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Artists On the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926-1956, by Andrew Hemingway. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale Univer sity Press, 2002. $65.00. Pp. 282.
This is an extraordinary volume, in some ways a lifetime effort of dealing with a subject as complex as it is fascinating. Andrew Hemingway has made available to us insights almost entirely lacking outside of the most limited circles of the artistic left in the United States: an overview, with wonderful specifics and marvelous examples, of what left-wing artists did, both in their art and their political work, and how they thought about it all during those years of peak significance.
The book's chief "revisionist" advance over previous treatments of the Communist Party's cultural role in the art world is a simple but decisive one: contrary to decades of anti-communist claims going back to Clement Greenberg's famed Partisan Review essays attacking both Communists and kitsch, no single "socialist realist" model ever ruled supreme, certainly not within the actual work of the most talented left-wing artists. Sometimes, the cultural commissars, all-too-faithfully reflecting current Soviet views, could make it seem so to outsiders, with blazing polemics against modernism. But among the artists themselves, individualistic projects of the most experimental kinds, as far from socialist realism as Picasso was in his own way, continued to flourish, sometimes encouraged from the left and sometimes conducted in face of left critics as hostile as the Establishment variety.
The artists, we now conclude, knew better than the Communist Party proper, although a generous handful of critics also delivered incisive commentary as well as publishing art, attending (or staging) gallery shows, and above all encouraging the presence of very likely the most working-class audience that American...