The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Taste (review)

This welcome study aims to locate the intellectual and moral origins of the New Deal Federal Art Project (FAP) within a history of progressive thought in the US dating back at least to the beginnings of the twentieth century. Although the historiography of the FAP has long recognised the contribution of philosophers and social reformers such as Van Wyck Brooks, John Dewey, and the museum director John Cotton Dana, Grieve's book is the first to make the question of mass education and culture as 'a whole way of life' central to an understanding of the FAP's genesis and modus operandi. The book is divided into two parts—the first three chapters devoted to accounts of Deweyian pragmatism and 'art-as-experience' thinking, the rise of interest in a specifically American culture as a 'usable past' and the development of institutions and a critical tradition devoted to dissemination and encouragement of this putatively autochthonous heritage. The second half of the book explores the action of these ideas and values upon facets of the FAP's activities between 1935 and 1943—within the Community Art Center program and Index of American Design in particular. Grieve's notion of 'middlebrow culture'—borrowed from a number of sources, including Virginia Woolf and the BBC (pp 4-5)—is curiously not very American, given the focus of her concerns, though the term is developed within her account and related to others both contemporaneous and retrospective. This conceptual underpinning to the book is arguably both its strength and weakness. On the one hand, the term was not espoused by the FAP's administration and an effort is needed to read policy discourse consistently 'through' the term and its socio-political implications as Grieve wishes us to understand them. On the other, its deployment indicates the author's tenacious search for an analytic perspective able critically to interpret the FAP's historical agency. The weakness of the first 'wave' of academic accounts of the FAP chiefly lay in its intellectual objectivism (e.g. Richard D. McKinzie) or uncritical subscription to Rooseveltian values (e.g. Francis V. O'Connor). Later studies, such as my own (Federal Art and National Culture, Cambridge UP, 1995), attempted to mobilise then emergent neo-marxist frameworks based, for instance on the idea of hegemony elaborated in Antonio Gramsci's writings in the 1920s and 1930s. Grieve's study takes this position on board—if partly to dismiss it implicitly as 'functionalist'—but goes on to say little in detail about social class and capitalism in the USA within formation of the nation's culture as a whole. To this extent her account exhibits the rather vague idealism of the Progressives she celebrates. Agents within the FAP sometimes had very different, and even contradictory, aims and interests—the socialists, Marxists and anarchists in New York are the most salient group. Grieve tends to underplay these antagonisms and concentrates on places and groups and individuals whose actions (as far as they are known) conformed to this idealism. Nevertheless, this is an interesting, well-written and thought-provoking book. It raises many questions about the New Deal and how and why we should study it—especially now given the comparisons made recently between Roosevelt's 'moment' then and Obama's now.