Harrison 1980

Prospects
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John Reed Club Artists and the New Deal: Radical

Responses to Roosevelt's “Peaceful Revolution”
Helen A. Harrison
Prospects / Volume 5 / October 1980, pp 241 - 268

DOI: 10.1017/S0361233300003185, Published online: 30 July 2009
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0361233300003185
How to cite this article:

Helen A. Harrison (1980). John Reed Club Artists and the New Deal: Radical
Responses to Roosevelt's “Peaceful Revolution”. Prospects, 5, pp 241-268
doi:10.1017/S0361233300003185
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Bernarda Bryson, sketch for one of thirteen panels, Bronx Central Post
Office, New York, 1938 (Photo: National Archives).
John Reed Club Artists
and the New Deal: Radical
Responses to Roosevelt's
"Peaceful Revolution"
HELEN A. HARRISON
N THE EARLY 1930s, a significant number of American artists who were

Ibecame
aligned, either practically or theoretically, with the Communist Party
supporters of the New Deal. Artist members of the John Reed
Club, a Party-directed cultural organization, were enjoined to develop
"revolutionary art" as a vehicle for the type of social change that had
transformed tsarist Russia into the Soviet Union. Yet many of them found
Roosevelt's "peaceful revolution" worthy of the highest accolade they
could bestow on a subject: its inclusion as an affirmative theme in their
work. In so viewing it, they ran counter to the Party's stated policy in
opposition to socioeconomic reform—a policy that was later reversed to
accommodate the New Deal and thus vindicate the artists's position.
From its inception, the New Deal seemed to offer artists an attractive
alternative to the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions pre-
dicted by Marx and promulgated by the Communists.
THE CLUB AND ITS PROGRAM
From the early 1920s, the Communist Party was the primary political
source of alternative viewpoints for artists in the United States. The
deportations of aliens, treason trials, and the general repression of So-
cialists, Wobblies, and anarchists during and immediately after World
War I had taken their toll on the leadership of the early radical move-
ments with which artists had been associated, leaving many followers
disaffected and searching for direction. The Communist Party moved in
to fill the void.
In 1921 the burgeoning Soviet Proletcult movement—calling for the
recruitment of worker-artists and the establishment of art rising from,
and expressing the values of, the proletariat—set out the official cultural
line of the Communist Party in the United States.1 Party organs such as
241
242 HELEN A. HARRISON
the Daily Worker, later joined by New Masses, carried articles directing
artists along the revolutionary path. In the pre-Stalin period from 1924
to 1928, the cartoonist Robert Minor, a high-Party official and Daily
Worker editor, reportedly enlisted "several hundred" artists to help out-
line a cultural program based on Proletcult guidelines. Minor told his
readers that art was more highly valued by the workers than by the so-
called cultured classes. He pointed out that movies, magazines, and other
popular art media, far from being "neutral," were in fact propagandizing
the capitalist system. Thus it was the duty of the revolutionary artist to
counteract this propaganda by using art as a "weapon in the class strug-
gle."2
However, the questions of what form this weapon should take, how
it should be employed, and at whom it should be directed were never
satisfactorily settled. The political cartoon, Minor's forte and the tradi-
tional medium of social protest, apparently was not fully satisfying to
many would-be revolutionary artists. Groups of artists and writers, meet-
ing informally at the offices of New Masses on New York's Union Square,
began to discuss ways to broaden the base of the Party's cultural program.
These discussions led, in October 1929, to the formation of the John Reed
Club. Anton Refregier, a founding member, recalls:
Once, the [New Masses] editor said, for Chrissake, I can't stand
you guys, get the hell out. It was the only one center where
artists, writers, poets used to gravitate. Finally, we got our-
selves a loft on 14th Street and opened up our own headquar-
ters. . . . The one group that was developing some attitude and
some position on the new social situation was the John Reed
Club.3
The club's first headquarters was on East Fourteenth Street, off Fifth
Avenue, but after a few months its rapid growth necessitated a move to
more spacious quarters at 65 West Fifteenth Street, in the New Masses
building. The club had its meeting room and gallery on the first floor and
ran an art school on the third, with the beleaguered staff of the magazine
sandwiched between on the second floor.
The impetus for the club's formation was actually a good deal more
formal than Refregier's recollections would lead one to believe. Named
for the American journalist and author of Ten Days That Shook the World,
an account of the Soviet Revolution of 1917, the club was a direct attempt
to implement the Proletcult program. In its preamble, it is stated that
the organization
. . . is devoted to the development of a cultural movement ded-
icated to advancing the interests of the working class. . . . to
the defense of the achievements of the Union of Socialist Soviet
John Reed Club Artists and the New Deal 243
Republics [and] the development of new working class writers

and artists, as well as alignment of all artists, writers and
intellectuals to the side of the revolutionary working class,
stimulating their participation in revolutionary activity.4
The club was a member of the Soviet-based International Union of

Revolutionary Writers and received its policy directives from the Stalin
regime.
In 1930 six John Reed Club delegates went to the Second World
Plenum of the International Union in Kharkov, the Ukraine, to partic-
ipate in the formulation of a program for a proletarian art movement in
the United States. In his thesis on the John Reed Club, Arthur Hughes
notes that although the artist delegates (William Gropper and Fred Ellis)
participated in the debate, "it was indicative of the method by which the
proletcult movement was developed in the United States that the program
for artists was worked out by an Artists Commission in the Soviet Union
rather than through internal debate within the Reed Club."5 Thus it was
clear from the outset that the club was Soviet-directed and subject to
Party discipline. As Hughes further points out,
Artists who were recruited to the movement during the

[1929-34] period were taking on no light commitment when
they joined the John Reed Club. It was an act that demanded
first taking on a sectarian politics and then an actual change
in the way the members conceived of themselves as artists and
in the type of art that they produced.6
The John Reed Club encouraged the production of several types of

visual art, aiming not only at readers of left-wing journals and
papers—preaching to the converted, so to speak—but also at the tradi-
tionally bourgeois audiences that frequented exhibitions of painting and
sculpture and at workers in whose clubhouses and meeting halls traveling
art shows could be mounted. Also, inspired by the highly acclaimed rev-
olutionary muralists of Mexico, they sought to develop mural art as a
revolutionary form.
EARLY DAYS
By 1932, when the John Reed Club moved to its own building at 430
Sixth Avenue at the corner of Fourteenth Street, the art school was
offering courses in drawing, painting, sculpture, mural painting, and
political cartooning. It also conducted a series of Wednesday evening
lectures, open to the public, at which staff members and outside speakers,
including artists Louis Lozowick and Robert Minor, art historian Meyer
Schapiro, planning theorist Lewis Mumford, critic Anita Brenner, Rus-
sian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, and Mexican muralists David Alfaro
Siqueiros and Diego Rivera were featured. Traveling exhibitions were
circulated to workers' clubs and some thirteen John Reed Club branches
around the country; a number were sent to the Soviet Union between
1931 and 1933 under the auspices of the Soviet Society for Cultural
Relations with Foreign Countries.
John Reed Club artists contributed collective works to the exhibitions
of the Society of Independent Artists in 1930, 1931, and 1932. At the
Society's Fourteenth Annual Exhibition, in 1930, the club exhibited a
Louis Lozowick, High Voltage—Cos Cob, 1930 oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches

