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WORK TITLE: Framing the Audience
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https://www.uwyo.edu/history/people/faculty/helfgott.html * http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/2338_reg.html * https://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/framing-the-audience-art-and-the-politics-of-culture-in-the-united-states-1929-1945/
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LC control no.: n 2015047484
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HEADING: Helfgott, Isadora Anderson
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100 1_ |a Helfgott, Isadora Anderson
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670 __ |a Framing the audience, 2015: |b CIP t.p. (Isadora Anderson Helfgott)
670 __ |a Temple University Press website, Aug. 3, 2015 |b (Isadora Anderson Helfgott is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wyoming)
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Swarthmore College, B.A.; Harvard University, A.M., Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Historian, educator, writer. University of Wyoming, Laramie, associated professor of history, 2009-. Has also taught at Georgetown University and the University of Toronto.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Isadora Anderson Helfgott is an associate professor of history at the University of Wyoming, where she teaches courses in American cultural history and the social history of American women. Among her research interests are cultural history and the history of the United States in the twentieth century. Both these interests come to play in Helfgott’s first book, Framing the Audience: Art and the Politics of Culture in the United States, 1929-1945.
Framing the Audience
With Framing the Audience, Helfgott examines the relationship between art and politics from the Great Depression through World War II. She looks at attempts to break down the barriers between fine art and popular culture and further examines how the changes in the appreciation of art by the general public affected the political, social, and artistic spheres of American life. Helfgott argues that the expanding appreciation of art had profound impacts on America’s sense of national identity and political life. She chronicles various efforts to popularize art. These included the aspirations of leftist artists to make art more accessible and understandable to the general public as well as New Deal art administrators of the Federal Art Project. Helfgott also looks at the significance of the establishment of the Museum of Modern Art and its traveling exhibitions and the attempts by periodicals including Fortune, Time, and Life magazines—all published by Henry Luce—to include the basics of art education in their ongoing visual record of life in the modern world. Such combined efforts changed the cultural landscape of America, according to the author.
Reviewing Framing the Audience, critic R.L. McGrath, writing in Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, had high praise, noting: “Historians will love this publication; it is a formidable piece of research and scholarship.” McGrath added: “This is cultural history writ large.” Journal of American Culture contributor David M. Sokol similarly commented, “Helfgott provides a serious examination of the ways that both the artists and the various stripes of cultural leadership worked to blur, if not entirely erase, the lines between high art and popular culture. … The author provides a study that fully engages diverse aspects of American cultural studies and has written a book that should become required reading for those interested in how the arts are part of and shape our identity.” American Historical Review writer Victoria M. Grieve also had a high assessment of Framing the Audience, noting: “[Helfgott’s] well-researched and clearly argued monograph charts the transition from 1930s efforts to democratize art audiences to the postwar consolidation of corporate influence over American culture. … Helfgott’s major contribution to the scholarship is in exploring how a variety of institutions participated in the emergence of middlebrow culture from 1929 to 1945…. [This] excellent study of often overlooked cultural institutions explains how cultural democracy became commercialized culture.”
Journal of American History reviewer Sharon Ann Musher likewise offered a positive assessment, observing: “Framing the Audience is a deeply researched work that skillfully considers the roles that a range of public and private institutions played in spreading art and thoughtfully meditates on the consequences of corporate patronage for artists, art, industry, and social change.” Online InVisible Culture writer Elizabeth Eikmann similarly commended Framing the Audience, commenting: “By focusing on the figures beyond the artistic frame, Helfgott introduces a fresh, innovative, and thoroughly researched take on this period in American culture. The prose is well written, the arguments are persuasive, and the archival evidence is thorough. Overall, Helfgott compellingly uncovers the competing visions of how and why the audience for art was refashioned in America, showing the reader how art for ‘the people’ was invented and how those visions continue to be imagined today. … She finds that the way Americans consume art today has roots in the culture wars of the 1930s.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
American Historical Review, June, 2016, Victoria M. Grieve, review of Framing the Audience: Art and the Politics of Culture in the United States, 1929-1945, p. 970.
