Matthew Baigell

From the 1870s to the 1930s, American cartoonists devoted much of their ink to outlandish caricatures of immigrants and minority groups, making explicit the derogatory stereotypes that circulated at the time. Members of ethnic groups were depicted as fools, connivers, thieves, and individuals hardly fit for American citizenship, but Jews were especially singled out with visual and verbal abuse. In The Implacable Urge to Defame, Baigell examines more than sixty published cartoons from humor magazines such as Judge, Puck, and Life and considers the climate of opinion that allowed such cartoons to be published. In doing so, he traces their impact on the emergence of anti-Semitism in the American Scene movement in the 1920s and 1930s.… (mais)

"Shortly after the Crash of 1929, revulsion from European art and culture and revived interest in rural and regional life prompted the growth of the 'American Scene,' an artistic movement founded on renewed belief in the strength and promise of America. Most of the American Scene painters were impoverished by the Depression and welcomed the chance to take a turn on one of another of the government aid programs. Many of them espoused radical causes, while others retained their faith in the traditional American system. Yet, despite stylistic and political differences, the artists who shared these experiences helped to crate a sense of community denied to earlier American artists, and their work has a unity of mood and feeling that is striking and evocative. For this reason, when images of the 1930's come to mind, they often have their source in American Scene paintings, which reflect so vividly a lost America and American way of life. In this illuminating evaluation of one of the most productive and diverse decades in American art, Matthew Baigell explores the variety of responses to the Depression era in the work of such major artists as Grant Wood, portrayer of the bitterness and harshness of existence in the Middle West; Thomas Hart Benton, renowned painter of urban and rural scenes; John Steuart Curry, depicter of the hardships and the richness of farming life; Reginald Marsh, veritable magician in expressing the excitement of teeming cities; Ben Shahn, vitally concerned with enduring human values; and Stuart Davis, discoverer of a brilliant middle ground between representational and abstract painting. The last section of the book is an album of pictures by major and minor artists of the period: Here are the cities, small towns, and rural hamlets of forty years ago. Here are the barnyards, factories, and fairgrounds, the breadlines, strikes, and political rallies that formed the world of the 1930's..."… (mais)