i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

190 / Notes5. Robert Shaffer, “Women and the Communist Party,” Socialist Review 45 (May-June 1979), 95.6. Increasingly embattled after 1940, it lost its union accreditation in 1942, emergingas the Artists League of America. Although the ALA continued to hold annual exhibitionsuntil 1948, its membership gradually declined as its cause retreated everfurther from view, until in a letter of August 23, 1948, to Daniel Koerner, RockwellKent suggested, “Let’s liquidate our assets in booze.” Daniel Koerner papersAAA1337/880. For information on United American Artists and the Artists Leagueof America see Lynd Ward papers, AAA4466/108–354; Charles Keller papersAAA7/591–740; Daniel Koerner papers, AAAN70–40/499–567; AAA1337/551–1028. For an excellent history of the trade union movement in American art seeGerald M. Monroe, “Artists as Militant Trade Union Workers During the GreatDepression,” Archives of American Art Journal 14/1 (spring 1974), 7–10.7. Letter of September 1943 from Joseph Solman to Jacob Kainen, Jacob Kainen papers,AAA565, 0170–0193.8. Anon., “The Passing Shows,” Art News 42/3 (March 15–31, 1944), 20.9. “Well, the mystery w/ WPA is cleared up. all the oils stored in King St. & adjacentwarehouses showed up in a second hand bric a brac shop down on Canal St . . . Ihurried down, recovered four really good ones of mine as well as several for [Mervyn]Jules, Louis Nisonoff & Alice Neel . . . Most of the stuff still lies in back of hisjunk shop on the „oor without beneƒt of stretchers—just one huge cofƒn.” Lettersof February 26, 1939, September 1943, and January 1944 from Joseph Solman toJacob Kainen, Jacob Kainen papers, AAA565, 0170–0193.10. Kenneth Fearing, The Big Clock (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946), 153–56 passim.11. Ibid., 47–50.12. Ibid.13. Philip Evergood, “Sure, I’m a Social Painter,” Magazine of Art 36 (October 1943),257.14. Anon., “The Passing Shows.” Unfortunately, this review cannot be attributed to theyoung Hilton Kramer, but it anticipates by thirty years the main points of his scathingreview of her Whitney Museum exhibition in 1974.15. According to Irving Howe, “In its origins the line that America was approachingfascism re„ected the need of Russia to revile its main enemy in the cold war. Asapplied by the party this line was supposed to bind the ranks during a time of troubles.”Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party (New York:Praeger, 1957), 457.16. Gropper, for instance, was called before the McCarthy Committee on May 6,1953, where the stoolpigeon Harvey Matusow testiƒed that Gropper was a communist.Later that year, the Cranbrook Academy canceled their scheduled Gropper exhibition.The artist’s response to this censorship by a respected arts institution was aseries of prints titled after Goya’s Capriccios. Like Neel’s The Stoolpigeon, The Informers(1953–1956) from this series visualizes the perversion of the truth in termsof exaggerated caricature. Louis Lozowick no doubt summarized their collectiveopinion when he wrote that “informers are the most despised of all groups in currentsociety.” Norma Shiela Steinberg, “William Gropper: Art and Censorship