(Photo: Hirschl and Adler Galleries, Inc., reproduced courtesy of the estate of the
artist). Lozowick, identified with the Precisionist celebration of urban and in-
dustrial America, showed strong Cubist influence in both his graphic and his
easel works.
cooperative mural—primarily the work of Gropper and Lozowick—entitled

An American Landscape, commemorating police brutality at a City Hall
demonstration. One of the largest works in the Society's exhibition in
1931 was a canvas entitled Washington Market, an enlarged cartoon
showing President Hoover driving a cart labeled "U.S.A." containing fish
representing the American public. This satire was the work of ten John
Reed Club artists, who expressed the intention to send it to Russia at
the close of the exhibition. Works by several other club artists were also
to be seen at the Independents that year: David Burliuk's triptych From
Breadlines to Meadows of Prosperity (showing Lenin behind a plow); Ben
Ovryn's militant Roar America, a depiction of demonstrating unem-
ployed; and Three (dis) Graces—reformer, politician, and apple-seller—by
Arthur Weindorf. At the 1932 annual show, the club exhibited another
cooperative mural, America Today, a pastiche of symbolic capitalist war-
mongers threatened by militant strikers.
John Reed Club artists were no less vitriolic toward the Roosevelt
Administration than they had been toward Hoover's. At the outset of the
New Deal, Daily Worker cartoons by club members Jacob Burck and
William Gropper portrayed "The Roosevelt Profit-sharing Program" as
a feast for big business and an insult to labor, and "The Roosevelt Ex-
press" as the vehicle of inflation and war. The introduction of the National
Recovery Administration (NRA) in June 1933 prompted New Masses and
Daily Worker cartoons characterizing the Blue Eagle as a fascist symbol.
Until the coming of the Popular Front in 1935, the official party line
held that all individuals or groups unwilling to express unreserved sup-
port for the Soviet Union and its policies were either fascists or practi-
tioners of that more insidious "concealed fascism which parades under
the mask of'socialism' "7—or "social fascism," as it was termed. The New
Deal, along with reform movements in general, fell into this latter cat-
egory. Yet, in spite of the Party's official stand in firm opposition to the
New Deal—and the anti-Roosevelt and anti-NRA cartoons notwithstand-
ing—John Reed Club artists were never firmly in agreement with this
policy.
As early as 1932 the Secretariat of the International Union of Rev-
olutionary Writers was complaining that New Masses artists showed
insufficient political awareness. "Very often," it stated, "in the drawings
published in the magazine [in 1931], we find revolutionary content sac-
rificed for esthetic innovations and experiments in form. . . . Witness the
fact that the artists are not yet strong enough to rise to direct militant
conclusions and show the only possible revolutionary escape from capi-
talism's crisis."8
Throughout the history of the John Reed Club, its members' exhibi-
tions were criticized in similar terms by commentators who felt that the
group lacked militant purpose and revolutionary direction. In his review
of the club's 1933 exhibition, "The Social Viewpoint in Art," John Kwait
of New Masses questioned the wisdom of inviting the participation of
"prominent painters who could submit only tame picturesque views of

cowboys, crapshooters and fat shoppers issuing from department stores."
Perceiving the show's title as "uncertain"—that is, not revolutionary—and
the inclusion of such "bourgeois" guests as Thomas Hart Benton and
Kenneth Hayes Miller as confusing in the light of John Reed Club spon-
sorship, Kwait concluded that he would have preferred to see "a small
show of twenty good, genuinely militant paintings than two hundred
mixed works of unequal quality and of all shades of social opinion."9
In his review of the club's exhibition "Revolutionary Front—1934"
(the title of which must have pleased Kwait), the printmaker Jacob Kai-
nen felt that the emphasis was
. . . . on the negative rather than the positive aspects of the

working class outlook. . . . The canvases seem sad, drab and
crushed. Such an outlook shows only half the situation and as
such, leads to only half the truth. The heroic effort of the pro-
letariat in the struggle must make itself felt in an exhibition
of this nature, if the artist's work is to be within hailing dis-
tance of the class-struggle front.10
Commenting on the following winter's exhibition in much the same

vein, Margaret Duroc lamented that, although the sincerity of the John
Reed Club artists was not in doubt,
. . . . the show cannot possibly be called a revolutionary

show. . . . In order to succeed, the John Reed Club artists will
have to realize for whom they are painting and what they wish
to achieve. At present they only seem to indicate that they are
allied with the working class. They exhibit their work as tokens
of sympathy. But they should become leaders in the fight."
Far from being under strict Party control, John Reed Club artists
insisted on experimenting with such aberrant styles as Cubism, Surre-
alism, Expressionism, and "High Renaissance," which Duroc considered
"inappropriate" and manifestations of "bourgeois formalism." Contrary
to the observations of orthodox critics that club artists were more con-
cerned with sloganeering than art, critics on the left felt the opposite to
be true.
THE NEW DEAL FOR ARTISTS
The generally contrary and free-thinking nature of Reed Club artists

is illustrated by their acceptance of the New Deal and its programs, well
in advance of the Party's about-face of the Popular Front era.12 Many
artists found it easy to accept the New Deal as a "peaceful revolution"

