Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926-1956

by Andrew Hemingway

This remarkable book is the first to examine in abundant detail the relation between visual artists and the American Communist movement during the twentieth century. Andrew Hemingway charts the rise and decline of the Communist Party’s influence on art in the United States from the Party’s dramatic rise in prestige during the Great Depression to its effective demise in the 1950s. Offering a full account of how left-wing artists responded to the Party’s various policy shifts over these years, Hemingway shows that the Communist Party exerted a powerful force in American culture, even after the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939.

The author scrutinizes the works of an array of leftist artists, many of great interest but largely forgotten today. He demonstrates that American art produced within the Communist Party’s orbit was far more diverse and had a much more complex relationship with modernism than has been previously understood. Refusing to march in lockstep to Party requirements, artists and critics in and around the Party accepted no single aesthetic line and engaged in heated debates. Hemingway offers radical new interpretations of some familiar works, reassesses the role of the John Reed Clubs and the work of artists in the federal art programs, and revises accepted thinking about art in the United States during the Cold War. In short, he offers a distinguished and original political history that recovers the rich artistic and intellectual legacy of the American left.

Genres: Art, History, Nonfiction

384 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Rebecca]

This book is an excellent analysis of artists in Communist Party art organizations and commentary in Communist arts publications in the U.S. It's unfortunate that it's now out-of-print and very expensive because of the large number of illustrations (I borrowed the copy I read from a university library). Hemingway does a great job recognizing individual innovation and arguments among artists even in the context of an increasingly Stalinist party. He manages to avoid apologism for the CPUSA and the USSR while sympathetically portraying the artists who were members of the CP iteslf or any of its many organizations. He does this by discussing the careers and works of a large variety of artists, whether lifetime stalwarts, "fellow travellers" who never joined the party, as well as many artists who ultimately left the CP. While the book provides a solid overview of changes in the party's positions on modernism, proletarian art, people's art, abstract expressionism, etc. there's enough detail to get a sense of specific smaller artists organizations, the work of individual artists, significant gallery shows, artists' battles with the government, and major publications of CP related art-criticism. Several chapters also serve as a detailed guide to the arts programs of the New Deal. The book gets the *amazing* rating for the amount of material covered while remaining readable and complex in analysis. An essential source for anyone interested in the history of the CPUSA or the politics of 20th century American art.