i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

64 / Neel’s Social Realist Artpainting of huddled Jewish refugees, like Neel’s Nazis Murder Jews, explicitlyrefers to Nazi political persecution.A few months later, in an Art Front article entitled “Our Expressionists”(February 1937), Kainen described the new “movement” as if it were an establishedfact. Again singling out Tschacbasov as an artist who has “made Expressionismthe vehicle for a militant proletarianism,” Kainen listed twenty-threepainters who exempliƒed the new expressionism, but Neel was no longeramong them. In a melodramatic conclusion, Kainen summarized his deƒnitionof an updated revolutionary art, one no longer based on proletarian subjectmatter but on the artist’s ability to visualize the “social passions” of an era:The old, literal naturalism is failing to register esthetically in the face of vast socialpassions and portents of doom and regeneration. In proportion to the awakeningof artists to the fate which awaits the world, will painting take on a more Expressionistform. 66Kainen’s article appeared just months before the July 1937 opening of theDegenerate Art exhibition in Berlin. The Nazi condemnation of German Expressionistartists could only add to the ideological import of the style. Kainen’smanifesto proved an accurate prediction of the course of art during the waryears, for the ƒgurative expressionism of Hyman Bloom and the early JacksonPollock, if not of the lesser-known artists cited in his article, was predominantin the 1940s. But it is indicative of the aesthetic volatility of the times that thetwo early champions of ƒgurative expressionism, von Weigand and Kainen,would themselves turn to abstract painting after the war. 67At a time when two con„icting political systems occupied common groundagainst a third, no single aesthetic system could claim to have an exclusive purchaseon social reality. The staged dramas of most social realist tableaux, withtheir coherent plots, could not visualize a reality that was fragmented and contradictory.For this brief moment, expressionism appeared to be the mostpromising option for a renewed social realism. It was not the only option, however,and early in 1937, in a review of the “Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism”exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, von Wiegand argued that surrealism’stechniques for reaching the unconscious mind could be useful to the developmentof a new social art as well. 68The immediate result of Art Front’s expressionist manifestoes was the formationof the New York Group. Founded in 1938 by Jacob Kainen, the NewYork Group was characteristic of the short-lived alliances of artists at the end ofthe decade. “Our Expressionists” had been in part a review of an exhibit at theMontross Gallery of The Ten, and their association may have inspired Kainento form his own group. 69 Kainen chose Jules Halfant, Herb Kruckman, Louis