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WiSe 13/14: Art and Radicalism in the United States, c. 1901-1929

Andrew Hemingway

Comments

The starting point of this course is the year of the founding of the American Socialist Party (SP); its end point is marked by the Wall Street Crash and the onset of the Great Depression. The course also pivots around two other events, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and US involvement in World War I from 1917-18. Although these episodes are not echoed directly in stylistic or iconographical shifts in the arts, their cultural impact was profound. The period prior to World War I witnessed the SP and the great Syndicalist union the International Workers' of the World (IWW) reach the height of their influence, as well as the rise of the New Woman and the founding of the first national civil rights movement. These developments provided the ideological framework for the radical subculture of New York City's Greenwich Village, which fostered revolutionary magazines such as The Masses and Mother Earth, and dissentient artistic groupings such as the Ashcan School and the Provincetown Players. At the same time, European modernist tendencies in the arts were increasingly taken up by American artists as a sign of their counter-cultural orientation. Over 1917-20, the war, the accompanying Red Scare, and the Palmer Raids broke up the radical culture of the pre-war period and contributed to the mood of disenchantment associated with the phrase "the Lost Generation," which has often been taken to define the culture of the 1920s. However, even with the political formations of the SP and IWW in long-term decline - and with a communist party that was small, beleaguered and fragmented - American modernist culture of the 1920s was distinctly anti-capitalist in tenor. This course tracks the culture of radical dissent across the little magazines, the modernist novel, experimental photography and film, Dada, the art of the "New Negro," and the post-Cubist painting of the decade. Preliminary Reading and Viewing: Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (1991) Adele Heller & Lois Rudnick (ed.), 1915: The Cultural Moment (1991) Yale University Art Gallery Art for the Masses (1911-1917): A Radical Magazine and its Graphics (catalogue by Rebecca Zurier, 1985) Rebecca Zurrier et. al., Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan School and their New York (National Museum of American Art, 1996) Andrew Hemingway The Mysticism of Money: Precisionist Painting and Machine Age America (2013) Novels: Sherwood Anderson and John H. Ferres, Winesburg, Ohio: Text and Criticism (1996) John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (1925; Houghton Mifflin edition, 1991) Watch the movie: Reds (1981, directed by Warren Beatty) close