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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 ofthat 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

1 This is an abbreviation of a longer essay, with most citationsremoved.

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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 mightcall 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

2 Taylorism is the shorthand used in labor history for one style ofscientific management. I use the notion here to refer to managerialsystems of increasing productivity that involved reducing workerscontrol 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 andregionalist 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 pseudo-

socialist 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

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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 servesto 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

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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 ofLife magazine featured this Margaret Bourke-

White 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 intofeeling 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.

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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 organizationalforms.

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 small-

town 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 small-

town post officesthe only organs of the federal government

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encountered by most of its citizens. American cultural nationalism

rested on nostalgic for rural life, with its alleged nuclear-family self-

reliance. 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 tocollectivize 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

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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 VeraMukhina 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

buntyby 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

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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 family-wage 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,

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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. Italynudity.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

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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 ofart 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

3 I need to dodge, for the purposes of this essay, the familiar claimthat all art is political, or rather that none can escape the politicaluniverse 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 whatothers 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

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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 artthat 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

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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 theperedvizhniki, 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

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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. xviii Even more

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-velocityperiod 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

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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 19 th-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

cripples and cretins, women who could only inspire aversion

children, who if such were to live, must instantly be considered the

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

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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 capitalistRight 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

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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.

4 Anti-semitism was insinuated in Stalin-era visual propaganda too, butthat 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 herwork 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

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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 amongthe 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.

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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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i Most of the critical work, however, concerns literature rather than visual art.ii Petropoulis, Faustian Bargain, p. 255.iii Catherine M. Sampsell, `To Grab a Hunk of Lightning: An Intellectual History ofDepression-Era American Photography, diss, Georgetown, 2002, p. 19.iv Laura Hapke, Labors Canvas: American Working-class History and the WPA Artof the 1930s (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), p. 64.v

Robert Edelman, "A Small Way of Saying `No: Moscow Working men, SpartakSoccer, 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. fromUmetnost i Revolutsia (Belgrade, nd), chapter 3.ixAlison 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 ofthe 1930s,AHR 98 #1, Feb. 1993, pp. 55-57.xi

Evgeny Dobrenko, The Disaster of Middlebrow Taste, or, Who `InventedSocialist Realism? in Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko, Socialist Realismwithout Shores (Durham, NC: Duke Univ Press, 1997), 135-64.xiiJohn 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.xviiIan 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: YaleUniversity 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, FascistItaly and the Peoples Republic of China (Collins Harvill, UK, 1990), 65.xxi Quoted in Igor Golomstock, Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the ThirdReich, 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 Germanmuseums; ibid, 144.xxii Mies van der Rohe tried to collaborate with the Nazi regime, arguing thatBauhaus design was compatible with Nazi ideology, to no avail; Kathleen Talpas,Art, Politics and Totalitarianism in the third Reich. PhD diss, University ofCalifornia Irvine, 1991, p. 31xxiii Igor Golomstock, Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, FascistItaly and the Peoples Republic of China (Collins Harvill, UK, 1990), 64-5, , 78-9,88, 107-8.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Giulio_Bragagliahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Giulio_Bragaglia

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