EXPERIMENT AND PROPAGANDA

ART IN THE MONTHLY NEW MASSES

Rachel Sanders

New Masses, the American magazine of ‘arts and letters’, was first published in May 1926 and ran as a monthly until October 1933, when it transformed into an overtly political weekly (1934–48). Although never an official organ of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), it was a principal disseminator of policy and sought to be the authoritative voice on the culture of the revolutionary left. History has painted a picture of an affiliation that dutifully marched to the tune of the Soviet piper.1 New Masses has been dismissed as ‘a vehicle for party dogma’ teeming with ‘pedestrian proletarian art and prose’, its ‘mindless crudity … a direct consequence of the international Stalinist line on cultural matters’.2 Its illustrations and cartoons have been described as systematically evolving from ‘formally innovative, often abstract, art’ to ‘art of explicit social and political content’ in a manner that ‘paralleled the comparable shift from abstract constructivism to socialist realist art in Soviet Russia during the same years’.3 However, pictorial evidence does not corroborate this assertion. As a monthly, New Masses fielded complex concepts, tactics and influences, including Leninist theory, Proletkult and the model of proletarian culture developed by the Russian Association of Revolutionary Writers (RAPP) that became the root of Stalin’s ‘method’ of Socialist Realism, as well as modernist developments prevalent in capitalist art markets and realisms that had emerged through its periodical predecessors.4 The result was a remarkable eclecticism. This essay will analyse its diversity through emphasis on stylistic idiom, its relationship to image content, and the perceptions of artists, theorists and national and international critics of its aesthetic and utilitarian worth.  

New Masses was founded with the support of an abundance of artists and intellectuals and a grant from the American Fund for Public Service. The prospectus submitted for funding laid out a non-partisan programme, but the continuation of the strain of national radicalism that had emerged through the Masses (1911–17) and the Liberator (1918–24) was affirmed when those involved declared ‘allegiance unqualifiably with the international labor movement’.5 Many contributors to the early numbers had been involved with these magazines, including editor Michael Gold, who stressed, in the second issue, that New Masses was an American experiment, ‘not a magazine of Communism or Moscow’. Nonetheless, he designated Russia and its revolutionary culture the ‘spiritual core’ around which thousands of artists were ‘building their creative lives’.6 Indeed, before the year was out paeans to the ‘great artist-nation, great scientist-nation, great worker-nation’ filled the magazine’s columns and Lenin’s portrait adorned its cover [1].7

1 Hugo Gellert, cover of New Masses, November 1926. Courtesy of the author.

Russia may have been a cultural beacon, but New Masses was consistently out of step with Soviet theory and practice, although this fact did not become apparent until it gained sustained contact with Soviet art and literary groups starting with the Second Conference of Revolutionary and Proletarian Writers, held at Kharkov in November 1930. Even so, it remained non-doctrinaire. As Andrew Hemingway states, ‘New Masses articulated the Party’s position on political issues (with which there could be no public disagreement), but continued to reflect the wide differences of opinion among communists and fellow-travellers on cultural matters.’8 The magazine exhibits neither uniform approach to content nor dominant stylistic idiom. Its artists transgressed directives and models of practice set in place by the Communist International (Comintern). This permissive attitude demands attention because, unlike earlier left-wing movements, communists endlessly deliberated upon formulating a programme for the production of effective revolutionary art to which they could adhere.

Between May 1926 and April 1928, the spectrum of political opinion of the editorial and executive boards shaped New Masses. These disappeared in June and Gold became sole editor until he was pressured into a three-man board in July 1931, which grew to six before the magazine became a weekly.9 With each new editorial grouping, adjustments in format and appearance occurred, but patterns of artistic activity, of stylistic transformation or favoured subject matter, do not neatly coincide with such changes, and it is a mistake to view modernist activity as determining the early issues, proletarian realism defining Gold’s periodical, or an emulation of Russian realism dictating the eighteen months that followed. The magazine’s artistic history is nuanced, and oversimplification distorts our comprehension and limits our appreciation of the images. New Masses’ life can be usefully divided into phases; the risk in prioritizing these is interpreting the artistic narrative as falling into step behind the political story.

The Phases of New Masses

The monthly New Masses coincided with a period of bitter factional fighting within the CPUSA, which was utilized by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) for its own power struggles.10 The magazine, which supported party policy from the outset, never become embroiled in these quarrels. Its incipient latitudinarian politics are apparent from the contributing socialists, independent Marxists and adversaries of the left; in particular, the publication of material by Leon Trotsky after he had lost his Politburo seat, and by his supporter and biographer Max Eastman, who had been chief editor of the Masses and the Liberator, exemplifies partial knowledge of, or partial allegiance to, the Soviet government.11

The bold format and the variety and volume of graphics featured in the first six months testify to the vision for New Masses outlined in its prospectus, which promised ‘at least half the pages will consist of pictures’. These would be political cartoons, drawings of American life and ‘pictures that have no “journalistic” value but are based on the emotions of art’.12 Printed inside and out in varying single colours under black on quality paper, it was initially several square inches larger than the roughly A4-sized magazine it shrank to in June 1928 and was visually striking with many full-page images. It claimed, in November 1926, that the switch to black and white, and a smaller size was made so ‘brave readers can hide their copies on subways from reactionary eyes’, although publishing costs were undoubtedly a concern.13 Printed on cheaper paper, the magazine was robbed of its vibrancy, yet variety endured. This was amplified in the early magazine by the number of individual contributions from unknown artists, such as Ernest Fiene’s soft-toned, naturalistic rural idyll Barns (June 1927) or the heavy marks, condensed space and flattened forms of Fred Gardner’s The Art Season Opens in Woodstock (June 1927). These ‘one-offs’ dwindled in later issues, but they continued to appear until early 1933.

