On December 9, 1936, the Museum of Modern Art opened Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (hereafter FADS, Figure 1.1). The second in a series of exhibitions organized by Alfred Barr to highlight prominent trends in twentieth-century art, FADS included 711 works, including painting, sculpture, drawings, prints from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries, advertisements, scientific instruments, architecture, film, animation cells, folk art, and the work of children and the so-called insane.1 FADS’s catholic array epitomizes the eclectic nature of MoMA’s early exhibition program, a phenomenon that has drawn renewed scholarly attention in the past decade.2 Building on this work, my essay examines the early history of MoMA through the lens of what I describe as the demotic imperative of the 1930s.3 From this vantage, the inclusion of popular, commercial, and folk art in MoMA’s galleries was neither pandering commercialism nor uncritical nationalism, but rather the museum’s attempt to address—and thus conjure into being—the unified mass known in period parlance as the “people,” without forfeiting its commitment to vanguard art.4
Figure 1.1 Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.
MoMA’s attempts to negotiate these ostensibly opposed aims engendered an ethos of amateurism I describe as “folk surrealism,” in reference to two prominent strands of the museum’s early curatorial program.5 Surrealism’s valorization of nonprofessional modes of cultural production allowed the museum to frame folk art and the work of children as innate forms of expression, thereby demonstrating the broad accessibility of Surrealist principles. Put differently, MoMA’s ethos of amateurism can be described as a kind of domestic primitivism, which, like all primitivizing formulations, relies on the “outsider” position of its objects to prove the universality of its concept. This stance proved untenable, endangering the museum’s status as a bastion of sacralized culture and appearing uncomfortably close to the strategies of totalitarianism by the late 1930s. MoMA’s attempts to expand the idea of who counts as an artist and what counts as art thus touched upon the paradox inherent to attempts to level established cultural hierarchies, which, taken to their logical extreme, threaten to destroy the boundaries between art and the world around it.
In an oft-cited irony, MoMA opened just days after the Stock Market Crash of 1929. The museum’s first three years of operation coincided with the nadir of the Great Depression, before the implementation of the New Deal in 1933. This turmoil created an imperative for artists and poets to respond directly to the present moment, pithily described by Wallace Stevens as “the pressure of reality.”6 MoMA’s founding charter appeared to answer this “pressure of reality,” by describing popular education as one of its central goals.7 Despite this, the museum’s three wealthy founders, and especially Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, led many to view MoMA as a symbol of the elitist culture that gave rise to the Great Depression. As New Dealer Edward Bruce sneered in 1933, MoMA was considered by many to be “the little snob which was recently dedicated by the Rockefellers who have put their dead hand on everything they touch.”8 By virtue of its immutable identity as an art museum and connection to the Rockefellers, MoMA thus found itself at odds with the decade’s emergent collectivist tenor. Although it was established in 1931, the Whitney never had to face this problem as intensely as MoMA because of its identity as an American art museum, as well as Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s deep ties to the Greenwich Village artistic community.9
In other words, the paradox facing artists during the 1930s was an ingrained part of MoMA’s early institutional identity: while its stated charge was to promote modern art, the museum’s relevance depended on its ability to make these aims accessible to a public. Curator Alfred Barr was uniquely positioned to address this situation. Although he had completed postgraduate work with Paul Sachs at Harvard, Barr’s scholarly approach was equally indebted to Princeton medievalist Charles Rufus Morey’s anthropological investigation of art and culture as seen in The Index of Christian Art.10 Following Morey’s capacious attitude toward culture, Barr organized exhibitions that extended beyond the museum’s traditional charge of fine arts, which he understood as a gesture toward popular legibility. As Barr later explained to critic Dwight MacDonald, “We hope that showing the best in the arts and popular entertainment and of commercial and industrial design will mitigate the arcane and difficult atmosphere of painting and sculpture.”11