that promised to redistribute national wealth and power without the
violent overthrow of the social order seen as essential and inevitable by
Soviet theoreticians. It seemed that capitalism was about to die a natural
death and that, far from being a "social fascist" dictator, Roosevelt was
a humanitarian savior of the beleaguered working class. Many artists
eagerly hitched their wagons to this rising star.
In the late summer of 1933 a group of John Reed Club artists began
to discuss the prospects for federally funded work-relief projects. The
Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) had just been created,
and the group, hoping to cash in on the agency's policy of employing the
needy rather than merely dispensing home relief, issued a manifesto
calling for state-sponsored art projects. "The State," they declared, "can
eliminate once and for all the unfortunate dependence of American artists
upon the caprice of private patronage."'3 Many, if not all, of the approx-
imately twenty-five artists who made up the early membership of the
Unemployed Artists Group, as they called themselves, were members of
the John Reed Club.
When federal patronage, in the form of the Public Works of Art Project
(PWAP), was initiated in December 1933, John Reed Club artists re-
sponded enthusiastically. Painters and sculptors clamored for employ-
ment on the basis of need, only tofindthat the New York regional director
of the project was hiring on the basis of proved artistic competence and
professional standing. Although this clash of attitudes prompted a storm
of protests from the John Reed Club and others, it was not the PWAP
itself that was being demonstrated against, but rather the autocratic
attitude of an individual administrator. Many artists expressed unre-
served support for the PWAP and sought to use it as a vehicle for the
exhibition of support for the broader policies of the New Deal.
John Reed Club artist Paul Meltsner wrote directly to the president
in December 1933, pleading for "the opportunity to make a mural [show-
ing] the country being brought out of a chaotic condition into industrial
activity under your leadership."14 Meltsner signed himself "Reverently
Yours." The following month he was hired on the PWAP and began work
on sketches for a mural entitled From Chaos to Recovery Under Roosevelt,
conceived as a 40-foot panorama showing the Wall Street crash and its
aftermath of economic and social disaster transformed by the leadership
of Roosevelt into recovery, represented by steaming trains, busy docks,
and a bustling construction industry.
Another Reed Club artist, Maxwell Starr, portrayed the new admin-
istration in much the same light. His mural sketch New Deal created
while Starr was on the PWAP, was described in the following terms in
the New York Post:.
Factories up in one corner of the canvas are going full blast,

in Starr's creation. Husky workers heave happily at a huge
Paul R. Meltsner, From Chaos to Recovery Under Roosevelt, 1933-34, medium

and size unknown (Photo: The Listener, August 1, 1934, p. 175). At this time,
Meltsner's easel work included such proletarian subjects as strikers, derelicts,
and a chain gang.
cogwheel, symbolizing the NRA, while New York's finest [the

police] are shown chasing gangsters and racketeers clean out
of the picture.
In the foreground sits the Forgotten Man and his wife, an
attractive brunette, who holds their young baby in her arms.
The Forgotten Family is tackling a bountiful meal spread out
on the Rooseveltian Table of Plenty. . . .
An air of serenity permeates the whole scene, and according
to artist Starr: It's all due to the NRA, the AAA, the FERA,
etc.15
Starr and Meltsner were only two of the multitude of artists of known
and presumed radical sympathies to express either direct approval of, or
tacit support for, the New Deal and the PWAP. The New York Herald
Tribune was scandalized to learn that the allegedly Communist cartoonist
William Gropper, who had produced anti-New Deal satires as a staff
artist for the Daily Worker, was holding down a PWAP job.16 John Reed
Club members in Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles
as well as New York gratefully sought PWAP employment and expressed
themselves in favor of continued and expanded federal work-relief long
before the Party advocated support for New Deal policies and programs.
The formal inauguration of the Popular Front, at the Seventh World

Congress of the Communist International in August 1935, was exactly
coincident with the initiation of the WPA's Federal Art Project. Just as
the U.S. government was taking major responsibility for the relief of both
blue- and white-collar unemployment through a program designed spe-
cifically to utilize the existing skills of the unemployed, the Soviet admin-
istration was taking a 180-degree turn in its foreign policy and extending
support to any and all powers that would uphold the Soviet Union's stand
against the spread of fascism.
THE POPULAR FRONT ERA
The Popular Front Against War and Fascism, as its title implies, had
far broader appeal than the narrow political orthodoxy previously de-
manded of Party members and expected of fellow travelers. The prior
requirement of support for the Soviet regime, with its ring of divided
loyalty, was eliminated in favor of a policy stating that "Communism is
20th Century Americanism." This shift in focus required, among other
things, a reorganization of the Party's cultural program to fit in with the
more loosely structured, nationalistic guidelines. Under such a policy, it
was easy for liberal intellectuals and artists to accept both the Party and
the New Deal.
In order for liberal sympathizers to be accepted as fellow-traveler
members by the John Reed Club, it had been necessary for them to ratify
a six-point policy directive issued at Kharkov and endorsed by the club's
National Convention in Chicago (May 1932). The directive made specific
and narrow demands that required an attitude of total revolutionary
commitment and thus theoretically excluded potential but not yet secure
converts. Although the club had pursued—and had been criticized for—a
"united front" artistic policy for some time (as exemplified by the "Social
Viewpoint" exhibition), its perimeters were, in theory at least, too lim-
iting to allow it to function successfully within the policies of the Popular
Front.
Accordingly, the John Reed Club was officially disbanded in the winter
of 1935. The school of art had moved to more modern quarters at 131
West Fourteenth Street by November of that year, and classes in etching,
silkscreen printing, and the chemistry of artists' media had been added
to the curriculum. There were also a library and an exhibition gallery
on the premises. The school was advertised in January 1936; but in
February it was announced that the school had been disbanded at the
end of the previous month. It was noted that a group of artists were
planning to organize an "independent" school that would take over the
quarters and equipment of the Reed Club. In the same month, the opening
19 3 4
19 3 5
Cover of the John Reed Club School
I of Art brochure for the term October
THE - J O H N • REED • CLUB 1, 1934—June 2, 1935 (Photo: Morris
OF Studio). The school had been in exis-
SCHOOL- tence for four years and was just be-

ginning to offer a full-time schedule
c L A s S E S AR
of day and evening classes. Instruc-
tors included Nicolai Cikovsky, An-
ton Refregier, Louis Lozowick, Raphael
Soyer, and Ben Shahn.
D R A W 1N G
;
P A 1 N T 1N G
S C UL P T U RE
• • • •
F 0 U R T H RT Y
IX TH AVE N UE
NEW-YORK . N•Y
of the American Artists School at 131 West Fourteenth Street was an-
nounced.17
In September 1936, in a review of a faculty exhibition of the American
Artists School, the New York Post commented that the show gave evi-
dence of "the ferment of ideas in that growing institution. . . . Despite
the fan-like spread of well-defined personal attitudes, [the faculty] find
their common center in the school's platform of art teaching based on
esthetic interests identified with progressive social trends."18
The following year, Philip Evergood's Art Front article on the school
stressed the need for a socially conscious art "devoted to understanding
America," but pointed out that only "a section" of the curriculum con-
sisted of the study of art from a social point of view. He concluded that
such avant-garde figures as Alfred Stieglitz and Julien Levy should sup-
port "the building of an art school that will give a student a chance to
study the best of every form of art from the abstract to expressionism,
to surrealism, to American genre, to experiments in painting revolving
around American thought and content."19 With an expanded staff, lib-
eralized curriculum, and the Party's blessing, the American Artists
School was the John Reed Club with a red-white-and-blue coat of paint.
Just as the Popular Front was broadening opportunities for artists to
participate in left-wing political activities in the period from 1935 to the
war, so the Federal Art Project broadened work-relief prospects and gave
artists the chance to express their social consciousness by instigating
programs intended to produce lasting benefits to the community. In ad-
dition, the Treasury Department offered prestigious commissions for the
decoration of new and existing federal buildings. Although many artists
complained that the competitions for these commissions were time-con-
suming and often a waste of energy, and left-wing artists frequently
demanded that entrants be paid for the sketches they submitted, thou-
sands of them entered the competitions, many receiving handsome
awards. Thus artists who had formerly been closely aligned with a narrow
political philosophy were more prone than ever to adopt the New Deal
as a respected symbol of opportunity for professional advancement and
the expected vehicle of social and economic reform.
THE NEW DEAL RECORDED
William Gropper, whose radical credentials were impeccable, was em-

