THE PUBLIC USE OF ART

D HE PRESENT ART PROJECTS ARE EMERGENCY PROJECTS AND THERE­

fore have an obvious impermanence.! It is possible that after the
national elections an effort will be made to curtail them or to drop them
altogether.
To the artists, however, the projects constitute a remarkable advance.
For the first time in our history the government supports art, assigns
tasks to painters, sculptors, graphic artists, and teachers, or accepts their
freely created work, and pays a weekly wage. The projects may be lim­
ited and the conditions poor, but the whole program is an immense step
toward a public art and the security of the artist's profession.
What can artists do to maintain these projects and to advance them
further toward a really public art?
It is the common sentiment that with the support of the organized
working class these projects can be maintained. The art projects are
parts of a larger government program that embraces many groups of
workers, and the artists as workers can rely on the support of their fel­
low workers, who will second their demands. But the interests of artists
and industrial workers are not identical in this matter today. The indus­
trial workers wish to return to regular and full employment and to
obtain social insurance; the government projects and relief often reduce
them to the status of unskilled labor and establish a wage far below the
older union scale. The artists on the other hand would rather maintain

173
WORLDVIEW IN PAINTING-ART AND SOCIETY

the projects than return to their former unhappy state of individual

work for an uncertain market. Even during the period of prosperity
artists were insecure; now during a general crisis they are, for the first
time, employed as artists. Workers and artists are not of one class or role
in society. Artists are usually individual producers. They own their tools
and materials and make by hand a luxury object that they peddle to
dealers and private patrons. They employ an archaic technique and are
relatively independent and anarchic in their methods of work, their
hours of labor, their relations with others. Under government patronage
they acquire a common boss, they become employees or workers, like
teachers and postal employees. But they are not yet really employees of
the government, they are simply on emergency projects.
If conditions improve and the great mass of unionized workers are
reemployed, what immediate interest will they have in demanding that
one small group of temporary government employees, engaged in deco­
rating buildings, should be kept permanently on the nati'onal payrolls,
especially when the majority of workers have no assurance of permanent
employment? Unlike the postal workers and the teachers, the artists do
not satisfy a universally recognized need; their services are not available
to everyone.
The possibility of working-class support depends on the recognition
by the workers that this program of art has a real value to them. It
depends further on a solidarity of artists and workers expressed in com­
mon economic and political demands.
We can learn from the example of the architects. It is also in the
interest of the architects to demand permanent government employ­
ment. But how can the government employ them? Chiefly by setting up
permanent national housing projects, and projects for schools, hospi­
tals, and places of recreation. Now such projects, if designed to reach
the workers, will have the support not only of the building workers, but
of all workers, since they are poorly housed and feel the urgent need of
such construction. The workers will, therefore, support the architects
in their fight, since the demands of the architects are also important
demands of the workers.
We also have the example of the teachers and free education. Public
schools were won by the persistent struggles of the workers and the

174
 The Public Use of Art

mechanics societies of the last century; they were not simply presented
to the people by a generous and enlightened state. The upper classes
opposed them on the ground that free education would give the work­
ers dangerous ideas. The workers demanded free schools precisely
because schooling enabled a worker to read and write and to learn
about the world; he could then defend his own interests better, form his
own organizations, and judge more critically the dogmas of the church
and the ruling class. But once the schools were established and the teach­
ing was directed more and more toward fixing the workers' mentality
along lines favorable to the ruling class, the teacher felt himself to be
socially superior to the worker and alien to him. It was only when teach­
ers showed their interest in the working class and its children, fought in
the same struggles, united their organizations, challenged the school
boards and legislatures in behalf of educational progress, that workers
could be aroused to support the teachers in their special demands for
better wages and conditions and for academic freedom.
It is necessary, then, if workers are to lend their strength to the artists
in the demand for a government-supported public art, that the artists
present a program for a public art that will reach the masses of the peo­
ple. It is necessary that the artists show their solidarity with the work­
ers both in their support of the workers' demands and in their art. If
they simply produce pictures to decorate the offices of municipal and
state officials, if they serve the governmental demagogy by decorating
institutions courted by the present regime, then their art has little inter­
est to the workers. But if in collaboration with working-class groups,
with unions, clubs, cooperatives, and schools, they demand the exten­
sion of the program to reach a wider public, if they present a plan for
art work and art education in connection with the demands of the
teachers for further support of free schooling for the masses of workers
and poor farmers, who without such public education are almost com­
pletely excluded from a decent culture, then they will win the backing
of the workers.
But to win and keep this support, the artists-for the first time free
to work together and create for a larger public-must ask themselves
seriously for whom they are painting or carving and what value their
present work can have for this new audience.