Yet it was curator Holger Cahill who was responsible for MoMA’s earliest attempt to directly answer the demotic imperative of the 1930s. Cahill, who took over as MoMA’s director while Barr was on sabbatical in 1932, remains best known for his directorship of the Federal Arts Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Cahill was also an accomplished curator, initiating his tenure at MoMA with an exhibition whose title announced its populist ambition: American Folk Art: Art of the Common Man, 1750–1900.12 For Cahill, folk art offered a means of reconciling modernism’s “revolution in form” and the decade’s radical politics.13 Unlike MoMA’s Harvard-educated moderns, Cahill’s interest in folk art originated in his early experience with Greenwich Village anarchism. None other than ardent leftist Michael Gold praised Cahill’s proletarian pedigree: “He hoboed and dug ditches and sweated in the Kansas harvest fields, he had washed dishes, rebelling at his own worthlessness, and swaggered in the fire zone and at political rallies with a newspaper reporter’s badge.”14
In Art of the Common Man’s catalogue essay, Cahill proposed that folk art’s simplified forms, so reminiscent of modernist abstraction, originated in preindustrial human instinct. Folk art, he wrote, was “an expression of the common people and not an expression of a small cultured class,” forming a lineage of modernism rooted in amateurism rather than industrial production.15 This approach was indebted to Marxist scholar Thorstein Veblen, whom Cahill studied with at the New School of Social Research.16 Drawing on Veblen’s 1918 book The Instinct of Workmanship, which traced the transition from handmade craft to mechanized production, Cahill positioned folk art as the last bastion of “workmanship” in an era of industrialized labor. Keeping with this logic, Cahill limited the exhibition to itinerant painting, wooden and metal sculpture, and plaster ornaments, deliberately excluding furniture, silver, glass, and other examples of decorative arts he deemed the work of “professionals.”17
Yet even within this idealistic framing, Cahill did not entirely eschew established cultural hierarchies.18 As he stated at the end of his catalogue essay, “Folk art cannot be valued as highly as the work of our greatest painters and sculptors, but it is certainly tied to a place in the history of American art.”19 Cahill’s deliberate privileging of fine art underscores folk art’s implicit challenge to the history of art museums in the United States, which since the Gilded Age had been charged with displaying “unique aesthetic and spiritual properties that rendered it inviolate, exclusive, and eternal.”20 Folk art’s presence in the museum instead located modern art’s most cherished principles of formal simplicity in the work of amateurs.21 Art of the Common Man thus placed MoMA in a precarious situation: while demonstrating the “inviolate, exclusive, and eternal” qualities of modern art, folk art’s connotations of amateurism also threatened to destabilize the very hierarchies that traditional museums were charged with upholding.
The untenability of this position became apparent with MoMA’s 1934 Westchester Folk Art. Hoping to boost museum membership, the museum organized a condensed reprise of Art of the Common Man at the Westchester Workshop, a community center specializing in arts education.22 In a gallery adjacent to the main exhibition, MoMA installed a show of children’s art from public and private institutions around Westchester County. The work was selected by teachers and judged by a committee including art critic Helen Appleton, artist William Zorach, and Barr himself, which awarded small monetary prizes to eleven of the nearly 400 entries.23 The exhibition illuminates the paradox inherent to MoMA’s ethos of amateurism. On the one hand, exhibiting the work of children alongside folk art demonstrated the broad purchase of modern art; on the other, the inescapable constraints of space and money required the committee to devise other standards of quality.
These competing imperatives of quality and expansiveness were also apparent during New Horizons of American Art, which closed three months before FADS. New Horizons included 435 examples of work produced under the auspices of the FAP, now headed by Cahill, who also organized the exhibition. In the foreword to the exhibition catalogue, Barr explicitly addressed notions of quality within the sprawling display, noting that Cahill selected each work “for its artistic value alone.”24 New Horizons also included a selection of children’s art made under the FAP’s education program, including works such as Passover Feast by the ten-year-old F. Rick (Figure 1.2). At Barr’s request, the museum acquired several examples of children’s work from the exhibition, compensating the child artists with opening invitations, free admission to the museum, film screenings, and lectures, ten complimentary museum tickets, and access to the museum library.25 Barr later echoed Cahill’s rhetoric about folk art when he noted that the best children’s art was “truer to the human type than the mature world of more precise and self-conscious knowledge.”26 Yet like Cahill’s qualification in the Art of the Common Man catalogue, the conditions of the museum’s acquisition also illustrate the liminal status of children’s art. While deserving of inclusion in the museum’s collection, they were procured by trade rather than purchase. Barr’s exacting connoisseurship in acquiring select examples from the exhibition furthermore suggests that his aesthetic judgment occurred within aesthetic categories rather than between them. In other words, Barr saw the “best” child’s drawing as worthier of consideration than a third-rate modernist work.
