The New Masses presents the Top Shelf in this special Art Issue with twenty-eight fantastic pieces from William Gropper, Peggy Bacon, .Selma Freeman, Gilbert Wilson, Louis Ribak, William Siegel, George Picken, Joe Jones, Arnold Blanch, Russell Limbach, Reginald Marsh, Joseph Vogel, Gilbert Rocke, Jacob Burck, Lil Adelman, Anton Refregier, Eitaro Ishigaki, Georges Schreiber, George Biddle, Raphael Soyer, Jim Quy, Luis Arenal, Nicolai Cikovsky, Mabel Dwight, Adolf Dehn, Peter Blume, Mitchell Siporin, and Margaret Bourke-White.

Special Art issue of the New Masses. Vol. 17 No. 1. October 1, 1935.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1935/v17n01-oct-01-1935-NM.pdf