ployed on Treasury Department art projects from 1935. After completing
two post office murals entirely devoid of political content, Gropper was
awarded a commission for a mural in the building of the Department of
the Interior in Washington, D.C. Gropper chose the subject of Recla-
mation, referring to the construction of Boulder and Grand Coulee dams
then being undertaken by the Bureau of Reclamation. He traveled to
Washington State and Nevada in the summer of 1937 to make sketches
from life, and his completed mural was installed in February 1939. In
choosing dam construction as his subject and by showing his groups of
laborers to be racially integrated, Gropper was clearly expressing his left-
wing sympathies and his solidarity with the proletariat; but he was also
acknowledging his support for New Deal policies of land reclamation and
rural electrification. Other John Reed Club artists went even farther in
their endorsement of New Deal programs.
Bernarda Bryson, formerly active in the Communist-sponsored Un-
employed Councils and a prime mover in the formation of the John Reed
Club's Unemployed Artists Group, was a joint winner of a competition
for murals in the Bronx Central Post Office in April of 1938. (Bryson's
William Gropper, Reclamation (detail), 1938-39, mural (oil on canvas), Depart-

ment of the Interior, Washington, D.C. (Photo: National Archives). Gropper's
other Treasury Section commission, for the Northwestern Station of the Detroit
Post Office, was in much the same vein, showing the assembly line of an auto-
mobile plant and treating it honestly but uncritically.
Bernarda Bryson, sketch for one of thirteen panels, Bronx Central Post Office,
New York, 1938, medium and size unknown (Photo: National Archives). Bryson's
other sketches include depictions of New Deal activities: the work of the WPA,
TVA, and AAA. The finished murals, Resources of America, are dominated by
Shahn's designs, which also celebrate reconstruction efforts, though in a more
generalized way.
co-winner was Ben Shahn, her husband and a former instructor in mural
painting at the John Reed Club art school.)
Bryson's winning sketches show specific activities of the New Deal
recovery effort, including WPA workers on the job and the construction
of public housing. In a triptych at the end of the post office lobby, Roo-
sevelt, flanked by archetypal American workers, is shown addressing
Congress. The text of his speech, although visible in the sketch, is not
legible; but it may be presumed that he is recommending the passage of
his proposals for social reform and economic stimulus measures. Although
the final murals reflect little of Bryson's original conception, such con-
crete references to the administration and its programs, intended for
execution in an important public building, clearly indicate Bryson's sup-
port for the New Deal.
Ben Shahn, like his wife, had been an active participant in the radical
activities of the John Reed Club. A former assistant to Mexican muralist

Diego Rivera, Shahn was an early supporter of New Deal policies. In
September 1935 he and Bryson joined the Special Skills Division of the
Resettlement Administration, becoming part of the small corps of artists
and craftsmen involved in the establishment of subsistence homesteads.
Shahn became attached to the work at Hightstown, New Jersey, where
the R.A. was constructing a homestead for garment workers from the
ghettos of New York and Philadelphia. The artist was deeply sympathetic
to the concept of the rural homestead, where small-scale agriculture and
industry were to form the basis of a planned economy.
Shahn, himself a Russian-Jewish immigrant, felt a strong affinity for
the aims of the homestead project. He proposed a mural decoration for
Ben Shahn, fresco in Community Center, Jersey Homesteads (Roosevelt), New

Jersey (detail), 1938 (Photo: National Archives). Roosevelt's portrait above the
drawing board hangs amid scenes of worker education and the rewards of co-
operative labor. Planners seated at the layout of Jersey Homesteads include
Senator Robert F. Wagner and labor leader David Dubinsky.
the town's community center that would tell the story of the garment
workers from immigration to the establishment of their planned com-
munity.
Although the settlement had actually been planned in the early 1930s
by a cooperative group of garment workers, it was the New Deal that
enabled its realization—which Shahn acknowledged in his fresco. In ad-
dition to depicting the struggles of the workers to unionize and establish
reasonable working conditions, the mural shows New Deal legislators
and planners inspecting the blueprint of Jersey Homesteads beneath a
portrait of "A Gallant Leader: Franklin D. Roosevelt." Shahn could not
have given a more direct endorsement to the New Deal.
In later years Shahn became, if anything, more sympathetic to the
social programs of the administration. In October 1940 he won a com-
petition for decorations in the new Social Security Building in Washing-
ton. In his letter of acceptance, Shahn stated that he was unable to
express fully his joy at the award. He wrote:
It seems to me that in all my work for the past ten years I have
been probing into the material which is the background and
substance of Social Security. The decoration of this building
calls forth research—if you can call it that—which I have been
doing consciously and unconsciously throughout my life, all of
it having to do with the problem of human insecurity.20
The artist saw the establishment of the Social Security Administra-