Figure 1.2 Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.
Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism
For Barr, Surrealism’s emphasis on found objects and automatic drawing offered a model for narrowing the distance between amateur and professional artists. Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism was preceded by Cubism and Abstract Art, the first of his ambitious synthetic survey exhibitions, which opened eight months prior.27 Although Cubism and Abstract Art debuted to critical acclaim, Barr found the subject matter passé, describing the show as little more than “an exercise in recent archeology.”28 By contrast, Barr understood FADS as unveiling a vibrant modern tendency towards the “bizarre, dreamlike, absurd, uncanny, enigmatic,” a host of characteristics he christened “the fantastic.”29 Barr continued that he considered Surrealism “[a] serious affair and for many it is more than an art movement: it is a philosophy, a way of life, a cause to which some of the most brilliant painters and poets of our age are giving themselves with consuming devotion.”30
As with MoMA’s earlier exhibitions of folk art, Barr’s approach to Surrealism contained an implicit argument for Modernism’s universality. By including work by those ostensibly unencumbered by the conditioning of modern society—children, folk artists, “the insane”—Barr construed “the fantastic” as an essential element of human nature. Other works in the exhibition included drawings and assemblages by so-called psychopathic patients (including an example lent by André Breton), a winking porcelain cat, and a spoon found in the cell of a prisoner. The exhibition’s scope illuminates the way Surrealism’s emphasis on unconscious expression at once expanded the idea of art and aligned with MoMA’s established commitment to amateurism.
While critics lambasted the show as hopelessly disorganized, Barr had in fact carefully researched and selected what he considered the best examples of each included object. For example, he wrote to a school official in Michigan to help him find a specific child’s drawing he had seen in a 1933 photograph. Created by eleven-year-old Jean Hoisington, A God of War Shooting Arrows to Protect the People (Figure 1.3) shows a small humanoid figure facing off against a monstrous form festooned with tails and multi-toed limbs.31 With its elemental violent struggle and timely invocation of “the people,” Hosington’s drawing would seem to encapsulate the idea of Surrealism as a “universal human tendency.” As if to underscore this point, Barr installed the drawing alongside work by Joseph Cornell, Joan Miró, and Marcel Jean, with only a museum label to differentiate it from these distinguished counterparts (Figure 1.4).
Figure 1.3 Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.
Figure 1.4 Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.
Despite Barr’s efforts, FADS was summarily dismissed by both cultural conservatives and avant-garde partisans for its willingness to elevate the work of “madmen” to art. In a characteristically vituperative remark, Thomas Craven declared it “one of the foulest doses of art ever compounded by the international apothecaries … The freaks of art belong in the tent show along with the two headed calf and the tattooed idiot.”32 It was precisely this reaction that Société Anonyme doyenne Katherine Dreier feared when she wrote to Barr, “It seemed as if you had deliberately hung the pictures to give the emphases to the abnormal!”33 Barr did little to dispel Dreier’s fears, replying, “Genius consists in the ability to retain in security the imaginative faculties of childhood.”34 Unconvinced by his response, Dreier withdrew her loans from FADS’s subsequent venues. Although diametrically opposed in position, Dreier and Craven appeared to discern the threat Barr’s approach posed to the sanctity of so-called high art.
