The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe (review)

Books 163 of the early 15th-century Renaissance artists who freed the art world from medievalism somewhat in the same way the cubists enabled artists who came after them to make works of art ‘whose reality would be independent o f . . . our visual impressions of reality ....’. There is a bibliography and an index in The Cubist Epoch; Barr’s book has bibliographies but no index. Social Realism: Art as a Weapon. David Shapiro, ed. Frederick Ungar, New York, 1973. 340 pp., illus. $12.00. Reviewed by John Adkins Richardson* Here is an anthology deserving serious attention largely because of the confused pretensions of the social realists in the U.S.A. The editor has been judicious in his selection of documents from the 1930’s and 40’s and he has taken care to balance left-wing paeans to proletarian need with the skepticism of humanist liberals. This is ironic, because, with a few brilliant exceptions, his subjects seem to have been muddle-headed about the Marxist doctrine they espoused; in fact, the book is virtually a compendium of pseudo-radical maunderings of the sort Karl Marx would have called bourgeois. People in the arts resist characterization of themselves or their ideas as middle-class. Committed Marxists would consider this just another of the self-delusions that are part of the ideological superstructure of capitalism. And, in point of fact, the bourgeoisie has contained two different groups: the owners of capital, on the one hand, and, on the other, those whose only capital is knowledge. It is true that we of the educated element rarely agree with the propertied group, but our revolts have usually been against philistine cultural attitudes rather than against such fundamental values of capitalist society as individualism or privacy of property and decision. No one should be deluded by the anti-bourgeois posturing of some of those in the arts; even conservatives should be able to see that any identification of artistic radicalism with social revolution is altogether rhetorical. What amazes me about the social realists is their casual acceptance of socialist jargon while at the same time they retained, and openly expressed, the passions of middle-class bohemians. Marxian thought has never provided very satisfactory answers to ethical questions about the role of artists in society, but it has raised some provocative problems in art history and criticism. The social realists, however, behaved as though their sincerity, outrage and explicit themes would put all disputation at an end. That, at any rate, is the impression one gets from this book. Of the many comments replicated in this collection, only one seems to me to have firmly grasped the situation during the time of the movement. Meyer Schapiro, then a young art historian addressing the First American Artists’ Congress in 1936, noted that since the general purpose of art was aesthetic, even artists of working-class origin were ‘already predisposed to interests and attitudes imaginatively related to those of the leisure class which values its pleasures as aesthetically refined, individual pursuits’. His was an extremely important insight, because the social realists exemplify precisely what he was talking about. Well, perhaps not precisely, since their art was not ‘abstract’. But the best among them certainly meet the requirements of his description of a ‘modern artist’. The real, hidden theme of this book is a contest between the demands of high art and the need of any mass movement for effectivepropaganda. It is an inevitable conflict, given the etiology of contemporaryculture. Mao Tse-tung . remarked it in 1942 when he distinguished between the kind of art needed to succor the educated cadres of socialism and the kind needed for the instruction of the masses, concluding that, in existing conditions, ‘popularization ’ was ‘the more pressing task‘. Virtually everyone connected with this movement in the U.S.A., seems to have thought just the opposite. The only ones who did not were the hard Communist Party liners and populists like Thomas Hart Benton and Thomas Craven. David Shapiro makes rather a point of exempting Benton and other ‘regionalists’ from the genuine social realist movement. The principal difference between the groups, however, is their relative distance from what Clement Greenberg first...