tion as the realization of the most humanitarian ideals of collective re-
sponsibility. Indeed, as his wife acknowledged in her memorial biography,
Shahn was dedicated to the New Deal and its objectives.
Several former John Reed Club artists joined in celebrating the New
Deal in general and the achievements of the WPA in particular in the
WPA Building at the 1939-40 New York World's Fair. Six muralists
decorated the building, and of those, four are known to have had some
connection with the Reed Club.
Philip Guston, whose mural Maintaining America's Skills embellished
the building's entrance, was a member of the club's Los Angeles branch
in the early 1930s. In 1932 he participated in an ill-fated John Reed Club
exhibition—destroyed by the Los Angeles police anti-Red squad—on the
subject of the persecution of blacks. Guston was employed as a muralist
on the Los Angeles PWAP, then worked in Mexico in 1934—35, after
which he joined the New York Federal Art Project. He went on to paint
a WPA mural celebrating the benefits of public housing and three panels
in the Social Security Building for the Treasury Department in addition
to his World's Fair decoration.
Seymour Fogel and Lou Ross, whose murals, in the WPA Building's
foyer and exhibition hall respectively, showed the community service and
employment benefits of WPA projects, had both exhibited with the John
Reed Club in New York, and Ross had taught mural painting in the art
school. Anton Refregier was one of the club's founders and a long-standing
member of the art school staff. His eight mural panels in the theater
lobby of the building lauded the Cultural Activities of the WPA and were,
in his words, a celebration of the fact that "we had the opportunity under
the government program to externalize our work. It was for the people."21
Many more former John Reed Club artists, including Hugo Gellert, Max
Spivak, Joe Jones, Edward Laning, Stuyvesant Van Veen, Louis Lozo-
wick, Walter Quirt, and Phil Reisman, worked on one or more of the
federal patronage projects, and further examples of New Deal subjects
in work done by such artists for the projects are undoubtedly awaiting
rediscovery.
In August 1938 several former John Reed Club artists and members
of the faculty of the American Artists School participated in an exhibition
entitled "1938" at the ACA Gallery in New York. Each artist contributed
a mural sketch with some aspect of the New Deal as subject matter. All
the canvases were favorable in content, from a work in support of the
antilynching bill (which, incidentally, did not pass in Congress) to one
dealing with the relief of unemployment. In the foreword to the catalog,
it was stated:
"1938" is an art exhibition. It is, however, no coincidence that
all the works have social implications. Artists have become
aware of the sharpening conflict between reaction and prog-
ress; they have definitely aligned themselves with the forces
grouped around the New Deal, which they are defending be-
cause they realize that its enemies are the enemies of democ-
racy and culture.22
When Congress cut the budget of the WPA in the summer of 1939
and the future of the cultural projects was threatened, Refregier, Gellert,
Gropper, and other former John Reed Club artists joined in producing a
portfolio of twelve lithographs defending the WPA and protesting the
cuts in the congressional appropriations. By this time artists—radical
and otherwise—needed no convincing that the New Deal was, for them,
a true revolution. That it appeared too revolutionary to its Congressional
opponents was also plain. Charges that the theater and writers' projects
were hotbeds for Communist propagandists allied with the New Deal led
to an investigation of the WPA by the newly formed House Committee
on Un-American Activities, beginning in August 1938. Although the Art
Project was not directly charged and its director was never called to
testify—and in fact many of the original charges against the theater and
writers' projects were eventually dismissed or, refuted—guilt by impli-
cation gave the anti-New Dealers in Congress the ammunition they
needed to reduce drastically federal responsibility for the WPA.
Hugo Gellert, Representative Woodrum's Committee "Investigating" WPA, 1939,

lithograph, 11 x 8V2 inches, published by the American Artists Congress (Photo
National Archives).
THREATS AND PROMISES

At the same time, WPA artists had been looking to the Congress to
create a Bureau of Fine Arts to assume permanent responsibility for the
cultural projects, but this was not to be. It was clear to congressional
critics that artists were unlikely to be fully absorbed into the economy
at the return of prosperity, as they had never been a functioning part of
it before the crash. This meant that a Bureau of Fine Arts modeled on
the WPA projects would turn into a permanent work-relief program,
dominated by the now influential artists' trade unions. Opposed to both
union influence and permanent federal responsibility for patronage on
a vast scale, conservatives killed the bill in the House.
The administration's congressional supporters argued that the inves-
tigation of the cultural projects (and especially the allegations of Com-
munist influence) was a ploy by the opposition coalition to discredit the
New Deal. Democratic Congressman Clarence Cannon charged that the
coalition "wanted to leave the public impressed with communist influence
and the notion that 'the Roosevelt administration was responsible for it
and must answer in the 1940 election.' " Cannon pointed out that no law
or WPA regulation prohibited government employees from joining any
political party or organization they chose. Congress's answer was to pass
a bill specifically excluding Communists from WPA employment and
instituting a "loyalty oath."23 The forces defined by the artists in 1938
as "the enemies of democracy and culture" were mobilized and on the
march.
Left-wing artists, whose numbers had greatly increased since the
hard-line John Reed Club days, were now in an unenviable position. The
ranks of the fellow travelers and liberal sympathizers were decimated by
the announcement of the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact in June 1939
and the Soviet Union's subsequent invasion of Finland in November.
Artists who had supported the Popular Front primarily because of its
militantly antifascist stance felt betrayed. Thus it was particularly gall-
ing for many subsequently to be asked by the WPA, "Are you now, or
have you ever been . . . ?"
The loyalty oath was, of course, only window dressing. It served notice
to Roosevelt that the opposition was wise to his "communistic" policies
and intended to make the public equally aware. The Popular Front, un-
fortunately, did everything to support the notion that the New Deal was
in line with the Communist program, which under the Popular Front no
longer overtly advocated "violent overthrow" but had ostensibly adopted
a pragmatic approach of working from within for immediate gains.
It is arguable that the shift in Communist policy was eased by a
leftward turn in the character of the New Deal. After the Supreme Court
struck down the NRA in May 1935—thus eliminating a cornerstone of
the New Deal and an agency criticized by the Communists as a "fascist"
"slave program"—historian Irving Howe theorizes:
Roosevelt now had no alternative but to seek new sources of

popular strength. The result was a leftward turn which won
the allegiance of the unions and liberals and brought with it
the most impressive legislation of the Roosevelt years: the
Wagner Act, Social Security, TVA, etc. At this point, conse-
quently, the Communists began to support the new New Deal.24
It must be noted, however, that the TVA was in fact created during
the First Hundred Days in May 1933, and that much of the progressive
legislation of 1935—including Social Security and the Wagner Act—had
been waiting in the wings for some time. It would have been possible for
the Communists to have supported the New Deal by asserting that a
conservative Congress had been blocking Roosevelt's radical reform pro-
posals for more than a year.
A more likely explanation for the policy change is the internal Soviet
decision to limit militant revolutionary activity on an international scale
and concentrate on "socialism in one country," the plan under which
Stalin avoided economic collapse and consolidated power. However, the
fact that Roosevelt's so-called Second New Deal of 1935 was considered
radical by contemporary commentators no doubt made it easier for
American Communists to negotiate their about-face.
Through the late 1930s, Communist support for the New Deal con-
tinued to grow. In 1938 the Daily Worker ran a four-part series of highly
favorable articles on the WPA cultural projects and federal patronage in
general, in which support was expressed for legislative efforts to make
the projects permanent. By 1939 the Popular Front had wholeheartedly
espoused the Democratic Party. In Howe's words:
Roosevelt's picture now appeared regularly on the front page

of the Daily Worker, which sometimes went so far as to imply
that he was as great a man as [Party leader Earl] Browder. In
early 1939 the CP began booming the President for a third
term: he is a leader, wrote the generous Browder, who stands
"on the same plane as Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln."25
Although such Communist support was an embarrassment to the New

Deal, it was of great psychological value to the artists. To them, it meant
official affirmation of the revolutionary characteristics they had long
perceived in the New Deal and made it possible for them to feel both
radical and secure. It takes little imagination to conjure up the unique-
ness of the situation: Artists, with the full approval and financial backing
of the federal government, were enabled to pursue their careers outside
the traditional capitalist mechanisms of the commercial gallery-private
collector system. They were encouraged to produce work that reflected
broad community concerns and dealt with contemporary subject matter,
while being allowed to work in any style they chose; and they were
Jacob Burck, The Builder, ca.