This suspicion of amateurism was also at the heart of critic Emily Genauer’s notorious “The Fur-Lined Museum,” published in Harper’s Magazine in 1944. As its title suggests, Genauer pinpoints Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism as the originary moment of MoMA’s decline, paving the way for what she described as “stunts like the display of a tinsel-bedecked shoeshine shoe chair, of the doodlings of inmates of insane asylums, and of the pathetic efforts of frustrated amateurs.”35 Genauer’s invocation of Joe Milone’s reviled shoeshine stand alongside Meret Oppenheim’s titular fur-lined teacup illuminates folk art and Surrealism’s elision in the mind of the museum’s critics: both validated the work of amateurs, threatening the sanctity (and labor) of professional artists. For Genauer, this focus siphoned support from “real” artists: “While serious professional artists fight for the recognition that life means to them, the Modern fiddles away its resources, building a precious cult around amateurism.”36
Genauer was not alone in her outrage. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, artists affiliated with professional associations such as the American Abstract Artists and the Federation of Modern Painters organized letter-writing campaigns and protests against what they saw as MoMA’s willful ignorance of abstract art. A flier advertising action against the museum excoriated it for “attempt[ing] to elevate handicrafts, industrial design, and children’s art to the highest forms of human endeavor; and develop[ing] the public image of the painter as a madly inspired child, rather than a human being.”37 For these protesters, the museum’s “precious cult of amateurism” denied both material support and respect for their artistic practice, which the WPA had recently redefined as valuable labor.38
MoMA official James Thrall Soby offered a point-by-point rebuttal of Genauer’s article in a remarkable sixteen-page internal museum memo. He wrote that Genauer’s argument was premised on a narrow-minded definition of art that refused to recognize “allied arts” such as architecture, design, and film, as well as Romantic or Surrealist works.39 Soby also astutely pointed out that Genauer’s accusation of the museum’s “fashionability” was supported by a litany of its successes, quoting her observation that “[the museum’s] audiences range from kindergarteners, for whom there is a special Young People’s Gallery, to soldiers who come in to see not only the painting exhibitions but also the occasional shows of sketches made at the front by their brothers-in-arms.”40 Reaching such audiences, Soby maintained, had always been MoMA’s primary aim, and by this measure FADS had been a success.
What Soby and Barr had failed to anticipate was the extreme strain such collectivist ideals would undergo in the subsequent years.41 And indeed, as Serge Guilbaut and more recently Thomas Crow have discussed, Barr’s 1942 ouster by trustee Stephen Clark was motivated in part by his support for the “naïve” work of Morris Hirshfield and Joe Milone.42 The exhibition’s success in galvanizing audiences and the subsequent denigration of these efforts suggest that Barr had touched upon something larger with his exhibition. If folk art and Surrealism seemed to imply that modern art could encompass work created without artistic intention, by what criteria could art distinguish itself from the commercial and political world?
The potential danger of Surrealism’s populist valences was presaged by a notorious episode in 1934, in which MoMA’s executive director Alan Blackburn and curator Philip Johnson quit their posts to join demagogue Huey Long in Alabama.43 Strikingly, the headline in the Rockefeller Republican New York Herald Tribune framed this populist venture as an act of Surrealism, blaring “Two Quit Modern Art Museum for Sur-Realist Political Venture.”44 For the Herald Tribune, the “sur-realist flavor” of Blackburn and Johnson’s politics emanated from their proclaimed anti-intellectualism.45 Instead, these so-called Gray Shirts advocated for an anti-capitalist system based on emotion and a strong charismatic leader, an overtly fascistic line of thinking.
This presumed alignment of fascism and Surrealism could also be seen in the pages of Art Front, the leftist magazine of the Artists Union edited by Stuart Davis and Joseph Solman.46 Art Front deemed Blackburn and Johnson’s abdication from MoMA the “Surrealist Revolution Counter-Clockwise,” decrying their perversion of Surrealism’s long-standing association with leftism in the work of artists such as Walter Quirt and O. Louis Guglielmi. The article detailed Blackburn and Johnson’s fascistic tendencies, which included a secret enemy list as well as a wish for revolutionary violence. Art Front also drew attention to the men’s role in bringing commercial strategies to MoMA, noting, “With some experience in advertising and high-pressure salesmanship, he is credited with combining Macy department store methods and Johnson’s super-window display decoration in the most successful feat of selling a museum to a large public yet known in this country.”47 The reception of the Blackburn/Johnson incident in two ideologically divergent publications suggests the shifting understanding of Surrealism, populism, and commercialism from strategies of achieving collectivity to a potentially fascistic strategy of irrational conformity.
The conflation of these narratives in the late 1930s is perhaps best encapsulated by Frank Caspers’s 1938 Scribner’s article “Surrealism in Overalls” (Figure 1.5).48 For Caspers, Surrealism’s greatest danger lay in its “effectiveness” in promoting consumer consumption, and no doubt thinking of the fascistic rallies across the Atlantic Ocean, he issued a grave warning: “What the medium will succumb next cannot be imagined.”49 Caspers’s evocative title inevitably calls to mind the garb of a humble farmer, no longer a mark common authenticity, but a veneer of faux-innocence intended to manipulate.50 If in 1930 the figure of the so-called common man had emerged as a potent symbol of proletarian collectivity, Caspers’s article demonstrates its perceived deceptiveness by the end of the decade.
