In early 1936, at the American Artists' Congress in New York City's Town Hall the famous convention where left artists and fellow travellers from across the country and Mexico gathered to affirm their commitment to each other, to international leftism, and, addressing the rise of National Socialism in Germany, to a principled stand against fascism and war the American artist Louis Lozowick was called upon to give one of the many stump speeches to stir the crowd. He was perhaps in a better position than most to articulate the anxieties and resolve of radicalised artists. Fluent in Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Russian, a longtime editor of New Masses, the American International Secretary to the John Reed Club, a widely travelled and seasoned veteran of left agitation, Lozowick was smart, eloquent, and imbued with a bird's-eye view of history. His brief speech, called 'Status of the Artist in the U.S.S.R.', was, typically, extraordinarily pointed. In contrast to what he perceived as the pathetic economic condition and questionable political role ascribed to American artists, Soviet artists were in his view 'an indispensable factor in the socialist reconstruction of the country'. In keeping with that status, they were wellpaid, given license to experiment in a wide range of imagery and styles, free of worry over finding jobs or exhibiting their work, and deeply engaged in the serious business of finding an art appropriate to 'the new man and woman, the new ways of living and working'. Even today, reading the text of the speech, one is struck by the careful, crescendo-like, and also extremely blunt contrast he offered between the American and Soviet conditions. There are no vivid recollections about how his speech was received, but given the horrible circumstances in which most Americans lived in 1936 (to say nothing of how most artists lived), I like to imagine it was met with a swell of approving 'amens' and a rhythm of nodding heads. Artists had an acknowledged and valued social purpose somewhere in the modern world, they must have thought. His conclusion must have been thundering: 'Artists until now have pictured the world differently; we intend to help transform it'.1 Today, it is also hard to read the speech without recognising the astonishingly idyllic image he painted for his comrades of life for an artist in the Soviet Union. Permanent state patronage? Freedom to experiment? Too many commissions? A widespread belief in a moral and ethical purpose for art? What an image! What a fantasy! Was this simply bad faith on Lozowick's part, a Communist Party hack who happily fabricated? Was it an example of ends over means, of an attempt to prod the crowd into useful and purposeful action, no matter the fibs that had to be told? Was it a bright light being offered to those who were losing spirit, a hopeful prod to keep them going during dark or confusing days? Or was it the chant of a true convert, an expression of yet another of the misguided but sacred beliefs that radicalised painters, even those who were more privy to the workings of the Communist Party, possessed of the Soviet Union, international Communism's spiritual home? Perhaps most importantly, how did individuals respond to these and similar kinds of claims by the American Communist Party (CPUSA) in its attempt to gather and energise artists on the left? These are the sorts of questions that Andrew Hemingway's long-awaited, wide-ranging book tries to answer.2 Surveying a thirty-year period, the book's ten chapters trace the relationship of artists on the American left to the American Communist Party. They focus primarily on developments in New York, arguably the largest and most active of the CPUSA's centres, but occasionally branch out to consider events in the Midwest and West. They describe the many episodes of energy and activism in left culture, the collective and sometimes dejected spirit among committed artists, the dramas and traumas of artists accommodating themselves and their beliefs to state and private patronage, their originality of expression in the exhilarating but also devastating moments of confrontation, violence, and war, the heated debates between artists, critics, and party functionaries, and the insights and fantasies these artists possessed of the Soviet Union and international Communism. Far from tracing a neat path between American artists and the CPUSA, Hemingway describes the varieties and extraordinary complexities of that relationship and also the truly fertile climate it fostered for making art. Indeed,
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May 1, 2004
Nancy Gabin 
