From the issue dated April 18, 2003
A Champion of Discarded Artists
Bram Dijkstra brings to light American Expressionism, 'great art with a social content'
By PETER MONAGHAN
Del Mar, Calif.
For more than 60 years, influential art critics have been completely wrong about American Expressionism, Bram Dijkstra insists.
The movement was marked by narrative works of emotional immediacy, and characterized by intense colors and other distortions. American Expressionist painters depicted workers worn out by the dictates of industry, unemployed men eyed warily by the law, families torn apart by racism, the depravity of war, and the ravages of poverty. The movement enjoyed a brief renown, from the 1920s to the mid-1940s.
But for decades, American Expressionism has been denigrated, if not ignored. Postwar conservative art critics and politicians derided the work as art by "Reds and fellow travelers." Contemporary critics are no kinder. Time's Robert Hughes gave the movement a scant few paragraphs in his 635-page American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), dismissing the artists as nothing but "dyspeptic" socialists depicting rubbish of no social value.
Mr. Dijkstra calls those merely "the standard critical clichés" that arise only because "people like Robert Hughes probably never spend more than five minutes looking at this art."
"This is not just art with a social content, it is great art with a social content," says the professor emeritus of comparative literature at the University of California at San Diego, who has written several well-received books about the connections among American art, literature, and society.
He is about to see if he can persuade others. His lavishly illustrated book American Expressionism: Art and Social Change 1920-1950 (Abrams) will appear next month, in concert with a four-city tour of a large exhibition of paintings. Mr. Dijkstra hopes to rehabilitate a period in American art that has long been deep underground, in museum basements and private collections, or lost.
Moral Indignation
Sitting in the living room of the oceanside home he shares with his wife, Sandra, a literary agent, Mr. Dijkstra talks about the American Expressionists who still, or again, enjoy some reputation: Marsden Hartley, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Jacob Lawrence, Alice Neel, and Ben Shahn. He also discusses artists who are little known, such as Philip Evergood, William Gropper, and Charles White, as well as many who are unfamiliar even to art historians.
American Expressionism employed disparate elements from realism, Surrealism, and abstraction. It clearly drew from Expressionism's European phase – early Modernists like Otto Dix and related painters like Edvard Munch – but, unlike the European movement, which was often "obsessive in its pursuit of the violence of life," the American Expressionists embraced humanist values, says Mr. Dijkstra.
They conveyed "the importance of human solidarity and community" and "wanted to shock their viewers to awaken their moral indignation" at race and class hatred, he writes. So, for example, Louis Ribak, in his "Convalescents," from 1932, depicts the harsh lives of laborers abandoned to haunted isolation by a society that has used them up.
Mr. Dijkstra flips open his book to "Coal Miner and Family," a 1938 painting by Harry Sternberg that he describes as a "perfect example" of art that weaves Modernism with social consciousness. "Sternberg used a Guggenheim award to travel to mining country, where he worked with the miners. He found a village where a mining company had directed its workers to dig shafts under their own homes. The houses started to sink. He is able to show this world of both backbreaking work and the fear of the mother and the children waiting: 'Is my father, is my husband, going to come home?' That tension. And he uses all kinds of Modernist techniques to build this up in a very complicated fashion. There's a narrative in there that's almost like a novel."
Most of the American Expressionists, either recent immigrants or their children, lived in "Old World, peasant-style environments," in extended families in urban ghettos, he notes. Most were Jewish, others of Southern European or Asian background; some were descended from "earlier, forced immigrants" – slaves. Their views of how America should run were formed among workers "fed up with the exploitative practices of the industrialists." They were able to make art out of "the underbelly, the suffering that people had to undergo, because they were part of it."
Many were Marxist or even Communist, in the days before most intellectuals in the West had realized what Stalin was up to. But they had also "absorbed the American values of self-assertion and social independence." In fact, says Mr. Dijkstra, many cited the influence of writers like Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. They embraced communal life within the broad possibilities of American democracy.
And, in those times, many enjoyed government support through the projects of the Depression-born Works Progress Administration, which from 1933 to 1942 paid $35-million in subsistence wages to American artists.
For the first time, notes Mr. Dijkstra, artists of Northern European lineage were distinctly a minority in an important American art movement. At the same time, however, "Nordics" were among those pushing legislation designed to exclude non-Nordic immigration. Anti-Semitism was rife, as was, of course, racism against African-Americans. In that climate, the Expressionists became, for their critics, the American equivalent of the Nazis' "degenerate" artists.