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, April, 2016. R.L. McGrath, review of Framing the Audience, p. 1157.
Journal of American Culture, March, 2017, David M. Sokol, review of Framing the Audience, p. 83.
Journal of American History, December, 2016, Sharon Ann Musher, review of Framing the Audience, p. 815.
ONLINE
InVisible Culture, https://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/ (September 13, 2016), Elizabeth Eikmann, review of Framing the Audience.
University of Wyoming, Department of History Web site, https://www.uwyo.edu/ (February 22, 2017), author profile.
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
Isadora A. Helfgott
Associate Professor of History
Isadora Helfgott
History Building 359
ihelfgot@uwyo.edu
307-766-5141
Isadora A. Helfgott received her A.M. and Ph.D. in History from Harvard University, and her B.A. in History with a minor in Art History from Swarthmore College where she graduated with Highest Honors. Before coming to the University of Wyoming in 2009, she taught at Georgetown University and the University of Toronto. She is as an advisory and adjunct member of the Gender and Women's Studies department and serves on the Advisory Committee of the Museum Studies minor.
Dr. Helfgott's research focuses on American cultural history and visual culture. She is interested in the meaning imbued in cultural display - the way that political ideology has been promoted in the distribution and consumption of cultural products. She focuses in particular on what happens when established cultural boundaries and hierarchies are contested or in flux. Her current project examines the relationship between fine art and popular culture in the United States during the turbulent decades of the 1930s and 1940s. It analyzes the efforts of Leftist artists, museums, the federal government and corporations to expand the size and scope of the audience for art in America and explores the struggles among these groups over the meaning of fine art in American society.
Research Interests:
20th-century U.S., American and Transnational Cultural History, U.S. Women and Gender, Radicalism and Social Movements, Visual Culture
Courses taught:
Historical Methods
U.S. Since 1865
Social History of American Women
Topics: American Cultural History
Topics: Consumer Society in America
Topics: America in the 1930s
Graduate seminar: American Cultural History
QUOTE:
Historians will love this publication; it is a formidable piece of research and scholarship.
This is cultural history writ large
Helfgott, Isadora Anderson. Framing the audience: art and
the politics of culture in the United States, 1929-1945
R.L. McGrath
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1157.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Helfgott, Isadora Anderson. Framing the audience: art and the politics of culture in the United States, 1929-1945. Temple, 2015. 293p Index afp
ISBN 9781439911778 cloth, $95.50; ISBN 9781439911785 pbk, $34.95; ISBN 9781439911792 ebook, contact publisher for price
(cc) 53-3358
N72
2015-13701 CIP
Historians will love this publication; it is a formidable piece of research and scholarship. No archive of American art went unvisited, no oral
history unheard, and no obscure book or magazine from the era unread. It is, and surely will remain, a definitive source for the social history of
the period for some time to come. But art historians and the broader public will encounter this book with less enthusiasm. The first two-thirds is
impenetrable, turgid, and repetitive. How many ways can a writer say the same thing? By contrast, the last third of the book is lucid, readable, and
interesting. It documents the way in which corporate America, especially Henry Luce's Time Inc., through its vanguard publications, Fortune, for
the business elite, and Life, for the huddled masses, co-opted the communal ethos and social purpose of the Depression era for postwar corporate
imperatives. This is cultural history writ large, and readers seeking a closer reading of works of art will be sorely disappointed; it does not offer
readings of art and for this reason is somewhat reductive. Nonetheless, it is a vital resource for anyone concerned with this complex era.
Summing Up: ** Recommended. All readership levels.--R. L. McGrath, Dartmouth College
McGrath, R.L.
3/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
McGrath, R.L. "Helfgott, Isadora Anderson. Framing the audience: art and the politics of culture in the United States, 1929-1945." CHOICE:
Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1157+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661489&it=r&asid=c1397d2eed9b27bb0e1ea8eaf2e5a491. Accessed 15 Mar.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449661489
QUOTE:
Helfgott provides a serious examination of the ways that both the artists and the various stripes of cultural leadership worked to blur, if not entirely erase, the lines between high art and popular culture.
he author provides a study that fully engages diverse aspects of American cultural studies and has written a book that should become required reading for those interested in how the arts are part of and shape our identity.
