The Remarkable Resemblance among Soviet, Nazi, Fascist and American 1930s Art: An Immodest Analysis Linda Gordon,

draft 13 September 20111 [The bracketed, italicized phrases are my notes for images that will be shown at the Sept. 20 meeting, 2:30 PM, DTC S-102.] [1, wpa.jpg; stakhanovite.png] Several art critics have noted the similarities between American Depression-era social-realist art, including documentary photography, and socialist realist art and photography in the Soviet Union.i Other critics have noted how the art of the German 3rd Reich resembled that of the USSR, as did, to a lesser extent, some of the art of fascist Italy. Several European critics, notably refugees from the totalitarian regimes, have argued or suggested that there was a uniquely totalitarian art (for e.g., Boris Groys, Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, Golomstock?). But none have brought American social realist art of the 1930s into confrontation with all three of the other nations styles of that period. [2. Nazi worker; Italy worker] The US case presents, obviously, a difficulty for the totalitarian-art-form theory. Even if we reject that theory, however, these resemblances produce puzzlement and discomfort--political, intellectual and even emotional. No scholar has offered an explanation, and this is almost certainly because the art critics and historians know enough to have the humility not to venture into an area that requires extensive expertise about art and politics on two continents. It is no doubt the fool in me that rushes in, the fact that I lack the knowledge to have the proper humility. But my work on This is an abbreviation of a longer essay, with most citations removed.
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the photographer Dorothea Lange has left me with an un-repressible desire to inquire and even hypothesize. The hypothesis is that the social/ist realist style reflects cultural, political and economic bases common to in all four places, namely a masculinist, populist statism resting on Taylorist2 industrial development; and that each countrys 1930s nationalism incorporated these values. In this comparison, Langes work becomes both quintessential of social realism and the exception that proves the rule, as I hope to show you. But the resemblances are limited and the common themes yield somewhat differing total significance. This is particularly true in the US where Popular Front art was divided, albeit with a fuzzy boundary, between New Deal and Left. Dorothea Lange more than any other artist straddled this division, and embodied its contradictions, and that is the reason she presents an ideal example of the American artistic sensibility of the era. The first commonality in these four countries is of course realism, but that is a slippery and contested concept. Some might call the style idealism, sentimentalism, or romanticism because it depicts only ennobled subjects. It will be simplest to assume that realism in this case means representational. Some painters sought to replicate photographic detail. The extreme case was that of Nazi painter Adolf Ziegler, a Hitler favorite, who became known, even at the time, as `master of the German pubic hair because of his hyperrealistic nudes.ii Portraits of the great leadersLenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitlerare always somewhat photographic, but in other Soviet and American painting and sculpture, the figures can be Taylorism is the shorthand used in labor history for one style of scientific management. I use the notion here to refer to managerial systems of increasing productivity that involved reducing workers control of work processes.
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represented sketchily, with simplified blocks of color, shape and volume. Photographs were of course manipulated in the darkroom but montage, double exposures, startling croppings and angles were taboo. [3. Two Rodchenko divers] A good example is Aleksandr Rodchenkos sublime photograph of a diver, in which his original print was ordered straightened. The populism behind this taste lies in the assumption that the masses, the common people, cannot understand and do not like images that deviate from straight. (A discussion of the origin of this assumption is in the longer essay.) Second, the representations, excluding for now the everpresent images of the leaders in the three European countries, honor and heroize the common people, the masses. To register the substance of these images, we must consider how rare they were in fine art previously. In easel painting there was a 19th-century tradition of misere, the representation of the suffering-but-enduring poor or the salt-of-the-earth peasants, as in the work of Courbet. In photography, until the mid-20th century few considered that documentary could be art at all. The populist turn of the 1930s was foreshadowed by German photographer August Sander and by the American Ashcan and regionalist painters, for example. Previously a few American Left artists had available the iconography of the mechanic, the white skilled workman still identified, despite the deskilling created by mass production, with the artisana figure of dignity with humility. Social/ist realist art transformed him into a laboring man, often a proletarian. The early Nazi and fascist posters remind us of the pseudosocialist origins of those movements. What Michael Denning called the laboring of America happened primarily thru visual material.iii Third, these popular heroes had to be large, even monumental. They are Prometheus. In portraying urban workers, the Americans as well as the Russians had their Stakhanovites. [4. US joemagarac; Soviet stakhanovite.jpg] The heroic workers were male, overly 3

