¶ … Joan Saab book: For Millions American Art Culture Between War
Joan Saab's book, For the Millions: American Art and Culture Between the Wars, captures and elucidates a vital component of American history, and that in regards to its visual art in particular. This manuscript chronicles a crucial shifting in the regard, usage, and conception of art in the early part of the 20th century between World Wars I and II. This historical epoch was crucial to the fostering of contemporary America and its art for a number of factors. The country was celebrating its victory in the Great War before it knelt to the pressure of the Great Depression, which was only alleviated by one of the most devastating martial encounters in the history of the man, the Second World War. This tumultuous time played a highly important part in the creation and usage of visual art, which was able to evolve to an egalitarian, utilitarian medium to both connect people and to enforce the new mores of a revolutionary zeitgeist in art. Saab's manuscript helps to contextualize this process, and offers first hand insight and original research into this phenomenon.
One of the most important aspects of this book that the author emphasizes early and often is the wholesale transition that visual art went through in the period spanning from the end of the Depression to the concluding years of the Second World War. Prior to this historical era, art was widely regarded as an elitist hobby, tradition, and pasttime of the rich. It was viewed through the somewhat snobbish lens of academia, with lofty prices and gallery showings of what was often complex pieces that alienated the everyday, common people in the United States. The author explains that this regard for art changed, primarily because of the global events taking place that helped to change society itself. Chief among these was the Depression, which suddenly reduced the rich and commoners to essentially the...
The way that this event helped art itself is that socially, politically, and in some sense economically, art served as a rallying point for which people could unite with one another, and form a new American ideal. The author explains that this new ideal was a form of modernity based on democracy, which helped to involve everyone regardless of their education and economic standing (since most everyone was poor anyway). One of the principle institutions that was created during this time period that helped to initiate this movement was the New York Museum of Modern Art, which was founded in 1929 during the end of the prosperous Roaring Twenties and at the outset of the Depression. Yet this new perception and use of art was orchestrated on the nationwide level largely thanks to the efforts of the Federal Arts Project.
This project, like all other New Deal reforms, was conceived of by Roosevelt to serve a variety of purposes. It hoped to restore American confidence and faith in the nation while providing for a few jobs and ideally bringing in some revenue to attempt to revitalize the failing economy that was indicative of a larger, global depression. The organization was created by the Works Progress Administration, and chief among its agendas was to interest common people in the art which was now regarded to have an everyday value. There were several types of visual art that was created by the Federal Arts Project, including posters, advertisements, murals and others that were extremely pragmatic in their purposes and, for the most part, in their depiction of a hard working American values. These depictions were purposefully portrayed by this movement as a way of involving people in the arts who were previously alienated from its elitist, affluent standards and the abstract, academic subjects that prior visual art readily demonstrated.
Yet as Saab explains, although one of the most vital pieces…
