Paint By Numbers

To the average art snob, such comments are of no consequence, because they reflect what ordinary people do when confronted with works of art: they look at the subject matter, not the art. From this perspective, Kantor’s painting could just as well have been a magazine illustration; that woman would still have remarked to her son, “We used to see games like that in Denver.”

In America, this art-snob perspective reached a zenith of sorts in 1939, when the critic Clement Greenberg published “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” a famous essay positing two ways of looking at art: the “cultivated” way, which focuses on the formal attributes of a work and fits them into an unfolding historical process; and the “naïve” way, which simply reacts to the scene or personage being portrayed.

Greenberg gives the example of a Russian peasant looking at a picture by Ilya Repin, the great realist painter touted by Stalin as a template for Soviet art. With Trotsky, Greenberg believed that to serve the revolution, art had to be on the cutting edge of modernism: the avant-garde. Thus, he dismissed Repin’s work as “kitsch” that “predigests art for the spectator and .  .  . provides him with a short cut .  .  . that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art.” Repin’s technique, acquired at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts and honed in Paris, is so masterful that it allows the peasant to perceive “no discontinuity between art and life.”

Thus, the “naïve” spectator looking at Baseball at Night sees only the red-dirt diamond illuminated by racks of yellow lights, the little clubhouse and radio station with windows aglow against the night sky, the players captured in classic poses anticipating the pitch, the candy-colored spectators jammed into low bleachers, the neat row of bats, the American flag, and the black-clad umpire standing with arms judiciously folded.

By contrast, the “cultivated” spectator sees Kantor’s “abstract technique”: the way he uses the lines of the chalked diamond, flagposts, batting cage, and long curved bleacher to pull the composition together. There must be a golden section in there somewhere, because the effect is so harmonious that the eye barely registers how absurdly small the playing field is, or how improbable it is that a bleacher would be curved. The cultivated eye is further seduced by Kantor’s “painterly” style: His brushes were wet when he sketched all those lively human forms, and while the paint has long since dried, the fluidity of his deft, playful touch remains visible.

To Greenberg, these two ways of looking are all but mutually exclusive. Yet to judge by the actions of the aforementioned woman, this was not the case with her. Unlike most museumgoers, she did not plod dutifully from picture to picture, spending 2.5 seconds in front of each one. Rather she crisscrossed the rooms with smiling son in tow, stopping before all the good paintings and ignoring the rest. And her response to Tenement Flats, a large, brilliant canvas by California painter Millard Sheets–“Look at that!”–suggested an appreciation for pure “plastic values” that, according to Greenberg, is found only in the “cultivated.”

That woman is hardly unique. Most people, including most art connoisseurs, find it unnatural to look at a well-wrought picture without responding to the subject it depicts. After all, Van Gogh didn’t paint cow flaps, he painted sunflowers. Yet to Greenberg, any such surrender to “the vividly recognizable, the miraculous, and the sympathetic” is hopelessly reactionary. Indeed, he held that the future of humanity depended on visual art being purged of its most ancient and primal power: representation.

Why stake out such an extreme view? It is not enough to say that Greenberg was a Marxist. In the 1930s Marxism was the art world’s dominant intellectual framework; indeed, Greenberg’s critique was largely aimed at other Marxists. Within the Marxist framework, there was general agreement on two things: first, that 19th-century realism, which began in the 1850s when Gustave Courbet broke with the French Academy to include humble people among his subjects, was the quintessential bourgeois style; and second, that this bourgeois style was being overthrown by a new style emerging from the proletariat. What Marxists disagreed about vehemently–and in the Soviet Union, fatally–was the right direction for this new proletarian style. For the Trotskyists, it should have been an outgrowth of modernism; for the Stalinists, a version of realism.

By a curious accident of timing, the paintings in the SAAM exhibition were created soon after Stalin handed down his notorious edict, “On the Reconstruction of Literary and Art Organizations,” which required all good socialists to purge their work of modernism and abstraction and adopt a standardized style called Socialist Realism that presented ideologically approved subjects in a manner that left no question, doubt, or mystery about their meaning. (Needless to add, Socialist Realism did not depict reality–far from it.)

The remnants of this propagandistic style can still be seen throughout the former Soviet bloc and Iraq, and its legacy lives on in China, North Korea, and every other nation where a Great Leader or all-powerful party still undertakes the work of engineering human souls. In one of history’s more amusing ironies, a remarkably similar style arose during the 1930s in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, where Mussolini and Hitler followed Stalin in excoriating modernism and ordering the production of didactic, easy-to-read art that borrowed from, but swiftly debased, the techniques of 19th-century realism.

