ABOUT THIS BOOK

Framing the Audience explores the cultural politics of the Great Depression and World War II through the prism of art appreciation. Isadora Helfgott interrogates the ideological and political motivations for breaking down barriers between fine art and popular culture. She charts the impact that changes in art appreciation had on the broader political, social, cultural, and artistic landscape.

Framing the Audience argues that efforts to expand the social basis of art became intertwined with—and helped shape—broader debates about national identity and the future of American political economy. Helfgott chronicles artists’ efforts toinfluence the conditions of artistic production and display. She highlights the influence of the Federal Art Project, the impact of the Museum of Modern Art as an institutional home for modernism in America and as an organizer of traveling exhibitions, and the efforts by LIFE and Fortune magazines to integrate art education into their visual record of modern life. In doing so, Helfgott makes critical observations about the changing relationship between art and the American public.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Isadora Anderson Helfgott is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wyoming.

REVIEWS

“Framing the Audience is a very smart book. With great finesse, Isadora Helfgott approaches the complicated political and ideological shifts in the promotion and reception of an art of social content during the 1930s. She fills in the gaps in our understanding of how traveling exhibitions and inexpensive reproductions of art advanced the ideal of a ‘people’s art.’ Her brilliant discussions and dynamic analyses of the artist Anton Refregier and the publisher of Time,Life, and Fortune, Henry Luce, clinch her arguments. This book is well argued and beautifully written.”—Patricia Hills, Professor Emerita of American and African American Art at Boston University and author of Painting Harlem Modern: The Art of Jacob Lawrence

“Framing the Audience is an insightful investigation into the shifting paradigms for developing mass appreciation of the visual arts from the 1930s to the postwar era. Isadora Helfgott brings new depth of analysis to often marginalized topics in American cultural history, from the hopes of leftist artists and New Deal art administrators, to innovative exhibition and sales options for making art experiences accessible to a wider audience, to the roles of Fortune and Life magazines in merging corporate patronage, advertising, and fine arts promotion. Focusing on visual art’s relationship to its larger cultural contexts, Helfgott thoughtfully explores changing strategies for building and encouraging art’s democratic audience.”—Helen Langa, Associate Professor of Art History at American University and author of Radical Art: Printmaking and the Left in 1930s New York

“Framing the Audience poignantly demonstrates the topicality of Depression-era art and cultural debate in the United States. Rejecting dismissal of that decade as a compendium of lost or irrelevant practices and ideals disconnected from our present, Isadora Helfgott shows the decisive nature of questions of ‘public,’ ‘representation,’ and ‘power’ both then and now—in not only art and criticism but also the reconstitution of the American social order. Through adept studies of artworks, critics, and cultural institutions of the day, Framing the Audience makes a valuable empirical contribution to the social history of art and New Deal–era cultural historiography as it poses questions about economic and social power in times of crisis that are as relevant today as they were during the ‘dirty thirties.’”—Jonathan Harris, Professor in Global Art and Design Studies at Birmingham City University and author of Federal Art and National Culture: The Politics of Identity in New Deal America

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: “This New American Reaction to Art”

Part I. From Revolution to Cultural Democracy: Artists Seek the People

1. “To Speak of and to the People”: Artists, Ideology, and Action from Proletcult to the Popular Front

2. New Horizons: From Federal Art to the Decline of New Deal Liberalism

Part II. Museums without Walls: Art and the Public Sphere

3. “Like Lecturers or Vaudeville Performers”: Traveling Art Exhibitions and the National Audience

4. Suitable for Framing: Mechanical Reproduction and Fine Art for the Masses

Part III. The Triumph of American Consumerism: Corporations, Art, and Popular Culture

5. The “Peculiar Virtue in the Lime”: Fortune Magazine and the Enlightened Businessman

6. Art in Life: Magazine as Museum

Conclusion: “Selling Goods and Winning Friends”

Notes

Index

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