175
WORlDVIEW IN PAINTING-ART AND SOCIETY

The truth is that a public art already exists. The public enjoys the
comics, the magazine pictures, and the movies with a directness and
wholeheartedness that can hardly be called forth by the artistic painting
and sculpture of our time. It may be a low-grade and infantile public art,
one that fixes illusions, degrades taste, and reduces art to a commercial
device for exploiting the feelings and anxieties of the masses; but it is the
art that the people love, that has formed their taste, and that will
undoubtedly affect their first response to whatever else is offered them.
If the artist does not consider this an adequate public art, he must face
the question: Would his present work, his pictures of still life, his land­
scapes, portraits, and abstractions, constitute a public art? Would it
really reach the people as a whole?
If the best art of our time were physically accessible to the whole
nation, we still would not have a public use of this art. To enjoy this art
requires a degree of culture and a living standard possessed by very few.
Without these a real freedom and responsiveness in the enjoyment of art
are impossible. We can speak of a public and democratic enjoyment of
art only when the works of the best artists are as well known as the most
popular movies, comic strips, and magazine pictures. This point cannot
be reached simply by education, as the reformers of the nineteenth cen­
tury imagined. It is not a matter of bringing before the whole people the
objects enjoyed by the upper classes (although that, too, must be done).
These pictures and statues are almost meaningless to the people; or they
have the distorting sense of luxury objects, signs of power and wealth,
and are therefore appreciated, not as art, but as the accompaniments of
a desired wealth or status. The object of art becomes an instrument of
snobbery and class distinction. Art is vulgarized in this way and its orig­
inal values destroyed. The abominable and pathetic imitations of upper­
class luxury sold to the workers and lower middle class in the cities are
often products of this teaching. The plans to improve the industrial arts,
to produce finer housewares, textiles, and furnishings for the people run
into similar difficulties. And as long as the income of the masses is so
small, as long as the majority do not have the economic means to re-cre­
ate their own domestic environment freely, such improvement of the
industrial arts affects only a small part of the people. The very limitation
of the market finally hampers their growth.

176
 The Public Use of Art

The achievement of a "public use of art" is therefore a social and eco­

nomic question. It is not separate from the achievement of well-being for
everyone: It is not separate from the achievement of social equality. The
very slogan "public use of art," raised in opposition to the limited and
private use of art, attests to the present inequality. From this inequality
flow many of the characteristics of both the private art and the com­
mercialized public art. To make art available to everyone, the material
means for diffusing the degraded contemporary art, the printing presses
and the admirable techniques of reproduction, must become the vehicles
for the best art. But these today are commercialized; they are private
property, although created and rendered productive by the labor of
thousands. When they become public property, the antagonistic distinc­
tion between public and private in art must break down. Art would be
equally available to everyone; you should be able to buy a print or a
faithful replica of the best painting as you buy a book or a newspaper.
Before the levels of art that the artist values can become available to
the masses of people, two groups of conditions must be fulfilled-first,
that the art embody a content and achieve qualities accessible to the
masses of the people and, second, that the people control the means of
production and attain a standard of living and a level of culture such
that the enjoyment of art of a high quality becomes an important part
of their life.
These conditions are not entirely distinct. The steps toward the first
are part of the larger movement toward the second. And since the latter
exerts a powerful influence on the imagination of artists, it inevitably
reacts upon art.
To create such a public art the artist must undergo a change as a
human being and as an artist; he must become realistic in his percep­
tions, sympathetic to the people, close to their lives, and he must free
himself from the illusions of isolation, superiority, and the absoluteness
of his formal problems. He must be able to produce an art in which the
workers and farmers and middle class will find their own experiences
presented intimately, truthfully, and powerfully. The shallowness of the
present commercialized public art would then become apparent.
On the other hand, the masses of the people must control production
before they can control their own lives; they must win a genuine social