As it happens, the paintings in “1934” were produced under a benign version of the same antimodernist rule. In the United States, the political right had long distrusted modernism, not only because of its difficulty but also because many modernists were foreigners, leftists, or both. What’s fascinating–and confusing–about the 1930s is that many American leftists took the same position, for a different reason. Following the Stalinist party line, they deemed modernism too challenging to serve as mass propaganda. It was this view, not Greenberg’s, that informed the choice of art in both the PWAP and the subsequent Federal Art Project. It was okay to dabble in modernism, as long as the work did not stray too far from representation–and in the case of the PWAP, depicted some aspect of “the American scene.”

Does this mean SAAM has mounted an exhibition of leftwing propaganda? The student of Socialist Realism will find echoes here, especially in the sections marked “Industry” and “Labor.” For example, Earle Richardson’s Employment of Negroes in Agriculture recalls the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, whose work inspired many of the public murals created under the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture, launched in 1934.

A dissenting Communist whose great talent transcended the confines of ideology, Rivera received private commissions to create murals in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York’s Rockefeller Center–although that last, an ambitious work called Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future, was destroyed after Rivera refused to comply with Nelson Rockefeller’s request that he replace the face of Lenin with that of an ordinary worker.

Notably, the destruction of Rivera’s mural occurred in February 1934, one month and a half after the launch of the PWAP. In today’s terms, it probably had a “chilling effect” on grantees itching to put Lenin’s face into their pictures. But compared with the artist-drones toiling under Communism and fascism, PWAP artists were free to paint whatever they liked, so long as they stayed within the parameters mentioned above. If some of them produced good socialist art, it’s doubtless because they were good socialists. It’s worth adding, though, that without the grants that kept them from starving that winter (one of the coldest on record), those artists might well have become even better socialists.

This background is essential to any reasonable understanding of America’s first foray into government arts funding. But while “1934” is well worth visiting for the dozen or so fine paintings it contains, the materials accompanying the exhibition–the wall texts, catalogue, and website–are surprisingly dumbed-down. Indeed, they are worse than dumbed-down; they are evasive. With the exception of one wall text–a quote from the German-born artist Paul Kelpe to the effect that the PWAP “refused to accept ‘nonrepresentational’ art”–“1934” contains no references to the PWAP’s antimodernist stance, and certainly no explanation of it.

Was this an oversight? I don’t think so. The message of “1934,” set forth by SAAM director Elizabeth Broun in the catalogue, is that artists are not “marginal ‘extras’ in our society” but “workers deserving of support.” Recalling that the WPA was criticized for including several projects for artists, Broun quotes Franklin Roosevelt’s comment: “Why not? They are human beings. They have to live.”

This point is remarkably similar to the one made by the arts lobby in early 2009, when Congress was debating the inclusion of $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. When the funds were finally voted on, the NEA’s Patrice Walker Powell commented that, at last, artists were being “dignified as part of the American workforce.”

To the conservative who asks how, exactly, the federal government acquired the power to confer dignity on American workers, the liberal would likely follow FDR’s logic: Workers need jobs; artists are workers; therefore, artists need jobs. There’s nothing wrong with this logic, except that in the United States it will fly politically only when the economy–and the nonprofit sector that has historically supported the arts–are in desperate straits. And even then, it will not fly if the artists being helped are seen as hostile to the values of ordinary Americans. The smart people behind the PWAP understood this, which is why they required grantees to paint the American scene and stick to a more or less representational style.

Today, the arts lobby would like to see a restoration of the endowment’s program of individual artist grants, which were cut in 1994 in response to a public outcry, led by conservatives but not confined to them, against NEA funding of artists whose work deliberately transgressed widely held standards of propriety, decency, and respect for religion.

One such artist was Robert Mapplethorpe, a handsome gay photographer who died of AIDS in 1989. In fact, Mapplethorpe never received an individual NEA grant. But the endowment did fund “The Perfect Moment,” a retrospective of his work that was scheduled to open at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington a few months after his death. Along with a lot of crisp, fine-veined flower pictures (which now, thanks to the notoriety attached to Mapplethorpe’s name are worth thousands of crisp, fine-veined dollars), that exhibition included the X Portfolio, inspired by the artist’s professed interest in pornography.

In Mapplethorpe’s own words: “There was a feeling I could get looking at pornographic imagery that I thought had never been apparent in art. And I thought if I could somehow retain that feeling .  .  . and make an art statement .  .  . then I would be doing something that is uniquely my own.”

Hence images such as Jim and Tom, Sausalito, in which Jim urinates into the open mouth of Tom (or is it the other way around?) and Self-Portrait, in which the artist, clad (partly) in black leather, crouches with his bare buttocks toward the camera and a bullwhip sticking out of his anus.

