BUY ART
You Say You Want a Revolution
In the 1930s, the Great Depression’s far-reaching economic impact lent credence to the Marxist belief that capitalism was doomed. Membership in the Communist Party U.S.A. (CPUSA) swelled, and artists became increasingly politicized. The near total collapse of the art market fostered interest in alternative modes of patronage. Recognizing that, even in good times, the elitist art establishment showers its favors on a mere handful of creators, artists cultivated new audiences and a broader relationship with society at large. At the heart of this quest were issues that bedevil artists to this day. Whom does art serve? By whom and by what standards should it be judged? For a brief period, artists tried to conjure an art world beyond the reach of the capitalist marketplace.
From the outset, the Communist Party, both in America and abroad, viewed art as “a weapon in the class struggle,” but the specifics of its aesthetic program were subject to vagaries of interpretation and the shifting priorities of the Soviet leadership. In addition to using art for propaganda purposes, Communists hoped to develop a distinctive workers’ art, free of “bourgeois decadence” and the conflicts engendered by capitalism. In the U.S., these efforts were initially driven by the Party’s culture magazine, New Masses, and its offshoot, the John Reed Club. Founded in 1929 and named after a cofounder of the CPUSA, the John Reed Club aimed to unite “cultural workers” in furtherance of the “international revolutionary labor movement.” Responding to “a crisis in art as deep, if not as obvious, as the economic crisis,” Club members would wrest control of culture from the elite and reestablish it on a sounder social footing.
In keeping with the directives of the Communist International (Comintern) , the John Reed Club initially disdained any sort of association with the bourgeoisie. But after Hitler came to power in 1933, Stalin adopted a more expansive tone designed to enlist the support of Western democracies in fighting fascism. The new Party line, dubbed the Popular Front, was announced at the Comintern’s Seventh World Congress in August 1935. At around the same time, a representative of the CPUSA’s Central Committee advised the John Reed Club (of which there were by now about thirty chapters) to broaden its reach by bringing “intellectuals into closer contact with the working class.”
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In the 1930s, the Great Depression’s far-reaching economic impact lent credence to the Marxist belief that capitalism was doomed. Membership in the Communist Party U.S.A. (CPUSA) swelled, and artists became increasingly politicized. The near total collapse of the art market fostered interest in alternative modes of patronage. Recognizing that, even in good times, the elitist art establishment showers its favors on a mere handful of creators, artists cultivated new audiences and a broader relationship with society at large. At the heart of this quest were issues that bedevil artists to this day. Whom does art serve? By whom and by what standards should it be judged? For a brief period, artists tried to conjure an art world beyond the reach of the capitalist marketplace.
From the outset, the Communist Party, both in America and abroad, viewed art as “a weapon in the class struggle,” but the specifics of its aesthetic program were subject to vagaries of interpretation and the shifting priorities of the Soviet leadership. In addition to using art for propaganda purposes, Communists hoped to develop a distinctive workers’ art, free of “bourgeois decadence” and the conflicts engendered by capitalism. In the U.S., these efforts were initially driven by the Party’s culture magazine, New Masses, and its offshoot, the John Reed Club. Founded in 1929 and named after a cofounder of the CPUSA, the John Reed Club aimed to unite “cultural workers” in furtherance of the “international revolutionary labor movement.” Responding to “a crisis in art as deep, if not as obvious, as the economic crisis,” Club members would wrest control of culture from the elite and reestablish it on a sounder social footing.
In keeping with the directives of the Communist International (Comintern) , the John Reed Club initially disdained any sort of association with the bourgeoisie. But after Hitler came to power in 1933, Stalin adopted a more expansive tone designed to enlist the support of Western democracies in fighting fascism. The new Party line, dubbed the Popular Front, was announced at the Comintern’s Seventh World Congress in August 1935. At around the same time, a representative of the CPUSA’s Central Committee advised the John Reed Club (of which there were by now about thirty chapters) to broaden its reach by bringing “intellectuals into closer contact with the working class.”
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