Joan Saab Book: For Millions American Art

¶ … Joan Saab book: For Millions American Art Culture Between War

Joan Saab's book, For the Millions: American Art and Culture Between the Wars, captures and elucidates a vital component of American history, and that in regards to its visual art in particular. This manuscript chronicles a crucial shifting in the regard, usage, and conception of art in the early part of the 20th century between World Wars I and II. This historical epoch was crucial to the fostering of contemporary America and its art for a number of factors. The country was celebrating its victory in the Great War before it knelt to the pressure of the Great Depression, which was only alleviated by one of the most devastating martial encounters in the history of the man, the Second World War. This tumultuous time played a highly important part in the creation and usage of visual art, which was able to evolve to an egalitarian, utilitarian medium to both connect people and to enforce the new mores of a revolutionary zeitgeist in art. Saab's manuscript helps to contextualize this process, and offers first hand insight and original research into this phenomenon.

One of the most important aspects of this book that the author emphasizes early and often is the wholesale transition that visual art went through in the period spanning from the end of the Depression to the concluding years of the Second World War. Prior to this historical era, art was widely regarded as an elitist hobby, tradition, and pasttime of the rich. It was viewed through the somewhat snobbish lens of academia, with lofty prices and gallery showings of what was often complex pieces that alienated the everyday, common people in the United States. The author explains that this regard for art changed, primarily because of the global events taking place that helped to change society itself. Chief among these was the Depression, which suddenly reduced the rich and commoners to essentially the same class -- destitute. The way that this event helped art itself is that socially, politically, and in some sense economically, art served as a rallying point for which people could unite with one another, and form a new American ideal. The author explains that this new ideal was a form of modernity based on democracy, which helped to involve everyone regardless of their education and economic standing (since most everyone was poor anyway). One of the principle institutions that was created during this time period that helped to initiate this movement was the New York Museum of Modern Art, which was founded in 1929 during the end of the prosperous Roaring Twenties and at the outset of the Depression. Yet this new perception and use of art was orchestrated on the nationwide level largely thanks to the efforts of the Federal Arts Project.

This project, like all other New Deal reforms, was conceived of by Roosevelt to serve a variety of purposes. It hoped to restore American confidence and faith in the nation while providing for a few jobs and ideally bringing in some revenue to attempt to revitalize the failing economy that was indicative of a larger, global depression. The organization was created by the Works Progress Administration, and chief among its agendas was to interest common people in the art which was now regarded to have an everyday value. There were several types of visual art that was created by the Federal Arts Project, including posters, advertisements, murals and others that were extremely pragmatic in their purposes and, for the most part, in their depiction of a hard working American values. These depictions were purposefully portrayed by this movement as a way of involving people in the arts who were previously alienated from its elitist, affluent standards and the abstract, academic subjects that prior visual art readily demonstrated.

Yet as Saab explains, although one of the most vital pieces of this new movement of art, by no means did the Federal Arts Project function in a vacuum. One of its primary branches of support in fostering this new sense of artistic, democratic, and modern mores was New York's Museum of Modern Art, whose director Alfred Barr went out of his way to make sure the institute addressed the contemporary regard for art that the museum was named for. During the 1930's, the museum had a number of exhibits that championed the cause of ordinary American people, and which allowed for informed consumption within the national marketplace. This sort of sentiment was further propagated near the end of the decade as World War II surfaced with the 1939-1940 New York's World Fairs. These events were planned during the Depression for similar reasons that the Federal Arts Project were, and provided a platform for which many artists could showcase their work of the new aesthetic in American values and visual art work. Lastly, the creation of Life magazine in the 1940s helped to further this movement as well. The magazine made wide usage of photojournalism, which helped to perpetuate images of ordinary Americans involved in common points of interest that were similarly aligned with the aesthetic of American art pioneered in the 1930's.

Due to the fact that the regard for artwork in the U.S. changed so dramatically during the aforementioned epoch, it was only natural that h role of the artist transitioned as well. In fact, the works of art could not have reflected the values of everyday American and the people it represented without this prior change in the role of the artist. Whereas artists were previously regarded as aloof and eccentric, the careful coordination of efforts between government officials, museum and media directors, and educators and the artists themselves helped to change that perception into one that was decidedly for and indicative of the people as a whole. The result was an egalitarian conception of art that was immensely relatable to people at the time they needed art, and anything else, for that part, most.