177
WORlDVlEW IN PAINTING-ART AND IOCIETY

equality before culture can be available to everyone. Only free men

who have power over their own conditions of life can undertake great
cultural plans.
The artists who identify themselves with the workers in the struggle
for this change, who find in the life and the struggles of the workers the
richest matters for their own art, contribute to the workers a means for
acquiring a deeper consciousness of their class, of the present society
and the possibilities that lie before them, a means for developing a read­
ier and surer responsiveness to their experiences, and also a source of
self-reliance. The workers discover through art a whole series of poetic,
dramatic, pictorial values in the life of labor and the struggle for a new
society that the art of the upper classes had almost completely ignored.
In strengthening the workers through their art, the artists make it possi­
ble for art to become really free and a possession of all society.
Now it may seem to some of you that this talk of socia,lism has car­
ried us too far from the present program, that we ought simply to stick
to our demand that the government extend the art projects to reach a
wider public. I think this is a serious mistake. The artists must look
beyond their immediate needs in making plans for a public use of art.
They might obtain many concessions from Washington and win the sup­
port of large and influential groups of workers and yet be no better off
in the long run, perhaps much worse. Even if in cooperation with the
unions they begin to decorate the walls of union houses and the homes
built for workers with government subsidy, they may find themselves
without means of work or dependent on a brutal fascist regime.
The powerful unions in Germany were smashed by Hitler and their
fine buildings confiscated . In Italy, while wages are being cut and the
people marshalled for the battlefield, artists are employed by the Fascist
regime to decorate the walls of the government unions with frescoes
showing dignified, massive laborers heroically and contentedly at work.
Government support of art and the cooperation of labor unions and
artists do not in themselves solve the insecurity of the artist. They may
provide a temporary ease and opportunity for work, but the unresolved
economic crisis will soon grip the painter again.
More important, this government patronage and this cultural coop­
eration with the unions may divert the attention of the artist and the

178
 The Public Use of Art

members of the unions from the harsh realities of class government and
concealed dangers of crisis, war, and fascist oppression. Artistic display
is a familiar demagogic means; the regime that patronizes art confirms
its avowals of peace and unprejudiced concern with the good of the peo­
ple as a whole. In 1764 after the ruinous Seven Years' War, the artistic
adviser of the French king recommended that he decorate his new palace
with paintings illustrating royal generosity, love of peace, and concern
for the goddesses. Today this choice does not exist. A regime that must
hold the support of the people today provides conventional images of
peace, justice, social harmony, productive labor, the idylls of the farms
and the factories, while it proposes at the same time an unprecedented
military and naval budget, leaves 10 million unemployed, and winks at
the most brutal violations of civil liberty. In their seemingly neutral glo­
rification of work, progress, and national history, these public murals
are instruments of a class; a Republican administration would have
solicited essentially similar art, though it might have assigned them to
other painters. The conceptions of such mural paintings, rooted in naive,
sentimental ideas of social reality, cannot help but betray the utmost
banality and poverty of invention.
Should the artist therefore abandon his demand for government sup­
port of art? Not at all. He must on the contrary redouble his efforts to
win this demand, since the government project is a real advance. But he
must develop in the course of his work the means of creating a real pub­
lic art, through his solidarity with the workers and his active support of
their real interests. Above all he must combat the illusion that his own
insecurity and the wretched state of our culture can be overcome within
the framework of our present society.
(1936)2

I The government employed artists under President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programs.
The Public Works of Art Project begun in 1933 was replaced by the larger Federal Art Project
(FAP). Part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the FAP paid wages to thousands of
artists in the years 1935-43. Some of these artists worked on the many murals commissioned for
public buildings by the Treasury Department in these years.
2 Published in Art Front (November 1936): pp. 4-6.

I 79