William Gropper and Louis Lozowick were the predominant artists of Gold’s magazine, an interesting combination as in many ways their oeuvres embody the stylistic dichotomy of realism and modernist abstraction that Gold associated with opposing classes. During this phase, illustrations decreased in number and size, although full-page pictures still appeared – mainly works by Lozowick, who published in thirty-five of the thirty-eight issues that Gold edited, including numerous industrial vistas built of flat or tonal geometric forms in the vein of American Geometry (September 1928). Gold’s first editorial as chief welcomed ‘unorthodox subjects in unorthodox techniques’.14 He accepted experimentation, but formal play for its own sake was not compatible with his cultural agenda. His editorship began just weeks before the Comintern ushered in the ‘Third Period’, an ultra-sectarian phase when all reformists were regarded as counter-revolutionary. This policy kept the CPUSA on the margins of American political life, even as the flailing economy plunged the nation into depression, leaving millions unemployed, homeless, hungry and notionally ripe for revolution. The tenor of Gold’s magazine frequently complemented rigid Third Period rhetoric. It propagated the class-against-class Party line and asserted proletarian realism as appropriate communist culture, its single-minded, robust, virility that was guilty of ‘crudities, puerilities and so-called crimes against good-taste’ lauded above sickly, emasculated, aimless modernism, the product of a decaying society.15 Gold’s New Masses has been continually associated with ‘leftism’, a criticism that denoted the unsatisfactory practices of prioritizing propaganda value, rejecting bourgeois culture, undervaluing form and technique and insisting on worker authorship, although recent scholarship has persuasively disputed this charge.16 Certainly there is no indication of ‘leftist’ attitudes in the art featured, which was idiomatically diverse and never solely propagandistic or partisan.

Gold’s dedication to proletarian culture predated New Masses and he expressed belief in its organic growth in his earliest writings, yet his concept lacked fixed form or identity.17 Gellert’s indomitable, muscle-bound labourers that regularly adorned the magazine’s pages – for example, the Russian peasant and proletarian holding aloft the hammer and sickle behind Lenin on the November 1926 cover – could be seen as graphic manifestations of Gold’s theory. Proletarianism frequently heroized workers when recreating their lives in art, and privileged them through requests to make their own voices heard. Gold implored workers to write of their lives ‘in mine, mill and farm’.18 His ambition to form a ‘staff of industrial correspondents’ is reminiscent of Russia’s Left Front of Art (LEF) and earned him considerable criticism on the communist world stage – at the Kharkov conference, in the international journal Literature of the World Revolution and in the German Die Linkskurve, as well as from fellow Americans concerned that the results would be ‘reportorial’ rather than ‘creative and cultural’.19

Proletarianism was never a sanctioned strain of communist cultural theory, being opposed by Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, and at Kharkov the International Union of Revolutionary Writers (IURW) sought to halt its dominance in America. New Masses was accused of neglecting important theoretical developments, prompting a ten-point ‘program of action’ that committed it to strengthening its knowledge.20 Six American delegates representing the magazine and its offshoot cultural organization the John Reed Club (JRC) were among more than one hundred representatives from twenty-three different countries invited to participate in the conference. They included Gold, Gropper, A. B. Magil, Joshua Kunitz, Fred Ellis and Harry Alan Potamkin – the former three were elected to the executive council of the IURW, cementing a keenly pursued affiliation.21

Despite improved channels of communication and availability of theoretical materials, New Masses remained wanting for one Russian reviewer whose harsh critique of the 1931 issues ran in International Literature (the journal of the IURW). Twenty-year-old Anne Elistratova concluded that ‘insufficient politization [sic]’, ‘rotten liberalism’ and ‘theoretical backwardness’ were the root causes of the magazine’s deficiencies. She berated its style and the overall paucity of revolutionary content, and particularly reproved artists who fixated ‘on isolated phenomena of the capitalist system without showing their connection to the system as a whole’. New Masses stalwarts Gellert, Gropper, Jacob Burck and Otto Soglow were all deemed guilty of ‘an advocacy of passiveness and non-resistance’, their works denounced as mere registers of degradation in danger of fulfilling ‘a demobilising function’.22 Although her zealous appraisal was based on an essentially one-dimensional view of what communist art should be – naturalistic, militant social criticism – her article demonstrated understanding of initiatives propounded at Kharkov and highlighted that these had been either misunderstood or ignored.

In September 1932, New Masses published an IURW-formulated resolution determining the need for an artistic strategy founded on ‘Marxism-Leninism’ to address its ‘grave shortcomings’.23 The impact of Soviet criticism on its art was negative, although not immediate. Throughout 1932 a range of idiosyncratic styles received ample space. But the 1933 issues became much drier visually; many even lacked a cover image, and most of the interior graphics were smaller, filling either a half-page or half-column. Humour maintained a foothold, but there were few non-political works. Stylistically, experimentation was undeniably reined in, yet the expressive cartoon line was still favoured over the naturalism characteristic of Russian realism, evident, for example, in Gropper’s comic attack on Roosevelt’s New Deal So What? (July 1933), with its blue eagle defecating for the unemployed.

The Dominant Idioms of New Masses

A political aesthetic that flourished in the fine art of the American left during the 1930s was consolidated in New Masses. Its genealogy can be traced to two principal sources: the emotive, rough-hewn realism of Honoré Daumier that had been forged into the emblematic style of socialism by the artists of the Masses; and the vitriolic, scratchy linear expressionism of George Grosz that had been absorbed into the Liberator via the illustrations of Gropper and Adolf Dehn and had become quickly representative of the fledgling communist movement. These styles were well represented in New Masses, affirming its artistic lineage, but it also featured something unseen in the pages of its predecessors: experimentation with modernist idioms derived primarily from Cubism, including abstract pieces.