Figure 1.5 Frank Caspers, “Surrealism in Overalls,” Scribner’s 104 (August 1938), page 17.
It was from this heated context that Clement Greenberg’s canonical “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” emerged.51 Much has been written on this foundational essay in American modernism and rightly so: Greenberg powerfully presents and anticipates many of the concerns of American art in the second half of the twentieth century.52 From the perspective of the history delineated in this essay, Greenberg’s text is most masterful in its ability to unite the various threads of 1930s art and politics into a statement of compelling moral clarity—a quality sorely lacking during this decade of drastic political reversals. For Greenberg, kitsch is an “ersatz art” whose power lies in its ability to manipulate. Like totalitarianism, it is not beholden to a single ideology (he notes that both Stalin and the Nazis make use of it) and can be used to indoctrinate the masses or trick them into mindless consumption. The idea of “kitsch” thus allowed Greenberg to place propaganda and commercial culture on the same plane and attribute kitsch’s danger not to any single ideology, but to formal representation. For Greenberg, representation combined disingenuous folk simplicity with the enchanting qualities of Surrealism. Kitsch was therefore a literalization of Marx’s theory of the commodity fetish, ascribing to commercial objects the dangerous power to manipulate or control.
Yet creating an enemy of such magnitude came at a cost. Imbuing kitsch with such power required a corresponding lack of agency on the part of the public, now recast as individual consumers. Indeed, it was the issue of audience rather than representation that first prompted Greenberg to write “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” The essay had its genesis in a letter from Greenberg to Dwight MacDonald regarding an article by the latter in the Partisan Review. In it, MacDonald wondered what to make of the curious disparity in attendance between the modernist Moscow Museum of Western Art and the Tretyakov Gallery, whose exhibition of the Russian Academic painter Ilya Repin drew sizable audiences. “The scales,” Greenberg explained to MacDonald, “are weighted in favor of kitsch to start with, by the very ignorance of the peasant.”53
The figure of the “ignorant peasant” appears again at the end of the letter, in far more ignominious form, as Greenberg elucidates the political stakes of his argument:
And I’m pretty pessimistic now, for it seems to me that in England, France, and this country, as well as in the dictatorships, avant-garde culture is beginning to retreat all along the line under the pressure of the demoralization of the left and in the face of the increasing boldness with which hill billies everywhere are coming into the light to attack all culture. Where Hitler came with Wotan, in this country they come with the Bible.54
MacDonald responded enthusiastically to Greenberg, encouraging him to turn the letter into what would eventually become “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” In its final form, the essay focused on the definition and historical character of kitsch, spending comparatively little time on the issue of audience. Yet as evidenced by Greenberg’s letter, kitsch requires the figure of the “ignorant peasant,” whose lack of sophistication and knowledge renders him wholly susceptible to its empty promises. If kitsch takes advantage of the ignorant, then it stands to reason that Greenberg and his enlightened brethren could resist such manipulations; thus Greenberg’s “hill billies” also implicitly inoculate him against kitsch’s enchantments, his exacting intellectual judgment affording him separation from the now-denigrated masses.