muscled, even monumental. Joe Magarac, the American Stakhanovite, is Paul Bunyan and John Henry in one. Their solidity, their very thickness exudes power. [5. Lange plowing back] Photographers and painters often shot from below in order to increase the stature of their subjects. American artists such as Louis Lozowick often made figures disproportionately large in relation to the buildings they were constructing or the machinery they were operating.iv Their heroism lies, however, exclusively in physical strength and courageas befits workers who are simultaneously being deskilled. 1930s architecture was, of course, the ultimate in monumentality. [6. 2 pavilions] At the International Exhibition of Arts, Crafts and Sciences in Paris in 1937, the organizers placed the German and Soviet pavilions opposite each other, perhaps in recognition of their impending conflict, but also perhaps in recognition of their cultural similarities. Many American New Deal buildings look like this. Only the Italians, with their greater desire to associate fascism with classical and renaissance power, built in an equally pompous but allegedly traditional style. [7. Mussolinibldg] The architectural, stone and concrete monumentality evokes pride, perhaps, even as it serves to diminish any sense of the possibility of bottom-up democratic power; while the human form of monumentality was intended to offer role models. The heroic workers tend to do construction or smelting or heavy metallurgy; assembly-line factory work was not heroic enoughand often female. Heroic workers were by definition creating heroic structuresthe large buildings, bridges and metallurgy, the magnitogorsks and Boulder dams of an industrial society that would create a better life for all. [8. Soviet and US dams] The iconography showed men of iron-hard muscles building the iron-hard concrete or steel structures, associating the heavy labor with the construction of socialism. By the beginning of the century this aspiration, even 4

confidence, expressed itself in a new aesthetic sensibility, finding beauty in the heavy, overweening shapes of industrial forms. [9. Soviet Lisitsky Eiffel] When El Lisitsky photographed the Eiffel Tower in the 1920s, he showed us not its reach toward the heavens but its massive base structures. [10. Nazi Colliery; US Bourke-White] The cover of the first issue of Life magazine featured this Margaret BourkeWhite shot. (Today a photograph of a smokestack belching dark vapors signals pollution; then it promised prosperity.) Fourth, monumentalism appeared in another common visual trope: the construction of mass pageantry.v [11. Nazi pageant] The synchronized movement of masses of people creating large-scale shifting patterns became a beloved art form, and until the Chinese choreography at the 2010 Olympics, no one did it better than the Nazis. They had been fans of rigorously unison marches well before taking power; the SA (sturmabteilung) was conducting in-step marches, in matching uniforms, through the streets in the 1920s. The Nazi straight-arm salute was ideal for creating vast displays of unison, and instruction books taught the precise angle at which to hold the arm.vi Performing the salute drew observers as well as paraders into feeling a part of a mighty military force.vii [12. Rodchenko.formation; Italy boys] The military parades, spartakiadi, and huge Nazi choreographed rallies were enhanced by the fact that participants are costumedin military uniform, in sports attire, or, especially for women, in folk dress. The mass pageants bested architecture by adding the dimension of time and the sensation of movement. The perfect synchronicity of movement and the use of thousands of bodies to create stunning shapes in space and time symbolized national unity. The displays both represented and constructed the willingness of the masses to cooperate, to follow, to allow themselves to be deployed in the service of the motherland, the fatherland, the construction of socialism. All of these regimes were, of course, tremendously statist. 5

In Gramscian terms, one could call them spectacles of consent. This pageantry existed both in time, as events, and timelessly, in repeated photographic representation. [13. Soviet construction] Mass construction projects were sometimes choreographed specifically for photography, as in the White Sea-Baltic Canal constructed by hundreds of thousands of prisoners, which Rodchenko was assigned to photograph. Thus labor itself became a mass spectacle. These are, in the words of Barthes, scenes that are laid, in the sense that tables are laid.viii The tableaus were then photographically reproduced and mass distributed. In the US, there were occasional military parades. Other parades were local, and never in unison. Participants wore varieties of costumes or none at all, created floats representing all sorts of groups. Choreographed and architected pageantry appeared, of course, in dozens of Hollywood Busby Berkeley movies where the message was quite different, frequently called escapism by the critics. Escape from economic worry, true; but other critics have pointed out that the synchronized performances also symbolized and promoted acceptance of Taylorist, mass-production organizational forms. Fifth: Despite the taste for the monumental, in all four countries the quintessential national figure in art for mass distribution was, paradoxically, rural, not proletarian; a man of the earth, not of concrete. In the US, agrarian images overwhelmingly dominated, with the exception of the work of ideologically Left artists. This is a case of overdetermination, arising from intersecting factors at several levels of analysis. The US electoral system over-represents rural and smalltown dwellers, so that the Roosevelt administration mustered political support for its arts programs by catering to the those non-urban tastes and locations. For example, mural painting filled the walls of smalltown post officesthe only organs of the federal government 6

