Introduction

Prints are made in a wide variety of techniques -- lithographs, etchings, woodcuts, silkscreens and many more -- and come in as many sizes and subjects. American artists produced more prints during the Great Depression than at any earlier time, inspired in part by the first significant government support for the arts this country has ever seen. Because this support was federal and because of the crisis of the Depression was so overwhelming, most of these prints addressed the state of the nation, the condition of America. The radical nature of this interest is expressed in the words of one contemporary catalogue. Entitled Good News for Printmakers, it was produced by the Brooklyn Museum of Art and a union, the United American Printmakers, a division of United American Artists, Local no. 60: a conjunction of forces never before seen in the art world and not likely to be repeated any time soon. Published just as the decade of the 1930s closed, the authors wrote: "Prints have always been intended as a product for the many. They were first conceived out of a need of the masses.... Prints must again become an art product for the many -- without the slightest concession in quality: for the best is just good enough for the masses."

But this simple political conjunction of "the masses" and "prints," felt deeply at a time when government programs brought artists and art to even the loneliest town in the country (an intrusion not always welcomed), conceals a real complexity of relations between the American public, for whom these prints were intended, and the graphic art itself, which this exhibition seeks to address. How did a fine art medium like prints, once the province of rich collectors, galleries and museums, hope to become a mass medium? How could it compete with the other media that carried images: advertisements, newspapers, magazines and the movies? And what was significantly or typically American? None of the answers to these questions in easy. But the prints themselves addressed the issues vividly and often brilliantly, even if never living up to the wild hope expressed by Local no. 60 in Brooklyn.

Artists Respond

The print world mushroomed just as the Great Depression hit, and printmaking was an established and highly visible part of the art scene well before federal aid programs established the first graphics workshops at the end of 1935.

The print world responded to the crisis of the Great Depression by desperately trying to reach new audiences in new ways. Commercial art galleries, as their expensive painting stocks failed to move, began to expand into the cheaper print market. The number of collectors'groups also expanded, with print clubs founded in most cities, from Rochester and Minneapolis to Dallas. Most of these societies commissioned an annual print to be distributed to their members, like Steven Dohanos' State Fair 1938. Prints became an attractive medium to express cultural sophistication when more expensive objects could not be bought.

Everyone looked for new marketing niches: the International Print Guild in 1933 promised 9 prints a year to institutional members like universities, and the Miniature Print Club offered prints like Samuel Margolies' Bridge to Babylon 1949 to those who liked small collectibles. Perhaps the most rewarding activities for artists were the commercial groups that were organized to promote and publish prints, even though most failed. These ranged from artists' groups to commercial galleries: from the Contemporary Print Group (1933), which published two portfolios of prints in editions of 300, including Thomas Hart Benton's Strike , before failing; to the Associated American Artists (1934), which published in editions of 250 more than 600 prints between 1934 and 1945, and still survives; to the American Artists Group, also established in 1934, which published unlimited editions (including Mabel Dwight's Children's Clinic 1936), although these seldom ran more than 300 impressions.

Success or Failure

But how effective were these attempts to reach audiences? Printmakers knew they needed to shape their imagery to the demands of a popular market, but their success was equivocal at best. The comments made in the Magazine of Art in 1937, in praising how inventively artists had marketed their work also revealed the pitfalls of their approach. Reviewing the international print exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, the magazine declared: "Never before has America proved herself so greatly interested in the graphic arts as at the present moment. Various groups, local, regional, national, have worked long and well toward this end. We have our woodblock calendars, print-of-the-month clubs, and even occasional bargain sales of genuine etchings in department stores. More significant still is the rise of the Associated American Artists and the American Artists Group, organizations which prosper because they use modern selling methods to put across prints of a certain standard. Even today, when we seem so surely leading in the field, it is good to check what we have against the imported variety. It is surely high time that our own artists won the esteem -- and the market -- they deserve." These comments summarize the structure of the print world and place it firmly within Depression economic ideologies: foreign competition and markets defined prints as just another successfully positioned commodity, like any other consumer item. But how, then, were they to be "art"?

Mass Media

The pressure to succeed economically forced fine prints into the marketplace; the desire to be at one with the "masses" forced them to be popular. Prints were now supposed to compete directly with the mass media that saturated America with visual imagery of all sorts from every direction. Advertising in the form of billboards, posters and signs dominated both urban and rural environments to an extent unseen today with our stricter codes and Highway Beautification Acts.

Visual images in the form of photographs overran the print media to a far greater extent than ever before. Life magazine, begun in 1936 as the first national weekly magazine of photographs, was only one of a dozen of such magazines at decade's end. Meanwhile, hand-drawn images became even more popular as cartoons, in such magazines as the New Yorker, Colliers, and The Saturday Evening Post. Comic books proliferated, Superman having flown in from Krypton in 1939. And, dominating all the rest there was the film industry, which spent over $150,000,000 in 1938 making movies to entice 85,000,000 people into 17,000 theaters!

