Say “American art of the 1930s” and a tidal wave of associations washes over you: the American Scene, wpa artists’ programs, Mexican Muralism, photographs of sharecroppers and anguished women, Alice Neel’s portraits, Stuart Davis’s abstracted “color space,” Grant Wood and American Gothic, David Smith and the first welded-steel sculptures made in the United States, social realism, modernist experimentation. And then we start thinking about the Great Depression, breadlines, Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath, the New Deal, and much, much more. It can seem as if it’s all too much to make sense of.
Now, “Art for the Millions: American Culture and Politics in the 1930s” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art offers a thoughtfully focused overview of this unruly, sometimes perplexing period.1 Organized by Allison Rudnick, the Met’s Associate Curator of Drawings and Prints, the show includes paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by some of the artists we expect to see, but mainly our conceptions of the decade are fleshed out with ephemera and the miscellany that academics refer to as “visual culture.” (It’s worth keeping in mind that the Met has a collection of rare baseball cards, although they don’t figure in “Art for the Millions.”) There are some works that have become emblematic of the period, such as Walker Evans’s confrontational photograph Floyd and Lucille Burroughs on Porch, Hale County, Alabama (1936), in which the barefoot subjects stare us down, somewhat accusingly. But much of the material on view is unfamiliar and/or by artists we encounter rarely. This is deliberate. Rudnick said she saw the exhibition as an opportunity to focus on works seldom or never exhibited, so there are many surprises.
We are immediately alerted to the exhibition’s attitude and ambitions before we enter. Displayed as an introduction is a film clip of Martha Graham performing Frontier in 1935. Subtitled “American Perspective of the Plains,” with music by Louis Horst and a set by Isamu Noguchi, Frontier was described by Graham as “a tribute to the vision and independence of the pioneer woman.” Accompanying the film of the leaping Graham is a woman’s dress, made about 1930, of fabric designed by Ruth Reeves, who had studied with Fernand Léger. The overscaled “playboy print,” in navy, red, acid yellow, and white, presents stylized figures of men riding, skiing, holding a bag of golf clubs, and playing tennis, along with some giant playing cards. (I kept thinking of Stuart Davis’s mural Men Without Women, with similar motifs, done for the men’s smoking lounge of Radio City Music Hall in 1932. Who saw what, and when? Should the dress be dated somewhat later?) Another aspect of what the wall texts and other documents call the “cultural production” of the 1930s is represented by a group of posters for the National Parks Service by various artists. These crisp, intensely colored, simplified images celebrate, among other important sites, the Grand Canyon, Lassen Volcanic National Park, and Yellowstone National Park, with the poster for the last depicting an explosive geyser, monumental against an intensely blue sky streaked with delicate clouds. Technically, the complex, elegantly rendered posters bear witness to the period’s growing interest in screen printing as an artistic medium.
Photographs and watercolors of demonstrations and protests intensify the sense of unrest and uncertainty.
Together, this wide-ranging assortment prepares us for what is to come: an unpredictable selection of posters, magazine covers, textiles, stylish utilitarian objects, and even postcards, along with paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture, organized thematically in three sections titled “Leftist Politics and Labor,” “Cultural Nationalisms,” and “The Promise of Progress.” Under the first heading we encounter works informed by the fact that 25 percent of the American labor force was unemployed after the Wall Street crash in the autumn of 1929, such as a Norman Lewis print of a soup kitchen, circa 1937, an economically drawn, tonally rich lithograph that places the viewer in the line of men approaching the apron-clad figure filling the bowls. Posters for the Communist Party and Daily Worker and covers of issues of New Masses, Labor Defender, and Der Hammer, with graphic, cartoonlike representations of muscular workers, venal plutocrats, and a threatening mounted policeman, enrich the mix. Photographs and watercolors of demonstrations and protests intensify the sense of unrest and uncertainty. Harmonious depictions of men at work, including a close-up Ben Shahn gouache of welders in their helmets and goggles and a subtle Robert Blackburn lithograph of men in a boat, provide an antidote. Women artists are represented by a rather creepy portrait of the proletarian poet Kenneth Fearing by Alice Neel (1935), with the subject surrounded by small, sinister figures; a Dorothea Lange photo; and works from a surprisingly large number of female printmakers, one by Elizabeth Olds with a row of tightly packed, grinning burlesque dancers above the upturned faces of their unlovely audience.
The relatively large number of prints throughout the exhibition reminds us of the enthusiasm among left-leaning artists for producing works of art, in multiples, that were inexpensive and available to large numbers of people. It also may reflect the wpa print project, which was considered to be among the most desirable of the government support programs for artists. Painters who received the monthly stipend had to produce a certain number of works that were then given to schools, libraries, and other public buildings. Those working on murals obviously did not get to keep the final result of their efforts. (The show includes a preparatory sketch by Philip Guston for a mural in a Queensbridge housing project.) But artists who made prints got to keep one edition or artist’s proofs of their work.
