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Art on the Left in the 1930s / 51and her desire to maintain an oppositional stance to the American politicalsystem. Similarly, Marxist theory provided only the broadest framework forthe content of her painting. According to Annette T. Rubenstein, communism,and speciƒcally the model provided by the Soviet Union, “was a tremendouslyimportant factor in our lives, but it was most important in ratherintangible ways . . . it gave us a feeling of worldwide comradeship and a senseof participating directly in world history.” 15 Neel might best be described as apopulist in the tradition of Walt Whitman, William Jennings Bryan, and oneof her intellectual mentors, Mike Gold. Her communal art was forged withinthe context of America’s cultural traditions and its changing political climate.Despite Neel’s skepticism about theories, one, the call for a social realistart published by Mike Gold the year Neel entered art school, can stand as astatement of her sympathies, even if she did not read it until years later. In aFebruary 1921 essay in the Liberator, “Towards Proletarian Art,” written onlytwo years after the Communist Party was established in the United States,Gold (nee Itzhok [Irwin] Granich) issued a passionate call to arms for an art of,by, and for the laboring poor, one that would be pure and direct and wouldavoid the weaknesses of modernism:What is art? Art is the tenement pouring out its soul through us, its most sensitiveand articulate sons and daughters. What is Life? Life for us has been the tenementthat bore and moulded us through years of meaningful pain . . . The art ideals of thecapitalistic world isolated each artist as in a solitary cell . . .The masses are still primitive and clean, and artists must turn to them forstrength again . . . It is Life at its fullest and noblest . . . The Revolution, in its secularmanifestations of strike, boycott, mass-meeting, imprisonment, sacriƒce, agitation,martyrdom, organization, is thereby worthy of the religious devotion of the artist. 16Published two years before Henri’s The Art Spirit, Gold’s manifesto shares theAshcan School artist’s passionate identiƒcation with the laboring poor, butmoves far beyond Henri in seeing the revolutionary implications of an art ofthe masses. Gold’s messianic faith that an art forged from life could help fosterthe revolution, which in turn would usher in a new society, exempliƒed the romanticzeal of the early converts to communism.Neel’s earliest social realist painting, the spare pictogram Futility of Effort(1930, ƒg. 26), can be considered a quite literal response to Gold’s call for anart of the tenement. Yet, it was Ben Shahn’s more monumental The Passion ofSacco and Vanzetti (1931–1932, ƒg. 34) that crystalized the form and contentof the new movement. The Italian immigrant workers, symbols of politicalpersecution to a generation of left-wing artists and activists, are depicted asmartyred saints. In presenting the story, Shahn combines information from