Artist Jennings Tofel takes issue with Meyer Schapiro’s essay Race, Nationality, and Art, and Schapiro responds. From the Artists’ Union’s ‘Art Front’ journal.

‘Race, Nationality, and Art: A Correspondence’ by Meyer Schapiro and Jennings Tofel from Art Front. Vol. 2 No. 6. May, 1936.

Editor, Art FRONT:

Mr. Meyer Schapiro in his article on Race, Nationality and Art, in which he sets out to level down to the earth the “presumed racial character of art,” puts up a warning to those who might dissent that is truly alarming. Says he: “The arguments for racial and national peculiarity are supported by the most reactionary groups in America.” He further says: “Such distinctions in art have been a large element in the propaganda for war and fascism…” After such admonitions and threats, the person who holds different views from Mr. Schapiro must stop and think twice before he can suffer himself to become an outcast and a traitor to his people or to a great cause. However, let me not be swayed by considerations of fear, if what I have to say is the truth as I see it.

Mr. Schapiro holds that nationality is an illusion and nationalism a source of danger. I am not alone in thinking that nationalism can be a source of great good; and as to its being an illusion, the most valid argument against that notion is the strong fact of its being.

Hitler and Mussolini have, of course, made the word “nationalism” suspect. But it is only their brand of nationalism that is despicable, having been exploited as an instrument of barbaric cruelty. Their nationalism is that fiercely aggressive, histrionic hocus-pocus, sustained by flags and cannons, with a most accomplished ventriloquist holding the middle of the stage and speaking the lines for a dumb-struck people.

Such frantic nationalism is certainly not conducive to the peace and happiness of the rest of us. And such nationalism, though of a somewhat modified and a subtler kind, I must say, prevails in the world at this day and age. Avaricious nations, like avaricious individuals, have always subjugated other weaker peoples. See how Mr. Schapiro would come to the rescue of these weaker submerged peoples; you, Chinese, Hindus, Negroes, Jews, Egyptians, Ethiopians, forget that you are distinct nations and races. Stop flaunting the white flags of your cultural and historical heritage in the faces of your neighbors and masters (whom no like intimations of mine will ever persuade). Practice the art of forgetting. Forget your Bibles and Korans, your traditions, your history, your lore and your language, your national heroes and ideals, your body of laws and moral teachings. Shall we not rather come to these peoples and say: Within each of you is a wholesome sense of life, perhaps momentarily dormant; the memory of a great ideal at one time or another in your historical life. Invoke that Ideal, in the light of this new day, live in it and you shall be morally the equal of any other stronger national group.

This is to go for all that live in the shadow and the chains of other nations.

I would not call for walls and fortifications around these reborn national groups. They must live an inclusive rather than an exclusive life, as is fitting in the open-flung world of today. Inclusive in what they experience and absorb, exclusive in what they give–like the artist. Let me explain. In the enjoyment of art we are eclectic, the range of the whole world is not too wide. All of us love French painting and prose writing, English poetry, the Mexican mural, Hindu sculpture, German and Russian music, Chinese painting and poetry. We delight in the Negro spiritual and dance, Jewish musicianship, the Psalms, and the visions of the Hebrew prophets. All of us love all these things and much more. But the creative spirit is exclusive and particular. He may take over the style and the hand-writing from his neighbors, due to this wide, free, joyous inpouring of many cultures. But if he is authentic and not merely a virtuoso or eclectic, or a trailer-along, the artist will not fail to reveal his identification with the national and cultural group he springs from, in a manner, it is true, that may prove intangible and escape the critical intelligence of Mr. Schapiro. But it is there for those to see who can and will.

Then let us frankly accord each artist this right he is enjoying nevertheless. Do not wish to take away from the artists of the minority peoples particularly, their own cultural heritage when you offer them yours, in the manner of religious missionaries. Tolerate but each one to develop his own in the open sight of all–and we shall perhaps all be the wiser for it in time.

JENNINGS TOFEL.

