Entitled

Author(s):  
Jennifer C. Lena

Two centuries ago, wealthy entrepreneurs founded the American cathedrals of culture—museums, theater companies, and symphony orchestras—to mirror European art. But today's American arts scene has widened to embrace multitudes: photography, design, comics, graffiti, jazz, and many other forms of folk, vernacular, and popular culture. What led to this dramatic expansion? This book shows how organizational transformations in the American art world—amid a shifting political, economic, technological, and social landscape—made such change possible. By chronicling the development of American art from its earliest days to the present, the book demonstrates that while the American arts may be more open, they are still unequal. It examines key historical moments, such as the creation of the Museum of Primitive Art and the funneling of federal and state subsidies during the New Deal to support the production and display of culture. Charting the efforts to define American genres, styles, creators, and audiences, the book looks at the ways democratic values helped legitimate folk, vernacular, and commercial art, which was viewed as nonelite. Yet, even as art lovers have acquired an appreciation for more diverse culture, they carefully select and curate works that reflect their cosmopolitan, elite, and moral tastes.

1972 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-296
Author(s):  
Helen A. Harrison

The current nostalgic interest in the 1920s and '30s has brought about more than the revival of period fashion and interior decoration in America. For anyone concerned with die visual arts it has illuminated the most exciting and prolific decade diat country has ever seen. During die Depression the official approach to art and die artist was radically different from anything before or since, and probably from anything in the Western world. That this should have come about is in itself amazing, die more so as it was done through Congressional legislation, supported by the President.


Author(s):  
Arleen Pancza Graham

Edward Hopper was known for his realist paintings of American life in the 1930s through to the early 1960s. Born in Nyack, New York, north of Manhattan and across the Hudson river, his family was successful and solidly middle class. Although his parents supported his study of art after his 1899 high school graduation, their conservative viewpoints informed the trajectory of his efforts; they encouraged him to seek a career in commercial art so that he would have a reliable income. He enrolled in the Correspondence School of Illustration in New York City, supporting himself as an illustrator until 1925, creating over five hundred works. From 1900 until 1906 he studied at the New York School of Art with Robert Henri, whose admiration for European artists inspired Hopper to travel abroad, which he did three times during his early career (1906, 1909, 1910). Hopper also studied with William Merritt Chase, and Kenneth Hayes Miller, and was determined to succeed as a fine rather than commercial artist. It was in these classes that he met friends like Rockwell Kent, Guy Pène du Bois, Reginald Marsh and Stuart Davis, who would become important figures in the art world of the time, as well as his future wife, Josephine Nivison, whom he married in 1924. It was during these early years that Hopper began to exhibit his works at the Whitney Studio Club in New York, the precursor to the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1920, Hopper had his first one-person exhibition at the Whitney Studio Club, and it foreshadowed his future relationship with that institution.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-281
Author(s):  
Sylvia Dümmer Scheel

El artículo analiza la diplomacia pública del gobierno de Lázaro Cárdenas centrándose en su opción por publicitar la pobreza nacional en el extranjero, especialmente en Estados Unidos. Se plantea que se trató de una estrategia inédita, que accedió a poner en riesgo el “prestigio nacional” con el fin de justificar ante la opinión pública estadounidense la necesidad de implementar las reformas contenidas en el Plan Sexenal. Aprovechando la inusual empatía hacia los pobres en tiempos del New Deal, se construyó una imagen específica de pobreza que fuera higiénica y redimible. Ésta, sin embargo, no generó consenso entre los mexicanos. This article analyzes the public diplomacy of the government of Lázaro Cárdenas, focusing on the administration’s decision to publicize the nation’s poverty internationally, especially in the United States. This study suggests that this was an unprecedented strategy, putting “national prestige” at risk in order to explain the importance of implementing the reforms contained in the Six Year Plan, in the face of public opinion in the United States. Taking advantage of the increased empathy felt towards the poor during the New Deal, a specific image of hygienic and redeemable poverty was constructed. However, this strategy did not generate agreement among Mexicans.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-254
Author(s):  
Andreu Espasa