The use of modern techniques appealed to those who wished to see the publication of a sophisticated, non-doctrinaire journal. A 1928 review declared great revolutionary art to be ‘revolutionary both in theme and method’.24 When Gold proclaimed the newly launched periodical ‘a magazine of American experiment’, it was with the proviso ‘let’s not experiment in the minor esthetic cults’.25 The following year, however, he championed ‘the new free technique’ of the Russian futurists and decried ‘stodgy tradition[al]’ propaganda that had ‘bored so many persons, including revolutionists’.26 Enthusiasm for the practices of the post-revolution Russian avantgarde, in so far as they were understood – for Constructivism, Proletkult and the LEF – permeated the left, despite acknowledged conflict between innovation and communication. As one play review noted, ‘from the standpoint of winning new converts … stale language and stale form’ would be most effective, while that which excites artists ‘would be absolutely valueless’.27

2 Louis Lozowick, Decorations, from New Masses, December 1927. Courtesy of the author.

‘Valueless’ was art editor Hugo Gellert’s assessment of Constantin Brancusi’s work in one of the few New Masses articles on fine art. Gellert chastized the Romanian sculptor for making art an end rather than a means, stating ‘pure form leaves us in darkness’.28 Through his prolific contribution, Gellert was integral to the magazine’s aesthetic. His distinctive style embraced modernist characteristics; his subjects were often isolated motifs constructed from thick strokes of flat-edged crayon creating sharp, geometric, planar blocks of shading that reveal a firm grasp of modern French art, especially Cubism, and of contemporary trends in advertising, specifically Art Deco graphics. Like the majority of New Masses’ artists, Gellert tempered experimentation with figuration. David Burliuk, Morris Pass, Jan Matulka and Theodor Scheel were among those who drew heavily on post-Cubist modernism, reducing urban and industrial scenes and images of labour to stylized forms and flat, angular blocks of solid monochrome, as in Matulka’s Fishing Boats (December 1927), with its fractured picture space and multiple perspectives. It was not the dominant practice, but the early magazine featured a wealth of such art, which maintained a presence under Gold’s editorship, including Lozowick’s abstract Decorations [2] that dotted the columns.

Lozowick was the most consistent practitioner of modernist abstraction publishing in New Masses and the only contemporary American communist to write in a sustained manner on the subject of art.29 Despite his non-figurative propensities, he warned, ‘The great danger of extreme preoccupation with formalism is that it is likely to degenerate into decoration and ornamentation’ when disconnected from life.30 Lozowick advocated a synthesis of realism and formal experimentation, praising Russian art that inhabited a middle ground between the two and being blatantly derogatory about conservative practices that took ‘advantage of the fact that the tastes of the masses are unsusceptible to the formal appeal of the modernist’.31 As a Russian immigrant to the United States aged twelve, who had twice visited his birth country during the 1920s, Lozowick’s knowledge of Soviet culture no doubt gave him clout among his peers. In Voices of October (1930), he wrote ‘though revolutionary themes in service of the state are not in themselves objectionable, they cannot alone constitute art, unless treated with technical competence’. He championed artists who applied their knowledge of ‘radical tendencies, Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, and Expressionism … to the solution of modern artistic problems’, even though the Comintern’s preference for naturalism, and the subsequent abandonment of abstraction by Russian artists, must have been apparent to him during his second visit (1927–8).32

Art’s utilitarian purpose was integral to Lozowick’s aesthetic. His characteristic iconography of industry and cityscapes, captured in lithographs such as New York, a celebratory vision of Manhattan’s towering skyscrapers against the majestic curve of the Brooklyn Bridge, which was selected for the cover of the New Masses prospectus (c. 1925), demonstrated his faith in ‘the paramount importance of machinery and technique in the achievement of the revolution and in the functioning of the new society’.33 His enthusiasm for technological power and precision was entirely consonant with his politics at a time when Lenin declared that communism equalled ‘soviets plus electrification’ and the ‘scientific management’ of labour was being wholly embraced by the CPSU.34 In a 1931 article in Literature of the World Revolution, Lozowick divided proletarian art into negative and positive themes. Negative subjects made ‘an annihilating attack on the capitalist regime in all its aspects’, whereas positive subjects, such as his images of industrial progress, should be understood ‘as a product of that rationalisation and economy which must prove allies of the working class in the building of socialism’.35 His distinction validates his activity, but his objective was thematic diversity.

Lozowick’s ‘fetishization of capitalist technique’ was singled out for criticism by Elistratova who described his work as ‘devoid of personality’ and politically inadequate.36 She was not alone in this opinion; one disapproving New Masses reader attacked his lithographs for their ‘neutral, static quality’ that lacked the ‘incentive to struggle’.37 Another likened Lozowick and his drawings of ‘pretty machines’ to jazz musicians who compose ‘for a bastard capitalistic generation’.38 Lozowick was not an aestheticist, but it seems that members of his audience identified him as such.

3 Theodor Scheel, Camera Eye, from New Masses, April 1930. Courtesy of the author.

Analysis of modernist characteristics in the monthly New Masses exposes how asynchronous America and Russia were; for example, the April 1930 issue featured Scheel’s Camera Eye [3], an exuberant, if chaotic, synthesis of mechanical forms and symbols of mental and physical labour reminiscent of the photomontage produced a decade earlier by Constructivist Aleksandr Rodchenko. Elistratova admonished ‘a resurrection’ of processes wherein ‘the revolutionary content of the work was subordinated to experiments of a formal nature’.39 The use of modernist forms had become a question of the value of bourgeois culture (or culture the CPSU perceived to be bourgeois), but the problem was never addressed with specific instruction, even inside Russia where excessive criticism of modernist trends and support of traditional practitioners and teaching methods at institutions such as the reopened, renamed All Russian Academy of Arts made clear the government’s conservative tastes.

Marx’s and Engels’s admiration for the likes of Balzac and Dickens confirmed a preference for realism and the utility of bourgeois culture. Of course their letters on literature and propaganda predate the birth of modernist art, and so Lenin became the last word on this issue: art had to communicate with the masses. His views were largely drawn from those of Georgi Plekhanov, who was not opposed to stylistic innovation per se, but believed modernist tendencies were the upshot of artists ‘in hopeless disaccord with the social environment’.40 Realism linked use-value to artistic-value; it assumed accessibility and was the crux of the content debate; revolutionary art was to represent the social reality of continuous class struggle by finding a midway between factual detail and abstract concepts, presenting the viewer with the ‘typical’. But in Stalinist Russia, realism was mutating into ‘truth to the essence of communism’, with celebratory and romantic aspects inapplicable outside the country.