encountered by most of its citizens. American cultural nationalism rested on nostalgic for rural life, with its alleged nuclear-family selfreliance. And there was the enormous influence of the FSA photography project and its assignment to document rural life; and the fact that it was ultimately situated in the Department of Agriculture, the largest federal agency, thus tying the conjunctural, contingent origin of that project to the overall political structure of the nation. The artists, meanwhile, were influenced by the earlier regionalist painters and the even greater influence of the Mexican muralists. [14. nazi bucolic; Soviet peasantwithcow ]The peasantry was of course central to the reality of the Bolsheviks: despite their Marxist education and hopes, they were stuck with a country that had a relatively tiny working class. The Nazis had different motivations, fearful as they were of the German, Austrian and Czech working classes. But all four countries romanticized the peasantry, however differently. Lyrical, even bucolic imaginary dominated. [15. US modesto mural] Until the Soviet Five-Year Plans pushed the industrialization of agriculture, farmworkers often appeared in relation to the earth, its produce, and farm animals. The Soviet campaign to collectivize and industrialize agriculture changed this imagery, of course. The old muzhiki, especially the baby, the old peasant women, then ceased to represent Mother Russia and came to stand for a reactionary old regime. In these years the tractor almost replaced the foundry or massive industrial structure as the symbol of Soviet power. But the new politically correct younger peasants were as romanticized as American family farmers. No doubt even the Taylorist managers of industry enjoyed the nostalgia. Here we meet a contradiction that appeared in all the social/ist realism: a worshipful attitude toward machinery, technology, and gigantic constructions along with an equally potent reverence for a simpler, unmechanized rural way of living. The latter took on a 7

nostalgic moodartists often liked to depict subjects in 19th or even 18th century garbalthough they were often creating an imagined rather than an historically actual life. This is of course a basic and very likely universal modernist contradiction, one in which the rejection or even hostility to modern life is produced by modern life. [16. US Seymour.fogel.gif; Nazi gendernorm; Italy lovelywoman] Sixth, except during wartime, all four countries dealt in gender ideals so conventional as to be practically Victorian. For Nazis, fascists and Americans, women were usually pictured with babies or children, and frequently in Christian imagery of self-sacrifice and purity. They are mothers, whether or not they have children. Sexualized women were, it seems, degenerate. Through the first Five-Year Plan, in fact, Soviet evocation of the economy was consistently gendered: industry was male, agriculture was female. [17. Mukhina] We see this in the image, one of the most famous works of art in the Soviet Union, men and women together wielding the (male) hammer and (female) sickle, the fundamental building blocks of the socialist economy and, allegedly, the Communist political alliance. The emblematicness of this sculpture by Vera Mukhina is underscored by the fact that she herself pronounced it analogous to the American statue of liberty.ix But the early Soviet images of farm women derived from the Marxist--and urban and intellectual--view of rural peasant women as backward: because they were peasants, because they were female. The traditional baba was for the Soviets a key supporter of everything backward--religion, superstition, and private propertyand opponent of collectivization. This changed with the beginning of the collectivization campaign. Propaganda posters and paintings fought the reputation of the baby bunty by featuring youthful, forward-looking, modern women.x [18. antikulak; prokolkhoz] There is something bitter in the use of lovely young women to egg on one of the USSRs most brutal and violent 8