A key moment in the decline of American Expressionism came in 1947. The U.S. State Department prepared a touring exhibition called "Advancing American Art," to advertise American accomplishments to the world, and included such works as Ben Shahn's "Hunger," depicting an emaciated young boy with hand outstretched toward the viewer, and William Gropper's "They Fought to the Last Man," a vision of battlefield carnage. The cultural right erupted, "complaining all over the place that Communists were being sent across the globe to represent America," as Mr. Dijkstra puts it. The tour was canceled, he says, because "the world ought not to be told that the United States had been unable to eradicate human misery from its own shores."
What Art Says
The walls in Mr. Dijkstra's home are crowded with extravagantly framed "salon" paintings, mainstream works that were assembled in large, 19th-century exhibitions. Such canvases are now in vogue among collectors, but 30 years ago, he recalls, "friends would laugh, and say, 'Aren't you being cute, buying these horrible things!'" What he values in them, clearly, is what they say. "Continence of Scipio," for example, depicts the young Roman general forgoing his own gratification with a captive woman in favor of returning her to her family.
In earlier books, Mr. Dijkstra argued that art is inescapably ideological and political. In Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (Oxford University Press, 1986) and Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood (Knopf, 1996), he traced the "iconography of misogyny," showing how frequently women have been depicted as demonic.
Those books drew both high praise and sharp criticism, sometimes within the same review – as "witty and rewarding," "learned," "academically unorthodox," and even "magisterial," but also as "reductive," "evangelical," "moralizing," and even "foolish and extravagant."
American Expressionism may meet with similar reactions; in it, art as ideology takes center stage. At the end of World War II, Mr. Dijkstra writes, the American art world bought wholesale the notion that Expressionism was bad art because its politics were bad. Critics and the public alike, he argues, swallowed the line that Abstract Expressionism was American art's ideologically neutral salvation.
Far from it, he responds. Rather, "the emphasis on the absence of ideology in abstract art was itself completely ideological." To make his point, he asks, How could Abstract Expressionism proceed from perfectly legitimate artistic development to "this wonder that would save the world?"
Meanwhile, the wartime U.S. economy had swelled the number of people with plenty of money to spend, and art prices shot up in the years that followed. At first, the American Expressionists benefited, selling works for thousands of dollars that in the 1930s would have brought at most $150, if anything at all. But even in the late 1930s, signs emerged that the movement was in the political cross hairs. For example, in New York State, legislators appointed arts-program administrators who, in a battle against what they saw as leftist influence, promised to shut down projects begun under the Works Progress Administration.
In 1943, one of them, Lt. Col. Brehon Burke Somervell, who openly despised art, ordered that thousands of Expressionist works that artists had handed over to qualify for monthly stipends were to be ripped off their stretchers, wrapped into bales, and sold by the pound. A Long Island scrap dealer happened upon the sale and bought heaps of the canvases for plumbing insulation. When he discovered what he had, he sold the paintings to a Lower East Side junk dealer in New York City, but many of them were ruined or heavily damaged.
"This was happening all over the country," says Mr. Dijkstra. As early as 1923, Expressionism was disparaged as "Ellis Island art," and such prejudice registered loudly two decades later. Almost all of the works jettisoned were by artists with "alien" names. At the time, he explains, that meant "not Nordic," under "a straightforward concept of racial superiority."
Tainted With Social Realism
Ironically, given that this thinking resembled Nazi race politics, many American critics disparaged Expressionism by likening it to Nazi and Soviet "Social Realism." But while both forms depicted realistic subjects, American Expressionism attacked injustice and warned of the dangers of conformity, while Social Realism reveled in triumphant workers and happy peasants with heroic visages and muscular bodies.
If any movement should have been likened to Social Realism, Mr. Dijkstra suggests – challenging current conceptions of American art of the period – it was American Regionalism, which in the 1930s was at loggerheads with Expressionism. Artists like Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood, he argues, really were candy-coating the America of the time, painting "all those wonderful workers in the fields, warbling while they tied corn."
When victory in World War II came, "you couldn't have a Regionalist art saying, 'We're not going to deal with those other people out there, we're going to paint the hills of Iowa.' No, you had to have an internationally focused art."
Enter abstraction.