The IURW argued that although communist culture could not be produced in capitalist nations, the Soviet Union’s cultural forms could be appropriated to inspire the struggling foreign proletariat. However, the models of practice available to Americans were sparse. Two exhibitions of Russian paintings and graphics were held in New York during the 1920s but received little attention from the communist press. The second of these included modernist works, but the foreword to the catalogue commended minimal ‘Cezannism’ [sic] and ‘the blighting abstractions of Cubism’.41 New Masses proffered ‘Stalin’s formulation: “proletarian culture – national in form, proletarian in content”’ as vague description of artistic activity realized inside the Soviet Union.42 It printed the occasional Russian image, crude lubok or broadside-style propaganda pieces that were equally uninformative about contemporary methods.43 Literature of the World Revolution featured very few pictures. Its successor, International Literature, printed graphics by international artists; the majority of this undoubtedly approved art can best be described as naturalistic, if inclined heavily towards an aggressive, ‘blocky’ or angular technique (sensual, undulating lines are not a common feature).

Of the New Masses artists, Gellert’s and William Siegel’s later illustrations sit most comfortably within the favoured Soviet idiom. Siegel was the only one whose works underwent substantial transition from modernist experimentation (Fifth Avenue Bus, October 1927) in the early magazines. Late 1932–3 brought a profusion of maladroit statements, for example Siegel’s Eviction (July 1933), with its weeping mother and stoic father who glares at his uniformed portrait propped against the family’s possessions piled in the street before the turned back of a policeman. Stylistically, the clumsy composition and inelegant naturalistic outline have little in common with the ubiquitous and distinctive Daumieresque Masses idiom that thrived in the Liberator and progressed to New Masses, identifying these periodicals as inheritors of a mode associated with the nation’s left.

With Masses contributors such as Maurice Becker, Boardman Robinson and Art Young featuring heavily in the early numbers of New Masses, coarse, grainy artless strokes of lithographic crayon had a healthy existence from the beginning, and remained significant in later years by engaging younger artists; Burck, Soglow, Reginald Marsh, Don Brown and Harry Sternberg all explored the aesthetic, some emulating it closely, others pushing its boundaries. With its urban iconography and types, its one-line joke, and a manner that adopts the assured, wobbling ink squiggles and cross-hatch lines favoured by Young, Soglow’s interior bar scene When Beer was Lawful Instead of Awful (May 1927) is clearly rooted in The Masses tradition; so too is the unrefined style and compositional format of Sternberg’s Subway Construction [4], although scenes of heavy labour were uncommon in the earlier periodical. The means of representation that dominated The Masses and its blend of irreverent humour and social commentary continued to be relevant into the 1930s, inspiring such works as William Hernandez’s scene of urban entertainment ‘Let’s Go. I Didn’t Come to the Theatre to See the Depression’ (February 1933).

The strain of realism pervading New Masses did not result from Russian influence but from home-grown practice. An approach redolent of its eponym had taken shape in its prospectus. It heralded the pursuit of slang, crudeness and vitality, ‘moving picture [sic], radio, vaudeville, strikes, machinery or any other raw American facts’.44 It became intimately combined with the principles of proletarian realism – ‘swift action, clear form, the direct line, cinema in words’ – manifested visually in works such as Gropper’s beautiful illustration East Side (August 1929) or The Dishwasher [5], one of his many images that displays deep understanding of the New York immigrant, working-class experience, accomplished through the representation of the typical.45 By rooting his practice in biographic experience, Gropper produced pictorial counterparts to Gold’s novel Jews Without Money (1930).

The pre-Kharkov magazine was rife with contradiction concerning idiom, partly because Gold insisted there was ‘no conscious straining after proletarian art’; it was instinctual, ‘the natural flower of [the worker’s] environment’.46 By stating ‘there is no ‘style’ – there is only clarity’, he created something of a guidance void.47 In fact, as late as September 1933, he wrote, acknowledging his own weaknesses, ‘No proletarian critic that I know has paid much attention to the difficult problem of style.’48 American artists may have construed their work as broadly conforming to Comintern ideals as no criticism was levelled at the style employed for these native themes, although the subject matter did come under attack. Elistratova expected images that served ‘as a militant banner’; instead, she found ‘satirical drawings and cartoons … so mild and harmless that they might be reprinted in any bourgeois humorous journal’. She deemed New Masses realism ‘the manifestation of direct political indifference’ and even panned overtly political statements such as Gropper’s Hunger March (February 1931), which was faulted for suggesting ‘spontaneous resentment’ with no hint of organized communist activity.49

There were also American critics who desired blatantly political art. John Kwait (a pseudonym for Meyer Schapiro) reprimanded artists who treated social elements ‘abstractly and picturesquely’. He called for art that ‘re-enact[ed] in a vivid, forceful manner the most important revolutionary situations’.50 Burck, staff artist for the Daily Worker (the CPUSA’s English-language newspaper), castigated him for suggesting that ‘the only art suitable to the working class is agitational’, but Kwait was not alone in his concern that American social realism was too timid.51 As critic Jerome Klein stated, ‘If the artist is to be effective he can hardly be too concrete and specific.… There is no virtue in the cryptic.’52 Even so, opinion was divided on the best means to make effectual statements. While Kwait called for ‘a simple plastic language’, Klein shared fellow Art Front (magazine of the Artists’ Union) columnist Jacob Kainen’s viewpoint that ‘the old, literal naturalism is failing to register esthetically in the face of vast social passions and portents of doom’.53

A 1931 resolution by the International Bureau of Revolutionary Artists (IBRA), signed by Ellis and Gropper, asserted that the goals of revolutionary art would be realized ‘using the accumulated artistic experience and achievements of past centuries’. Goya, Courbet and Daumier were unsurprisingly named as appropriate references, but the comparatively modernist van Gogh and Gauguin were also cited.54 Lunacharsky’s ‘Marxism and Art’, published in New Masses the following year, argued, ‘It is possible to find in a degenerate work of art something which is very useful from a technical point of view.’55 A year later, Soviet dramatist Vsevolod Vishnevsky advised readers of International Literature to ‘look at Grosz, look at Proust, look at Picasso … we should be able to see that behind them, beside them, a tremendous new seed is already sprouting. One must understand where it is and grasp it, taking culture as a whole under investigation.’56 Such theoretic sources indicated openness to experimentation that was embraced by Americans seeking paradigms fitting to their lived experience, which they found in German political imagery, particularly that of Grosz.

