Acknowledgements

Hemingway, Andrew

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Acknowledgements

Andrew Hemingway

Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement 1926–1956

Acknowledgements

Author

Andrew Hemingway

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00025.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-17847

Acknowledgements

Research for this book was supported by grants from the Dean of Arts Travel Fund, the Dean of Social and Historical Sciences Travel Fund, and the Graduate School of University College London, the Central Research Fund of the University of London, and the British Academy. A Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 1996–7 was crucial to both research and writing.

My interest in the Communist cultural movement in the United States has its beginnings in the American Studies Programme at Ealing College of Higher Education in the early 1980s. So, first of all, I must thank my former colleague Frank McMahon for encouraging me to develop my fascination with American history and culture in a more scholarly direction, and for the many rewarding conversations I have had with him about these things over the years.

I began research on what became the book project in 1988, just after joining University College London. The History of Art department there has provided an enormously stimulating and supportive environment, and I am deeply grateful to my colleagues for making it so despite all the pressures that the ill-conceived and expedient policies of successive governments have put on the British university system over the last two decades.

Staff at numerous institutions have helped me with my research. I cannot list them all here, but I must at least mention the following: Beth Joffrion, Nancy Malloy and Judy Throm at the Archives of American Art; Marc Pascale and Daniel Schulman at the Art Institute of Chicago; Becky Hart at the Detroit Institute of Arts; Phyllis Rosenzweig and Judith Zilczer at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Tish Collins and Mary Rosser at the Marx Memorial Library, London; Dina Young at the Missouri Historical Society; Lyn Pudney at the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Peter R. Griffith at the Springfield Museums; Ellen Sragow of the Sragow Gallery, New York; Kathleen Manwaring at the Bird Library, Syracuse University; Andrew H. Lee and Gail Malmgreen at the Tamiment Institute Library of New York University; Betsy Hughes at the University of Arizona Museum of Art; Lesley Budgen in the Interlending Department at University College London Library; Ellen Demsch at the Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University; Deedee Wigmore of Wigmore Fine Art, New York; Phillip A. Robertson at the T. W. Wood Gallery & Arts Center, Montpelier, Vt; and Linda Freaney at the Woodstock Artists Association. In Chicago, the staff at a number of high schools were generous with their time when I visited to see WPA artworks, particularly: Dean Schultz at Bloom High School, Connie Kieffer at Highland Park High School, Flora Doody at Lane Technical High School and Georgia Rodwell-Brooks at Lucy Flower Vocational Academy. Some further specific debts are acknowledged in the notes to the text.

Material in the book was presented in lectures and seminars at a number of institutions, and I am grateful to friends and colleagues at the following who allowed me to try out ideas on them and their students, or even on the public: the Art Institute of Chicago; Barnard College, New York; King’s College London; Ithaca College; Northwestern University; Open University; Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, Warsaw; University of Birmingham; University of Leeds; University of Missouri, Columbia; Washington University, Saint Louis; and Winchester School of Art. I also want to thank especially Ida Rodríguez Prampolini and Leticia López Orozco for inviting me to speak at the conference on Muralism in the Americas at the Insituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 2000, an event that changed my perspective on everything.

For the last six years I have co-chaired the Seminar on Comparative Labour and Working-Class History at the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research. I owe a great debt to Rick Halpern for inviting me to join in organising this and for all he has taught me since. The seminar has been a crucial forum for socialist history in London, and I am grateful to all those who have helped to make it such, and especially to Andy Strouthous and Keith Flett, both for their consistent insights and their amazing tolerance of our forays into cultural history.

Without the support and encouragement of some of the survivors of the Communist movement, this book would be much poorer. Sadly, in the nature of things, some of those I spoke to have not survived to see its publication. I am grateful to the following: Lloyd Brown, the late Milton Brown, Bernarda Bryson, Louis Harap, the late Jacob Kainen, Jack Levine, Annette Rubinstein, the late Meyer Schapiro, the late Harry Sternberg and Anthony Toney. To Charles Keller and Joseph Solman I owe a special debt. I am also grateful to the following relatives of participants: Lillian Ben-Zion, Michael Biddle, Andrew Bolotowsky, Earl Davis, Andrew Dintenfass, Ruth Kainen, Lillian Milgram, Nancy Neel, Louise Reisman, Rose Shain and Anita Toney.

One of the pleasures of moving into the field of us history and culture has been the friendships and intellectual interchanges with others working in the area that have resulted. In this regard, I must particularly acknowledge the encouragement and stimulus I have received over the years from A1 Fried, Pat Hills, Garnett McCoy, Angela Miller and Alan Wallach. A1 Fried and Pat Hills both read this book in manuscript, and responded with characteristic generosity. Others from whose conversation I have benefited include Pamela Allara, Paul Buhle, Michael Denning, Anthony Lee, Diana Linden, Fraser Ottanelli, Jack Salzman, Bob Sampson, Liz Seaton and Alan Wald. At University College London I have been fortunate to work with a succession of gifted graduate students whose research and questions have prompted me to fresh thinking, namely: Warren Carter, Michael Corris, Morgan Falconer, Jennifer Golden and Nancy Jachec. Without the enterprise and dedication of Makiko Yamanashi, I simply could not have covered Japanese-American artists to the extent I have, and an important strand in Communist culture would again have been ignored. She was everything one could wish for in a research assistant.

Additionally, a number of friends have provided a continuing stimulus to my thinking on questions of art history and socialist politics in the course of writing the book, notably: David Bindman, Stephen Eisenman, Briony Fer, Tamar Garb, Josephine Gear, Tom Gretton, Paul Jaskot, Janet Koenig, Stanley Mitchell, Fred Orton, Alex Potts, John Roberts, Jake Rosen, Fred Schwartz, Greg Sholette, Peter Smith and Karl Werckmeister.

At Yale University Press, Gillian Malpass has been consistently supportive and encouraging and Elizabeth McWilliams was a real pleasure to work with on the book’s design.

My family have put up with the extended periods of self-absorption and the protracted absences that research on a book like this requires. I am grateful to my mother, Audrey Hemingway, and my children, Mary and Frankie, for their continuing affection and tolerance through it all.

Carol Duncan has been my companion almost from the inception of this project. She has been unwavering in her enthusiasm and support, and I have benefited from her good humour, her driving skills (which include teaching me to drive on the right side) and her critical insights. Quite simply, I could not have done it without her.

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