projects, and many of the posters not only called people to join the kolkhozi but also instigated actionperhaps even violent action toward the kulaki, the more prosperous peasants. From a western point of view an equally startling aspect of the imagery was the association of women with the essential symbol of Soviet agricultural industrialization: the tractor. The female Stakhanovite is a peasant tractor driver. Lenin had once said that soviet power plus electrification would produce communism; the tractor delivered the message that machine power plus collectivization would produce communism. The tractor thus represents industry and agriculture, the hammer and the sickle, united. True, there were placid, sweet cows along with women and tractors, as if to reassure the viewer that the ideals of rural life could remain. [19. US getz] By contrast in the US the rural ideal remained the family farmno matter that these were virtually outmoded economic structures, failing by the hundreds of thousands, forced out by the huge corporate plantations of the west that were powered not by farmers but by wage workers. Ironically, however, the family-farm model in the depression both reflected and helped reproduce a familywage model in which men produced and women reproduced. In much imagery, particularly the growing number of murals in public buildings, farm women remained passivethe givers of food, not the growers of food. [20. US 921267e; Nazi peasants] In all four countries, however, the approved, chaste women were neither sylphlike nor fragile; like men they had a solidity that connoted and symbolized strength. [21. Italy gender.jpg] This is no frail mother victim; it is Mother Courage, strong, stubborn, and fierce. . [22. Soviet socialistwoman] In the Soviet Union, she occasionally possessed startling levels of strength, imagery that might be considered unfeminine. [23. Lange toughRichmondwoman] We see this in the US only in Langes work, 9

which Ill discuss in a few minutes. The sturdiness is a class marker, reminding the viewer that these are not aristocrats, not pampered women. They work hardalthough primarily on farms, where womens labor did not threaten the gender system. This in turn is because their rural labor is naturalized as an organic aspect of the nurturing conceived as biological. They are typically assigned by the system to caring for animals and growing subsistence crops, thereby understood as reproducing rather than producing. [24. Soviet womanathlete; Nazi female athlete] Women were allowed their greatest displays of strength in Nazi and Soviet athletics, but even that was taboo in the US and, apparently, Italy. In all these respects, the US is the most conservative. Outside of Langes work and that of a few younger women photographers such as Esther Bubley, the American women represented are placid, immobile, and engaged in reproduction, rarely production. Restrictions on womens activities shifted radically during wartime, of course, and anyone familiar with gender analysis would suspect that wartime imagery, intended to mobilize a new labor force, would bear cross-national, cross-ideological similarities. [25. Italy nudity.iwojima; US iwojima; Thorak menatwork] Yet there are parallels so complete that they create surprises; just consider these two. [26. Soviet victory; Italy victory] Or this Soviet painting, which could have represented Napoleon, Caesar, or Peter the Great but actually shows Marshal Zhukov. [27. Soviet female paratroopers; US womanpilots] Heroic images of women multiplied once the war started and womens services were needed. These were strongest in the US and USSR. Rosie-the-Riveter photographs have become an American clich The Soviet Union and the US occasionally honored female paratroopers and pilots. [ 28. Soviet womanwarworker poster; rosie-riveter-3] But everywhere, mobilizing women for defense-industry work made it necessary to reassure the public of their continuing femininityagain a 10

trope strongest in the US. [29. Thorak; thorakatwork] One aspect of Nazi gendered imagery stands out as unique: its devotion to heavily muscled men in nudes. Much has been said about homoerotic themes among the Nazis, but here I am concerned with the superficial lack of prudery, quite possibly an influence remaining from Weimar. [30. Italian fascists indulged as well, always in the guise of the classical tradition. Any such exposure of the body was entirely forbidden in official art in the USSR and US. I have saved the most obvious common theme for last: all this social/ist realist art was politicized;3 all were serving newly or increasingly statist regimes. All those making social/ist realism saw art as a weapon in the building of a stronger and more prosperous national state, although some might have chosen less militarist language. But all, too, would have identified with the Soviet constructivist slogan, Art into Life. In populist fashion they wished to be understood by the masses. There were of course differences: Nazi and Soviet politicization of art was more doctrinaire, and took the form of a binary: you were for the regime or you were a traitor. Leaders of both countries promoted a binary division of art into, alternatively, bourgeois or socialist, Aryan/German or Jewish. This difference is reflected in the level and form of coercion applied in the several locations. The Nazis simply prohibited formalist art, along with anything done by Jews, gays, etc. Germany subordinated all art to Goebbels Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. Already in 1937 Hitler threatened to send those who made such trash to concentration camps. The I need to dodge, for the purposes of this essay, the familiar claim that all art is political, or rather that none can escape the political universe of the creator and culture from which it emerges.
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Soviet Union moved more cautiously, making it difficult for unapproved artists to get materials by creating a state monopoly on canvas, paper, paints, plaster, bronze, marble, etc. Ultimately the Soviet Communist Party created the agency known as Agitprop, the Committee for Agitation and Propaganda, to supervise and enforce correctness. [ 31. industrialization.jpg; Lisitskymontage] But in fact the Soviet CP never managed, and probably never wanted, to eliminate entirely the influence of the brilliant avant garde design of the revolutionary years. [32. Italy boccioni; fasces.abstract] Similarly the influence of the Italian avant garde never entirely disappeared. The fascist symbol (the fasces) was often abstracted, in Futurist style. The absence of similar political apparatus in the US does not mean that there was no coercion. Two forms of economic persuasion shaped art in the 1930s US: One was the various federal arts programs which paid salaries to thousands of artists whose usual sources of income had disappeared (commissions, sales, and teaching jobs) in the depression of the 1930s. The other form of coercion, always fundamental for artists, was of course the market. Whether you depend on selling your work or teaching, you must produce what others approve and will pay for. I do not mean to suggest that the economic coercion of a capitalist economy is equivalent to that of persecution or active attempts to prevent artists from making art; nor to suggest that limiting artistic freedom is every acceptable. But many US artists would have accepted the constraint of making only approved art in return for a guaranteed salary. Still, it may well be that the most powerful forms of coercion everywhere were social pressure and enthusiasm for serving the new regimes. But whence does the pressure originate? Russian art critic Evgeny Dobrenko argues that the Soviet social/ist realist form developed from the bottom up more than the top down; that artists moved in that direction out of their own passion for reaching the 12

