word—“play of body-mind trying to free itself from mechanical social responses, and in this becoming essentially moral, in subverting and even overthrowing an established American social order which is inhuman in its drives and responses. Our own Fascism, you could say.”
“Exactly!” Bernie Nova pounced. “Regionalism is Fascist painting; it appeals to the same
Lumpen
, it labels everything else degenerate, just like Nazism it caters to injured pride and a warped national ego. It hates the French, it hates the immigrants, it’s rural America—the pitchfork, the fat cattle, the cotton fields, the Okie in his jalopy, the good simple straight-standing farm folk, good Christ, the tidy rows of corn, the tornado lowering on the horizon—rural America in all its anti-Negro, anti-Jew, anti-city isolationism. The war, bless it, has swept isolationism away; ditto AmericanScene, though its cartoon populism makes good war propaganda. And good leftist propaganda, too.”
“Not propaganda, expression,” mildly objected Mahlon Strunk, who for all his stodgy appearance was a doctrinaire Socialist. “What the Urban Scenists said was there, was there. Poverty, crowding, tenements. Give them that, Bernie.”
Several painters began to object, to be sardonic, but Bernie’s staccato voice, a Bronx native’s undrownable-out voice, cut through them; settling his monocle in place with a lifted eyebrow, and switching his mustache back and forth with a sideways pursing of his lips, he continued haughtily, “Pittsburgh factories, breadlines, long-legged coons loping along A Hundred Twenty-fifth Street—face it, it’s all cheap genre painting, Benton and Grant Wood with their bib overalls off. American art has become a picture-postcard factory. Every nation has its commercial artists,” he stated resolutely, seeing that others wished to speak, “but not even the Nazis claim to have made art history with them. Americana doesn’t make good American painting; the American project,” he said, removing his monocle and gesturing with this disembodied emblem of vision, “is to create the conditions out of which great painters—great minds, great
seers
—can emerge. It is time artists refused easy success, refused isolationist-philistine money, repudiated the art dealers and museum directors; it is time we forgot about success.”
This was proclaimed, the last phrases with the drumbeat sonority of President Roosevelt’s high-toned broadcasts, to a group that had known little success. Their paintings—weak, coarse, modest-sized echoes of Miró and Mondrian, with a muddy impasto borrowed from the Mexican muralists—held yet only the wish for revolutionary action, not the achievement. Jarl Anders, gaunt and pasty, a Minnesota preacher’s child, a humorless shaman, cried out, hoarse with wrath, in the Cedar Tavern of Hope’s recollection, “Swill! Ever since the Armory Show, synthetic tradition and unredeemable corruption! The Armory Show was swill, the spoiled fruit of Western European decadence, dumped on the American yokels with all its labyrinthine evasions, and it’s been total confusion ever since. No shouting about individualism, no manipulation of academic conceits or technical fetishes can truly liberate. No literary games and idiotic automatism, no Bauhaus sterilities, no pseudo-religious titles, no obscene toadying to the smooth-tongued agents of social control can rise as high as even the toenail of the sublime.”
“My goodness,” Myrtle Strunk had to exclaim, sitting wedged against her husband. “ ‘The toenail of the sublime’—Jarl, how high would you say you have risen? The ankle? The kneecap?”
“You mean to mock,” he stated, his torso as rigid as the dark near-abstract shaman-figures prominent in his work, “but I will repay your discourtesy with an honest answer. Since 1941—I date the year precisely, as more momentous than any puffed-up events at Pearl Harbor—space and the figure in my
“Exactly!” Bernie Nova pounced. “Regionalism is Fascist painting; it appeals to the same
Lumpen
, it labels everything else degenerate, just like Nazism it caters to injured pride and a warped national ego. It hates the French, it hates the immigrants, it’s rural America—the pitchfork, the fat cattle, the cotton fields, the Okie in his jalopy, the good simple straight-standing farm folk, good Christ, the tidy rows of corn, the tornado lowering on the horizon—rural America in all its anti-Negro, anti-Jew, anti-city isolationism. The war, bless it, has swept isolationism away; ditto AmericanScene, though its cartoon populism makes good war propaganda. And good leftist propaganda, too.”
“Not propaganda, expression,” mildly objected Mahlon Strunk, who for all his stodgy appearance was a doctrinaire Socialist. “What the Urban Scenists said was there, was there. Poverty, crowding, tenements. Give them that, Bernie.”
Several painters began to object, to be sardonic, but Bernie’s staccato voice, a Bronx native’s undrownable-out voice, cut through them; settling his monocle in place with a lifted eyebrow, and switching his mustache back and forth with a sideways pursing of his lips, he continued haughtily, “Pittsburgh factories, breadlines, long-legged coons loping along A Hundred Twenty-fifth Street—face it, it’s all cheap genre painting, Benton and Grant Wood with their bib overalls off. American art has become a picture-postcard factory. Every nation has its commercial artists,” he stated resolutely, seeing that others wished to speak, “but not even the Nazis claim to have made art history with them. Americana doesn’t make good American painting; the American project,” he said, removing his monocle and gesturing with this disembodied emblem of vision, “is to create the conditions out of which great painters—great minds, great
seers
—can emerge. It is time artists refused easy success, refused isolationist-philistine money, repudiated the art dealers and museum directors; it is time we forgot about success.”
This was proclaimed, the last phrases with the drumbeat sonority of President Roosevelt’s high-toned broadcasts, to a group that had known little success. Their paintings—weak, coarse, modest-sized echoes of Miró and Mondrian, with a muddy impasto borrowed from the Mexican muralists—held yet only the wish for revolutionary action, not the achievement. Jarl Anders, gaunt and pasty, a Minnesota preacher’s child, a humorless shaman, cried out, hoarse with wrath, in the Cedar Tavern of Hope’s recollection, “Swill! Ever since the Armory Show, synthetic tradition and unredeemable corruption! The Armory Show was swill, the spoiled fruit of Western European decadence, dumped on the American yokels with all its labyrinthine evasions, and it’s been total confusion ever since. No shouting about individualism, no manipulation of academic conceits or technical fetishes can truly liberate. No literary games and idiotic automatism, no Bauhaus sterilities, no pseudo-religious titles, no obscene toadying to the smooth-tongued agents of social control can rise as high as even the toenail of the sublime.”
“My goodness,” Myrtle Strunk had to exclaim, sitting wedged against her husband. “ ‘The toenail of the sublime’—Jarl, how high would you say you have risen? The ankle? The kneecap?”
“You mean to mock,” he stated, his torso as rigid as the dark near-abstract shaman-figures prominent in his work, “but I will repay your discourtesy with an honest answer. Since 1941—I date the year precisely, as more momentous than any puffed-up events at Pearl Harbor—space and the figure in my
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