De forma un tanto paradójica, a finales de los años treinta, las relaciones entre México y Estados Unidos sufrieron uno de los momentos de máxima tensión, para pasar, a continuación, a experimentar una notable mejoría, alcanzando el cénit en la alianza política y militar sellada durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. El episodio catalizador de la tensión y posterior reconciliación fue, sin duda, el conflicto diplomático planteado tras la nacionalización petrolera de 1938. De entre los factores que propiciaron la solución pacífica y negociada al conflicto petrolero, el presente artículo se centra en analizar dos fenómenos del momento. En primer lugar, siguiendo un orden de relevancia, se examina el papel que tuvo la Guerra Civil Española. Aunque las posturas de ambos gobiernos ante el conflicto español fueron sustancialmente distintas, las interpretaciones y las lecciones sobre sus posibles consecuencias permitieron un mayor entendimiento entre los dos países vecinos. En segundo lugar, también se analizarán las afinidades ideológicas entre el New Deal y el cardenismo en el contexto de la crisis mundial económica y política de los años treinta, con el fin de entender su papel lubricante en las relaciones bilaterales de la época. Somewhat paradoxically, at the end of the 1930s, the relationship between Mexico and the United States experienced one of its tensest moments, after which it dramatically improved, reaching its zenith in the political and military alliance cemented during World War II. The catalyst for this tension and subsequent reconciliation was, without doubt, the diplomatic conflict that arose after the oil nationalization of 1938. Of the various factors that led to a peaceful negotiated solution to the oil conflict, this article focuses on analyzing two phenomena. Firstly—in order of importance—this article examines the role that the Spanish Civil War played. Although the positions of both governments in relation to the Spanish war were significantly different, the interpretations and lessons concerning potential consequences enabled a greater understanding between the two neighboring countries. Secondly, this article also analyzes the ideological affinities between the New Deal and Cardenismo in the context of the global economic and political crisis of the thirties, seeking to understand their role in facilitating bilateral relations during that period.


Author(s):  
Nancy Woloch

This chapter traces the changes in federal and state protective policies from the New Deal through the 1950s. In contrast to the setbacks of the 1920s, the New Deal revived the prospects of protective laws and of their proponents. The victory of the minimum wage for women workers in federal court in 1937 and the passage in 1938 of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which extended labor standards to men, represented a peak of protectionist achievement. This achievement rested firmly on the precedent of single-sex labor laws for which social feminists—led by the NCL—had long campaigned. However, “equal rights” gained momentum in the postwar years, 1945–60. By the start of the 1960s, single-sex protective laws had resumed their role as a focus of contention in the women's movement.


Author(s):  
Landon R. Y. Storrs

The loyalty investigations triggered by the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s marginalized many talented women and men who had entered government service during the Great Depression seeking to promote social democracy as a means to economic reform. Their influence over New Deal policymaking and their alliances with progressive labor and consumer movements elicited a powerful reaction from conservatives, who accused them of being subversives. This book draws on newly declassified records of the federal employee loyalty program—created in response to fears that Communists were infiltrating the U.S. government—to reveal how disloyalty charges were used to silence these New Dealers and discredit their policies. Because loyalty investigators rarely distinguished between Communists and other leftists, many noncommunist leftists were forced to leave government or deny their political views. This book finds that loyalty defendants were more numerous at higher ranks of the civil service than previously thought, and that many were women, or men with accomplished leftist wives. Uncovering a forceful left-feminist presence in the New Deal, the book shows how opponents on the Right exploited popular hostility to powerful women and their “effeminate” spouses. The loyalty program not only destroyed many promising careers, it prohibited discussion of social democratic policy ideas in government circles, narrowing the scope of political discourse to this day. This book demonstrates how the Second Red Scare undermined the reform potential of the New Deal and crippled the American welfare state.


Author(s):  
Amy C. Offner

In the years after 1945, a flood of U.S. advisors swept into Latin America with dreams of building a new economic order and lifting the Third World out of poverty. These businessmen, economists, community workers, and architects went south with the gospel of the New Deal on their lips, but Latin American realities soon revealed unexpected possibilities within the New Deal itself. In Colombia, Latin Americans and U.S. advisors ended up decentralizing the state, privatizing public functions, and launching austere social welfare programs. By the 1960s, they had remade the country's housing projects, river valleys, and universities. They had also generated new lessons for the United States itself. When the Johnson administration launched the War on Poverty, U.S. social movements, business associations, and government agencies all promised to repatriate the lessons of development, and they did so by multiplying the uses of austerity and for-profit contracting within their own welfare state. A decade later, ascendant right-wing movements seeking to dismantle the midcentury state did not need to reach for entirely new ideas: they redeployed policies already at hand. This book brings readers to Colombia and back, showing the entanglement of American societies and the contradictory promises of midcentury statebuilding. The untold story of how the road from the New Deal to the Great Society ran through Latin America, the book also offers a surprising new account of the origins of neoliberalism.


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