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At a time of great activity in art with American subjects, and of great expectations for it, in many quarters, Diego Rivera achieved a coup that historians of our formative aesthetic expression, and of our transitional social estate, may at a future time find splendidly entertaining. This Mexican, educated in French post-Impressionism and active in the Mexican revolution, saw himself in the line of journeyman painters who from remote times have taken entire wall areas on which to make a record of their faith, as is reported in his Portrait of America. In the pay of art's most conspicuous private patron of modern times, in Rockefeller Center, he painted his version of what the world (including Radio City) would be like when capitalism was overthrown and the workers had taken charge. His theme, handed out by the general architectural staff in charge of the building group, was "Man at the crossroads, looking with uncertainty but hope and vision to the choosing of a course leading to a new and better future."
On April 24, 1933, a New York evening paper carried the headline: "Rivera Paints Scenes of Communist Activity and John D. Jr. Foots Bill." On May 9, following Rivera's refusal to make changes that had been requested in the meantime, work was stopped. To quote Rivera: "The entrance to the building was closed off with a thick curtain (was it also bulletproof?), while the streets surrounding the Center were patrolled by mounted policemen and the upper air was filled with the roar of airplanes flying around the skyscraper menaced by the portrait of Lenin. . . ." Before he left the building an hour later, the carpenters had already covered the mural. All that remained of it in a short time was a film in a Leica camera, with some of the detail which had been covertly photographed by an assistant when the trouble became imminent.
Some of the earliest " American Scene" art championed a pioneer way of life against alien influences, while some of the earliest workers' propaganda art made melodramatic use of starving workers, slavedriving industry, and politics in the guise of a monster. But the depression, continuing to the mid-thirties as the central problem of all American life, tended to draw professional artists together against a common, and a grim, enemy. Backwoods art, lynchings and mob scenes, Hogarthian satire, and Bosch-inspired fantasy bordering on Surrealism, were seen in exhibitions together, exhibitions into which French modern art influences were returning.
The partnership between the artist and the Federal Government, effected through the formation, in 1935, of the Federal Arts Project, became an outstanding accomplishment in American art history. This Project gave employment to more than five thousand unemployed artists and began the work of absorbing emergency artist units organized formerly in some states or regions under the Public Works Administration Projects, and of administering a nationwide service. Related to this undertaking, and inspired by the early experiences with unemployed painters and sculptors, the Federal Government meantime established the permanent policy of commissioning art work for all important public buildings in future.
The meaning of government subsidy and government patronage to sometimes desperately driven men and women, enabling them to do their own work in their own fashion, did not become generally apparent at once. But as the nineteen thirties are ending, more than a quarter of a century after post-Impressionism came to America, "government art" is prominent in post offices, courthouses, and school buildings (as well as community centers of all sorts) in every part of the country, often where there had never been art of any kind before. There is an often visible and painstaking effort on the artist's part to present his conception of American democracy in symbols drawn from the familiar everyday environment or the historic background of the place. At its best, the work rises to spontaneous vision and creative distinction.
Throughout the wider range of contemporary painting and sculpture, as in this, there are everywhere evidences that the problems of plastic form that belong manifestly to the twentieth century have been studied, if not finally solved. There are evidences also that the artists generally are concentrating upon their own country or their own region, in its physical and spiritual aspects, and that the human and social values are of primary importance to them.
The individuals whose work is represented here all appear as contributors one way or another to the vital and dynamic character of contemporary art and help to account for it. Their importance is not in their service to any academism old or new, to "French art" or "native American art," but is in the degree to which the unique quality of artistic sensibility appears in the individual product. Nothing that any of these individuals is doing takes place without regard for the changes which have been going on in European art for more than a half century, and no artist's career is formed independently of the consideration of what is the American aesthetic heritage. The next two chapters are therefore devoted to these two questions: the authority for contemporary American art practice in European art since Cézanne and its ancestry in pioneer American life and taste.
Van Wyck Brooks said, in The Flowering of New England, that the test and measure of all creative work is its power to transubstantiate the world. It is easy enough, he wrote, in the interpretation of Emerson's philosophy of art, to repaint the mythology of the Greeks, the medieval Church, the feudal castle, the martyrdoms and the crusades of former times, but the test is whether one can recapture the same creative power, and can convert into universal symbols the energies acting at this hour in New York, in Chicago, in San Francisco. That is the question which our artists of today are asking themselves as it has never before been asked of American creative workers.
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