i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

54 / Neel’s Social Realist Arttent of socially concerned art but of its audience. To create a genuinely publicart, Schapiro argued, the artist “had to undergo a change as a human beingand as an artist; he must become realistic in his perceptions . . . and free himselffrom the illusions of isolation, superiority and the absoluteness of his formalproblems.” 25 This meant working directly with the proletariat to determineits needs.Schapiro not only recognized that the gap between the bourgeois artist andthe working class had to be bridged before a public art could emerge, but concludedthat beyond an art accessible to the masses, “the people [must] controlthe means of production and attain a standard of living and a level of culturesuch that the enjoyment of art of a high quality becomes an important part oftheir life.” 26 As Patricia Hills has pointed out, this essay “calls for nothing shortof revolution...” 27Mike Gold could hardly let such radical criticism of social realism stand,and disparaged Schapiro’s writings as merely “wonderful victories on paper”penned by “a little group of Phi Beta Kappa Trotskyites in New York . . .” 28During the Popular Front years, in sum, the Communist Party deliberatelymuzzled all talk of world revolution, whereas Trotskyite Marxists such asSchapiro continued to speak of its necessity. Hills concludes: “Hence the Partysacriƒced a sharp cultural critique of capitalism to political expediency. At thesame time, independent intellectuals like Schapiro in their writings called for‘revolution’ for artists and cultural workers, but remained aloof from collectiveaction and the struggles in the streets.” 29 Neel’s move to Spanish Harlem in1939 was a political statement to the extent that she considered it a move awayfrom the rariƒed world of Schapiro and the Greenwich Village intelligentsiato the “real” world of the underclass. In essence resolving the contradiction betweenthought and action, Neel decided that her art would be made from andaddressed to that audience.The path the socially concerned artist was to follow became even less distinctwith the coming of World War II. The acrimonious debate over the Russianinvasion of Finland within the American Artists Congress in the spring of1940 caused the public defection of its most prestigious members, includingMeyer Schapiro, George Biddle, and Stuart Davis, after which the Congressslowly declined. 30 During the 1940s and 1950s, the word revolution disappearedfrom the literature, as the Smith Act of 1940 had made its advocation acrime. When the Supreme Court upheld the act in 1951, the door was openedfor McCarthyism.During these years, radical artists’ writings became reassuringly centrist andtheir art ambiguously allegorical. Philip Evergood’s 1943 article, “Sure, I’m aSocial Painter,” written the year that WPA’s easel program was dissolved, setthe tone for postwar social realism: