| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Radical Art: Printmaking and the Left in 1930s New York. By Helen Langa. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. viii, 342 pp. $55.00, ISBN 0-520-23155-4.)
Scholarship treating radical artists has surged forward in recent years, in tandem with the advance of a mostly fan-based popular interest in comic strips and comic books, the most vernacular of visual arts. The middle ground is printmaking, devised in part to make artwork more accessible through lithography or other means but also to retain the artist's touch missing or little appreciated by the commercial producer.	1
Here we find the narrative of Radical Art during the era when its subject came closest to the lives of working people and actually gained significant government support. Helen Langa, who teaches art history at American University, is sophisticated enough to grasp that, while art critics of all political persuasions carried on ideological crusades, individual artists, for the most part, went their own way. The "social viewpoint" was a natural one for the hungry thirties, and the upswing of quasi-documentary realism had already begun before the stock market crash. The emergence of the Popular Front proved immediately important because it validated a sympathetic interest in American traditions. But variations of style and subject flourished, facing their most formidable censorship from sponsoring government agencies.	. . .

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