Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement 1926-1956 (review)

For "artists on the left," political art was no laughing matter; it was a grim, serious business, a vital contribution to the struggle for world socialism. This, after all, was class war. Vladimir Lenin himself had articulated the principle of partiinost (submission to the Party) and sent a note to his colleague Nikolai Bukharin in 1920 with the stark equation "proletarian culture 5 communism," setting a guidepost for all leftist art.

Artists on the Left is a handsome volume, well written, and rich in detail, but it makes for exhausting reading. Poring through it, we can understand why the average member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) remained in the party for only eighteen months—the nagging was unbearable. For many leftist artists, arguing over how to implement the party line was their great passion, and the paperwork mattered more than the artwork. Essays, reviews, and counterreviews raged over the proper rendering of a picket line, or which modernist forms were "inherently" progressive, or the true nature of the formalist threat. At one point, the CPUSA even got into a fight with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People over the proper artistic treatment of lynching.

This was essentially a religious art—a secular religion, but a religion nonetheless. True believers engaged in terrible fights over details, like Catholics who agree on dogma but come to blows over the proper shade of a cardinal's zucchetto. As with other religious art, the similarity of the output becomes numbing (even with all the variation in style and skill). If you ignore the text and look at the pictures in this book, you will be amazed that these works generated so much heated debate. When "the masses" (whose consciousness all this effort was meant to raise) failed to respond with sufficient enthusiasm, some artists actually expressed disdain. Elizabeth Olds, a "radicalized" artist, accused most Americans of being "'culturally illiterate' persons to whom 'the language of art is a closed book'" (p. 183). The proletariat, she implied, needed the proper kind of education to appreciate the proper kind of art. But what did Olds really expect? There are only so many obese capitalists, muscle-bound laborers, and starving workers you can look at before fatigue sets in.

Although this book deals exclusively with the American scene, you might find yourself wondering about artists on the left who lived and worked in the Soviet Union, where socialism was already victorious. They, too, loved disputation, but in the Soviet Union an artist's stylistic preferences could result in far more than a bad notice in New Masses. Osip Beskin, the editor of a prominent art journal, was partial to impressionism and was therefore expelled from the artists' union in 1948. Lev Vyazmenskii, a monumental painter, ran afoul of the Soviet Communist Party in 1938 and was shot. The critic Nikolai Punin had been the head of the art history department at Leningrad State University, but his artistic views branded him an "enemy of the people," and he was sent to Siberia, where he died in 1953. This kind of thing was still going on years after Stalin died. As late as 1974, an open-air display of politically incorrect art in Moscow was plowed under by bulldozers.

This book will also make you wonder how artists—who live for free expression, after all—in the United States could have supported one of the most repressive systems in recorded history. Information about what was really going on in the Soviet Union, with starvation and mass killing and repression, had leaked out by the 1930s. Yet many American Communist artists remained staunch defenders of the Soviet system. Even those who ultimately distanced themselves from the CPUSA tended not to alter their fundamental devotion. Socialism remained the "beloved" goal, their idée fixe. They were nineteenth-century romanticists who had convinced themselves they were the vanguard of a new era.

Andrew Hemingway's goal in...