Modern Art despite Modernism: Humanism, Realism, and American Art in the Forties

This paper explores an “anti-modernist” impulse in American art of the forties. It considers artists working during the years surrounding World War II who dextrously and strategically engaged modernist aesthetic devices, but who refused to sacrifice content and the potential for communication with a popular audience in the name of formalism. Rejecting the turn toward abstraction in favour of maintaining their commitment to figuration, artists such as Philip Evergood, Jack Levine, Ben Shahn, Honoré Sharrer, and Anthony Toney eschewed the irrationalism and alienation ascribed to much gestural abstraction; equally, they discounted the naturalism and instrumentalization of art as propaganda associated with Social Realist painting. Instead, they insisted on a modern art that was sufficiently “humanist” — a term invoked within cultural circles of the period as coded reference to steadfast support for leftist social and political ideals. Despite the obstinacy of canonical conceits, theirs was an approach to painting demonstrating art can be emphatically modern without being modernist, and not all realisms are intrinsically reactionary. The shared ambition of these artists was to create a technically-advanced art that (to varying degrees) engaged the lessons of Cubism, Expressionism, Symbolism, and Surrealism, but which remained realist in its objectives and ideological import.