In February 1950, Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy began accusing people in the State Department of being communist spies. It opened a grim few years in American political history in which dissenting from the mainstream political thought could get you ostracized, blacklisted, or worse. While easily the most notorious of this bunch, McCarthy was not the first member of Congress to venture down this toxic trail. In 1947, Michigan congressman George Dondero began accusing people in the Truman administration of having Communist ideas.
Five years later he turned on artists. Dondero had no background in art whatsoever, but he felt like he was the one who should determine what it was, and what its purpose should be. All Modern art, he said simply, was communist and the entire form was in reality a conspiracy directed from Moscow. I know.
In an interview with critic Emily Genauer, he spelled out his reasoning, if that’s the word for it. “Modern art is Communistic,” he said, “because it is distorted and ugly, because it does not glorify our beautiful country, our cheerful and smiling people, and our material progress. Art which does not glorify our beautiful country in plain, simple terms that everyone can understand breeds dissatisfaction,” he said. “It is therefore opposed to our government, and those who create and promote it are our enemies.”
So, according to Dondero, the very purpose of art was to glorify the country. Dondero was not alone in his viewpoint then, and I dare say, many people echo his views today, and even a good bit of his word choice. His view, however, is one that confuses art and propaganda. And it was precisely the view that the Soviet Union took of art in that country. When Genauer pointed this out, he tried to have her fired from her newspaper.
An editor of ARTnews magazine made the connection as well. “Only a great, generous, muddling democracy like ours could afford the simultaneous paradox of a congressman who tries to attack Communism by demanding the very rules which Communists enforce wherever they are in power....” While at the same time, “...a handful of artists...in movements sympathetic to Soviet Russia...go on painting pictures that would land them in jail under a Communist government.”
The artist Ben Shahn said that what right-wing congressmen were trying to suppress, namely freedom of thought, was in essence the very heart of artistic creation. To deny the artist the right to paint or sculpt whatever themes, in whatever style he chooses, was to deny his entire freedom.
It was true during the Cold War. It’s true now.