Greenberg’s disdain for the “common man” (never a woman) can be understood as the culmination of the growing discontent with populism as a viable artistic and political goal. And indeed, as the decade closed, Greenberg’s proclamations proved prescient. Russia’s unwillingness to intervene in the Spanish Civil War and Stalin’s purges created a growing disillusionment with Russia on the left, culminating in the signing of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact on August 23, 1939. With these events, the focus of the New York art world shifted from the people to the artist, from an art of the people to an art that could resist the corrupting influence of the public, thereby providing a bulwark against the mindless submission to a charismatic, enchanting leader.55
While MoMA’s engagement with folk art and Surrealism persisted well into the 1940s, the rhetoric around both shifted. In the 1938 exhibition Masters of Popular Painting: Modern Primitives of Europe and America, for example, Barr described his aim “to show, without apology or condescension, the paintings of some of these individuals, not as folk art, but as the work of painters of marked talent and consistently distinct personality.”56 The keyword here is “individual”: Barr reframes amateurism as a marker of individual genius rather than collectivist appeal. This shift was no doubt encouraged by the popular and critical renown of Henri Rousseau, of whom Barr noted, “It is only since the apotheosis of Henri Rousseau that individual [emphasis his] popular artists have been taken seriously.”57 If Cahill had described folk art as “the sense and sentiment of a community” just six years earlier, Barr’s essay marks the decline of Cahill’s formulation by the decade’s end. The oft-remarked-upon shift in American art during the 1940s was not simply a matter of style, but of the individual’s triumph over collectivism. While MoMA’s idealistic promotion of folk surrealism could not survive its enshrinement within a museum or the mounting political threat of the late 1930s, for a few brief years it offered one vision of a modernism for the people.
1 The five shows in this series were Cubism and Abstract Art [MoMA Exh. #46, March 2–April 19, 1936]; Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism [MoMA Exh. #55, December 7, 1936–January 17, 1937]; Masters of Popular Painting: Modern Primitives of Europe and America [MoMA Exh. #76, April 27–July 24, 1938]; Americans 1943: Realists and Magic Realists [MoMA Exh. # 217, February 10–March 21, 1943]; Romantic Painting in America [MoMA Exh. #246, November 17, 1943–February 6, 1944].
2 See Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Jennifer Jane Marshall, Machine Art, 1934(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Richard Meyer, What Was Contemporary Art?(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013); Kristina Wilson, The Modern Eye: Stieglitz, MoMA, and the Art of the Exhibition, 1925–1934(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Sandra Zalman, Consuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism(New York: Routledge, 2015); Thomas Crow, The Long March of Pop: Art, Music, and Design, 1930–1995(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); Lynne Cooke, ed., Outliers and American Vanguard Art(Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2018).
3 My use of the terms “populist” and “demotic” are not intended to invoke specific political formations, but rather the general period concern with the so-called common people. As such, this essay departs from the prevailing art historical view of the period as defined by a search for “American” identity or art. This is not to deny that such a tendency existed; rather I see such discussions as motivated by a broader societal emphasis on collectivity rather than an ahistorical Cold War nativism. For more on American art and nationalism, see Matthew Baignell, The American Scene: American Painting of the 1930s(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974); Celeste Connor, Democratic Visions: Art and Theory of the Stieglitz Circle, 1924–1934(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Wanda Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Joan Saab, For the Millions: American Art and Culture between the Wars(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); and Kristina Wilson, The Modern Eye: Stieglitz, MoMA, and the Art of the Exhibition, 1925–1934(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
4 As both T. J. Clark and Thomas Crow have argued, the “public” (the “people” in 1930s parlance) is a perpetually unstable construction that struggles to assimilate specific lives and bodies into its abstract collectivity. T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848–1851(London: Thames and Hudson, 1973); Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-century Paris(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).My use of the term “public” is also influenced by Michael Warner’s discussion of publics as social imaginaries that are called into being by being addressed, rather than preexisting entities. See Warner, Publics and Counterpublics(New York: Zone Books, 2002), 67.
5 I use the term “folk art” not as a discrete ontological category, but as period-specific term. For a thorough discussion of the historiography and implications of this term see Julia S. Ardery, The Temptation: Edgar Tolson and the Genesis of Twentieth-century Folk Art(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
6 Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and Imagination(New York: Vintage Books, 1951), 20.
7 The charter describes MoMA’s aim as “encouraging and developing the study of modern arts and the application of such arts to manufacture and practical life and furnishing popular instruction.” Quoted in Suzanne Hudson, Robert Ryman: Used Paint(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 37.
8 Quoted in Andrew Hemmingway, Artists on the Left(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 81.
9 For more on the history of Whitney Museum of American Art, including its roots in the Whitney Studio Club, and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s identification with American artists, see Avis Berman, Rebels on Eighth Street: Juliana Force and the Whitney Museum of American Art(New York: Athenaeum, 1990); and Flora Miller Biddle, The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made: A Family Memoir(New York: Arcade, 1999).
