i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

Art on the Left in the 1930s / 53If she were to make her mark, however, it would be with the dramatictableau, the staging of revolutionary scenes that formed the staple of social realistsubject matter. Yet only a handful Neel’s tableaux from 1933 to 1936 areexplicitly political. Her most militant social realist tableau, Nazis Murder Jews(1936, ƒg. 37), depicting a communist torchlight parade, 20 creates an antifascistprotest by documenting one. As with Futility of Effort, it can be considereda response to the period’s manifestoes, in this case Stuart Davis’s insistencethat the American Artists’ Congress was to “be a strengthening element to thewhole ƒeld of progressive organization against War and Fascism.” 21 As withher contemporary Uneeda Biscuit Strike, Neel documents actual events, inthis instance the demonstrations that characterized the Popular Front period.As in the documentary photography of the period, Neel uses signage in orderto underscore the work’s message. By afƒxing her sign to the front plane of thecanvas, Neel visually arrests the pictorial momentum and demands attentionto the cause of the march. As in any good propaganda art, the work’s message isforceful and devoid of ambiguity. However, when shown in a group exhibit ofhonorable mention recipients of “The First Annual Competitive Exhibition”for American Artists Congress members at Herman Baron’s ACA galleries, itwas found lacking in formal terms. In the September 12, 1936, New York WorldTelegram, Emily Genauer wrote:Alice Neel brandishes aloft the torch which she and members of the Artists’ Unionalong with her hope will eventually lead to enlightenment and destruction of Fascism.One, depicting a workers’ parade, would be an excellent picture from thepoint of view of color, design, and emotional signiƒcance if the big, bold black-andwhitesign carried by one of the marchers at the head of the parade, denouncingHitler, didn’t throw the rest of the composition out of gear by serving to tear a visualhole in the canvas. 22Neel countered appropriately: “But if they had noticed that sign, thousands ofJews might have been saved.” 23 An important contribution to social realism,Neel’s painting is one of the earliest in American painting to speciƒcallyprotest the Nazi persecutions of Jews. 24As Neel’s painting indicates, the notion of a public art directed to the proletarian,which had guided the artistic stance of Gold and of the New Masses,was now redirected toward the threat of fascism; the comparable situation inpolitics was the CPUSA’s support of Roosevelt’s 1936 campaign. The additionalcon„icts involved in being a revolutionary artist employed by the U.S.Government were exposed in a review of an exhibition of WPA art at the WhitneyMuseum. In “The Public Use of Art,” published in the November 1936issue of Art Front, Meyer Schapiro raised the question not of the style or con-