In the last two decades, scholars in art history, cultural history, and American studies have produced a host of important texts examining the once aesthetically maligned decade of the 1930s, according it a dignified place in the history of American visual production. In expanding this historiography, scholars have developed new historical and cultural explanations for images, including their content, settings, and audiences. Armed with contextual methods, with postmodern identity theory, and highly sensitive to period culture, politics, economics, and institutional constraints, writers have interpreted murals, prints, easel paintings, photography, and design. In these studies we learn of the workings of Roosevelt’s cultural New Deal, of the realignment of politics and art for claims of social justice, and of the importance of rethinking aesthetic models and mediums. Shunning the single artist monograph approach, many of these studies confront this broad range of images in order to illuminate the social and cultural work they perform in the complex and deeply fraught decade of the thirties.¹

A. Joan Saab’s highly readable book contains many familiar players and places, but she enters this mix from a different angle with a book about institutions, politicized cultural rhetoric, and the history of ideas—specifically, the idea of democracy in art. She focuses not on works of art, but, “on the moment during which, in addition to questioning what democracy in art would look like, a diverse group of individuals and institutions not only began to announce its arrival but also attempted to share it with a wider public, in both theory and practice” (8). That art could be a force for good in the world while providing a transformative aesthetic experience became a set of ideas the public seemed willing to embrace in the 1930s. In addition, one could produce, understand, and consume art as something practically useful in daily life.

By the 1930s, a host of intellectuals had helped to shift the grounds of discussion about art from the accepted Arnoldian view of the best and highest to one in which culture—in a more sociological and anthropological vein—was a whole way of life (a position by now familiar to students of visual and cultural studies). Lewis Mumford makes an early appearance in Saab’s introduction, praising a McAn shoe store or a Blue Kitchen sandwich place as a site of American culture, while Van Wyck Brooks provides a more “genial middle ground” for aesthetic experience. Along with John Dewey’s 1934 publication Art as Experience, these thinkers sought to break down boundaries between high and low forms of art and to democratize experience in the everyday.

In Saab’s study, two important institutions drew from these and other thinkers to reshape the idea of democracy in art for their substantial publics. The Federal Art Project (FAP), the New Deal agency whose multiple projects employed thousands of artists, operated in the public sector, while the new Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), founded by elites as a private (some would say corporate) sector institution on the eve of the Depression, sought to widen its purview and outreach via major design and photography exhibitions. Both institutions took the idea of aesthetic education as central to their missions, but each created a model of cultural democracy with an attendant pedagogy. The FAP’s “pedagogy of artistic production” taught that “making art would make good citizens,” while MoMA’s “pedagogy of cultural consumption” joined the “aesthetically informed purchase of selected industrial goods to a functioning democracy” (10). In either case the focus on pedagogies allows Saab to see art as participatory whether as a form of cultural capital or a form of communication. She also chronicles the dissemination of ideas and ideologies by important institutions and their major players—in this case, and to name but two, Holger Cahill of the FAP and Alfred Barr of MoMA.

A series of important oppositions completes the scaffolding of Saab’s project marking out the Depression era as a distinct interlude between the high culture separations of traditionalism in the Gilded Age and the carefully circumscribed aestheticism of postwar High Modernism. On the one hand, the “experiential definitions of culture” promulgated by early twentieth-century intellectuals opposed the sacralization of culture. On the other hand, the useful art object took on new value, opposing the auratic object whose “authentic” (often academic and European) qualities were promoted by elites to maintain class hierarchies. Part of the desacralization project for art was to find its distinctly American voice, a quest pursued by several generations of artists and critics. Saab concludes her opening remarks with a final caution against understanding thirties culture as a simple “reaction/rebellion dichotomy” (14). Both the FAP and MoMA kept a significant tension in play throughout their instantiations of the desacralization project. At times they promoted radical new definitions of art to destabilize its aura; conversely they might leave that aura in place but make it more accessible to the public. In both cases, it would make art more available to more people, fulfilling the ideal of cultural democracy.