The work of artists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning certainly was captivating, Mr. Dijkstra allows. As a teenager in the early 1950s, he was himself a "true believer." Then, "you couldn't consider yourself au courant about anything related to the visual arts and not love abstraction."
"In terms of the taste of the average person, that art made no sense at all," he says. But an influential new breed of critics emerged to tell the public what to think about art, and to direct corporate and private collectors to buy it. Although most of these critics, like Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, were Jewish, they staked their claim to legitimacy, says Mr. Dijkstra, by denouncing "the predominantly Jewish, socially conscious artists who had, by their insistence on political action, identified themselves to the Nordic ruling class as 'Jewish Bolsheviks.' "
Greenberg's powerful legacy, he says, was the idea that great art announces itself on "a mystical level," and that art addressing the concerns of the masses is vulgar kitsch. Within that schema, abstraction, a kind of "art for art's sake," boomed.
Government agencies helped out. The State Department and even the Central Intelligence Agency generously financed Abstract Expressionists, along with many other intellectuals whose output was perceived to reduce the Communist threat, notes Mr. Dijkstra, citing Frances Stonor Saunders's The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New Press, 2000). Corporations got on board, too. Their coffers swelling in the postwar years, they built huge headquarters buildings, "and you don't put a large mural of the people you're exploiting in your entry hall," the professor says. Businessmen opted for canvases that filled big spaces, and "the Abstract Expressionists instantly responded."
In a bizarre dynamic, says Mr. Dijkstra, the staunchest cultural conservatives denounced abstract art as outrageous, which helped its creators to feel avant-garde and the corporations to feel liberal: "Look, we're buying this abstract, radical work." That, too, he writes, was Greenberg's legacy. He made being vaguely to the left and yet "snobbishly horrified at the 'vulgarity' of political statement in art not just acceptable, but stylish."
Mr. Dijkstra by no means is out to denigrate Abstract Expressionism. What does annoy him, clearly, is that abstract art has retained such sway ever since those cultural arbiters, "in a brilliant appropriation, took the one thing that seems the most absolutely contrary to the bourgeois mind and made it into a mainstay of bourgeois culture." Even academic art historians, although generally more left-leaning than art critics, have for the most part fallen in with the tendency to ignore American Expressionism.
Mr. Dijkstra, by contrast, has for 40 years chosen to delve into art that insisted on acknowledging social realities. His interest culminated three years ago in a 9,000-mile, two-month trek around the country to search for surviving American Expressionist works. Museum curators told him over and over that they had let go of them. Many works that were renowned in their day still sell for a song at auctions.
Some Expressionists have fared better. The Japanese-American painter Yasuo Kuniyoshi, although little known in his native United States, commands high prices in Japan. Jacob Lawrence has been rediscovered, along with other African-American artists. Not so Eldzier Cortor. "He was, as far as I'm concerned, one of the most brilliant painters of the 1940s," says Mr. Dijkstra. "He was very adventurous, very unusual. He should be considered as great as Jackson Pollock."
Early readers have hailed Mr. Dijkstra's book as "brilliant." It "overturns most of our preconceptions about American art," says Henry Adams, chair of art history at Case Western Reserve University and former curator of American art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. "He finds affinities between the work of some quite well-known artists and some completely forgotten artists."
The result is "more innovative in its selection and emphases than anything I've seen heretofore," says Charles C. Eldredge, a professor of American art and culture at the University of Kansas and former director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art.
Mr. Dijkstra's view is of someone born of Dutch parents in Indonesia who was schooled there and in Switzerland before settling in the United States. "By his own upbringing and training," says Mr. Eldredge, "he brings with him all the virtues of outsider vision, which allows his fresh insights."
People will be able to form their own opinions of American Expressionism at the exhibition Mr. Dijkstra has curated, which will be at the Columbus (Ohio) Museum of Art from May 22 to August 24, and then at the Portland (Ore.) Museum of Art, the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, and the Montclair and Newark (N.J.) Art Museums. Concurrent exhibitions of representative Expressionists will take place in Boston, New York, and Washington.
"My hope," says Mr. Dijkstra, "is that people are going to say, 'I had no idea there was so much interesting art.' Not necessarily, 'Wow, this is great art.' People never say 'This is great art' at first."
Spending so much time with it has persuaded him. He says: "All the things that are best about America are in this art."
Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
