Date of Award

5-8-2024

Author's School

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Author's Department

Art History & Archaeology

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Degree Type

Dissertation

Abstract

American art in the 1930s was shaped by questions of social relevance and utility. The crisis of the Great Depression left millions destitute, and the contradictions of capitalism were exposed for all to see. Many artists and intellectuals, despite their marginal and specialized status in American social life, recognized that there was a need to connect their work to the mass mobilization of the working class, who were organizing in the face of unprecedented poverty and misery. The culture of working-class radicalism in this period, now commonly referred to as the “Red Decade,” was the result of the rapid development of class consciousness and the need to develop strategies of revolutionary praxis to fight oppression, exploitation, and racism. Organizations like the John Reed Club and publications like New Masses acted as sites for the growth of working-class culture, and engaged artists worked to contribute to the revolutionary emancipation of the working class. These social and historical conditions prompted a complex discourse around the responsibility of artists and their relationship with the labor movement, and these questions were made all the more complicated by the creation of the New Deal art programs. Philip Goldstein (later Guston) began his artistic career in this complicated and tense social environment. At the time of the stock market crash in 1929, Guston was only 17, the son of working-class immigrants from Ukraine. He was already a precocious artist, and the crisis of the Depression brought him in contact with the rapidly developing culture of the working class. He encountered a wide range of artistic and intellectual interlocutors at a very young age in Los Angeles. He participated in the John Reed Club, working collectively with other young artists to contribute to the labor movement. His personal interest in Quattrocento Renaissance fresco painting coincided with a broader interest in the possibilities of public mural painting, inspired by the example of Mexican public muralism. He spent the decade seeking opportunities to create public artwork while advancing through his own individual artistic and political development. In 1936, he moved to New York, and eventually secured employment through the New Deal art programs. Through these programs, he completed public mural commissions in New York, Georgia, New Hampshire, and Washington D.C. His experiences as a government artist, which gave him the opportunity to maintain an artistic practice without having to get another job, were formative for Guston, and allowed him to establish an artistic career. He then went on to have a long career as a celebrated member of the New York School, cementing his place in American art history. In this dissertation, I undertake an extended and wide-ranging analysis of both Guston’s early career and the social world of American painting in the 1930s. Guston’s status within the history of American art has grown in recent years; his work is increasingly seen as a unique and vital example within the canon of 20th century American painting. However, this characterization of Guston has emerged in spite of the lack of engagement with his early work. His explicitly political work has been explained away as simple juvenilia, a “product of the times” that is an exception to his otherwise important work as a high modernist. Ellen Landau, in her analysis of Guston’s early work, points out this discrepancy in scholarship on Guston, arguing that the extent of the importance of left-wing politics in Guston’s artistic education “has yet to be acknowledged.” In this project, I take her claim as a call to action, and argue that Guston’s development as a painter in the 1930s, shaped by the massive historical and social forces of period, is crucially important to our understanding of both his work as an individual and of the social role of art in twentieth century American culture.

Language

English (en)

Chair and Committee

Angela Miller

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