Grosz’s art raised questions about content in the early New Masses. Reflecting on why it did not ‘glorify the workers’ or ‘the nobility of the revolutionary spirit’, a laudatory 1927 article tendered Grosz’s belief that ‘during a period of struggle the revolutionary artist has no choice but to criticize the masters of society, and to shock people out of their faith in the superiority of the ruling class’.57 Grosz’s ‘Prost Noske! The Young Revolution is Dead’, published alongside the article, delivers just such a slap, with its representations of sword-impaled babies and castrated and disembowelled males. Grosz’s expressive subject and style was closely emulated, principally by Dehn and Gropper. His influence on Dehn is apparent in the sinewy lines and distorted forms of comic grotesques of the bourgeoisie. Dehn made scathing physiognomic statements on occasion, as in O Lord, Our Shepherd (September 1927), although generally his work lacked Grosz’s virulence.

Gropper’s constant presence and prolific output meant that his work, probably more than that of any other contributing artist, denoted a communist aesthetic for the New Masses readership. He published a total of 163 cartoons between 1926 and 1933. He was among those artists, including Siegel and Isidore Klein, who grabbed the opportunity of regular publication to explore a variety of styles. These included smooth, rounded, cartoon strokes influenced by Young (Ladies, It Gives Me Great Pleasure, July 1926) and an occasional foray into heightened naturalism (Toward a Classless Society, November 1932), but the illustrative style immediately identifiable as his is indebted to Grosz. This is most apparent in scratchy, abrasive drawings such as Join the Maroons (April 1927), in which the mutilated bodies of army veterans also pay homage to the German artist’s postwar invective. Gropper’s use of Grosz’s narrative symbols and distorted or condensed spatial arrangements added a modern flavour to his work. Dishwasher employs the latter; this image successfully blends proletarian realism with expressionist line and form that flirts with the grotesque. Comparatively, Gropper’s delivery is often softened by crayon line and touches of shading, along with comic text, but the idiom he developed was no less expressive and was interpreted as a ‘felt’ comment on the reality of his world, which prevented censure of staid passivism from left-wing American critics. Lozowick argued that as a result of his experimentation Gropper’s ‘best cartoons carry power, vitality, and conviction which a mere recording of actual events could never achieve’.58 For Lewis Mumford, Gropper had earned ‘a pre-eminent place as an interpreter of the mangled reality that people confront today’, making him ‘one of the most accomplished’ artists of his generation.59

6 Herb Kruckman, ‘After All, It is a Case of the Survival of the Fittest’, from New Masses, June 1932. Courtesy of Marx Memorial Library, London.

Critical response is crucial to establishing why American leftist art transgressed Soviet example. Writing in Art Front, Harold Rosenberg praised Gropper’s ‘coherent purposefulness’, but he also felt moved to defend his ‘unworried eclecticism’ and so simultaneously drew attention to it, implying Gropper’s manner was too tame, for while he was producing quality art influenced by such varied sources as Breughel, Forain and Cubism, he was ‘load[ing] revolutionary material into the old apple-carts of art-technique’.60 Anita Brenner spelt out her hope for stylistic progression in her review of the 1933 John Reed Club exhibition, which included work by several New Masses illustrators. She asserted that propaganda was hampered by conventional political idioms (she cited Daumier and Goya), arguing that artists ‘cannot adequately and movingly paint or carve their time and place in the technical and emotional terms of another age’.61

Many American critics believed the ‘contemporary artist must … develop plastic methods which are suited to his needs’.62 This was Lozowick’s opinion, but his figurative post-Cubist abstractions introduced a level of challenging sophistication that was negatively received, whereas expressionism appears to have been valued, praised by critics as ‘the direction par excellence for social disillusion’ and pursued by numerous artists.63 Emotive content is, arguably, a salient feature of New Masses imagery throughout its run as a monthly. Naturalistic representation presented a problem for American artists: how did one create in a manner aligned with the social and political struggle, that critiqued the dominant order and its cultural preferences, in a style so deeply rooted in traditional skills it was entirely inoffensive? Expressionist tendencies – aggressive line, twisted forms and warped spatial arrangements – offered a solution. They were a means to grab the viewer’s attention and a vent for political frustrations. They also allowed artists to make comprehensive statements while being in the stylistic vanguard. Overwhelmingly, stylistic experimentation meant incorporating the grotesque as an appropriate response to the experience of a society in crisis. Herb Kruckman’s ‘After All, It is a Case of the Survival of the Fittest’ [6] is exemplary of an abundance of works contributed by Scheel, Soglow, Phil Bard, Philip Reisman and Anton Refregier, among others.

Conclusion

Lack of comprehensive theoretical material and poor lines of communication contributed to, but do not wholly account for, the apparent fact that American artists did not adhere to Soviet pictorial example. When the Bolsheviks seized upon realism as the aesthetic to convey their politics, they bled out the critical element so fundamental to its nature, creating art transparently didactic or fantastical in sentimentality, and redundant in non-communist countries. Nonetheless, the model had impact beyond Russian borders as the process of Stalinization absorbed cultural agencies, such as New Masses, keenly seeking direction from the foremost representatives of the proletariat. Presumably conscious of the limitations and specificity of Soviet practices, the theoretical advice extended by the CPSU was never a rigid universal cultural mould into which international activity was expected to fit, but rather an aesthetic of flexible parameters necessary to the creation of an effective political tool.