masses. In a form of reception scholarship, he uses testimony from working-class people about their tastes and finds that they loved conventional representational art, as well as the cheerfulness of the images used in representing the Soviet ideals, and that they disliked formalism and abstraction.xi John Heskett made the same point about Nazi art.xii But another critic points out that three times as many Germans visited the Degenerate Art exhibit, despite the fact that the SS photographed everyone attending, than the approved art exhibit right next door.xiii This finding suggests popular interest in modern art, or in censored art, at least among a museum-going public. Certainly folk art suggests that the capacity to appreciate design, form, structure is not limited to those with advanced formal education. We might even ask whether the idea that realistic art is the only form that can be popular might itself be a top down view, a form of disdain that serves to reinforce a sense of elite cultural superiority. Certainly what moved American artists toward social/ist realism was largely social pressure from their peers, an elite idea about what the masses would like. All four national groups of artists rejected the more utopian ideas found in the revolutionary period, that the masses could appreciate art that did not teach you what to think if they were exposed to it and were less strait-jacketed by convention. Moreover, in the US and in the Soviet Union, democratizing and leveling politics worked against the 19th-century notion of artist as outsider. Artists inherited a legacy as, first, privileged retainers of the rich and wellborn and, then, romantic eccentrics of exquisite sensibilities. Both populist and Marxist influence denounced such elitism in favor of a modernist notion that we are all workersall except the varyingly defined class enemy. The task, in the words of American Left art critic Harold Clurman, was to "rid the world of the idea of the artist as `a prank of nature, an isolated phenomenon, a separate jewel."xiv The artist must see him/herself as a worker whose 13

specific skills were not necessarily superior, worthier or more esoteric than those of other workers. Becoming employees of the state, of course, further promoted this perspective. The far greater coercion applied in Germany and the USSR is of course consistent with the repressiveness of these regimes, but it was also rooted in what they were trying to repress. All three European countries experienced an extraordinarily rich effervescence of radical, modernist and often non-representational art in the early 20th century an artistic movement mainly lacking in the US. Italy led the way, at least ideologically, with the Futurist Manifesto of 1909, which quickly caught the imagination of Russian artists. Very much a youth movement and an attack on the Academies that defined art, futurism began from the negative and developed little positive programmatic content. Influenced of course by Parisian currentsfrom Impressionism through CubismFuturists expressed their generations sense of rapid social change through a visual emphasis on movement.xv Photographers expressed this instability by making action photos with slow film to achieve deliberately blurred results, with images of new and often bewildering machinery and technology, through double or even more multiple exposuresa collection of methods they came to call photodynamism.xvi Futurism was ofcourse a male-dominated movement but it aligned itself with womens and sexual freedom. The Russian avant garde in the pre-revolutionary period seized upon Futurism as nourishment for the starving. They too talked of jettisoning all previous art, even that which had been committed to social justice (such as the peredvizhniki, or wanderers, who focused like many 19th-century reformers on raising the moral consciousness of those with power and privilege). They soon became Bolshevik supporters, and named their group Comfut, for communism and futurism. After 1917 they sought to make their art serve: to defeat the 14