Sokol, David M. Journal of American Culture. Mar2017, Vol. 40 Issue 1, p83-84. 2p.
Framing the Audience: Art and the Politics of Culture in the United States, 1929-1945 Isadora Anderson Helfgott. Temple University Press, 2015.
There have been many books, articles, and exhibitions focusing on the art of this period, some concentrating on the social realists, some on the so-called American Scene artists, and some on the abstractionists who challenged what was politically acceptable and supported by both the press and government policy. Indeed, some of the best known are those writings which documented either the attacks on modernism by the press [as in the travelling exhibition "Advancing American Art"] or those [like How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, by S. Guilbaut] which explained the official acceptance of modernism by both the government and the press as part of a new Cold War policy.
Almost all of these publications have tended to compartmentalize the arts, with most concentrating on full-scale oil painting and its reception, or on one aspect of the artistic production, like art addressing social issues, across various artistic mediums. In addition, and this is a key element of her contribution to American cultural studies, Helfgott provides a serious examination of the ways that both the artists and the various stripes of cultural leadership worked to blur, if not entirely erase, the lines between high art and popular culture.
The book consists of a substantial introduction and three major divisions: "From Revolution to Cultural Democracy: Artists Seek the People"; "Museums without Walls: Art and the Public Sphere"; and "The Triumph of American Consumerism: Corporations, Art, and Popular Culture." The titles of the six main chapters are both descriptive and instructive. Chapter One, "'To Speak of and to the People': Artists, Ideology, and Action from Proletcult to the Popular Front," introduces the reader to the sometimes warring, sometimes mutual supporting artists who came to grips with modern art after the Armory Show. Chapter Two, "New Horizons: From Federal Art to the Decline of New Deal Liberalism," covers the more often told story of the shift from supporting artists of a liberal stripe as the nation moved onto war footing. Chapter Three is concerned with traveling art exhibitions, sponsored by the governmental agencies with the help of museums, while Chapter Four, "Suitable for Framing: Mechanical Reproduction and Fine Art for the Masses," is a fairly terse exploration of the meaning behind the title of the book and presents the ways in which the press and various organizations really began to blur the traditional divisions between high art and that which is part of popular culture.
The final two chapters, "The 'Peculiar Virtue in the Line': Fortune Magazine and the Enlightened Businessman" and "Art in Life: Magazine as Museum," bring into full relief the way that these magazines, major purveyors of popular culture and of great influence in the lives of everyday people, helped legitimize a lot of what was happening in the art world. For instance, the author shows how Fortune magazine wrote about the art of muralist Diego Rivera as being complementary rather than antagonistic to our capitalist system, using some of his art to make that point. Life also developed a strategy of bringing art to the masses, demystifying it and making them aware of the human qualities of the great collectors the magazine profiled. This chapter also points out how Life worked to change the idea of the artist as part of a collective--the artist was, instead, the individualist that its conservative ideology supported as the correct way to be an American.
The concluding chapter somewhat summarizes the ideas earlier expressed and ties together the ways that art had come to be seen as a more basic, less elitist, part of the American experience than it had before the Great Depression. The recognition of artists in the press, and the greater familiarity of the public with both the art on the walls and that which was found in the magazines, marked a new era in both art appreciation and the recognition of art as part of the broader American cultural landscape. In presenting this picture and conclusion to us, the author provides a study that fully engages diverse aspects of American cultural studies and has written a book that should become required reading for those interested in how the arts are part of and shape our identity.
~~~~~~~~
By David M. Sokol, University of Illinois at Chicago
QUOTE:
well-researched and clearly argued monograph charts the transition from 1930s efforts to democratize art audiences to the postwar consolidation of corporate influence over American culture.... Helfgott’s major contribution to the scholarship is in exploring how a variety of institutions participated in the emergence of middlebrow culture from 1929 to 1945.... Helfgott’s excellent study of often overlooked cultural institutions explains how cultural democracy became commercialized culture.
