| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

For the Millions: American Art and Culture between the Wars. By A. Joan Saab. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 227 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-8122-3818-4.)
Changing concepts of modernity and democratic access transformed Americans' beliefs about the social roles of visual art during the interwar decades. A. Joan Saab's intriguing book demonstrates that diligent primary source research and innovative reassessment of institutional activities can contribute important new concepts to this topic, already widely discussed in American art-historical scholarship.	1
Two theses focus Saab's study. She argues, first, that the Federal Art Project (1935–1943), the New York Museum of Modern Art (founded in 1929), the organizers of the 1939–1940 New York World's Fair, and Life magazine in the late 1940s each instituted a distinctive pedagogical strategy to present visual art to a broad public audience as a modern form of cultural expression linked to democratic ideals. Second, she also interrogates the ways in which these competing projects contributed first to what she calls the desacralization of contemporary art during the 1930s and then to its resac-ralization in the postwar era. Her research has unearthed fascinating new material from archival and published sources, and she enlivens her argument with individual voices by drawing on a wide range of contemporary critical reviews, speeches, radio texts, and essays.	. . .

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