With her framework in place, Saab constructs a five-chapter narrative—one might even call it a five-act play. It features development, culmination, and decline in the idea of cultural democracy, all the while featuring the endless sense of debate, conflict, and compromise. In chapter 1, “Like the Farmer or Bricklayer,” Saab turns to administrators, artists, and critics and their circulation of ideas in the desacralization project. Figures like John Cotton Dana, Edith Halpert, and Cahill, the eventual head of the FAP, defended the FAP and the idea of artists as both talented makers of work in a separate category and as “useful” members of the social family. Artists, too, participated in desacralizing art in organizations from the John Reed Club to the Artists’ Union. Stuart Davis becomes a major voice in the quest for a democratic modernism that holds its own in the category of Art.

Chapter 2, “Future Citizens and a Usable Past,” continues with the FAP and the government’s “pedagogy of artistic production,” but shifts its focus from artists to citizens, and from representation to the object. Here Saab examines both the Community Art Center Program and the Index of American Design. Community center proponents—specifically Cahill and Thomas Parker—argued that appreciating art comes from making as well as looking. Participation came concurrently from the community, which raised funds and shared in running a center, and from artists who were employed to teach. Holding to the idea that art could treat social issues, Cahill wanted art education to forge links between knowledge and experience and between education and citizenship (66). But there were both nostalgic and anti-industrial constructs permeating the educational literature and the aesthetic ideals of the program—residues of a desire to maintain disappearing communities and save declining pieces of American culture. Indeed, this salvage effort lay at the heart of the Index of American Design. The program hired skilled artists to make meticulous watercolor renderings of America’s vernacular craft heritage, focusing on local and regional artifacts. In the process, the index widened both the definition of art and the category of the artist. But with the index, Saab notes the beginning of a shift from the pedagogy of artistic production to the pedagogy of cultural consumption. Cahill and other administrators, routinely accused of boondoggling, suffered from congressional budget cuts. In retaliation, they began to argue that manufacturers would find inspiration in these vernacular forms and make new American-inspired products for mass purchase. Shifting away from the focus on production and experience, administrators countered these accusations with “market-value based definitions of art” (81).

This emerging pedagogy of cultural consumption achieved its full realization in MoMA’s design programs of the 1930s, the subject of chapter 3, “Democracy in Design.” The centerpiece of the book, this chapter chronicles the often contradictory decisions of the new museum as it worked to chart its path within competing cultural discourses—on art, design, business, government, citizenry, and nation. Narrating the key relationship between MoMA and department stores (and watching the latter co-opt many of MoMA’s claims to cultural expertise), Saab argues that the increased cooperations between these stores and the museum broke down barriers not only between art and commerce but also between education and consumption, so that “learning about ‘art’ became, in essence, learning about what to buy” (86).

Following Dewey, usefulness continued to be crucial in MoMA’s pronouncements; but unlike Cahill, Barr knew that his audiences could only “use” through consumption rather than making. MoMA also participated in the democratizing and desacralization process “by locating cultural capital in individual aesthetic experience” (87). In this chapter Saab examines many of Barr and Cahill’s early exhibitions—along with MoMA’s catalogues, publicity, and, crucially, educational programs—to show how that process was under constant revision. She follows the museum’s efforts to promote the modern against the popular “modernistic” and to identify standards for determining aesthetic value in useful objects. Educated consumption was the goal, with functionality rather than exchange the value MoMA promoted. In effect, MoMA played both sides of the chronic tension that permeates Saab’s account: the museum democratized the consumption process, but in advocating high modernism as a form of aesthetic cultural capital it resacralized these useful objects.