The originality of this art statement did not impress Dick Armey, Jesse Helms, and 100 other lawmakers, who raised hell on Capitol Hill until the Corcoran, shaken by the bad publicity and warned by its legal department that because the show also contained photos of naked children it might be prosecuted under the District of Columbia’s child pornography law, cancelled “The Perfect Moment.” However prudent this decision may seem to the innocent bystander, it was reviled by the arts lobby as craven self-censorship.

To this day, the arts lobby is fond of noting that the Mapplethorpe exhibition had been shown without incident in Philadelphia and Chicago before coming to Washington, and that, after the cancellation, it was mounted to general acclaim at the Washington Project for the Arts. What they fail to note, however, is that all three of these venues are “contemporary,” “alternative” arts spaces, patronized mostly by shockproof aficionados. The Corcoran, by contrast, is a major tourist attraction adjacent to the White House that draws thousands of visitors each year, many with offspring in tow and (shall we say) ill-prepared to encounter a graphic tribute to the esoteric thrills of all-male S&M.

Recalling the constraints imposed on government-funded artists back in 1934, our innocent bystander may wonder why the NEA didn’t just cope by imposing some minimal constraints on its grantees. The answer is: It tried. John Frohnmayer, the new chairman appointed by George H.W. Bush, made a half-hearted effort to enforce a congressionally mandated “anti-obscenity pledge,” but all he succeeded in doing was provoking a huge blowback from the arts lobby: lawsuits, polemics, lofty refusals of grants by eminences such as Leonard Bernstein and Joseph Papp.

Next, Congress formed an Independent Commission led by John Brademas, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, president of New York University, and longtime supporter of the NEA. That commission produced one of the most thoughtful reports ever written about government arts funding in America. But by then the culture wars were in full swing, and the endowment was suffering the death of a thousand cuts–including the virtual elimination of individual artist grants in 1994. Perhaps because this last cut was not contested by Jane Alexander, the actress who served as NEA chairman under Bill Clinton, it was accepted by the arts lobby as a necessary sacrifice to save the endowment from total destruction.

But when it came to assigning responsibility for the disaster, the dominant view has always been that a bunch of mad-dog Republicans suddenly went berserk and began attacking unsuspecting painters, actors, musicians, and poets whose only crime was to care deeply about artistic freedom. Of course, when it comes to actually dealing with those mad dogs, this view has been carefully swaddled in the NEA’s usual anodyne language, a quintessentially American blend of 19th-century gentility (art as mentally improving and morally uplifting) and 20th-century boosterism (art as psychologically therapeutic and economically stimulating). This is the native tongue of all arts lobbyists, to say nothing of arts bureaucrats.

Just to cite one example from the “1934” catalogue, the Smithsonian’s Roger G. Kennedy quotes FDR’s remark that “one hundred years from now, my administration will be known for its art, not its relief,” and interprets it to mean “we are a species that can transcend necessity. When we again breathe freely, creation renews and from creation comes–art.”

Doubtless Kennedy was thinking of such inspirational works as Ray Strong’s Golden Gate Bridge, a highlight of “1934” showing that structure partly built against the glorious backdrop of San Francisco Bay. But such lofty language sits ill with the sensibility of a transgressive artist like the late David Wojnarowicz, who fumed, after being defunded by the NEA, that the whole point of art is to make a “radical gesture” asserting the “ungoverned imagination” against “thought police,” “bonehead newscasters,” and (of course) a certain “repulsive senator from zombieland,” whom Wojnarowicz wanted to douse “with a bucket of gasoline and set his putrid ass on fire.”

Such outrage might make sense if the senator in question had been out to censor Wojnarowicz’s work. There are conservatives who wish to outlaw transgressive art, but they are a tiny minority in a vast American population more opposed to censorship than ever before. The real issue was–and is–government funding, which, as stated in the original legislation, is “subject to the conditions that traditionally govern the use of public money.” Chief among those conditions is that public funds be used for public purposes.

I, the taxpayer, respect the right of my fellow citizens to breathe freely, even heavily. I also respect their right to take pictures of themselves while doing so, and to display the results in an art gallery. What I don’t respect is the presumption that I should pay for it unquestioningly.

The arts lobby belittles this “taxpayers’ money” argument, calling it “a perfect if misleading slogan” and reiterating the existence of a firewall between the deliberations of the NEA and the meddling of politicians. This is an important principle, and in some ways, the endowment’s firewall is stronger now than in the 1980s. But such professions in the total autonomy of the endowment seem a bit naïve, coming from people whose general view of politics borders on the paranoid hysteric. No firewall can ever be perfect, because government support of any enterprise is, in the long run, subject to political pressure.