whites and the foreign intervention of the civil war, and to build Russias economic growth. They became avid producers of posters and other public art. Rodchenko coined the term constructivism because he thought artists should make meta-images through assembling, juxtaposing images in order to achieve maximum provocation; but more importantly constructivism sought to liquidate art as a unique category, to unite its practitioners with working people of all kinds.xvii The constructivists by no means rejected representation tout court, but approached it with a kind of Brechtian aesthetics: Art should disrupt, the viewer should be presented with a riddle, `unmasking the prevailing view of things as the view of those who are in power emphasizing the element of development They believed that their startling imagery would be more effective in raising consciousness than traditional forms of representation.
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than their futurist inspirers, and like so many Russians in this period, they produced almost as many words as images. One result was that, like many artistic movements at a time of radical change, theirs quickly divided into autonomous streams and quarreling, competing tendencies, giving rise to an extraordinarily fertile and high-velocity period of artistic production and development. And here too the modernist arts were associated with radical sexual and gender politics. In the fourteen years of Weimar Germany, an avant garde dominated in all the arts: painting, sculpture, architecture and photography, of course, but also modern dance, theater, music. Like the Russians, they were almost uniformly Leftists, pinning their hopes for a democratic Germany on either the Communist or Social Democratic Parties. More than in Russia or Italy, the German Left and its artists committed themselves to a sexual and gender as well as an economic and political revolution, and the era saw campaigns for birth control, abortion, womens sexual rights and gender fluidity. Photographers such as Albert Renger-Patzch, Lotte Jacobi, Laszlo 15

Moholy-Nagy, Lucia Moholy, Hannah Hoch, and Raoul Hausmann explored birds-eye-view angles, close-ups of ordinary objects rendered as abstractions, faces partly cut off, sun prints and collages. Critic Annette Michelson associates these interests with the fracturing intellectual impact of psychoanalysis and relativity theory.xix And beginning in about 1921, as the Soviet Communist leadership became increasingly hostile to avant-garde art, the Soviet artists looked to Berlin and made pilgrimages there: Ehrenburg, Eisenstein, Gorky, Lisitsky, Lunacharski, Malevich, Mayakovsky, and Dziga Vertov published and exhibited there and soaked up the work of the Weimar Germans.xx Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union not only feared artistic radicalism and devoted significant resources to outlawing it, but also denounced it on the same terms for the same reasons with the same vocabulary. lamentable daubs, idiocies, were among the mildest of Hitlers epithets. Deeply interested in art, and hazily informed about it, he even traveled back to denounce 19th-century modern art: ` Cubism, Dadaism, Futurism, Impressionism, Expressionism Not one drop of talent; dilettantes who should be sent back to the caves of their ancestors. [They manufacture] misformed instantly be considered the cripples and cretins, women who could only inspire aversion children, who if such were to live, must accursed of God!xxi In the famed 1937 Nazi exhibition of Degenerate Art, even the work of Nazi party member Emil Nolde, an expressionist, was labeled barbarous.xxii For the Stalinist arts commissars, calling formalism the art of the `gloomy past was mild; it soon became the `most harmful element, a sign of `over-sophistication, and, of course, bourgeois. After Lukacs, under pressure, denounced Expressionism as `the artistic form of mature imperialism which easily enters the 16

service of Fascist demagogy, the German Communist Party leaders began echoing the Soviets and condemned formalism. Among the Nazi-Soviet resemblances, perhaps the most ironic was in the diagnoses of the source of the formalist evil: for the Nazis, formalism was kulturbolschewismus and for the Soviets, it was fascist.xxiii In the US, by contrast, there was no influential visual art to repress. American social realism continued its more conservative artistic traditions. In the early 20th century American cultural radicals fled to Europe and filled Parisian cafes with musicians, writers and artists. The cultural counter-revolution in the USSR was associated also with what we might call a gender Thermidor, a rolling back of womens rights and a repression of the womens activism that had appeared with the Revolutionchanges that exactly paralleled what went on in the Third Reich. In the US, by contrast, womens and sexual rights activism was already slowed by the 1920s, while it was still vibrant in Europe. Because there was no repression of earlier forms, when a repressive response came, it came from the out-of-power capitalist Right and focused on content, not form. The powerful opposition to FDRs New Deal was furious that what it considered Left-wing politics was being supported by federal arts programs, and eventually succeeded in closing them down. (That legacy remains today, as the US provides less government subsidy for art than any other economically advanced country.) The furious, angry attack on avant-garde art did not happen in Italy. Perhaps because the Futurists were such enthusiastic and early supporters of Mussolini, perhaps because they did not, could not sustain their rejection of traditional art given that Renaissance and classical arts were so fundamental to Italian national identity, Futurist work continued to thrive alongside conventional representation. Both 17

