A Note on New Deal Iconography: Futurology and the Historical Myth

Abstract

In 1939 Erwin Panofsky opened his seminal essay on the interpretation of expressive content in the visual arts with a bold definition of a new and socially relevant discipline. “Iconography,” he declared, “is that branch of the history of art which concerns itself with the subject matter or meaning of works of art, as opposed to their form.” According to his model, subject matter can be read in three stages, ranked in an ascending hierarchy of richness and complexity. The first and simplest step isolates the “factual meaning” of patterns and shapes under the guidance of the history of style, or knowledge of the ways in which, at a given moment in time, objects were expressed by forms. Hence, certain arrangements of line and color in an American painting of 1934, let us say, may be identified as a representation of a male figure grimly carrying a flat rectangular object on a pole. When this object can subsequently be recognized as a sign bearing the legend “On Strike,” the “secondary or conventional” subject matter is exposed: the hypothetical canvas depicts a strike. Subject to a knowledge of the history of types, or the ways in which, at a given moment in time, concepts were expressed by objects, the motifs of worker and placard form a coherent image, which conveys the concept or story of a strike. These “factual” and “conventional” revelations are the prelude to an exposition of “intrinsic meaning”; the history of culture and ideas is brought to bear on the work of art in this third and final stage through an intuitional process, which suggests how “the essential tendencies of the human mind” in a given epoch have been expressed via objects and concepts, style and type.