10 Charles Rufus Morey included a diverse array of evidence, including liturgical metalwork, tapestries, and panel painting in the Index of Christian Art, which he began in 1917, a year before Barr entered university. Following German historian Heinrich Wöfflin, Morey organized the Index thematically and iconographically to trace stylistic transformations over time.
11 Quoted in Sybil Kantor, Alfred Barr and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 309.
12 Art of the Common Man was a reprise of Cahill’s successful exhibition of folk art at the Newark Museum in 1930. Cahill began working at the Newark Museum in 1922, which was then under the directorship of Progressive reformer John Cotton Dana. For more on John Cotton Dana and the Newark Museum, see Carol G. Duncan, A Matter of Class: John Cotton Dana, Progressive Reform, and the Newark Museum(New York: Periscope, 2010).
13 Recent scholarship on Cahill and folk art include Kathleen Jentleson, “‘Not as Rewarding as the North’: Holger Cahill’s Southern Folk Art Expedition,” Available at https://www.aaa.si.edu/essay/katherine-jentleson; Jillian Russo, “From the Ground Up: Holger Cahill and the Promotion of American Art” (PhD diss., CUNY Graduate Center, 2011).
14 Mike Gold, “Two Critics in a Bar-Room,” The Liberator4 n. 9 (September, 1921), 28.
15 Holger Cahill, American Folk Art: Art of the Common Man(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1932), 6.Scholars such as Wanda Corn, Joan Saab, and Celeste Connor have argued that Cahill’s interest in “community” can be seen as an attempt to create a singular national aesthetic identity, a view undoubtedly grounded in his work with the Federal Arts Project. Cahill forcefully denied such a view, noting in the Pring interview, “Now, I didn’t think very much of this idea of a nationalistic art, but I did think that we needed to study phases of our art and to bring some of this back into circulation, and we needed to build up certain American artists who had been neglected in the previous write-up of the American tradition of painting.” Cahill, “Interview with Joan Pring,” reel 5285, frame 244, Holger Cahill Papers, AAA.
16 It is also possible that Veblen’s example led to Cahill’s initial interest in folk art. See Joseph Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America(New York: A. M. Kelly, 1961), 349.
17 Cahill, American Folk Art, 6.
18 For an important consideration of the relationship between the designation of “folk” and social and cultural hierarchies, see Eugene W. Metcalf, “Black Art, Folk Art, and Social Control,” Winterthur Portfolio18, no. 4 (Winter 1983), 271–89.
19 Cahill, American Folk Art, 28.
20 Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). See also George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).
21 Cahill’s tendency to compare folk art with children’s art was present as early as 1930. As he noted in a 1930 radio speech, “One of the characteristics of folk art is that it goes straight to the essentials. It is like the art of children. It is naive, but it has great vitality. It is highly individual and often original expression.” Holger Cahill, “American Folk Art,” radio talk, November 1930, reel 5290, frame 2, Holger Cahill Papers, AAA.
22 MoMA Exhs., Westchester Folk Art Exhibition, folder 22.2, MoMA Archives, NY.
23 Ibid.
24 Alfred Barr, foreword to New Horizons in American Art ( New York : Museum of Modern Art, 1936), 7.
25 Of the works Barr acquired, only a sculpture by Mike Mosco remains in the museum’s collection. Another by Hyman Dorfman is currently in MoMA’s study collection. My thanks to Kristin Gaylord for this information.
26 Alfred Barr, undated notes on Surrealism, folder 10A.71, Alfred Barr Papers, MoMA Archives, NY.
27 Edward Alden Jewell, “The Anatomy of Cubism and Abstract Art,” New York Times, June 7, 1936, 88. See also “Cubism and Abstractions,” Christian Science Monitor , March 10, 1936, 14. For a negative review, see W. B. C., “The Cult of Ugliness,” letter to the editor, New York Herald Tribune, March 28, 1936, 12.
28 Alfred Barr to Jerome Klein, July 19, 1936, folder 1.5, AHB, MoMA Archives, NY; Alfred Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936), 18.
29 Alfred Barr, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936), 12.
30 Ibid., 8. Quite predictably, this framing drew the ire of André Breton and Paul Éluard, who implored Barr to hew more closely to their published theories, to no avail. See Sandra Zalman, “Vernacular as Vanguard: Alfred Barr, Salvador Dalí, and the U.S. Reception of Surrealism in the 1930s,” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas1 (2007): 46.
