Art and the struggle for the American soul: The pursuit of a popular audience for art in America from the Depression to World War II

This dissertation examines the popularization of fine art in the United States from the beginning of the Great Depression through World War II. It looks at the various ways art was brought out of its confinement in urban museums and private collections and into the popular cultural experience. It examines how competing visions of bringing art to the people developed in these years as artists, art critics, museum administrators, nonprofit arts organizations and corporate leaders with cultural aspirations each made attempts to find and define a new audience for art in America. Informed by Antonio Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony, it seeks to illuminate the political implications of the contest over who would define the new relationship of fine art to the American public. This dissertation argues that the movement to expand channels of art appreciation evolved from the leftist commitment of artists to use art as an engine of social change to an institutionalized approach that reified the significance of wealthy art institutions and a new class of corporate art patrons.; Each of three parts approaches the question of broadening access to art from a different perspective. Part I uses the artist Anton Refregier as a guide to understanding how and why artists sought to expand the audience for their work. It shows how artists adapted their understanding of what it meant to make art for the people to evolving artistic and political contexts, arguing that the principle of changing the social basis of art appreciation outshone political commitments to the Communist Party or the New Deal government. Part II integrates artists' efforts to reach a larger public with similar efforts of art world institutions, examining how arts organizations and museums used traveling exhibitions and color reproductions to bring art to a greater number of people. In cultivating a national audience, these structural innovations laid a broad foundation for imbuing popular appreciation of art with political meaning. Part III looks at how art was presented and discussed in Fortune and Life magazines and shows how these magazines appropriated the idea of bringing art to the people, and thereby challenging more radical notions of expanding access to art.