Advertising

Many artists had strong commercial roots. Perhaps most of the artists in this exhibition had trained as illustrators, beginning with the oldest and most famous of the lot, John Sloan, who had worked as a book and newspaper illustrator long before he had been lured into fine art by his friend Robert Henri. In this period, the option of teaching at a university was generally unavailable. Today perhaps the majority of artists support themselves with teaching; however, in the 1930s, most were trained as commercial artists and found jobs in advertising or illustrating. Robert Riggs, Steven Dohanos, Harry Brodsky and Bertrand Brussel-Smith, among others, either worked as art directors for advertising companies, or corporations, or worked for art directors; in the worst days of the Depression everyone from Georgia O'Keefe to Thomas Hart Benton , Rockwell Kent, Louis Lozowick and Raphael Soyer permitted their work to be used in advertisements. During the late 1930s, the number of "fine" artists whose work was used in advertising campaigns was at an all-time high, a trend noticed by several commentators who touted it as a sign of a new maturity in the field of advertising, as well as in the public itself.

Cartoons

In the mid-1930s cartoons and comic strips also briefly dominated advertising. The very practice of cartoon images made some artists uneasy, and one would be very hard put to distinguish the work of someone like Russell Limbach in either subject matter, style or presentation from the work of Peter Arno, the popular cartoonist whose work appeared in the New Yorker, advertisements and anthologies in the 1930s. Limbach's work itself sometimes slipped across such lines: Reviewing Stand 1934. was published as an editorial in the New Masses after it had been issues in a limited edition for the Contemporary Print Group: the only difference being the quality of the paper. An image performing such "high" and "low" work was not uncommon.

Despite the comically exaggerated content and style of much of their work, these artists thought of themselves as reporting on American realities rather than entertaining their viewers. In 1935 the New Masses defined a new term to describe the work of those who looked long and hard at the bleak new world around them: "Reportage in three-dimensional reporting. The writer not only condensed reality, he helps the reader feel the fact. The finest writers of reportage are artists in the fullest sense of the term. they do their editorializing through their imagery." This condensation of reality, which was made both truthful and emotional though the use of strong imagery is what most printmakers strove for as well. Their sincere "feeling" made any explicit claims to be funny dangerously equivocal. On the other hand, reportage itself had an ambiguous relationship to reality.

Photography

The primary model for such visual reporting was not graphic art, however, but photography. The uses of photography dramatically increased in all media throughout the period, as new technology made good quality photo-reproduction increasingly cheap. The administrators of federal agencies who employed photographers were especially good at publicizing their photographers' work. Philip Evergood, who did not travel into the hinterland to produce his melodramatic responses to rural tragedy, relied instead on images from newspapers: Sorrowing Farmers. might well have been taken from Dorothea Lange's photographs, some of which appeared in her collaborative book with Erskine Caldwell, You Have Seen Their Faces 1937.

Movies

Photography's power was felt most strongly in its largest manifestation, the movies, the visual medium which represented America to itself most persuasively. While connections in subject matter between prints and movies are most prominent -- the string of social realist movies from Warner Brothers and other studios popularized studies of rural poverty and unemployment -- there was also the occasional stylistic trait printmakers took from the movies. The visual narratives of Lynd Ward came closest to the movies -- as both Ward and his reviewers were aware -- although the effect was more like that of a silent movie. The relationship could work the other way as well. In 1939, The Wizard of Oz took the dramatic scene when the tornado drives Dorothy's family into the storm cellar from a 1932 print, Tornado, by John Steuart Curry.

If movies were the communal activity of Americans, advertising was its bread-and-butter. There was certainly no clear distinction between advertising images and fine art prints. Perhaps the most vivid demonstration was Darryl Zanuck's commission of six prints by Thomas Hart Benton to advertise the movie of John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath in 1940. But in a sense, Zanuck's use of Benton's images testifies to the ubiquity of this imagery as much as is does to any co-option of Benton by the world o commerce: Zanuck knew that Benton's work typified the subject of the film.

"High/low" or "Art and the Public"

These are the lessons to be learnt from this analysis: there is no clear division between the worlds of art and mass media: nor can we assume that the images produced were passively accepted by the public. Printmakers belonged to the same visual culture as moviemakers, photographers and advertisers. Seldom were their viewpoints different, partly because they were molded strongly by the desire to fit in and communicate to an audience that would understand their use of familiar imagery in addressing common problems. The prints belonged by and large to a visual style that conformed, rather than one which stood against the mainstream. While there was certainly a range of variation, as these prints themselves bear witness, even the most radical -- at least for the first part of the decade -- were seldom more stylized or abstract than much of the advertising, which also used distortion to express elegance, speed or power. The figural conventions used by Limbach, Peggy Bacon or Palmer Schoppe were seldom more extreme than the physical distortions seen in cartoons and comics; the only thing different was their "market share," or, as the artist Arthur Millier dismissively said, their "distribution."

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