When asked about this still-festering issue, the new chair of the arts endowment, former Yale Drama School professor and broadway impresario Rocco Landesman, was refreshingly candid. “I am in favor of direct grants to artists,” he said. “That’s what we are here for.” But then he added, “Having said that, I don’t think it’s good form for one grantee to spoil it for everybody else by selfishly advancing [his] own agenda at the expense of the entire enterprise. .  .  . I don’t think that we are serving anyone’s purpose by going out and funding art that is of minimum merit and maximum controversy.”

Well, amen. Does this mean the NEA is looking for a way to restore individual artist grants without letting the whole thing turn toxic again? To some degree, the question is moot, because no one wants to make room for a renewed grants program by terminating any of the well-received programs and activities nurtured by Alexander and her successors, Bill Ivey and Dana Gioia. And the only alternative to that would be to double the NEA’s present staff and quadruple its funding, an unlikely prospect even in good economic times.

The question is also moot because while the NEA no longer funds artists directly, it does so indirectly, through its many partnerships with arts organizations in all 50 states, and it is far from clear that these local and regional groups are less immune to the charms of transgressive art than the Mother Ship sitting in the shadow of Capitol Hill.

This is the danger of the system: It is highly decentralized, with wide discretion exercised at many different levels by many different kinds of Americans. But this is also its beauty. If the arts lobby has been making one valid point all these years, it is that you don’t get the beauty without the danger. If you try to control everything from the top, you will have a dead culture, not a living one.

At this juncture, it is probably worth noting that the NEA was never intended to replace the traditional American system of private philanthropic support for the arts. This is what made the endowment politically palatable in the beginning, and it still does. Gioia says that, in recent years, the NEA has been attracting considerable interest from European ministers of culture: “When I was chair, Europeans would lecture me about the superiority of their centralized cultural ministries, then ask why I thought our system worked so much better.” Gioia also mentioned the French writer Frédéric Martel, whose De La Culture en Amérique (2006) argues that French cultural life would be better served by following the American model.

“We need thousands of people defining culture,” Martel says about his own country. “Power should flow bottom-up, not top-down.”

So what is flowing bottom-up these days? The most obvious answer is a change of attitude toward the federal government. Instead of the culture wars’ slings and arrows, the Obama administration is being pelted with cool, creative ideas about how, in Landesman’s words, the arts can “be part of the plans to come out of this recession.”

Underlying some of these ideas is the theory, popularized by economist Richard Florida in 2003, that prosperity grows like crabgrass under the feet of the “creative class,” a baggy term encompassing just about every social type–except, of course, people who are too old, too white, too straight, or too conservative to be “creative.” This is not the place to repeat all the criticisms that have been leveled at Florida’s facile analysis. Suffice it to say that some have come from the left, others from the right, and all have hit the mark sufficiently hard, and one is tempted to say that only an arts lobbyist could continue to find such ideas credible.

The arts lobby is also buzzing and tweeting with pride over how artists played a vital role in getting Barack Obama elected. No matter how often you search for the evidence behind this claim, you will turn up the same two items: The “Hope” poster by graphic artist Shepard Fairey; and the “Yes We Can” hip-hip video by will.i.am, singer for the Black Eyed Peas. Posters and hip-hop are both grassroots art forms, and, as such, they both have an affinity for political protest. What’s striking about these examples, though, is that they are not about protest. Upbeat and user-friendly, they are about hero worship.

To some libertarians, this new eagerness to be of service to the government is a harbinger of totalitarianism to come.

For example, Reason contributor Patrick Corrielche recalls being part of an early August conference call touted by the public relations people at the NEA and the White House as a chance for “artists, producers, promoters, organizers, influencers, marketers, taste-makers, leaders, or just plain cool people to join together and work together to promote a more civically engaged America and celebrate how the arts can be used for a positive change!” Looking askance at this sudden rush to the other side of the political boat, Corrielche frets about the NEA being transformed into a “message machine” cranking out “imagery, songs, films, and literature” to achieve “what Noam Chomsky calls ‘manufacturing consent.’ ”

This is a stretch. In the first place, when Chomsky talked about “manufacturing consent,” he was not predicting a dire future but describing what, to him, was the dire present. Chomsky has long been a favorite among transgressive artists, because until quite recently–last November 4, to be exact–it was fashionable for people on the cutting edge of American culture to assert that the United States government was already a totalitarian regime, whose oppression was all the more effective for being wrapped in the illusion of freedom.

It was from such assertions–typically made by those who have the luxury of living under American totalitarianism, as opposed to some other kind–that the culture of transgression emerged and achieved its intellectual dominance. How amazing to think that it could evaporate so quickly! (And how wonderful.)

Martha Bayles teaches in the honors program at Boston College.