Ostensibly no visual sources were to be disregarded, yet International Literature printed commentary encouraging the artist to ‘hate, not by request, but by himself … pure work, technical armor’ and ‘formal innovation’.64 The gap between Soviet theory and practice and criticism such as Elistratova’s against ‘the might of technique’ must have caused confusion.65 Certainly her critique was detrimental to the presence of cubistic modernism in New Masses, with Lozowick all but disappearing from its pages from 1932–3, possibly suggesting resistance to accommodating her demands. Americans repeatedly employed modernist styles and even when condemned by foreign or national critics these were not summarily rejected. Clearly they held appeal, prompting the question, did artistic quality take precedent over political utility? The means of representation were never far from the artist’s mind, as Lozowick informed one critical reader: ‘Art has its own specific problems of importance to the artist and the worker. People who make flying excursions into sociology and aesthetics would do well to remember this.’66 Of course the magazine’s artists were not preoccupied with experimentation that pandered to the art market’s obsession with originality, though that is not to say that vocational success was not a concern, but rather they held a belief, one that took root in predecessor periodicals, that freedom of expression was the reward of political revolt, and this was routinely on display in New Masses.67

Alongside the dominant idioms discussed, which had established left-wing associations that may explain their assumed acceptability, the diverse styles of New Masses ranged from the scratchy, needle-thin etched lines of Reisman (The Working Class Mother, August 1928) to the dense cross-hatching, fluid outline and bulbous shapes of Mitchell Siporin (The Father, the Sons and the Holy Guns, October 1931), the soft-textured naturalism of Marsh (Pneumatic Drill, January 1928) to the raw-edged woodblock prints of Gan Kolski (cover, May 1929). The subject matter was similarly diverse. Humour was a potent tool, with capitalist bosses and the upper classes habitually mocked. Empathetic depictions of people’s lives, attacks on political powers, lynching and working-class demonstrations were all common content. Current affairs occupied artists; inevitably these changed over time with Depression conditions unsurprisingly becoming a priority, alongside the growing threat of Nazism. There are, however, no obvious trends linking style and subject. Examples can be found of jokes, explicit propaganda and non-political graphics in every idiom and all classes, races and genders were depicted in all styles.

The rationale for experimentation seems to have been the production of apposite art forms for artist and audience. In part, this involved New Masses appropriating the practices of its predecessors, which were the result of years of seeking popular appeal. By maintaining established idioms and embracing new techniques, artists were able to draw images that made sense to its readership, that communicated emotional investment, and that were suitably progressive within the cultural framework of a capitalist society. They were encouraged in this by the nation’s left-wing critics, who implied Russian art did not live up to the task, arguing that work ‘couched in classic and archaic terms … obscure[d] the subject’ and made ‘the emotional impact of the picture an abstract one’.68 Lozowick believed that if the artist could ‘apply the force of technical equipment to the wealth of new themes, no prospect for what he might accomplish would be too hopeful’.69 There was a demand for thematic and idiomatic diversity and quality – but art had to strike the right balance between innovation and utility. As Gold wrote, ‘I think a new content often demands new form, but when the new form gets so far ahead of us all that we can’t understand its content it is time to write letters to the press.’70

That some Russian critics found this approach problematic is palpable in Boris Ternovetz’s review of a John Reed Club exhibition held in Moscow in 1933, which included pieces by Gropper, Bard, Burck and Lozowick. His underlying critical tone – his emphasis on the need for vigilance against bourgeois ‘abstract schematism on the one hand, and sickly expressionist hysterics on the other’ – belies his assessment that ‘the general impression was extremely favourable’. Ternovetz noted that other Soviet critics shared his concerns and proposed that a major benefit of the exhibition was a ‘stock-taking for the foreign artists themselves’, submitting their work to ‘fraternal criticism’ exposed ‘their diseases of growth’.71 Improved channels of exchange had not transformed New Masses’ imagery, which maintained an identity independent of Soviet influence. By 1935 international military aggression prompted the adoption of the Popular Front policy (a drive to form an anti-fascist coalition) and previous cultural directives were overshadowed by the conciliatory strategies that afforded communist sympathizers aesthetic autonomy. But the visual evidence indicates that cartoonist Russell Limbach was voicing the long-held opinion of many when he told readers that year, ‘The American artist has nothing to learn from his comrades in the USSR in the field of graphic art.’ New Masses featured ‘much better material for a study of what revolutionary art can or should not be in this country’.72

1 See Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (Harcourt: New York, 1961); James Gilbert, Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America (John Wiley & Sons: New York, 1968); and Eric Homberger, American Writers and Radical Politics, 1900–1939 (St Martin’s Press: New York, 1986).

2 Leslie Fishbein, Rebels in Bohemia: The Radicals of The Masses, 1911–17 (University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1982), p. 207. Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party: A Critical History (Viking Press: New York, 1957), p. 278.

3 Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt, ‘New Masses and the John Reed Club, 1926–1936: Evolution of Ideology, Subject Matter and Style’, Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, no. 12 (Spring 1989), pp. 57–8. The length of Marquardt’s text necessarily limits the detail of her argument, which redresses previous appraisals of New Masses, but her preoccupation with modernist trends results in a distorted account of the magazine’s artistic development. Her viewpoint stems from her study ‘Louis Lozowick: Development from Machine Aesthetic to Social Realism’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Maryland, 1983), which describes a shift from 1929 onwards, indicative of overt politicization, when labourers were introduced into the artist’s monumentalized urban scenes. This is not discernable in the pages of New Masses – peopled prints predate Gold’s editorship, while Lozowick’s unpopulated landscapes continued to feature into the 1930s. Similarly, Patricia Phagan ‘William Gropper and Freiheit: A Study of his Political Cartoons, 1924–35’, unpublished PhD thesis (City University of New York, 2000), argues that following a trip to the USSR in 1927 Gropper’s work became more naturalistic. In fact, Gropper’s New Masses work is stylistically changeable. There is evidence that Russian art made an impression, but this was an addition to his oeuvre, not a change of direction.

