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REPRESSION OF ART IN AMERICA

JOE JONES

So long as the overwhelming majority of American artists were concerned only with the creation of individual art works with no predetermined destination, censorship or repression of art was no problem in this country. If works made for hypothetical buyers found no takers, the artist could only complain of being neglected or not appreciated. And there the matter ended.

But with the depression came a new interest in art with a social, a general public bearing. And with the expression of this interest came reactionary efforts to stifle freedom of thought.

In the worst depths of the crisis, in 1933, the Rockefellers found it expedient to make a liberal gesture toward the distressed masses of the country by employing Diego Rivera to paint a mural in Rockefeller Center showing "Man Standing at the Crossroads, Looking to the Future with Uncertainty but Hope." When Rivera expressed more certainty than the Rockefellers had bargained for by including a portrait of Lenin in his prospect, he was asked to remove this detail and on his refusal he was ordered off the scaffold. Widespread protests were made against the stoppage. Several months later, the Rockefellers had the unfinished mural completely destroyed, an act characterized by outstanding liberal artists as "vandalism." 

The Museum of Modern Art, where the Rockefellers are also active, had attempted censorship of work by Ben Shahn, William Gropper and Hugo Gellert in its mural show on the ground that attacks against living Americans in their works were unpermissible. In this case J.P. Morgan, one of those caricatured, preferred letting the pictures hang to getting unfavorable publicity, and for this reason censorship was not finally imposed. 

A cooperative mural done in the old court house of St. Louis by Negro and white students under the direction of Joe Jones was saved from destruction for a year and a half through mass defence by the workers. Finally the administration succeeded in closing the room to the public. 

The first censorship of art on government projects was the case of the Coit Tower murals in San Francisco, where artists were forced to efface the title of a worker's newspaper, The Western Worker, and other symbols before authorities would permit the public showing of the paintings. 

The most openly Fascistic act, however, took place in Los Angeles, where Police Captain Hynes and his notorious Red Squad broke into a John Reed Club exhibition, smashing sculpture and portable murals. To show their feelings they put bullet holes through the heads of Negroes portrayed in the murals, but spared two figures, a Ku Klux Klan member and a judge. 

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On a number of government art projects artists have been ordered to make all sorts of changes to blunt or polish up the plain truths of the situations they were paintings before they were found acceptable to the reactionary administrators. A mural by Michael Loew for Textile High School in Brooklyn was found unsatisfactory by the Board of Education because workers leaving a factory looked too serious, whereas "they should have been smiling." Also the massing of workers left possible the inference that it was a strike walkout, according to the educators, who ordered the number of workers reduced. Another high school mural by Louis Ferstadt was rejected because it did not conform to the "taste" of the principal.

The splendid mural designed by Ben Shahn and Lou Block for the Riker's Island Penitentiary in New York, contrasting brutal methods of penal institutions under backwards administrations with the technique of modern scientific penology, a work widely praised, was rejected by the Municipal Art Commission as "psychologically unfit." This phrase might better have been applied to the commission itself, as a poll of the prisoners showed an intelligent response. Jonas Lie, at the time a member of the commission, described this progressive work as "anti-social"!

Most significant is the fact that the reactionary moves toward censorship and repression has even extended to the field of private easel painting. The mere showing of a few realistic or highly personal expressions in the last annual exhibition of contemporary American art at the Chicago Art Institute brought indignant protests and threats of withdrawal of contributions to the museum from a number of "art benefactors."

These cases need no further elaboration. They indicate plainly how the widespread growth of reaction in the United States is affecting liberty of artistic expression. Powerful protests actions have already done much to prevent further stifling of our liberties. It is up to the American Artists' Congress to give impetus to the movement for the defense of our rights as artists and Americans.

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