Many large questions raised on the relationship of art and artists to revolutionary politics in this relatively short, early review of a John Reed Club exhibit by Meyer Schapiro, writing as John Kwait.

‘John Reed Club Art Exhibition’ by John Kwait (Meyer Schapiro) from New Masses. Vol. 8 Mo. 7. March, 1933.

The current exhibition of paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures at the John Reed Club of New York is the first large important enterprise of the club in promoting an active revolutionary art. The exhibition committee deserves warm praise for the manner in which the works were arranged and exposed, for the wide publicity given to the show, and for the public meetings at which the show was discussed by invited critics and artists and by members of the club.

Nevertheless the exhibition cannot be considered a success. More than half the objects shown express no revolutionary ideas; and of the rest, only a few reenact for the worker in simple, plastic language the crucial situations of his class.

The very title of the exhibition betrays the uncertainties of our revolutionary art. What is The Social Viewpoint in Art? It is as vague and empty as “the social viewpoint” in politics. It includes any picture with a worker, a factory or a city-street, no matter how remote from the needs of a class-conscious worker. It justifies the showing of Benton’s painting of negroes shooting crap as a picture of negro life, or a landscape with a contented farmer, or a decorative painting labelled “French factory.” The mere presence of such “social” elements in a picture does not indicate any social viewpoint, since these elements are often treated abstractly and picturesquely without reference to a social meaning of the objects. Sometimes the worker is only a remote spot on the horizon. Such pictures are dragged into the exhibition as any picture with a fish might be shown in an exhibition of “The Fish in Art” arranged by a group of art-loving fishermen.

The Social Viewpoint in Art is a confused effort to designate a united artistic front, to rally together all painters who represent factories, workers and farmers, in opposition to painters who represent bananas and prisms. The John Reed Club has just been guided by the vague liberalism of the critic, Thomas Craven, and the painter, Benton, for whom the real goal of art is the reproduction of “American Life.” But this “life” is conceived as a meaningless, picturesque, turbulent activity. It is arranged in banal and cynical contrasts, rendered in a pretentiously virile manner. How far it is from our own understanding of American society can be judged from Benton’s murals in the Whitney Museum where Negro life is summarized by a revival meeting and crap-shooting boys, and the city is an intentionally confused panoramic spectacle of overlapping speakeasies, strikers, gunmen and movies, that corresponds to the insight of the tabloid press. The concern with American life is to some degree a chauvinistic response of American critics and painters to the competition of French art, which is technically far superior and enjoys the prestige of an imported luxury. It flatters the patron ruling class to hear that its factories, industries, and cities are noble subjects of art, in fact the materials of a renaissance, and that the American artist, to produce great art, must confront “life,” like a hard-boiled businessman.

The John Reed Club cannot accept such a view of art, yet it has been guided by such views in the title of the exhibition, in the selection of pictures, and in its mistaken devotion to mural painting as a “social” form of art. The club should not have invited in the name of an imaginary united front the prominent painters who could submit only tame picturesque views of cowboys, crap-shooters and fat shoppers issuing from department-stores. These pictures were to be expected, for they are exactly what these artists have been making, with the applause of bourgeois critics, for many years, and will continue to make when this exhibition is over. The exhibition of their works might lend a little respectability to the John Reed Club. But shown under such auspices, they could only confuse young artists as to the nature of revolutionary art. Better to have a small show of twenty good, genuinely militant paintings than two hundred mixed works of unequal quality and of all shades of social opinion.

Undoubtedly the American painter has no clear idea of the world about him or the issues of the class struggle. But this exhibition, encouraging him to confront life and to ally himself with the workers, offers him no bearings, no technical aid, no definite model of action. Is this too much to ask of an exhibition? I do not think so. For an exhibition could easily have been arranged with carefully prepared series of pictures, illustrating phases of the daily struggle, and reenacting in a vivid, forceful manner the most important revolutionary situations. It could have included examples of cooperative work by artists,–series of prints, with a connected content, for cheap circulation; cartoons for newspapers and magazines; posters; banners; signs; illustrations of slogans; historical pictures of the revolutionary tradition of America. Such pictures have a clear value in the fight for freedom. They actually reach their intended audience, whereas the majority of easel paintings are stuck away in studios. (Sometimes they are purchased by a sympathetic dentist in exchange for a tooth-pulling). The John Reed Club must offer specific tasks, especially cooperative tasks, to the revolutionary artist. Only in this way will it develop an effective revolutionary art. The artist who must produce daily a trenchant pictorial commentary on daily events for a workers’ newspaper quickly develops an imagination and form adequate for his task; but the artist left to himself remains a confused individual, struggling for a precarious living, fussing over a picture of “American life” which he would like to sell to a dealer, like his paintings of still-life. The good revolutionary picture is not necessarily a cartoon, but it should have the legibility and pointedness of a cartoon, and like the cartoon it should reach great masses of workers at little expense. A cooperative program of agitational prints for cheap distribution by the thousands, of agitational pictures for every militant occasion, is within the means of the John Reed Club. In this way the artists can be as effective as the writers and speakers, and develop their own powers in the process.

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/1933/v08n07-feb-1933-New-Masses.pdf