Framing the Audience: Art and the Politics of Culture in the United States, 1929-1945 Isadora Anderson Helfgott. Temple University Press, 2015.There have been many books, articles, and exhibitions focusing on the art of this period, some concentrating on the social realists, some on the so-called American Scene artists, and some on the abstractionists who challenged what was politically acceptable and supported by both the press and government policy. Indeed, some of the best known are those writings which documented either the attacks on modernism by the press [as in the travelling exhibition Advancing American Art] or those [like How York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, by S. Guilbaut] which explained the official acceptance of modernism by both the government and the press as part of a new Cold War policy.Almost all of these publications have tended to compartmentalize the arts, with most concentrating on full-scale oil painting and its reception, or on one aspect of the artistic production, like art addressing social issues, across various artistic mediums. In addition, and this is a key element of her contribution to American cultural studies, Helfgott provides a serious examination of the ways that both the artists and the various stripes of cultural leadership worked to blur, if not entirely erase, the lines between high art and popular culture.The book consists of a substantial introduction and three major divisions: Revolution to Cultural Democracy: Artists Seek the People; Museums without Walls: Art and the Public Sphere; and Triumph of American Consumerism: Corporations, Art, and Popular Culture. The titles of the six main chapters are both descriptive and instructive. Chapter One, 'To Speak of and to the People': Artists, Ideology, and Action from Proletcult to the Popular Front, introduces the reader to the sometimes warring, sometimes mutual supporting artists who came to grips with modern art after the Armory Show. Chapter Two, New Horizons: From Federal Art to the Decline of Deal Liberalism, covers the more often told story of the shift from supporting artists of a liberal stripe as the nation moved onto war footing. Chapter Three is concerned with traveling art exhibitions, sponsored by the governmental agencies with the help of museums, while Chapter Four, Suitable for Framing: Mechanical Reproduction and Fine Art for the Masses, is a fairly terse exploration of the meaning behind the title of the book and presents the ways in which the press and various organizations really began to blur the traditional divisions between high art and that which is part of popular culture. …