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Exhibition Sections: Art of
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Ben Goldstein
THE RADICAL
IMPULSE
The years just before World
War I witnessed a period of unprecedented political activism among American
artists. The Ashcan School, led by Robert Henri and John Sloan, who
ran for office as a Socialist Party candidate in New York City, introduced
urban realism to the rarefied world of academic art. Robert Minor transformed
the profession of editorial cartooning with his innovative use of the
lithographic crayon. Encouraged by significant popular support for the
Socialist Party, which counted nearly one million votes from Americans
in 1912, even mainstream magazines like Collier's went
so far as to publish cartoons and drawings challenging the status quo.
Radical art and politics converged in The Masses, a socialist
journal that appeared on newsstands from January 1911 through December
1917. Each month The Masses featured articles, essays,
and cartoons commenting on American economic and political conservativism
with anger, irony, and irreverence, offering a forum for strong graphic
satire that mainstream publications would not print. Such subsequently
celebrated artists as John Sloan, Stuart Davis, and Robert Minor took
advantage of this platform and their drawings from the period exerted
a powerful influence on the profession for decades.
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Hoboken,
1916.
Stuart Davis, 1892-1964.
Watercolor. Published in the Liberator 1 (August 1918).
LC-USZC4-5707; LC-USZ62-119283
© Estate of Stuart Davis/Licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y. (13)
Stuart Davis's watercolor
drawing was published in 1918 in the Liberator, an illustrated
journal whose editor, Max Eastman, described Hoboken as "a city
about a square mile, over in the smoke across the Hudson, shuffling
down the beginnings of the Palisades to the edge of the water
with a loose collection of factories and railroad yards and cheap
flats." Of Davis's style, Eastman wrote that "His art lives among
the same squalid and strong-smelling and left-out objects, and
it goes its sordid way with the same suave dirty muscular self-adequate
gracefulness of power."
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Pittsburgh,
1916.
Robert Minor, 1884-1952.
Lithographic crayon and India ink. Published in The Masses,
no. 8 (August 1916).
LC-USZ62-111306; LC-USZC4-4903 (38)
Robert Minor revolutionized
editorial cartooning in the years before World War I by introducing
new media-crayon and ink brush--to a field dominated by pen-and-ink
drawings. This technical innovation, derived from the work of
such European masters as Francisco Goya and Honoré Daumier, enabled
him to create spare, forceful drawings, including his masterpiece,
Pittsburgh, drawn for The Masses during a 1916 steel
workers' strike.
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"Tee
Hee" Boys: Born with a Vote and a Partial Sense of the Ridiculous,
1912.
John Sloan, 1871-1951.
Ink and crayon. Published in Collier's (May 18, 1912),
as: "Aw, Susie, be them dishes washed?"
LC-USZC4-5708; LC-USZ62-119292
© Estate of John Sloan. (50)
John Sloan created this
acerbic caricature of chauvinist males jeering a suffragette parade
for the popular magazine Collier's. Sloan began his career
as a newspaper sketch artist, making his name as a member of the
circle of young artists that formed around Robert Henri, becoming
known as the New York Realists or the Ashcan School. To supplement
his income, Sloan drew illustrations for mainstream magazines
like Collier's and Century, and for such radical
leftist journals as The Call and The Masses. Insightful
observation, a keen sense of humor and irony, a reforming spirit,
and an easy realist style are hallmarks of his illustrative work
.
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54
Hour Week / Low Wages, ca. 1930s.
Fred Ellis, 1885-1965.
Crayon, ink, pencil and opaque white. Published in the Daily
Worker.
LC-USZC4-6598
© Robert Ellis. (17)
Political cartoonist
Fred Ellis learned his craft from Robert Minor, sharing his mentor's
concern for the plight of the working man. 54 Hour Week
/ Low Wages shows death as the reward for long hours with
little pay for miners. In 1922 Ellis joined the Communist Party
and, thanks to Minor, landed a position as cartoonist for the
Daily Worker, which moved from Chicago
to New York in 1927. He later spent six years working in Berlin
and Moscow, before returning to New York in 1936 to continue his
post at the Daily Worker and teach at the American
Artists School .
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Heywood
Broun, 1930.
Peggy Bacon, 1895-1987.
Lithograph. LC-USZC4-6600
© Estate of Peggy Bacon. (3)
The work of Honoré Daumier
inspired Peggy Bacon's interest in caricature and satire, and
in 1928 she learned the art of lithography. In the fall of 1930
Bacon dashed off her satirical image of the journalist Heywood
Broun for an American Printmakers exhibition. This picture of
Broun at his typewriter was published in Bacon's compilation Off
with Their Heads! (1934), with her description: "Sits in black
leather chair with floppily crossed feet in god-awful mess of
letters and litter. Looks like a stage elephant made of two men.
Mild, journalistic anxiety stamped on face. Must-get-the-article-in
look."
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The
Troublemaker Who Acts Like a Provocateur at the Caucus,
1943.
William Gropper, 1897-1977.
Ink and white with spatter. Illustration for Avreml Broide,
by Ben Gold (New York: Prompt Press, 1944), p. 138.
LC-USZC4-6595
© Gene Gropper. (23)
Studies with Robert Henri
and George Bellows gave William Gropper, the son of poor Jewish
immigrants to New York's Lower East Side, the graphic tools to
express his passionate commitment to the social and economic welfare
of the working classes. This image appears among Gropper's illustrations
for the novel Avreml Broide by Ben Gold, published in Yiddish
in New York in 1944.
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Girls
Wanted, 1916.
Henry Glintenkamp, 1887-1946.
Crayon. Published in The Masses, no. 8 (February
1916), p. 9.
LC-USZC4-5712; LC-USZ62-119277 (20)
Girls Wanted comments
on the Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire of 1911, which came to
the public's attention again in 1916 as investigators issued their
report on the tragedy. Henry Glintenkamp began contributing drawings
to The Masses in 1913, remaining a regular contributor
through 1916. Born in Augusta, New Jersey, he studied at the National
Academy of Design and with Robert Henri at the New York School
of Art, where he met and shared a studio with Glenn O. Coleman
and Stuart Davis. Later he lived in Mexico, traveled in Europe,
and worked for the WPA .
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HOME -
Exhibition Overview -
Object List -
Bibliography -
Credits
Exhibition Sections: Art of
the People - The Radical Impulse - City
Life
Capital and Labor -
The American Scene -
Ben Goldstein
Library of Congress
Contact Us
(03/28/2000)
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