Antifascism in American Art

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00017

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15139

Between 1933 and 1945, American painters of widely divergent political views and artistic styles shared a belief that their art should aid in the fight against fascism. In this engrossing book, Cécile Whiting presents the first thorough study of the politically motivated art of this period.

Whiting shows how the various manifestations of antifascist art negotiated the competing demands of artistic conventions, aesthetic and political theories, and historical developments. The author explores the art produced by the radical Left in the early 1930s and social-realist art of the late 1930s. She looks at the way in which Stuart Davis reconciled modernism with antifascist politics by celebrating American democracy through semi-abstract paintings, and how the regionalists Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry strengthened American patriotism with nationalist myths and propaganda for the Allied cause. Whiting explains that as such overtly political and nationalist art came under fire for resembling the propaganda of the enemy, social realists and regionalists alike sought to endow some of their paintings with more universal appeal. She concludes by examining the myth paintings of Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, which not only captured a sense of the chaos and violence of the war but also challenged the way Nazi, regionalist, and social-realist artists used myth for nationalist political purposes. The dominance of abstraction in the post-war art world, says Whiting, was the direct legacy of this contentious artistic debate on how best to use art in the service of antifascism.

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Author

PublisherYale University Press

Print publication date September 1989 (out of print)

Print ISBN 9780300042597

EISBN 9780300232189

Illustrations 107

Print Status out of print

Publisher (out of print)

WorldCat

Google Books

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List of illustrations

Another Triumph of Free Speech
Fascisti Finance
Workers Unite
Untitled
May Day
Spring
Not on Your Tintype
Save That Nordic Strain
Adam n' Eve
Rot Front
Untitled
Untitled
Untitled
One Must Have the Courage to Deliver Europe from the Bolshevist Plague
Prost Noske! The Young Revolution is Dead
Social-Democracy
Refugees
The Eternal City
Where Next?
The Little People
Guernica
Those Who Always Pay
Untitled
Lost Horizon
Europe's Winter Parade
The Best Answer to Race Persecution
Flight from Fascist Terror in Almeria
Refugees
Untitled
The Snowstorm or Winter
Y aún no se van! (And Still They Don't Go!)
The Invaders
The New Order
Jack-in-the-Box
Monstra della rivoluzione fascista, cover
Another Classic Bust Unearthed in Greece
Waterfront Demonstration
Drawing for Art Front cover
Composition
History of Communications
Untitled (Municipal Broadcasting Company, WNYC, Studio B)
Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors — 7th Avenue Style
Eggbeater No. 2
Eggbeater No. 2 (Hot Still-scape)
Ultra-marine
Ultramarine, detail study
Parson Weems' Fable
Father I Can Not Tell a Lie: I Cut the Tree
The Artist in His Museum
Venus and Adonis
Bäuerliche Venus
Fighting the Tories—1776–1937
The Delaware for Them—The Atlantic for Us
Bundles for Britain
The Return of Private Davis from the Argonne
Parade to War: Allegory
The Light of the World
Sowers
Again
Starry Night
Indifference
Casualty
Harvest
Invasion
Exterminate
Our Good Earth, Keep It Ours
The Farm Is a Battleground, Too
Achelous and Hercules
Homeless in Poland
Out of Darkness
Partisans
The Defenders
Boy from Stalingrad
Keep 'Em Flying
Civilians
All in a Day's Work
Souvenir of Lidice
Bomber
Murder
Paul Bunyan
Untitled
Fascist Company
Good and Evil
Three Men on a Horse
War-Mad
Italian Landscape II: Europa
We Fight for a Free World!
Pacific Landscape
Concentration Camp
Italian Burial Society
Italian Landscape
The Red Stairway
Liberation
Home
Produce for Victory!
Witch Hunt
Second Allegory
Rape of Persephone
Sacrifice of Iphigenia
Tiresias
Antigone
Hands of Oedipus
Omen of the Eagle
Alphabet of Terror, or, Eyes of Oedipus
Expectation of Evil
The Red Bird
Leda and the Swan

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Contents

Contents

Author

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00017.001

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15140

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Illustrations

Illustrations

Author

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00017.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15141

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Acknowledgments

In many respects this book, like the antifascist struggle in art that it discusses, was a collaborative effort supported by a variety of institutions. Generous grants from Stanford University, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution greatly facilitated the research and writing of the manuscript. During the year I spent in Washington, D.C., as a fellow at the National Museum of American Art, a number of historians and art historians commented constructively on my ideas; …

Author

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00017.003

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15142

Introduction

The American artistic response to fascism was not a single, uniform movement. Between 1933 and 1945 artists ranging from members of New York radical circles to painters from the heartland of the United States reacted against fascist repression abroad and at home. Together they erected political organizations that otherwise might never have existed and under the auspices of which they planned innumerable antifascist activities. At the same time, antifascist politics assumed a variety of pictorial …