Editor, Art Front:

I beg Mr. Tofel to read my article again and to read it more carefully. He will not find in it the opinions he imputes to me and attacks with such feeling. No- where do I say that nationalism does not exist or that artists are unaffected by their national and cultural groups. Nor do I call upon artists and oppressed peoples to give up their traditional cultures. I try to show rather that the culture or nation to which an artist belongs affects him more deeply than his so-called blood heritage. This culture is not uniform or permanent, but is conditioned by natural, social, economic and historical circumstances. Psychological or cultural characteristics in art have never been explained scientifically by a presumed racial or national spirit rooted in the blood of a people. There is no known connection between the peculiar physical types in a nation or ethnic group and their cultural achievements.

If we criticize the effort of some Negro liberals to revive older African arts as the racial culture of the modern Negroes, we do so, not because we despise these arts, but because such a return to a remote past would weaken the modern Negro in his struggle for equality and freedom. It would only accentuate his present exclusion from the most advanced forms of modern culture.

An oppressed people, in its struggle for independence, does not fight simply to maintain its historical traditions. It can win the fight only to the degree that it uses modern weapons and assimilates the lessons of European revolutionary struggles. Its traditional customs and institutions are double-edged; they may serve as the basis for asserting the human capacities of the oppressed group and its claims to political and cultural autonomy. But these customs and traditions may also be a brake on such aspirations; they may teach passivity, conservatism, submission. The Koran, which Mr. Tofel is so anxious to have the Arabs remember, supports slavery and calls upon servants to respect their masters; it also consigns women to the harem. The traditions of China have been used to suppress the revolutionary zeal of the Chinese masses, not to encourage it.

Therefore, in supporting the struggles of oppressed peoples for political emancipation, we do not accept all their slogans, traditions and claims as equally valid, and worthy of preservation. It is one thing to encourage the effort of a struggling people to maintain its own language and customs and arts; cultural re-awakening is a powerful, and often indispensable, factor, in the fight for freedom. But it is quite another thing to suppose that these customs and arts represent an inherent psychological peculiarity, independent of history and rooted in a supposed racial or constant national character. That would only play into the hands of the oppressors, whose intellectual agents, often archaeologists and ethnologists, have maintained that the primitive peoples are unchangeably primitive and inferior, and cannot produce science, industry and modern thought. The Egyptologist, Petrie, wrote that only what is self-evolved in the mind of a people can really endure or be effective. What does this mean? That the colonial peoples cannot attain the levels of Western culture. that these are beyond the mentality of Africans and Asiatics, that Europeans must remain in control, for the natives could not possibly preserve or develop what they themselves have not created. As colonial peoples become more rebellious, their oppressors sometimes show an increasing solicitude for certain native customs and arts, as a means of retarding the struggle for independence; and in this, they are aided by scholars and aesthetes who write “sympathetically” of the picturesque beauty and traditions of the old-fashioned primitive life and art.

A concluding word about “good” and “bad” nationalism. In making this distinction, Mr. Tofel is not very clear and opens the way for further confusions. He falls into the error of attributing wars to “avaricious” nations, and of describing fascism as the exploitation and perversion of an essentially healthy nationalism. Wars are not due to “avaricious nations”, but to the needs of the dominating classes of capitalist nations; they need new lands for raw materials, for new markets or new fields of investment. Or they fight in order to consolidate their possessions or to maintain a threatened status quo.

MEYER SCHAPIRO.

Art Front was published by the Artists Union in New York between November 1934 and December 1937. Its roots were with the Artists Committee of Action formed to defend Diego Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads mural soon to be destroyed by Nelson Rockefeller. Herman Baron, director of the American Contemporary Art gallery, was managing editor in collaboration with the Artists Union in a project largely politically aligned with the Communist Party USA.. An editorial committee of sixteen with eight from each group serving. Those from the Artists Committee of Action were Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Zoltan Hecht, Lionel S. Reiss, Hilda Abel, Harold Baumbach, Abraham Harriton, Rosa Pringle and Jennings Tofel, while those from the Artists Union were Boris Gorelick, Katherine Gridley, Ethel Olenikov, Robert Jonas, Kruckman, Michael Loew, C. Mactarian and Max Spivak.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/parties/cpusa/art-front/v2n06-may-1936-Art-Frontpdf.pdf