The painting itemizes braided rugs, a woven coverlet, a Shaker box, a wooden trencher, and utilitarian furniture.
The second section, titled “Cultural Nationalisms,” explores, in part, the question “What is American about American art?” In evidence are a selection of works that range from Georgia O’Keeffe’s Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue (1931), with its undisguised reference to emblems of the nation, to the elaborately carved tableau Adam and Eve and the Serpent (ca. 1930) by the self-taught artist José Dolores López. We also get a powerful Charles White drawing, Sojourner Truth and Booker T. Washington (1943), and Marsden Hartley’s haunting 1938 portrait of Albert Pinkham Ryder in a woolly cap, beard neatly tucked into his coat, a tribute to one eccentric, unforgettable, quintessentially American artist by another, though Hartley did have connections to the European avant-garde of the first part of the twentieth century. In a sense, Charles Sheeler’s well-known painting Americana (1931) answers the question of how to define the characteristics of the art of this country, but it also acknowledges modernism’s debt to the vanguard on the other side of the Atlantic. The painting itemizes braided rugs, a woven coverlet, a Shaker box, a wooden trencher, and utilitarian furniture, but these vernacular American references are tipped and flattened into overlapping, patterned planes, thrust toward us like those of a cubist collage. More literal answers to the question are offered by lithographs by Thomas Hart Benton (a typically sentimental “American Scene” farmscape, from 1940) and John Steuart Curry (a heroic John Brown in full cry, his beard blowing in the wind, from 1939).
The last section of the installation, titled “The Promise of Progress,” addresses, according to Rudnick, American ingenuity. The stage is set by chic, streamlined luxury objects, such as futuristic lamps, an apparently floating clock, and “Manhattan,” a high-style cocktail set designed by Norman Bel Geddes in 1935–40 whose tall, minimalist shaker explains the name. The most striking of these offerings are a snappy black-and-red Patriot radio, also designed by Bel Geddes (ca. 1940) in some newfangled plastic, and a sleek, gleaming meat slicer, all suave curves and soft edges, from 1940, rather redundantly named “Streamliner.” Bold magazine covers for Fortune and Life and close-up photographs of machinery and industrial structures by Margaret Bourke-White and Ralph Steiner expand the conversation, while a wall of 1937 posters by Lester Beall for the Rural Electrification Administration—with enormous, pared-down images evoking the benefits of electricity to farm work, wash day, lighting, running water, and the like—remind us that the government once had high aesthetic standards for disseminating information. One subsection evokes the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933 (“A Century of Progress”) and the New York World’s Fair of 1939 (“The World of Tomorrow”) with photographs that emphasize modernity and crowds, souvenir scarves by Ruth Reeves (the creator of the “playboy print” at the start of the show), flashy postcards depicting the signature Trylon and Perisphere or a tall parachute-jump tower with searchlights, and more—all of it expressing optimism, confidence, and an appetite for futurism. Most curious is a small Augusta Savage sculpture, Lift Every Voice and Sing (The Harp) (1939), alongside a postcard view of what appears to be a monumental version of the piece installed at the New York fair. It’s an ambiguous conception, with rows of robed women of diminishing size standing in a tight, upward-slanting formation, like the strings of a harp. A subdued, bare-chested man holding a plaque with the sculpture’s title crouches in front of the “choir,” each member individually characterized, mouths open in song. While it’s good to know that Savage, an inventive black artist, was represented at the fair, the little sculpture—a maquette for a large work?—and the postcard raise questions about the history of the scupture that remain unanswered.
One quibble: the last section of the show includes a single and not very distinguished painting by Stuart Davis, aptly titled Men and Machine (1934), from the Met’s collection, like most of the work on view. Davis was both a committed modernist and a committed political activist, and he mainly drew, rather than painted, in the 1930s because he was so involved with protests, the American Artists Congress, editing activist publications, and petitioning the government to recognize artists as workers deserving of support (which led to the wpa art programs). He was hostile to the social realism that inflected so much of the work of the 1930s, convinced that it was reactionary rather than progressive, and convinced, too, that making art was not the way to solve social problems. That demanded direct involvement. Couldn’t Davis have been represented by a work that showed him to be the inventive artist and great colorist that he was, instead of a rather anomalous picture that fit so neatly into the show’s thesis? But I admit to being prejudiced.
“Art for the Millions” is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with informative essays by Rudnick and several other scholars, including one on materials by the Met’s paper conservator Rachel Mustalish. It’s a useful overview of a sometimes overlooked part of the history of twentieth-century art and design in this country. But do we have to call it “visual culture”?