served the fascist state.xxiv Moreover, Italian fascism was less universalist than Bolshevism, less racialist than Nazism, its appeal primarily nationalistso everything Italian was honored. Another difference: in Mussolinis Italy, architecture became the art most important to signaling fascist ideology, and architecture could not be representational. Precisely because of its populist and nationalist character, official 1930s art is characterized by a relative lack of conflict, particularly class conflict. Only two enemies appear prominently before the WWII: Jews, of course, and kulaks in the USSR.4 [33. Gellert 1933; Levine] It is here, with the identification of a class enemy, that Left American art differed from that of the New Deal. The Left, furthermore, depicted racial injustice. Official New Deal art never depicted conflict or injustice of any kind and never represented injustice. Its nationalism took the form of preaching cooperation and unity, behind the president, of course. In all four countries, workers, farmers, owners, managers and professionals worked together under the leadership of a great man to reconstruct the economy. Although Roosevelts image was not publicly purveyed outside news outlets, it was remarkably present among the less privileged population, millions of whom put up his photograph in their homes. And this fact suggests something of the ambiguity of his regime. One coal miner, when asked why her supported Roosevelt, told an interviewer because hes the only president weve had who knows that my boss is a son-of-a-bitch.xxv It seems that the very imaging of the common man suggested something more progressive than simple cooperation: a democracy in which the working stiff (slang of the times) had a voice. Anti-semitism was insinuated in Stalin-era visual propaganda too, but that must remain another story.
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This is where the work of Dorothea Lange comes in. She was masterful both in purveying 1930s visual clichs, and in insinuating radical democracy. [34. MM] Consider her most famous photograph: here we have a madonna, a pieta, and a Mother Courage who could well be a tractor driver. [35. black mother; nursing mo] Then look at some of Langes other madonnas. [36. commonman] The clichs of working men are rare and frequently subverted. [37. Graceoncar] She was exquisitely sensitive to the damage unemployment inflicted on male egos. And of course she was photographing a depression, while the Soviets could brag that they didnt have one. Even bracketing that obvious point, Langes subjects are unlike those of the other countries. True she honored them, but never to the exclusion of internal tension and contradiction. She was mainly a portrait artist and her innovation was to take the same eye she had used in a previous career as portrait photographer to the very rich think Richard Avedon--and turn it toward the poor and working class. She was one of the few modern photographers who could use portraiture as documentary. [38. tobacco woman; Okie woman] She was the only New Deal artist to concentrate a significant part of her work on people of color. [39. cotton worker] (There is simply no space here to discuss the vital dimension of race in Nazi, fascist and Soviet 1930s art; suffice it to say here that all German and Italian art and most Soviet and American art were racially exclusive.) Her eye did not stereotype. Her heroes were not marching into the bright dawn but neither were they victims. [40. BAE522199] And her subjects negated the gendered and racial clichs so standard in the 1930s. [41. sharecropper couple; thoughtful cropper] She rejected the masculinism of most New Deal populism. Her preferred male subjects are softened, even depressed, by no means confident of the bright future awaiting them. [42. white and black fatherchild] Some of that preference shows in her many, many photographs of fathers with 19

children, photographs that are on the whole more tender than those of mothers. Perhaps more important than Langes racial and gender nonconformity was the tendency of her images to explode another aspect of the heroic clichs. Langes work, through contrast, allows us to see the flattening and sentimental visage of typical social/ist realist heroes: they are simple. They are handsome, happy, internally homogeneous, and therefore all alike, even in photographs. Langes subjects have the inner complexity of another kind of realism; theyre all different and they are interesting. They are people we might like to converse with. There is an un-knowability, a mystery about them; they cannot be proper totalitarian subjects because they retain an individual independence. They often exude ambivalence or inner conflict, however controlled. Yet her attempts to photograph conflict were failures. However progressive and sympathetic to the underdog, Lange was neither activist nor materialist, not a Leftist. She was ambivalent about unions and abhorred conflict. She saw strikes as a failure and cooperation as the remedy. [43. strikemeetings.jpg; demonstration] These are among the few that survive; she made many attempts and, recognizing them as failures, probably destroyed them. There were physical reasons for the failurenotably her disability, which prevented her from moving fast. When she returned to her metier, portraiture, her photographs of strike leaders and participants were strong. [44. angryspkr] But even these are problematic. As Nicholas Natanson commented, an angry face may be a repellent face, and this was not her intention although it may speak to her unintended emotional response. Moreover she was unable to show collective action at all. She was, for example, admitted to a secret meeting of the Southern Tenant Farmers Unionsecrecy being necessary to avoid white racist terrorbut none of her photographs show the nature of their struggle. 20

