postponed<\/a> by three major world museums over concern that material depicting racism would be interpreted as racist). An extraordinarily delicate woodcut, View of Atlanta<\/i>\u00a0(1935), by Hale Woodruff, a black artist who studied with Diego Rivera and is better known as a muralist, shows a large woman ascending rickety stairs to a rickety house, with grace and in high heels.<\/p>\n Some of the artists were members of the Communist Party or involved in left movements, and the exhibition does a good job of highlighting those relationships, presenting, for instance, Alice Neel\u2019s eponymous depiction of her fellow communist Kenneth Fearing, a poet, which shows a bloody skeleton intertwined with his heart. (As Neel once put it, \u201cHis heart bled for the grief of the world.\u201d) Other artists in the show with leftist commitments include Shahn and Olds. The exhibition features a clip from Charlie Chaplin\u2019s Modern<\/i> Times (1936), a comic and terrifying glimpse of the inhumanity of work under capitalism. (\u201cI am not a Communist,\u201d Chaplin said in 1942, \u201cbut I am proud to say I feel pretty pro-communist.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Art for the Millions<\/em> includes graphically elegant Communist propaganda from the period, too: covers from the New Masses<\/i> (both Yiddish and English versions), a party poster \u201cagainst hunger and war,\u201d and Hugo Gellert\u2019s haunting lithographs for the 1934 edition of The Communist Manifesto<\/i>.<\/p>\n But as the label copy for the show notes, it wasn\u2019t only the politically identified artists and organizations who displayed a preoccupation with labor. The famous street photographer, Weegee, has a striking 1940 image of a protest over the murder of a union agent.<\/p>\nCover of volume 8, no. 3 of New Masses<\/cite>, September 1932. (Marxists Internet Archive)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nArt for the Millions<\/em> does an excellent job of highlighting the New Deal\u2019s role in funding this work. Many of the artists and works were underwritten by the Federal Art Project, which, as part of FDR\u2019s Works Progress Administration, supported some ten thousand artists during the Great Depression, virtually without restriction on content or subject matter, and is believed to be responsible for about two hundred thousand works of art. This robust government backing for visual art wasn\u2019t a technocratic whim: as art critic Ben Davis has noted, the Roosevelt administration\u2019s policy grew out of pressure from leftist artists and their organizations. While in some periods the independence and isolation of the artist has been valorized, in the 1930s, communities of artists supported one another, encouraged political work, and agitated to create resources for it.<\/p>\nThe show also highlights the work used to advertise public goods: a series of posters celebrating the United States\u2019 National Parks and the 1937 series of simple-yet-dramatic posters by Lester Beall promoting the Rural Electrification Administration, a government office that lent money to electricity cooperatives run by farming communities.<\/p>\n
The leftist labor politics of the present, while more visible and robust than at any time in years, seem disconnected from the production of art and culture. The reverse is also true, with the art world almost synonymous with the monied classes and working-class artists lacking in public support. While gestures at racial justice \u2014 or improved representation \u2014 are common in New York City\u2019s museums and galleries, they often feel superficial. This exhibition reminds us that it doesn\u2019t have to be that way.<\/p>\n
Art for the Millions<\/em> is tremendous, both politically uplifting and aesthetically awesome and will be up until December 10. If you\u2019re in, near, or passing through New York City, you shouldn\u2019t miss it.<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n\n\nThis post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The last time New York City\u2019s Metropolitan Museum of Art was prominent in socialist conversation was probably in 2021 when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attended the Met Gala, a lavish annual display of wealth and fashion, wearing a white dress with the words \u201cTax the Rich\u201d emblazoned in red. Whatever you made of that intervention \u2014 protest? [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1646,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272914"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1646"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1272914"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272914\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1272915,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272914\/revisions\/1272915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1272914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1272914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1272914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}