American artists against war, 1935-2010

Abstract

American against War, 1935-2010 David McCarthy. University of California Press, 2015.Having published books on Pop Art and H. C. Westermann's art and the Cold War, David McCarthy has taken on an ambitious and broad topic. The present volume examines the work of the many American artists: painters, printmakers, sculptors, and those who worked in many or mixed media, in their often fervent attempts to document and protest abuses of governmental power and war itself. And he makes a distinction between artists who use very specific imagery in their art to make their political/social points and those who confine their protest to the oral and written word or participate in demonstrations, as individual citizens with some authority, rather than speaking through their art. Particularly in the introduction, McCarthy points out that some styles or forms of art more readily take on social issues than others. After pointing out that the social realists were quite emphatic in their choice of subjects and imagery, he notes that the abstract expressionists and other abstractionists had social values too, but their need to move beyond figuration showed their support and involvement in social action via protest, writing, etc. He gives Ad Reinhardt as an example of that kind of artist activism unconnected to the visual appearance of the art. Thus, while he helped organize protests, signed petitions, and contributed art for an anti-Vietnam war group, he was publicly critical of political art per se.Of the five chapters in the book, Artists against War and Fascism, deals with the more obvious and best known period, up to and including World War Two. The horrendous exterminations and other atrocities were attacked by artists like Evergood, Gropper, and David Smith, in various media and over and over. Particularly valuable are the illustrations of works that are rarely seen in books and even more rarely in exhibitions. Several of these artists, whom the author refers to as the Old Left, remained active and turned a lot of their attention to their increased awareness of the Holocaust and the destruction wrought by the Atom Bombs on Japan; this is the subject of the second chapter, Doom. Here, sculpture and collage are more dominant than in the earlier period.The next chapter, End Your Silence, is primarily directed at the work of artist and their opposition to the Vietnam War (which the author sometimes refers to as the Vietnamese Civil War) but also to their concern with American policies and involvement in the Dominican Republic and Asia. The treatment of color in regard to the armed forces is also addressed briefly, including the work of African American activist artists. Again, artists not only created individual works that addressed both specific actions and broader issues but also participated in written protest. …