I do not mean to compare Langes work invidiously to that of left artists such as William Gropper, Hugo Gellert, Jacob Levine, Jacob Lawrence. And I will readily admit that photographyif it is to be straight, representational photography-- is far more limited in representing generalizations like conflict and struggle that other visual media. My point is that Lange, like all New Deal artists, clung to a cooperative-commonwealth vision of the good society. She was an ardent champion of Roosevelt, and until the War never wavered in her trust in the nations leadership. Not until the 1950sironically in a most repressive perioddid her photography challenge faith in the Taylorist and statist vision of progress. In the 1930s her work defines the limits to the New Deals democratic vision, and the odd resemblance of its statist populism to that of the European statist tyrannies of the 1930s.

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Most of the critical work, however, concerns literature rather than visual art. Petropoulis, Faustian Bargain, p. 255. iii Catherine M. Sampsell, `To Grab a Hunk of Lightning: An Intellectual History of Depression-Era American Photography, diss, Georgetown, 2002, p. 19. iv Laura Hapke, Labors Canvas: American Working-class History and the WPA Art of the 1930s (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), p. 64. v Robert Edelman, "A Small Way of Saying `No: Moscow Working men, Spartak Soccer, and the Communist Party, 1900-1945," AHR 107 #5, Dec. 2002. vi Steven Heller, Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-century Totalitarian State (London: Phaidon, 2008). vii Castello-Lin, 238. viii Milanka Todic, Photography and Propaganda, 1945-1958, trans. from Umetnost i Revolutsia (Belgrade, nd), chapter 3. ix Alison Hilton, Feminism and Gender Values in Soviet Art, in Slavica Tamperensia (Tampere, Finland), vol. II, 1992-93, p. 102. x Ibid, passim; Victoria E. Bonnell, The Peasant Woman in Stalinist Political Art of the 1930s, AHR 98 #1, Feb. 1993, pp. 55-57. xi Evgeny Dobrenko, The Disaster of Middlebrow Taste, or, Who `Invented Socialist Realism? in Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko, Socialist Realism without Shores (Durham, NC: Duke Univ Press, 1997), 135-64. xii John Heskett, Art and Design in Nazi Germany, History Workshop Journal #6, autumn 1978, p. 143. xiii Kathleen Talpas, Art, Politics and Totalitarianism in the third Reich. PhD diss, University of California Irvine, 1991, p. 32-3. xiv Quoted in Mike Weaver, "Dynamic Realist," in Stange, ed., Paul Strand, p. 198. xv Gentile, Emilo. The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism (Praeger Publishers, 2003); Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds., Futurism: An Anthology (Yale, 2009). xvi See images by Anton Giulio Bragaglia and his brother Arturo. xvii Ian Jeffrey, How to Read a Photograph: Lessons from Master Photographers (NY: Abrams, 2008), p. 84. xviii Margarita Tupitsyn, The Soviet Photograph 1924-1937 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 91-93, quotation on 97. xix In Montage and Modern Life, 1919-1942, ed. Matthew Teitelbaum. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994. xx Igor Golomstock, Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the Peoples Republic of China (Collins Harvill, UK, 1990), 65. xxi Quoted in Igor Golomstock, Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the Peoples Republic of China (Collins Harvill, UK, 1990), 105. In fact he never removed work by Monet, Pisarro or Renoir from German museums; ibid, 144. xxii Mies van der Rohe tried to collaborate with the Nazi regime, arguing that Bauhaus design was compatible with Nazi ideology, to no avail; Kathleen Talpas, Art, Politics and Totalitarianism in the third Reich. PhD diss, University of California Irvine, 1991, p. 31 xxiii Igor Golomstock, Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the Peoples Republic of China (Collins Harvill, UK, 1990), 64-5, , 78-9, 88, 107-8.
i ii

Steven Heller, Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-century Totalitarian State (London: Phaidon, 2008); Franck M. Mercurio, Exhibiting Fascism: Italian Art, Architecture and Spectacle at the Chicago World Fair 1933-34, MA thesis, Northwestern University, 2001; xxv Leuchtenberg
xxiv