1933-34, from the Daily Worker,
reproduced in Hunger and Revolt:
Cartoons by Burck (New York:
Daily Worker, 1934, 1935), p. 91
(Photo: Morris Studio). In Hunger
and Revolt Earl Browder states,
"This collection of Burck's cartoons
dealing with the New Deal and the
N.R.A. is a historical document. It
contains the essence of the Com-
munist Party analysis of Roose-
velt's policies in the form of a
pictorial argument" (p. 103).
regarded in the same classification with other workers performing so-

cially valuable tasks. The program of the WPA corresponded closely, in
theory at least, to the dictum of Lenin on the effect on artists of the Soviet
revolution:
In a society based on private property the artist produces his
goods for the market; he needs purchasers. Our Revolution has
removed the pressure of this very prosaic state of affairs from
artists. It has made the Soviet State their patron and customer.
Every artist, and everyone who regards himself as such, claims
as his proper right the liberty to work freely according to his
ideal, whether it is any good or not. There you have the fer-
ment, the experiment, the chaos.26
Although it is at this point that Soviet and U.S. government art

policies diverge, it is interesting to note how closely Lenin's view of the
artist's position and rights under a socialist state corresponds to the
program of the Federal Art Project. The bypassing of the commercial art
market, employment on the basis of need rather than talent, and the
aesthetic freedom which leads to experimentation and innovation, are all
hallmarks of federal work-relief for artists. The fact that Lenin's ideals
were later perverted by and subsumed beneath the rising tide of Stalinism
was only slowly and incompletely perceived by U.S. artists. It was not
until 1939 that they began to realize how fully Stalin had taken control,
imposing the narrow line of Socialist Realism as the one permissible form
in art and literature, and driving dissident elements out or underground.
SERVING THE PARTY AS ARTISTS
In the United States, however, Stalinist elements were never able to

gain the upper hand in aesthetic matters, although they did control the
executive committee of the Artists Union, the group representing workers
on the Federal Art Project, which had grown out of the Unemployed
Artists Group. They also exerted a covert influence over the American
Artists Congress Against War and Fascism, a prestigious Popular Front
cultural organization to which many Art Project artists belonged. But
even in the early days of the John Reed Club, when serious efforts were
being made to establish a revolutionary proletarian aesthetic under Sta-
linist direction, members were apt to be disrespectful of Party policies.
The Diego Rivera controversy is a case in point.
The Mexican artist was expelled from the Communist Party in 1929
for a variety of "leftist deviations," including his support of the exiled
Trotsky. Thereafter, Rivera was a victim of the vicious character assas-
sination to which the Party regularly subjected dissidents, and his work
was condemned as decadent and bourgeois. When he came to the United
States to paint murals for the Fords and Rockefellers in 1932-34, he was
greeted coolly by many Party artists. But this did not prevent members
of the John Reed Club from inviting him to address the group, even
though the meeting provoked heated arguments and much shouting from
the floor. The club refused to send a speaker to the rally in support of
Rivera when his partially completed fresco in Rockefeller Center was
censored because it contained a portrait of Lenin; yet Hugo Gellert and
several other John Reed Club artists were primarily responsible for or-
ganizing the rally!27 Club artists Ben Shahn, Hideo Noda, Seymour Fogel,
and Edward Laning were among Rivera's assistants in New York, yet
they were neither publicly censured nor expelled.
Right through the Popular Front period, professional advancement
and aesthetic considerations often took precedence over political ques-
tions in the minds of artists. The fact that the Party strongly supported
both the New Deal in general and the arts projects in particular made
artist identification with the Party and its aims all the easier; but it did
not ease the conflict between professional and political life. It sometimes
came down to a choice between art and the Party. Gerald Monroe, in his
pioneering study of the Artists Union, describes a meeting of the union's

Communist fraction at which Party officials urged artists to devote more
time to organizational and promotional work. "Finally, one of the artists
rose and respectfully pointed out that they needed more time for their
own work, that the Party should not expect them to sacrifice their creative
life. Someone else quietly inquired if it was not possible for artists to
serve the Party as artists."28 When the Party district chairman stated
that he had given up a promising career as a violinist to devote all his
energy to the cause, it was clear he was not in sympathy with the artists.
According to Monroe's informants, the Party lost members that night.
Max Spivak, one-time Party member and an Artists Union executive,
recalls that union president Chet La More (also in the party) was forced
to give up his organizational work because it left him no time for art.
"He was a real rabble-rouser," Spivak remembers. "He could whip people
up into a passion. But he had to choose—art or politics. He chose art."29
Others, like Stuart Davis and Paul Block, faced a similar dilemma. Davis
chose art; Block chose Communism and was killed fighting for Loyalist
Spain in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
Spivak also points out the fact that, although Communism offered an
energetic and seemingly viable alternative to the precarious existence
artists had known under capitalism, the New Deal offered much the same
benefits without a violent revolution. He maintains that the Federal Art
Project era was
. . . . one of those periods where, without a police state, without

the viciousness that goes with a class struggle, we managed
to survive and do the work we did. . . . We didn't corrupt our
lives for a slogan. . . . Even though you might be a CP artist
and try to paint propaganda, you didn't bring it onto the Proj-
ect. . . . Most of the artists were poor. They had to make their
way, so this income was a godsend. It was a windfall for them,
so they couldn't kick it in the face.30
In hindsight, however, it can be seen that the New Deal afforded

artists only a short-term solution to their chronic problems of unem-
ployment and dependence on a fickle market for their wares. Although
one can only speculate on how artists would have fared under an Amer-
ican version of the Soviet state, they were, in the 1930s, sufficiently
optimistic to believe that the success of the Federal Art Project would
prompt the federal government to accept permanent responsibility for
their maintenance, much as the Soviet government had undertaken the
support of Russian artists. That they neither realized the extent of
Congressional hostility to both the New Deal and the cultural projects
nor appreciated the true position of the artist in the Soviet Union is now
apparent.
A considerable number of the Communist and fellow-traveler artists
of the 1930s were more idealistic than politically sophisticated. They

