James Wechsler

Certain artists who were active in the Communist Party, such as George Grosz, John Heartfield, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, are important figures in the modernist canon; yet American communist artists in general have been excluded. This omission presents a skewed, incomplete picture of a movement that was international in scope. During the 1920s American artists such as Hugo Gellert, Louis Lozowick, William Gropper, and Maurice Becker established contact with artists in Russia, France, Germany, and Mexico through the illustrated leftist cultural magazines the Liberator and New Masses. By late in the decade these and other American artists were frequently publishing their work in foreign periodicals such as Monde, edited by Henri Barbusse, and Knueppel, the German satirical journal most associated with Grosz. In the early 1930s, through the Moscowbased International Association of Revolutionary Artists (IBRA), members of the American John Reed Clubs were in contact with Party-affiliated organizations throughout the world. These included the French Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Revolutionnaires (l’AEAR), the German Assoziation Revolutionärer Bildender Künstler Deutschlands (ARBKD), and the Mexican Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR).

During my postdoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, I will continue to explore these international connections and respond to the widely accepted argument that modernism and communism were divergent, incompatible ideologies.