In his Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926–1956, Andrew Hemingway provides a materialist history of the left movement in the visual arts in the United States, beginning with the founding of the magazine New Masses in 1926. The year 1956 is a more symbolic terminus: the date the American Communist Party (CPUSA) “imploded,” to use the author’s oblique characterization. (Specifically, this was the year Nikita Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin, among other critical events, resulting in an exodus of members from an already weakened and contracted organization.) Extensively researched, this important and provocative book challenges much existing scholarship on social and revolutionary art practices of the period and the impact of the CPUSA upon them. Hemingway cites the need for more substantive scholarship by art historians better informed about Communist institutions, practices, and shifting aesthetic ideology, and he then delivers in this clearly written yet complex study. He also provides a corrective to the tendency to focus upon only the “Red Decade” of the 1930s, demonstrating conclusively “the error of the widespread assumption that the ending of the Popular Front in 1939 also marked the end of significant Communist influence among American cultural workers” (2). As he argues, a longer trajectory more accurately captures the historical significance of the party, “for better or worse—the most powerful ideological and organisational force on the left for more than two decades” (1), while also exposing significant gaps and distortions in our modernist histories of postwar American culture.

By the left movement, Hemingway does not refer to artists sharing a common style, iconography, or even a clearly defined program. Rather, he uses the term to refer to a succession of institutional initiatives, an evolving critical discourse, and a range of practices corresponding in complex and varying ways to political commitment and to certain fundamental assumptions about the social purposes of art. Thus Artists on the Left is essentially a history of those institutions through which the CPUSA sought to organize cultural work and to promote an aesthetic discourse by means of public lectures and debates, art criticism, and publications. Hemingway’s analysis of artistic practices as well as his brief interpretations of individual art objects are subsidiary to these larger purposes and are integrated within his narrative. Regarding artists, he makes clear that his writing is premised upon “a model of individual agency that stresses the role of institutions and ideology in defining the parameters of subjective choices” (3). In that connection, he provides several pages of information about the careers and beliefs of a number of artists who were temporary or long-term party members or fellow travelers. Such information, however, is often distributed throughout several chapters, as is the case with Joe Jones and Stuart Davis, and is either supportive or illustrative of points he is making about the programs of institutions such as the Artists’ Union, the American Artists’ Congress, Herman Baron’s American Contemporary Arts (ACA) Gallery, or the New Deal arts projects. The exception to this is Hemingway’s handling of social art of the 1940s and 1950s, when arts organizations through which Communists operated could not provide the levels of support their precursors had. Thus, in this section, he provides greater individual attention to artists like Philip Evergood, Jack Levine, Alice Neel, Raphael Soyer, Charles White, Jacob Lawrence, and Robert Gwathmey, each of whom managed successful careers despite the demise of the New Deal programs, the dominant critical support for Abstract Expressionism, and the politics of Cold War America.

Particularly strong in Hemingway’s book is his attention to attempts by Communists to locate or define cultural practices that responded to the exigencies of Soviet policy yet were adaptive to the realities of American life, and to contending artistic discourses divided over issues of Americanism, realism, and modernism. This might best be illustrated by his discussions of the differences in policy between the Third Period, 1928–1935, and the years of the Popular Front, 1935–39, as reflected in the art criticism of the New Masses. Briefly, the Third Period New Masses, through the writings of John Reed Club artist Stephen Alexander, favored a revolutionary proletarian art and exhibited skepticism toward modernist formal devices. In contrast, the Artists’ Union’s contemporaneous Art Front permitted more open exchanges concerning the value of modernist painting and was ultimately “a more accurate register of the divisions within the artistic left” (42). In 1936, the Popular Front New Masses attempted to attract a middle-class readership through more decorative covers, less strident headlines, and the substitution of American scene imagery for political cartoons. Revolutionary art was supplanted by increasingly tepid social art, as the magazine also opened itself to a modernist graphic style exemplified by Ad Reinhardt’s contributions. Charmion Von Wiegand’s art criticism favored a fusion of modernist form with social themes, while the writing submitted by Elizabeth McCausland toward the end of the period rose little above art reporting, as Hemingway characterizes it. In its “bland inclusiveness” of everything from documentary photography to abstraction, McCausland’s criticism matched poorly “the Party’s utter inflexibility on other issues and could look simply unintellectual and opportunistic” (112).

Such a brief summary does little justice to the depth of Hemingway’s scholarship and the nuance of his analyses of texts and events. Nor does it do credit to his examination of the effect of display, either within the context of the printed page or in a gallery space, on the experience and interpretation of art objects. For example, he discusses the work of Louis Lozowick, whose Machine Age imagery might be characterized as proletarian when reproduced in the New Masses but be considered bourgeois in more mainstream publications. On the other hand, institutional spaces are the primary focus of his chapter on how paintings functioned within the context of the John Reed Club exhibitions, and how works by the same artists functioned outside that space, specifically within the walls of the Whitney Museum of American Art. This productive comparison in particular demonstrates effectively how the institutional setting overwhelmed the art, either by reinforcing or nullifying its political effectiveness.

Hemingway strives to recover for a twenty-first-century American audience its radical heritage. He also seeks to challenge the dominance that the modernist narrative still exerts upon our understanding of twentieth-century art, particularly the exclusivity generally accorded to Abstract Expressionism as the only movement of its period worthy of serious study. He reserves criticism even for social historians of art who, in his opinion, have remained preoccupied with the terms of this narrative and whose writings essentially become celebrations of the “same old masterworks” (2), with insufficient skepticism toward categories of taste, quality, and value. Much of his epilogue is given over to a careful analysis of the effects of modernist narratives on the art, artists, and institutions of his study. In the course of this investigation, he notes that the last substantive studies of American art to give prewar artists coverage equal to that devoted to Abstract Expressionists were published in the 1950s. He points out, too, that few of the artists he examines in the volume have assured places in dominant narratives of modern painting. Hemingway lists Davis and Reinhardt as potential exceptions, although neither they nor the others have received the attention lavished on postwar artists associated with Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, Minimalism, and so forth.

In addition to the value and validity of Hemingway’s critique, specialists in prewar American art will find reward in this book’s generous illustrations. There are 150 black-and-white and 40 color photographs of art objects, many of which have seldom been published. Most of the plates are reproductions of mural and easel paintings and prints, with only a handful of sculptures. Photography is not covered. Moreover, much of the artwork displayed here resides in private or small public collections.

Hemingway’s already lengthy text whets the appetite for even more, but, of course, he is unable to rectify in a single volume the neglect of a half-century. In the introduction he points out the obvious limitations of the book: that it deals almost exclusively with painting and the graphic arts, that it is concerned almost exclusively with activities in New York, and that his research has been confined to the Communist Party’s English-language press. He also admits that he does not read Yiddish, so a large and potentially fruitful body of resource materials remains virtually untapped. There is also a handful of factual errors that might have been caught with better editing. For instance, Hilla Rebay becomes “Hillar,” the Design Laboratory of the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project in New York becomes the “Design Studio,” and Irene Rice Pereira is called an abstractionist during a year in which she exhibited only figurative social art. But these are mere quibbles that do not materially detract from the power of the text.

Near the end of his epilogue and his critique of modernist theory, Hemingway articulates an assumption that he shares with scholars with backgrounds in women’s and ethnic studies: “[A]n historical narrative that omits consideration of significant bodies of work for blatantly ideological reasons is not just partial but is in important ways inadequate to the explanation of its object” (282). One measure of his success is the degree to which his book considers what has been omitted, while simultaneously offering us a model for an alternative historical narrative.