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Paintings of Protest
Traditionally, paintings hung in museums had aesthetic beauty. They were
often images of nature, or monarchs, or idealized lives that typical people
would never experience. But in the early 20th century, painters developed the
concept of social realism, to paint, and take photos of, life as it really was–with
the poverty, deprivation, sickness, and social ills that were evident to anyone
who looked for them. By the postwar era, the school of social realism was
well-established and it was not unusual for artists to paint scenes from every-
day life [though it was virtually impossible to find them on the walls of elit-
ist museums]. However, critics, and the government, equated social realism
with the school of “Socialist Realism” encouraged by Stalin in the Soviet
Union, so it was much more difficult for paintings of the “underbelly” of life
to get public notice. As with virtually all aspects of culture in the early cold
war, art was supposed to reflect the patriotic goodness of America.Still, many
artists did challenge that standard, and after World War II painted and photo-
graphed scenes that offered a harsh examination into American life, espe-
cially its conformity. This art was in many ways a reaction to the horrors of
World War II–the Holocaust, the devastation, the social upheavals, and then a
response to what they saw as the “sameness” of cold war life. Indeed, the
visual arts were ahead of other cultural forms in pointing out the warped
Cold War values and hypocrisy of the postwar era.
Some of the more noted artists of this period began working during the
war years. Aaron Douglas, an African-American painter, emerged out of the
“Harlem Renaissance” and his 1944 work, “Building More Stately Mansions”
featured depictions of muscular workers involved in the manual labor of
building huge edifices, not the esthetic nature of the mansions themselves.
Like Douglas, John Biggers, who headed the art department at Texas Southern
University in Houston for over three decades, celebrated everyday life and
working people. His work also directly criticized racism and poverty, as in
“The Garbage Man” and “Victim of the City Streets #2,” both painted around
the end of World War II. The photographer Gordon Parks contributed signifi-
cantly to the African-American arts scene as well. He created his own version
of the Grant Wood classic “American Gothic,” but instead of featuring aged
white farmers with a pitchfork, he took a photo of a black cleaning woman,
Ella Watson, in Washington D.C.