4 Andrei Zhdanov announced the ‘artistic method’ of Socialist Realism at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in August 1934. See C. Vaughan James, Soviet Socialist Realism (Macmillan: London, 1973).

5 Quoted in Marquardt, ‘New Masses and the John Reed Club, 1926–1936’, op. cit., p. 58–9.

6 Michael Gold, ‘Let it be Really New’, New Masses, vol. 2, no. 2 (June 1926), p. 20–6.

7 Michael Gold, ‘The Ninth Year’, New Masses, vol. 2, no. 1 (November 1926), p. 5.

8 Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926–1956 (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2002), p. 29.

9 New Masses had six initial editors: Michael Gold, Joseph Freeman, Hugo Gellert (art editor until August 1928), John Sloan, Egmont Arens and James Rorty. Freeman and Rorty dropped to the ‘Executive Board’ in December 1926 and Sloan left the magazine. William Gropper replaced him as art editor. In July 1931, the editorial board consisted of Gold, Robert Evans and Louis Lozowick. In February 1932, Gellert and Moissaye J. Olgin joined, followed by Whittaker Chambers in May 1932. Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (Random House: New York, 1978), pp. 94–6, describes the addition of Chambers as a result of Party involvement.

10 Political division complicates the historiography of the CPUSA. Theodore Draper’s The Roots of American Communism (Viking Press: New York, 1957) and American Communism and the Soviet Union (Viking Press: New York, 1960) are the determining texts of the Cold War perspective. See also, Howe and Coser, The American Communist Party, op. cit., and Harvey Klehr and John Haynes, The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself (Twayne Publishers: New York, 1992) for ‘traditionalist’ views. Fraser Ottanelli’s revisionist interpretation The Communist Party of the United States (Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, 1991) argues that the CPUSA was not a servile appendage of Moscow, but ‘was shaped by a homespun search for policies which would make it an integral part of the country’s society’ (p. 4). My study of the visual culture has led to similar conclusions.

11 Eastman published Leon Trotsky: Portrait of a Youth in 1926. He became a political pariah as a result of his support for Trotsky, who made his last speech at the Eighth Comintern Plenum in May 1927 before being expelled from the Party.

12 Quoted in Marquardt, ‘New Masses and the John Reed Club, 1926–1936’, op. cit., p. 58–9.

13 New Masses, vol. 2, no. 1 (November 1926), p. 5. New Masses frequently printed requests for financial support.

14 Michael Gold, ‘Editorial Notes’, New Masses, vol. 4, no. 1 (June 1928), p. 17.

15 Michael Gold, ‘A Letter from a Clam Digger’, New Masses, vol. 5, no. 6 (November 1929), p. 11.

16 James Murphy, The Proletarian Moment: The Controversy over Leftism in Literature (University of Illinois Press: Urbana, 1991) demonstrates that Gold’s association with extreme leftism arose from sweeping statements and contradictions in his writing. Murphy’s introduction identifies numerous texts that have asserted New Masses, and Gold particularly, as proponents of leftism. Marquardt uncritically accepts this, claiming ‘Gold narrowed the formal and thematic range of “workers art” during 1929 and 1930.’ Marquardt, ‘New Masses and the John Reed Club’, op. cit., p. 67.

17 Irwin Granich (Michael Gold), ‘Towards Proletarian Art’, Liberator, vol. 4, no. 2 (February 1921), pp. 20–4.

18 Michael Gold, ‘Go Left, Young Writers!’ New Masses, vol. 4, no. 8 (January 1929), pp. 3–4.

19 Michael Gold, ‘A New Program for Writers’, New Masses, vol. 5, no. 8 (January 1930), p. 21. Ralph Cheney, ‘On New Program for Writers’, New Masses, vol. 5, no. 9 (February 1930), p. 21. On the LEF, see Brandon Taylor, Art and Literature Under the Bolsheviks, vol. 1 (Pluto Press: London, 1992), pp. 175–83.

20 Fred Ellis et al., ‘The Charkov Conference of Revolutionary Writers’, New Masses, vol. 6, no. 9 (February 1931), p. 7.

21 The IURW was a Soviet-based coordinating body for the exchange of theoretical material. Literature of the World Revolution, which was published in four languages – German, French, English and Russian – thoroughly covered the Kharkov conference in a ‘Special Number’.

22 A. Elistratova, ‘New Masses’, International Literature, no. 1 (1932), p. 109–11.

23 ‘Resolution on the Work of New Masses for 1931’, New Masses, vol. 8, no. 3 (September 1932), p. 21.

24 Bernard Smith, ‘Machines and Mobs’, New Masses, vol. 3, no. 11 (March 1928), p. 32.

25 Gold, ‘Let it be Really New’, op. cit., p. 26.

26 Michael Gold, ‘A New Masses Theatre’, New Masses, vol. 3, no. 7 (November 1927), p. 23.

27 Kenneth Fearing, ‘Hoboken Blues’, New Masses, vol. 3, no. 12 (April 1928), p. 27.

28 Hugo Gellert, ‘O+.I. = Brancusi’, New Masses, vol. 2, no. 3 (January 1927), p. 25. See also ‘Pound vs. Gellert’, New Masses, vol. 2, no. 5 (March 1927), p. 25.

29 Lozowick published his opinions in articles, reviews and books, such as Modern Russian Art (1925) and Voices of October (1930). His papers include numerous essays on modern artists including Cézanne and Kandinsky, and he wrote at length on Marx and art.

30 Louis Lozowick, ‘Lithography: Abstraction and Realism’, Space, March 1930, Lozowick papers, AAA, 5895.

31 Louis Lozowick, ‘A Decade of Soviet Art’, Menorah Journal, vol. 16, no. 3 (March 1929), p. 245.

32 Joseph Freeman et al., Voices of October: Art and Literature in the Soviet Union (Vanguard Press: New York, 1930), pp. 273–81.

