PARTISAN REVIEW
619
the FAP and the New York World's Fair of 1939-1940, and the New
York City Municipal Art Galleries. The archival book ends with a
"dialogue" in which five of the veterans and the editor hash over the
consequences and implications of the experiment in government art
patronage.
Reading
The New Deal Art Projects
is like overhearing a disjointed
rap session by a group of alumni reminiscing about the old days. The
essays, as might be expected, overlap; the authors interpolate their pages
with lists of names, galleries, exhibitions and the like which art historians
of the period will undoubtedly find useful but which are too often
unsatisfactorily integrated into the fabric of the narratives. The editor
would have been well advised to preface the specialized essays with an
overview of the art scene in the 1930s by someone as knowledgeable,
say, as Donald Egbert, an art historian well informed on the subject
of social radicalism and the arts.
Lincoln Rothchild's "Artists' Organizations of the Depression De–
cade" pays insufficient attention to the Communist party's role in the
formation of the Artists' Union and later of the American Artists' Con–
gresses and the effect of the shifting Party line on aesthetic debates in
this period. The extent of the Party's domination of artists' unions and
associations may very well be exaggerated, as Rothchild suggests, but it
is not merely coincidental that the CP vigorously backed the WPA art
programs even though the radicals on relief apparently paid little
attention to Party directives as they applied to the fine arts and even
though some of the good Stalinists among them were tainted with
Formalism.
These qualifications detract very little from the value of O'Connor's
compilation nor do they invalidate the achievements of the artists and
supervisors, well or little known, who are mentioned in its pages. The
contributors, graduates of the Federal Art Project, are loyal to their
Alma Mater if not entirely uncritical. Edward Laning, author of the
essay on "The New Deal Mural Projects," sees the Depression decade
as the worst and best of times, "our Golden Age, the only humane era
in our history, the one brief period when we permitted ourselves to be
good." In the opinion of Audrey McMahon, former director of the
New York region, the Federal Art Project offers a model "for the artists
and public of tomorrow," and she concludes: "never in the history of
any land has so much cultural progress been achieved in so brief a
time as in the New Deal years."
"It
was a rich and exciting experience,
both esthetically and socially," writes the sculptor, Robert Cronbach,
"and one I should have hated to miss." Jacob Kainen remembers the
Project days "with mixed feelings." He calls attention to the uninviting