(note--total review is over 1000 words in length--no available for full download)
GRIEVE, VICTORIA M. American Historical Review. Jun2016, Vol. 121 Issue 3, p970-971. 2p.
"Her well-researched and clearly argued monograph charts the transition from 1930s efforts to democratize art audiences to the postwar consolidation of corporate influence over American culture.... Helfgott’s major contribution to the scholarship is in exploring how a variety of institutions participated in the emergence of middlebrow culture from 1929 to 1945.... Helfgott’s excellent study of often overlooked cultural institutions explains how cultural democracy became commercialized culture."
QUOTE:
deeply researched work that skillfully considers the roles that a range of public and private institutions played in spreading art and thoughtfully meditates on the consequences of corporate patronage for artists, art, industry, and social change.
(note--total review is over 1000 words in length--no available for full download)
Musher, Sharon Ann. Journal of American History. Dec2016, Vol. 103 Issue 3, p815-816. 2p. DOI: 10.1093/jahist/jaw444.
Framing the Audience draws on letters, diaries, and printed materials to trace how artists, bureaucrats, and cultural entrepreneurs popularized art during the Great Depression and World War II. Extending Michael Denning's Cultural Front (1996), Isadora Anderson Helfgott traces art activists, particularly Anton Refregier, from leftist art organizations into the New Deal's art projects and then to corporate sponsorship.
She begins by arguing that artists on the left used schools, galleries, media, collectives, and government programs to reimagine the training of artists and the distribution of their work. Such organizations sought to shift contemporary understandings of art from products created for their own sake by solitary geniuses working in an ivory tower to ones formed collectively by politically aware artists seeking to engage diverse publics...
"Framing the Audience is a deeply researched work that skillfully considers the roles that a range of public and private institutions played in spreading art and thoughtfully meditates on the consequences of corporate patronage for artists, art, industry, and social change."
—Journal of American History
—American Historical Review
QUOTE:
By focusing on the figures beyond the artistic frame, Helfgott introduces a fresh, innovative, and thoroughly researched take on this period in American culture. The prose is well written, the arguments are persuasive, and the archival evidence is thorough. Overall, Helfgott compellingly uncovers the competing visions of how and why the audience for art was refashioned in America, showing the reader how art for “the people” was invented and how those visions continue to be imagined today. ... She finds that the way Americans consume art today has roots in the culture wars of the 1930s.
Framing the Audience
Reviewed by Elizabeth Eikmann, Saint Louis University
Isadora Helfgott. Framing the Audience: Art and the Politics of Culture in the United States, 1929-1945. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015. 326 pages. 21 color plates.
The culture wars of the years surrounding the 1930s are known for the many and well-fought domestic battles over high art, popular culture, and consumerism. During this era, the barriers between high and popular art upheld by centuries of tradition came crumbling down as leftist American artists worked to redefine the relationship between art and the greater society. Mass circulation of visual media gave 1930s Americans unprecedented access to art and, as scholars such as Michael Denning have argued, it would be during this decade that art gained a new power to create, challenge, and reinforce ideas about national politics, economy, and identity. While numerous scholars have focused their work on the art produced during this time, Isadora Helfgott’s Framing the Audience: Art and the Politics of Culture in the United States, 1929-1945 flips the focus onto the figures behind and beyond the works of art. By placing a critical focus on leftist artists, the art establishment, and the corporate sector, Helfgott uncovers the story of how the makers behind 1930s visual culture deeply influenced the consumption of art. Helfgott investigates the effects that audience appreciation of art, which was influenced by both artists and members of the private sector, had on American political, cultural, and social landscapes. She finds that the way Americans consume art today has roots in the culture wars of the 1930s.
Framing the Audience follows a logical organization, tracing the purpose of visual art as it evolves from a form used for collective, social change by artists, to one that serves individual, corporate interests within the business sector. Smartly, the text is divided into three parts, respectively focusing on the artists, the art establishment, namely museums and foundations, and the corporate sector. In part one, Helfgott highlights artist efforts to redefine the relationship between makers, their work, and the broader society. Using muralist Anton Refregier and his involvement with the John Reed Club as a case study, Helfgott shows how “social content artists” sought to bring socially-conscious art to the people for the purpose of cultivating societal change (29). Challenging the way American art had been traditionally appreciated, Refregier and other artists of this period believed visual art was no longer a cultural form to be observed passively by the social and political elite. Rather, art should concern collective, social criticisms that illuminated inequalities and would be available for viewing by broad audiences and accessible to all classes, not just the wealthy.