joined the Party, or took part in its activities, for the genuine rather than
theoretical "comradeship" it offered. For the first time, it appeared that
artists as a group might have some voice in the determination of their
social, political, and economic position. And, although they were pri-
marily concerned with tangible gains, such as the expansion and main-
tenance of the Federal Art Project, they were not unaware that emergency
relief measures were by nature temporary and subject to Congressional
scrutiny. Still, I think it was difficult for them to conceive of the project's
coming to an end.
From the outset, artists demonstrated militantly in favor of extended
Art Project employment and vigorously supported the establishment of
the permanent Bureau of Fine Arts. Yet in doing so they were acting
contrary to both New Deal policy and the mood of the nation as a whole.
Both the Administration and the country were anxious for the WPA to
end, for that would mean that the private sector had recovered sufficiently
to make work-relief unnecessary. The initials "WPA" carried with them
the taint of Depression, poverty, and wasteful "boondoggling," as well as
the implication of Communist subversion.
It must be pointed out that by no means all Art Project artists were
either Communists or fellow travelers. The Artists Union, the linchpin
of rank-and-file radicalism after the demise of the John Reed Club, was
estimated by Monroe to have supported some 500 registered Party mem-
bers in the Popular Front years. It may be calculated that during the
1936—39 period, union membership averaged around 1,200 out of a pos-
sible 1,800 on the Art Project. Of the 500, or less than half, of the union
membership who were registered Communists, many were inactive or at
best mere tacit supporters of Party policy. The remaining 700 union
members, while they may have been sympathetic to the aims of the Party
and might be supportive of executive board directives, were primarily
concerned with their work as artists. As painter Francis Avery remarked,
"Sometimes we just got sick and tired of all that political business. A lot
of people I knew just wanted to go home and paint. They didn't understand
what all the fuss was about."31 The Party's liberal attitude toward the
errant artists is summed up by Monroe:
Perhaps inspired, at least in part, by the spirit of comradeship

in the [Union] leadership, many members were drawn to the
Party only to drift away when the demands of membership
proved too rigid for them. As long as the former member did
not become actively anti-CP, he could still function as an active
member of the leadership and might even be invited to fraction
meetings.32
Monroe concludes that artists were just too independent to accept

rigid Party control. Spivak concurs. "The Party was wary about trying
to influence these people," he maintains, "because [it] didn't know how

to deal with them."
COMRADESHIP AND COMMUNITY
Of course, control and influence are two different things. The atmos-
phere or mood engendered by both the New Deal and the Popular Front
was highly conducive to artistic activity. In his report on federal patron-
age, Francis O'Connor cites Chet La More's assessment of the effect this
atmosphere had on artists:
The sense of community dominated the period 1936 to 1939 in

New York. It is still recalled with wonder among those who
shared it. It is probably unique and can never happen again.
The interesting thing is that all the usual contentions were
present: abstractionists vs. social realists, older vs. younger,
etc. but these differences were submerged in a situation which
was virtually non-competitive in all its basic aspects . . . . Com-
petition in art is inimical to it—is poison to artists as a group.33
This sense of community was affirmed by three-quarters of the re-

spondents in O'Connor's survey. Although it certainly had its beginnings
in the John Reed Club days, it was fostered and reinforced under the
Federal Art Project, where it proved to be a valuable psychological factor
in the face of economic hardship, bureaucratic red tape, and layoffs. The
esprit de corps did not, however, lead to practical gains for artists in the
short term—such as increased Art Project employment or the permanent
reduction of the relief quota—nor to lasting programs for federal patron-
age after the demise of the New Deal. Its one far-reaching contribution
was in surviving the war years and into the postwar decade, when it
helped create the atmosphere in which Abstract Expressionism devel-
oped.
The 1940s, like the 1930s, had their community and their club; but
unlike the group that had met under John Reed's banner to formulate
"art as a social force," the members of the Eighth Street Art Club returned
to the "art for art's sake" approach. On the other hand, there were those
who, like Gropper, Shahn, and Refregier, never repudiated "social" art,
but whose work became more expressionistic and showed the influence
of the formal radicalism of the action painters. To the postwar modernists,
however, the socially conscious activism of Depression days seemed hope-
lessly passe, if not downright dangerous in the climate of the cold war.
Perhaps the fact that vanguard artists repudiated revolutionary expres-
sion and turned inward to their own psyches for inspiration illustrates
Anton Refregier (wearing hat) and assistants at work on mural panels for the theater lobby of
the WPA Building at the New York World's Fair, 1939 (Photo: WPA, collection of the author).
The cycle Cultural Activities of the WPA consisted of eight panels, of which three can be identified
here—left to right: Community Center, Historical Records Survey, Index of American Design.
their sensitivity to political stimuli even when that sensitivity is not

overtly reflected in their work.
AFTERWORD
Assertions of artistic independence are often made in the context of