33 Louis Lozowick, ‘Machine Art is Bourgeois’, New Masses, vol. 4, no. 9 (February 1929), p. 31.

34 On Russia’s relationship with Taylorism, see Taylor, Art and Literature Under the Bolsheviks, op. cit., pp. 120–9.

35 Louis Lozowick, ‘Art in the Service of the Proletariat’, Literature of the World Revolution, no. 4 (1931), p. 126–7. Lozowick put forward a similar argument in ‘What Should Revolutionary Artists Do Now?’, New Masses, vol. 6, no. 7 (December 1930), p. 21.

36 Elistratova, ‘New Masses’, op. cit., p. 110.

37 Vern Jessup, ‘And Now, the Artists …’, New Masses, vol. 6, no. 5 (October 1930), p. 22. Interestingly, Jessup also accused Gellert of producing ineffective, ‘arty’ illustrations on occasion.

38 Pauline Zutringer, ‘Machine Art is Bourgeois’, New Masses, vol. 4, no. 9 (February 1929), p. 31.

39 Elistratova, ‘New Masses’, op. cit., p. 109.

40 Georgi Plekhanov, Art and Social Life (Lawrence and Wishart: London, 1953), pp. 177–224.

41 Quoted in Hemingway, Artists on the Left, op. cit., p. 26. The second show, entitled ‘Exhibition of Contemporary Art of Soviet Russia: Paintings, Graphics, Sculpture’, was held in a gallery at Grand Central Station, New York in 1929; see Hemingway, pp. 26, 289.

42 ‘Art is a Weapon: Program of the Worker’s Cultural Federation’, New Masses, vol. 7, no. 3 (August 1931), p. 12.

43 See examples in the January and November 1927 issues.

44 Quoted in Marquardt, ‘New Masses and the John Reed Club’, op. cit., p. 59.

45 Michael Gold, ‘Notes of the Month’, New Masses, vol. 6, no. 4 (September 1930), p. 5.

46 Gold, ‘Go Left, Young Writers!’, op. cit., pp. 3–4.

47 Michael Gold, ‘Note’, New Masses, vol. 6, no. 1 (June 1930), p. 22.

48 Quoted from Daily Worker, 1933, in Murphy, The Proletarian Moment, op. cit., p. 122.

49 Elistratova, ‘New Masses’, op. cit., pp. 109–11. See also Ternovetz’s criticism of the ‘sentimental lachrymose treatment of proletarian themes’, Boris Ternovetz, ‘John Reed Club Art in Moscow’, trans. Louis Lozowick, New Masses, vol. 8, no. 8 (April 1933), p. 25.

50 John Kwait, ‘John Reed Club Art Exhibition’, New Masses, vol. 8, no. 7 (February 1933), p. 23. On Schapiro, see Andrew Hemingway, ‘Meyer Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 17, no. 1 (1994).

51 Jacob Burck, ‘Sectarianism in Art’, New Masses, vol. 8, no. 8 (April 1933), p. 26.

52 Jerome Klein, ‘Twenty-One Gun Salute’, Art Front, vol. 1, no. 5 (May 1935), p. 6.

53 Jacob Kainen, ‘Our Expressionists’, Art Front, vol. 3, no. 1 (February 1937), pp. 14–15.

54 ‘To All Revolutionary Artists of the World’, Literature of World Revolution: Special Number on the Second International Conference of Revolutionary Writers, 1931, pp. 10–11.

55 Anatoly Lunacharsky, ‘Marxism and Art’, New Masses, vol. 8, no. 4 (November 1932), p. 14. Lunacharsky had resigned from the Commissariat of Enlightenment in 1929, but he was not politically discredited until after his death in 1933, and was still cited in New Masses as a cultural authority.

56 Quoted in Murphy The Proletarian Moment, op. cit., p. 98.

57 Julian Gumperz, ‘George Grosz – Up Out of Dada’, New Masses, vol. 2, no. 6 (April 1927), pp. 17–18. Gumperz was the editor of the German communist newspaper Die Rote Fahne (The red flag) and cofounder of Der Gegner (The opponent), a periodical aimed at the working class that published Grosz’s art.

58 Quoted in Marquardt, ‘Louis Lozowick’, op. cit., pp. 135–6.

59 Lewis Mumford, ‘Satirist into Painter’, New Yorker, 27 March 1937, reprinted in David Shapiro (ed.), Social Realism: Art as a Weapon (Frederick Ungar Publishing Co: New York, 1973), pp. 203–5.

60 Harold Rosenberg, ‘The Wit of William Gropper’, Art Front, vol. 2, no. 4 (March 1936), pp. 7–8.

61 Anita Brenner, ‘Revolution in Art’, The Nation, vol. 136, no. 3531 (8 March 1933), pp. 267–9. Brenner was an independent left-wing writer who contributed to New Masses.

62 Kainen, ‘Brook and his Tradition’, Art Front, vol. 2, no. 3 (February 1936), pp. 6–7.

63 Kainen, ‘Our Expressionists’, op. cit., pp. 14–15.

64 I. Kataev, ‘Art on the Threshold of Socialism’, International Literature, no.1 (April 1934), pp. 83–91.

65 Elistratova, ‘New Masses’, op. cit., p. 110.

66 Lozowick, ‘Machine Art is Bourgeois’, op. cit., p. 31.

67 See Gellert, ‘I Meet an Individualist’, New Masses, vol. 3, no. 5 (September 1927), p. 25. Also Lozowick, ‘What Should Revolutionary Artists Do Now?’, op. cit., p. 21.

68 Jacob Kainen, ‘Revolutionary Art at the John Reed Club’, Art Front, vol. 1, no. 2 (January 1935), p. 6.

69 Lozowick papers, AAA, 5895.

70 Quoted from Daily Worker, 1934, in Murphy, The Proletarian Moment, op. cit., p. 140.

71 Ternovetz, ‘John Reed Club Art in Moscow’, op. cit., p. 25.

72 Russell T. Limbach, ‘Soviet Art’, New Masses, vol. 17, no. 9 (26 November 1935), p. 25.