Social Realism

Social Role of Artists

This desire to return a social role to artists in the United States manifested itselfby artists and critics alikein the need for art to be more democratic. The modernist ideal of the artist as a bourgeois individualist, isolated and misunderstood by society, was replaced by one in which the artist was fully integrated into that society. Artists would now work alongside other artists on communal projects, such as murals, and their art would be brought into the public realm, moving beyond the restricted space of the museum and art gallery, and into libraries, schools, hospitals, prisons, and other public institutions. Rejecting contemporary art in the United States as feeble imitations of modern European art, the new ideal was an art created by Americans and for Americans. Epitomized by Pablo Picasso, who in the 1930s was creating increasingly abstract art, modern art was perceived by artists and the public as decadent and bourgeois, far removed from questions of politics and society, and concerned only with its own aesthetic. Moreover, as a foreign influence, it had to be purged in the search for an indigenous U.S. art. Several art critics, including Thomas Craven and Royal Cortissoz were adamantly against modernism, and the artist Thomas Hart Benton, who had been a modernist painter before World War I, turned against it during the Depression. Realismthe opposite of modern art, which was moving increasingly toward abstractionthus came to be [Page 760]the most appropriate and authentic mode of representation. This rejection of the avant-garde distinguishes social realism from the realism of 19th-century Europe.

These goals lay at the center of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Federal Art Project (FAP), which began in 1935 and ended in 1943. Part of the New Deal, the FAP employed artists as state workers, often collectively, on public projects in return for a standard weekly wage. The commissioned works put into visual form the nationalist and populist rhetoric of Roosevelt's reformist policies, their function was to restore public faith in the government as a unifying source in a moment of political and economic crisis and to offer images of a promised social utopia. Murals such as Philip Guston's Work and Play in the lobby of the community room in the Queensbridge Housing Project in New York City, with its images of a family, children playing, musicians and dancers, and workers, were meant to depict the different social roles of a productive society, and its idealization of these roles illustrated the unifying and ordering function of state-sponsored art. Other FAP works, such as Cesare Stea's Sculptural Relief for the Bower Bay Sewage Disposal Plant (1936), offered heroic and monumental images of workers, symbolic of the country's efforts to rebuild itself.

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