132, 137, 157, 158, 159, 160, 163, 164, 165, 166, 174–86 Stalin, J. 118, 165, 176, 181, 185 Stanislavsky, K. 60, 67, 84, 95, 120, 121, 123 State Theatre, Jena 42 Stavba 25 Steffens, L. 2 Steichen, E. 146, 154, 155 Steiner, R. 6, 35, 74, 93, 113, 114–17, 119– 23, 128, 133, 146, 147, 147, 148, 148, 149, 154, 156, 157, 164 Café Universal 122 H2O 115–16 Mechanical Principles 115–17 Panther Woman of the Needle Trades 120 Pie in the Sky 119–23 Surf and Seaweed 115, 116 Steinway Hall 28, 34, 63 Stenberg Brothers 11, 28, 64, 71 Stepanova, V. 28, 64, 138 Stern, S. 102, 105, 111, 112, 113, 118, 127n.89, 152 Stieglitz, A. 146, 152, 156 Stotz, G. 143, 144 Strand, P. 113, 123, 146 Manhatta 32, 113 Strasberg, L. 84, 120 Suprematism 3, 14, 37 Surrealists 1, 179, 180 Svilova, E. 94 Symbolism 15, 60, Syrkus, S. 28 Taggard, G. 21, 35, 117 Tairov, A. 40 Tatlin, V. 11, 12, 14, 15, 22, 41, 42, 43 Monument to the Third International 12, 15, 22, 41, 42, 43, Taut, M. 39, 41 Taylor, F.W. 2, 61, Taylorism 2, 61, 75, 79 Taylor, P. 166 Tchelitcheff, P. 28, 64 Tensionism 27, 30 Theatre Beresil 28, 64 Theatre Guild 28, 58, 59, 83 Theatre of the Revolution 28, 61, 64, 65, 66, 79 Third Period 6, 9, 81, 121, 166

Toller, E. 56, 58, 65, 66, 75, 76, 86n.43 Masses and Man 58, 65, 66, 75, 86n.43 The Machine Wreckers 58, 75 transition 45, 102 Tresca, C. 85n.10 Tretiakov, S. 44, 45 Trotsky, L. 2, 176, 185 Turin, V. 150, 153 Turk-Sib 150 Two Days 98, 101 Tzara, T. 26 USSR in Construction 130, 131, 137, 153, 157, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166 Vanity Fair 54, 79, 148, 164 Velizshev, A. 66 Vertov, D. 11, 79, 92, 93–101, 97, 110, 114, 115, 119, 120, 123, 143, 150, 161, 165 A Sixth Part of the World 95 Kino-Pravda 94, 95 The Eleventh Year 95 The Man with a Movie Camera 93–101, 97, 114, 115, 120, 143 Veshch/ Gegenstand/ Objet 19, 21, 24, 25 Vesnin, A. 28, 32, 64 Vesnin Brothers 11, 39, 40, 41, 43 Palace of Labour 39–41, 40 VKHUTEMAS 40 Vlag, P. 57 Voloshinov, V. 7 VUFKU (All Ukrainian Photo and Cinema Directorate) 94, 98 Walrond, E. 71 Weidemann, H. 110 West, O. 106 Weston, B. 131 Weston, E. 131, 133, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 161, Winfield, H. 71 Wilson, E. 77, 118, 122 Wittfogel, K. 68 worker photographers 131–6 Workers Camera League 108 Workers Drama League 68 Workers Film and Photo League 92, 107, 108, 109, 110, 110, 109, 112, 113, 114, 115, 120, 121, 122, 123, 132, 135, 136, 149, 150, 151, 153, 154, 155, 160, 161, 164, 166, 167

America Today 110 Bonus March 110 Ford Massacre 110–11 National Hunger March 110 Workers International Relief 93, 109, 110, 121, 132, 135, 160, 182 Workers’ Laboratory Theatre 82, 122

index 213

Workers Theatre 108 Works Progress Administration 91n.141 Yuon, K. 12 Zenit 25