a supporting organization or faction. Sometimes a group so rife with
dissension that it can hardly be perceived as an entity can, by its mere
existence, lend credence and legitimacy to the actions of its individual
members. In spite of unclear goals and an uncertain future, the John
Reed Club sought to provide both a framework and a program for the
ideological security and aesthetic guidance of its members; yet, in the
last analysis, its most important function was neither ideological, orga-
nizational, nor aesthetic. Like the New Deal, the club gave its members
hope and support in a time of unprecedented social upheaval.
In championing the New Deal in spite of official Communist opposi-
tion, John Reed Club artists were surprisingly unified and pragmatic.
Through the club, each artist's personal and subjective commendation
achieved a sanctioned status. By the time the Party came around to the
artists' way of thinking, the Federal Art Project was evidently vindicating
their faith in the New Deal. Paradoxically, the stronger Party support
grew, the weaker became the New Deal's revolutionary arts-patronage
programs.
It is indeed possible that the artists' militancy, born in the John Reed
Club and nurtured in the Aritsts Union, worked against rather than for
them. More than demonstrating approbation of government programs,
the vociferous marchers and the demonstrations of solidarity were suf-
ficiently alarming to conservatives and reformers alike to militate
against the extension of patronage. Revolution, however peaceful, was
not after all part of the New Deal master plan.
NOTES
1. See C. Vaughan James, Soviet Socialist Realism: Origins and Theory (New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1973), pp. 49-51, 112-15, for a discussion of Proletcult
policy and Lenin's criticism, which led to the movement's dissolution by the early
1930s.
2. Robert Minor, "Art Is a Weapon in the Class Struggle," Daily Worker,
September 22, 1925, p. 5.
3. Taped interview with Anton Refregier, January 2, 1975. He recalls that
founding artist members were Hugo Gellert, William Gropper, Fred Ellis, Louis
Lozowick, Joseph Pass, and himself. I am grateful to Mr. Refregier for his com-
ments and advice on this paper.
4. Reprinted in full in Leftward 1 (Boston, November 1932), 1.
5. Arthur Hughes, "Proletarian Art and the John Reed Club Artists, 1928-35,"
unpublished M.A. thesis, Hunter College, 1970, p. 32.
6. Ibid., p. 59.
7. "The Charkov [sic] Conference of Revolutionary Writers," New Masses,
February 1931, p. 6.
8. "Resolution on the work of New Masses for 1931 as formulated by the
Secretariat of the IURW relating to the fulfillment of the decisions of the Kharkov
Conference," New Masses, September 1932, p. 21..
9. John Kwait, "John Reed Club Art Exhibition," New Masses, February 1933,
p. 23.
10. Jacob Kainen, "Revolutionary Art at the John Reed Club," Art Front,
January 1935, p. 6.
11. Margaret Duroc, "Critique From the Left," Art Front, January 1936, pp.
7-8.
12. While the Daily Worker was calling for a "united front" against capitalism
and inviting the Socialist party and the A.F. of L. to join (May Day Supplement,
May 1, 1933, p. 7), the Party's official attitude was that Roosevelt was "carrying
out more thoroughly and brutally than even Hoover the capitalist attack against
the living standards of the masses." The Party held this position for more than
two years after the initiation of the New Deal. See Irving Howe and Lewis Coser,
The American Communist Party: A Critical History 1919-1957 (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1957), pp. 232-33.
13. From the manifesto of the Artists Group of the Emergency Work Bureau
(forerunner of the Artists Union), quoted in Gerald Monroe, "The Artists Union
of New York," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York Univ., 1971, p. 39.
14. Paul Meltsner to FDR, December 17, 1933, National Archives Record
Group 121, Entry 108, Box 2, folder M.
15. "Another Round in Art Duel over New Deal Goes to F.D.R.," New York
Post September 1, 1934, clipping in National Archives Record Group 121, Entry
108, Box 3, folder S.
16. " 'Daily Worker' Cartoonist Has CWA Art Job," New York Herald Tribune,
March 16, 1934, clipping in National Archives Record Group 121, Entry 111, Box
2, folder: Region 2.
17. Advertisements appeared in Art Front, the magazine of the Artists Union.
18. "The Critic Takes a Glance Around the Galleries," New York Post, Sep-
tember 26, 1936, Cronbach papers, Archives of American Art, microfilm roll
D260, frame 1218.
19. Philip Evergood, "Building a New Art School," Art Front, April-May 1937,
p. 21.
20. Ben Shahn to Edward Bruce, November 7,1940, National Archives Record
Group 121, Entry 133, Box 416, folder: Social Security Bldg.—re: Ben Shahn.
21. Refregier interview.
22. From an unpublished history of the ACA Gallery by its director, Herman
Baron, ACA Gallery papers, Archives of American Art, microfilm roll D304,
frames 673-74.
23. A summary of Congressional opposition to the WPA is found in Richard
McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press,
1973), pp. 155-65.
24. Howe and Coser, American Communist Party, pp. 233—34.
25. Ibid., 331.
26. From an undated conversation with Klara Zetkin, quoted in Kurt London,
The Seven Soviet Arts (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1938), p. 66.
27. Officially, the John Reed Club refused to participate because Rivera al-
legedly requested that their speaker "refrain from stating the Club's attitude
toward him in the field of revolutionary action." See "Why the John Reed Club
Has No Speaker at This Meeting," undated broadside, Tamiment Labor Library
(New York Univ.), folder: OF John Reed Club; cf. New York Times, May 15, 1933,
p. 9, where it was reported that a John Reed Club artist attending the rally
pointedly insisted on addressing Rivera as "Mister" instead of "Comrade."
28. Monroe, "Artists Union of New York," p. 138.
29. Taped interview with Max Spivak, December 19, 1974.
30. Ibid.
31. Interview with Frances Avery, August 13,1972.
32. Monroe, "Artists Union of New York," p. 137.
33. Quoted in Francis V. O'Connor, Federal Support for the Visual Arts: The
New Deal and Now (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1969), p. 96.

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John Reed Club Artists and the New Deal: Radical

Prospects / Volume 5 / October 1980, pp 241 - 268

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N THE EARLY 1930s, a significant number of American artists who were

THE CLUB AND ITS PROGRAM

Republics [and] the development of new working class writers

The club was a member of the Soviet-based International Union of

Artists who were recruited to the movement during the

The John Reed Club encouraged the production of several types of

Louis Lozowick, High Voltage—Cos Cob, 1930 oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches

cooperative mural—primarily the work of Gropper and Lozowick—entitled

"prominent painters who could submit only tame picturesque views of

. . . . on the negative rather than the positive aspects of the

Commenting on the following winter's exhibition in much the same

. . . . the show cannot possibly be called a revolutionary

THE NEW DEAL FOR ARTISTS

The generally contrary and free-thinking nature of Reed Club artists

artists found it easy to accept the New Deal as a "peaceful revolution"

Factories up in one corner of the canvas are going full blast,

Paul R. Meltsner, From Chaos to Recovery Under Roosevelt, 1933-34, medium

cogwheel, symbolizing the NRA, while New York's finest [the

The formal inauguration of the Popular Front, at the Seventh World

THE POPULAR FRONT ERA

SCHOOL- tence for four years and was just be-

THE NEW DEAL RECORDED

William Gropper, whose radical credentials were impeccable, was em-

William Gropper, Reclamation (detail), 1938-39, mural (oil on canvas), Depart-

activities of the John Reed Club. A former assistant to Mexican muralist

Ben Shahn, fresco in Community Center, Jersey Homesteads (Roosevelt), New

The artist saw the establishment of the Social Security Administra-

Hugo Gellert, Representative Woodrum's Committee "Investigating" WPA, 1939,

THREATS AND PROMISES

Roosevelt now had no alternative but to seek new sources of

Roosevelt's picture now appeared regularly on the front page

Although such Communist support was an embarrassment to the New

Jacob Burck, The Builder, ca.

regarded in the same classification with other workers performing so-

Although it is at this point that Soviet and U.S. government art

SERVING THE PARTY AS ARTISTS

In the United States, however, Stalinist elements were never able to

pioneering study of the Artists Union, describes a meeting of the union's

. . . . one of those periods where, without a police state, without

In hindsight, however, it can be seen that the New Deal afforded

of the 1930s were more idealistic than politically sophisticated. They

Perhaps inspired, at least in part, by the spirit of comradeship

Monroe concludes that artists were just too independent to accept

to influence these people," he maintains, "because [it] didn't know how

COMRADESHIP AND COMMUNITY

The sense of community dominated the period 1936 to 1939 in

This sense of community was affirmed by three-quarters of the re-

their sensitivity to political stimuli even when that sensitivity is not

Assertions of artistic independence are often made in the context of

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