31 Barr Correspondence, MoMA Exhs., Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, MoMA Archives, NY.
32 Katherine Dreier, letter to Alfred Barr, February 27, 1937. Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism Exhibition Files, MoMA Archives. My discussion of this exchange draws on Sandra Zalman’sConsuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism(New York: Routledge, 2016), which expands the present chapter’s concern with Surrealism at MoMA through the 1939 World’s Fair.
33 Katherine Dreier to Alfred Barr, February 27, 1937, MoMA Exhs., folder 55.2 Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, MoMA Archives, NY.
34 Alfred Barr to Katherine Dreier, MoMA Exhs., folder 55.2., Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, MoMA Archives.
35 Emily Genauer, “The Fur-Lined Museum,” Harper’s Magazine, July 1944, 130.
36 Ibid.
37 “Protest against the Museum of Modern Art,” April 24, n.d., Mary Ryan Gallery.
38 The WPA officially closed in 1943, and it is possible that the increasing vitriol against the Museum of Modern Art for not supporting artists was due in part to the loss of this source of support. My thanks to Angela Miller for drawing my attention to this important event.
39 James Thrall Soby, “Statement in Response to ‘The Fur-Lined Museum’ by Emily Genauer, Harper’s Magazine, July, 1944,” August 18, 1944, folder IV.16, Early Museum History Administrative Records, MoMA Archives.
40 Genauer, “The Fur-Lined Museum,” 129.
41 For more on the Popular Front, whose reception offers a striking parallel to that of Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, see Hemingway, Artists on the Left, 103; Cécile Whiting, Antifascism in American Art(New Haven: Yale Press, 1989), 38.
42 Thomas Crow, “Folk into Art: A Phenomenon of Class and Culture in Twentieth-century America,” in Harry Smith and the Avant-garde in the American Vernacular, ed. Andrew Perchuckand Rani Singh(Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010) 205–24.
43 For more on Long and Father Coughlin, see Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); and Charles Postel, The Populist Vision(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
44 “Two Quit Modern Art Museum for Sur-Realist Political Venture,” New York Herald Tribune, December 18, 1934, 1. With its invocation of the word “sur,” which means “South” in Spanish, the phrase “Sur-Realist” also operates as a pun for Johnson and Blackburn’s departure for Alabama. I am grateful to David Reilly for drawing my attention to this.
45 Ibid.
46 For a detailed account of Art Front’s history and its position with respect to other leftist magazines of the time see Hemingway, Artists on the Left, 39–42.
47 “Surrealist Revolution Counter-Clockwise,” Art Front, February 1935, 3.
48 Frank Caspers, “Surrealism in Overalls,” Scribner’s Magazine, August 1938, 17.
49 Ibid., 20.
50 The title of the article refers to a passage in which Caspers argues that Surrealism’s manipulation can be traced back to the paintings of Bosch and Breughel (neatly echoing, Barr’s thesis of the “fantastic”). “They had surrealism in overalls even then,” he notes, “for their monsters were selling religion by picturing the horrible fate of the people who refused the wares of their sponsors.” Caspers, “Surrealism in Overalls,” 18.
51 Clement Greenberg, “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review, Fall 1939, 34–49.
52 For more on Clement Greenberg’s art theory, and especially its relationship to 1930s politics, see Clark, “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art”; Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Fred Ortonand Griselda Pollock, Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); Susan Noyes Platt, Art and Politics in the 1930s: Modernism, Marxism, Americanism: A History of Cultural Activism during the Depression Years(New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1999).
53 Clement Greenberg to Dwight MacDonald, February 6, 1939, box 24, folder 8, Clement Greenberg Papers, GRI
54 Ibid.
55 For an excellent consideration of this shift, see Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
56 Alfred Barr, Masters of Popular Painting: Modern Primitives of Europe and America(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1938), 9.For more detailed considerations of this exhibition, see Sandra Zalman, “Janet Sobel: Primitive Modern and the Origins of Abstract Expressionism,” Woman’s Art Journal(Fall/Winter 2015): 21 , and Richard Meyer’s essay in Outliers and American Vanguard Art ( Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2018).
57 Barr, Masters of Popular Painting, 9.