Parts two and three address how art establishments and the corporate sector imagined the purpose of visual art. According to Helfgott, while art establishments upheld the purpose of art as a tool for social change, they also used it for advertising and self-promotional purposes. Relying upon the Harmon Foundation and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) as examples, Helfgott explores how traveling exhibitions and mechanically reproduced images of art on postcards, posters, and books moved fine art from the realm of high to popular culture. The distribution of these images introduced art as a mass commodity for the first time. The Harmon Foundation’s exhibits displayed and sold the works of African American artists in predominantly African American neighborhoods. On one hand, this promoted greater accessibility to the fine arts across class and racial boundaries; on the other, it fostered economic security for African American artists through the sale of their art works. In addition, Helfgott argues that the Foundation’s exhibitions aimed to break down boundaries of racial segregation by encouraging racially mixed audiences.
MoMA also produced traveling exhibitions; however, in contrast with the democratizing impulses of the Harmon Foundation, it aimed to exert their cultural leadership over the art world by promoting the museum’s brand. MoMA created mechanically reproduced print materials, which allowed broad audiences to interact with and, for the first time, own likenesses of fine art. Yet, MoMA’s mass-produced prints were used as museum advertising, thereby linking education and fine art with self-promotion. According to Helfgott, MoMA’s printed reproductions “legitimized the idea that reproductions were suitable stand-ins for originals, particularly in the context of spreading cultural knowledge and familiarity,” which paved the way for the corporate world to interact with art in advertising and promotion, which is addressed in part three (145). Here, Helfgott closely examines how Henry Luce and his involvement with Fortune and Life magazines reveals how corporate sectors used print materials to convince the public that businesses had a meaningful role to play in the newly developing tradition of American art. Capitalizing on visual art’s new position as a mass commodity through circulating print materials, the corporate sector sought to harden the relationship between art and business by reinforcing the notions that art could only be appreciated if a culturally knowledgeable mediator, such as Fortune or Life, was there to teach and explain how art should take on meaning. Challenging leftist artist attempts to use art for social change, the corporate sector worked to reify traditional notions of art appreciation by producing advertisements and editorial panels of notable artists and their works that emphasized “the promotion of the importance of the Western canon, the critical role of wealthy collectors, and the sacralized space of American museums” (151).
Focusing on how art was appreciated, Helfgott uses the archive to determine why artists created the kind of art they did and evaluates what impact these changes had on how art was appreciated in the broader social, political, and cultural landscape. Helfgott’s analysis is supported by careful examination of a unique collection of artifacts, such as artists’ letters and diaries, art organization and establishment records, and print materials from critics and periodicals. Departing from traditional, formal analysis of actual art works, Helfgott uses these archival materials to focus on, as she states, the “rhetorical and organizational efforts of artists, art critics, museums, and a new kind of corporate art patron to reconceptualize the social basis of art with a view toward understanding the implications of both their intentions and their efforts” (12). Through this compelling use of the archive, Helfgott aims not to understand what a piece of art contains or implies, but rather how the art was brought to the American people and how that approach affected American culture. In addition, she is careful to place her discussion within the context of greater 1930s American history. Descriptions of New Deal legislation, the Great Depression and widespread economic concerns, the Communist movement of the late 1920s, and the emerging Popular Front serve as the backdrop to her story and are woven in throughout the text. The inclusion of this political and social context proves to be necessarily important to her argument.
By focusing on the figures beyond the artistic frame, Helfgott introduces a fresh, innovative, and thoroughly researched take on this period in American culture. The prose is well written, the arguments are persuasive, and the archival evidence is thorough. Overall, Helfgott compellingly uncovers the competing visions of how and why the audience for art was refashioned in America, showing the reader how art for “the people” was invented and how those visions continue to be imagined today.