If MoMA’s system of aesthetic value turned on use and function, other institutions claimed that the industrial products were themselves art. This position took shape in the rhetoric of the organizers of the 1939 World’s Fair, the subject of chapter 4, “Art and Democracy in the World of Tomorrow.” The governing commission, consisting almost exclusively of businessmen, decided to christen everything at the fair—from industrial products to freak shows—as art and to call it democratic. There would be no need for separate art exhibitions since everything was already art. Unfortunately this ultimate desacralization/democratization backfired, and the fair became a site of aesthetic contestation. In response to the announced absence of art, angry artists and infuriated arts organizations forced planners to dedicate two spaces to art—one of “masterpieces” displayed in sacred fashion but desacralized in guided tours, the other to works from the FAP and a model community art center. But these two sites failed to overcome either the overwhelming spectacle of the fair (which turned visitors into more passive spectators rather than consumers of useful objects) or its emphasis on the popular aesthetic of streamlining, which MoMA’s design shows had worked so hard to counter with good “modern” design. Saab argues that a plethora of definitions of democracy in art never lifted the 1939 World of Tomorrow beyond the status of a trade fair. At its end, the participatory model of art began to disappear and High Modernism—the ultimate twentieth-century resacralization—began its long ascendancy.

Chapter 5, “The Triumph of American Art?” adds a skeptical question mark to the declarative title of Irving Sandler’s classic introduction to the postwar generation of modernist abstract painters. Noting the coincidence of Clement Greenberg’s 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” and the World’s Fair, Saab points to the celebration of industrial goods as art on the one hand and their dismissal (even threat) on the other. But the war brought a hiatus in the debate as art makers on all sides mobilized against war and fascism. Here Saab chronicles many of the important organizations and exhibitions in this patriotic project. At the end of the war, new critics and galleries promoted the abstract artists as, in the words of critic Howard Putzel, the “real American Painting beginning now” (172). The notion of artistic genius reemerged, supplanting the democratic plurality of the earlier decade. And while LIFE magazine made the new art accessible to a wider audience, it was really an elevated discussion among critics who saw the “layman” less as the former active participant in art than as the new passive appreciator. Of course, the idea of democracy continued, but now the artist modeled it for the audience, as the free creator working in a democratic society, against totalitarian ideologies. And rather than breaking down all those hierarchies, new anti-mass culture critics simply reinscribed them, battling to keep high culture distinct from its mass counterpart.

There is much to like in Saab’s account. A good story with a plausible narrative arc, it is accessible and useable. I recently introduced an undergraduate 1930s seminar with the first chapters, concluded with later ones, and the book proved useful in providing the intellectual “big picture” (and with usability one of the book’s key themes, this was a happy coincidence). Saab’s book can also be read as one of many expanding the understandings of modernism, as it reaches back to the thirties—straddling modernism’s major museum and less familiar sites of certain kinds of “modernist” thought, i.e., the Federal Art Projects. Because of its generality, its intellectual sweep, and the neatness of its conceptualizations, I can understand how more focused scholars might quarrel with some of its claims, whether about Abstract Expressionism, the World’s Fair, or the Federal Art Projects. Saab asserts that “spectacle” governs the mode of display and reception at the fair, but the claim lacks development. And might some of her arguments about the fair not hold true for other fairs and other exhibition models? Some might allege that many of the arguments she makes about Abstract Expressionism are tried and true, breaking little new ground.

But these are small quarrels with a highly synthetic study that comes at an important moment in the intersections between art history, 1930s scholarship, and cultural/visual studies. At the most recent (2006) College Art Association meetings, I attended the session reevaluating the relationship between Thomas Hart Benton and Alfred Stieglitz in the 1930s, a panel which, like Saab’s book, took a wider view of a central debate and moved beyond focused scholarship on individual figures to question the rhetoric and received wisdom around them. And, like Saab, the panel asked about production, circulation, and reception of these rhetorical strategies, including their functions and uses. Saab, too, provides an important new combination of institutions normally kept discrete, uniting them under the umbrella of democracy in art. Perhaps most refreshing of all is the book’s positive tone in a time when governments and corporations nod toward the “haves and have mores.” Art can do better, Saab suggests, concluding with the hope that individual experience and alternative definitions of value will bring many more to art’s table.