Author

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.1-7

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00017.004

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15143

Chapter subject tags:Anti-fascist movements in artPainting, American--20th centuryPropaganda in artPolitics and culture--United States--History--20th century

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1. Propaganda in Print

During the 1920s the American artistic response to fascism was all but nonexistent. From 1922, when Benito Mussolini established his dictatorship in Italy, until Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, the communist political newspaper the Daily Worker published only a few topical illustrations in which the massive figure of Mussolini consistently appeared asserting absolutist political control. The New Masses, which began publication in 1926 and became the best-known American communist …

Author

Chapter subject tags:Graphic artists, American--20th centuryAnti-fascist movements in artPropaganda in artPolitics and culture--United States--History--20th centuryUnited States--Politics and government--Periodicals

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.8-33

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00017.005

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15144

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In William Gropper’s Refugees (ca. 1937, fig. 17), an anonymous peasant group crosses a barren landscape in slow procession. This painting, completed at the height of the Popular Front, forms a dramatic contrast to the antifascist illustrations dating from the early thirties, especially those by Gropper himself. Gone are the simple dichotomies with the worker-heroes vanquishing the fascist-villains: Refugees neither promises ultimate victory to the people nor explicitly condemns the fascist …

Author

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.35-64

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00017.006

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15145

Chapter subject tags:Gropper, William, 1897-1977Lozowick, Louis, 1892-1973Anti-fascist movements in artSocial realismPropaganda in artPolitics and culture--United States--History--20th century

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3. Practicing Democracy through Abstraction

In Stuart Davis’s painting now entitled Artists Against War and Fascism (1936, fig. 37), two bulky soldiers outfitted in dark green military uniforms, one of them swinging a black billy club, grasp a prisoner between them. Their victim slumps helplessly, a white sack spotted with blood covering his head. An interrogation lamp hanging from a cord stretches across the top of the canvas and illuminates a section of barbed wire on the ground. Scattered across the landscape, and surrounding the …

Author

Chapter subject tags:Anti-fascist movements in artDavis, Stuart, 1892-1964Propaganda in artNew York World's Fair (1939-1940 : New York, N.Y.)Jazz in artPolitics and culture--United States--History--20th century

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.65-97

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00017.007

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15146

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4. American Heroes and Invading Barbarians

The regionalist artists Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood did not belong to the American Artists’ Congress, nor did they participate in the numerous artistic and political activities organized on behalf of Spain during the Popular Front. These artists resided in the Midwest, removed from the leftist political fervor concentrated in New York City; they appeared far more concerned with developing an indigenous American art than with addressing international political events. …

Author

Chapter subject tags:Anti-fascist movements in artNationalism in artBenton, Thomas Hart, 1889-1975Curry, John Steuart, 1897-1946Wood, Grant, 1891-1942Painting, American--20th centuryPolitics and culture--United States--History--20th centuryRegionalism (Art movement)

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.98-132

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00017.008

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15147

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5. The Politics of Propaganda during the Second World War

From Pearl Harbor until the end of the Second World War, a number of American social-realist artists documented the fight against fascism from the viewpoint of the communist Left. However, a series of traumatic and disillusioning events at the end of the thirties—the 1939 Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact, the 1939 Russian invasion of Poland, and the Russian defeat of Finland in 1940—had greatly diminished the ranks of American liberal and leftist artists committed to the Soviet Union. Each shift …

Author

Chapter subject tags:World War, 1939-1945--PropagandaAnti-fascist movements in artPainting, American--20th centuryFolklore in artGropper, William, 1897-1977Shahn, Ben, 1898-1969Politics and culture--United States--History--20th century

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.133-169

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00017.009

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15148

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6. Antinationalist Myths

The few public statements issued jointly by Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb in the early forties make it abundantly clear that the Second World War affected their thinking about art. They suggested on several occasions that their paintings related to the turbulence of their times. It is therefore tempting to point out a correspondence between their mythic imagery—which mingles references to Greco-Roman tragedies with a surrealist style—and the violence of the war. Neither artist, however, went …

Author

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.170-196

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00017.010

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15149

Chapter subject tags:Mythology, Classical, in artAnti-fascist movements in artRothko, Mark, 1903–1970Gottlieb, Adolph, 1903-1974SurrealismPolitics and culture--United States--History--20th century

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Conclusion

During the thirties and early forties, American painters with often widely divergent political beliefs and esthetic practices enlisted their art in the conflict between democracy and fascism. They developed a variety of stylistic devices and rhetorical strategies to respond to fascism, even though both contemporary and subsequent critical literature often reduced that multiplicity to a clear-cut choice between propaganda and modern art. Certainly, the question of whether artists had a greater …

Author

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.197-201

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00017.011

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15150

Chapter subject tags:Anti-fascist movements in artPropaganda in artPainting, American--20th centuryPolitics and culture--United States--History--20th century

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Bibliography

Bibliography

Author

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00017.012

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15151

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Index

Index

Author

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00017.013

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15152