
          Un-American Censorship.
          Reviewed by Dunbar, LeslieLeslie Dunbar
          Vol. 12, No. 5, 1990, pp. 11, 13
          
          Advancing American Art by
Taylor D. Littleton and Maltby Sykes. Introduction by Leon
Litwack. (University of Alabama Press, 1989. 159 pages.).
          A Romare Bearden for $6.25 anyone? How about a Jacob Lawrence for
$13.93? Or a destined to be famous Ben Shahn for $60? A Georgia
O'Keefe for $50?
          Professor Littleton and Emeritus Professor Sykes of Auburn
University recount how their campus obtained a collection of
paintings, notable ones by artists of interest, for prices such as
those. The story, a generally forgotten one, is fascinating and also
an exemplary one, in these days of zealotry over the National
Endowment for the Arts and what to do about alleged "obscene" art. The
book is so unintentionally topical that I am puzzled by its neglect in
the national press.
          The short facts were these. In 1946 the State Department, in the
enthusiasm of those post-War days for spreading American influence and
values, decided to send art exhibits abroad. At a cost of $49,000 it
selected 79 oils. Some were to go to Europe, some to Latin
America. Perhaps unwisely they were first shown at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in October 1946. Criticism commenced at once. It was to
increase, in the press-New York Journal-American,
Look Magazine, others-radio-Fulton Lewis Jr.-and
most impellingly, Congress. As the selection was mostly "modern" (but
not inclusive of then emerging "abstract expressionism"), more
conservative artists also were disparaging. The ruckus in Congress
proved too embarrassing to an administration with larger
concerns. President Truman called the paintings "merely the
vaporings of halfbaked lazy people"; his opinion had, however, not
been publicized before the time when Secretary of State George
Marshall recalled all the paintings in June 1947 (they were then being
shown in Prague and Port-au-Prince); a short time later he had them
declared "surplus property" and transferred to
the old War Assets Administration. The 79, plus 38 watercolors
separately purchased, were auctioned to tax-supported
institutions. Auburn got 36 of them (for $1,072). The University of
Oklahoma got another 36. (The University of Georgia bought ten, and
the remainder went to Texas A&M, Rutgers, and the University of
Washington.) The total purchase price, for oils and watercolors, was
$5,544.
          Should public money--tax payer's money--be used for art? The
complaint in 1946-47 was less that it had been than that it had been
for this art, which is the same as the complaint trumpeted
and neighed by North Carolina's Jesse Helms and allies, Republicans
and Democrats, in 1990. There is a difference between then and now, an
interesting one though I am not sure what it portends. The criticism
in the 1940s was that the selected paintings somehow demeaned the
United States, put it in a poor light, and were done by politically
suspect (i.e. leftist) artists; in 1990, obscenity is the enemy. Like
a lot of civic 

life, the direction is toward below the belt.
          Yesterday's liberals were much like today's. They retreated; those
who held office in government scampering away fast. The brouhaha was
soon forgotten. Likely as not, so will be the one now led by
Mr. Helms, when the 1990 Congressional races are over and done
with. These political campaigners against art, then as now, knew,
however, what they were about, which was--as now--providing red meat for
the American electorate.
          Liberals tend not so well to know what they are about. Littleton
and Sykes report little evidence that liberals of the 1940s defended
these pictures. They ought to have, I think, because some of them as
reproduced in this book are stunningly beautiful. I don't think the
same can be said for the works which have uncorked the current uproar,
but then what is it that has not deteriorated culturally in our,
present decade? Liberals even as they bring charges of censorship are
inclined today to leave the quality debate alone, 
as they concentrate on process. It is a losing 
tactic: substance wins every argument with process. The public, which 
is the final arbiter, wants art it can respect.
          What though. of process? Is a democratic government required, by
any political theory, to support art? Probably not. But if it decides
to do so, may it fittingly choose among artists and their works?
          It is an age-old issue. Plato wrote at length about it. Art he
thought to be fundamental to a good political order, but he would have
firmly controlled its forms and shaped their style. The modern
democratic tradition is otherwise, both in public respect for
art-which is reduced to an anarchy of taste-and government's right and
even duty to direct it. Respect art or not, American
governments-federal, state, local-inevitably involve themselves in
artistic decisions. The design of public buildings, the illustrations
in children's school books, the taxation of art collections, the
awarding of scholarships-these and like matters all pave the way for
more direct challenge, such as what art-the statues, the murals, the
anthems- governments may commission and what artists' careers it may
financially aid. Who will decide what is to be favored?
          One may well not like (I don't) his or her tax dollars being spent
on some of the forms of expression we have lately seen publicized. One
may think (I do) our art community and art critics irresponsible in
their aesthetic judgments. But if we are to have federal support of
art at all, the worst conceivable judge of what is good and worthy is
Congress.
          This incapacity of Congress is true not only for art. I am not sure
that the Constitution requires that there be publicly supported
education. Certainly it does not require federal support. But the
truth we have had to learn, sometimes painfully, is that though
legislative bodies are indispensable for deciding whether to do or not
to do, they are when they intrude in areas such as education and art
bumbling at best and malign at worst, and the worst is frequent. Advancing American Art tells well what havoc
Congressmen caused in 1946-47. We may see a repeat today. Littleton
and Sykes let us see too how the uproar over these paintings was an
overture for the Red scare which would seize the country and corrupt
our law, morals, and political values during the ensuing decade.
          In the late 1980s and early 1990s Congress has become a destructive
institution. By its own complicity in the wastage of national treasure
on arms and military might, neither it nor Presidents can seldom do
anything-can move-against problems that matter to people's
welfare. All they can readily do, as long as foreign governments will
lend or give us the money, is saber-rattling or saber-unsheathing
abroad and-here at home-the flailing at "social
issues": art censorship flag burning, "family
values," and-yes--drug criminalizing. We tear ourselves apart
over such issues, and it is Congress and Presidents who impel us to do
so. It is self-willed destruction of the capacity for
self-government. Issues-if one may call them that-like these are for
this generation of Congressmen and other politicians the functional
equivalent of "rigger" politics, of "waving the bloody shirt," of
antiCommunism for their predecessors. They are the kind of
"issues" that allow Congress to turn away from
the nation's real problems, or to mask the roles they themselves play
in service to financial interests.
          Littleton and Sykes have done a great service in reminding us of an
earlier bout of this democratic disease. They and Professor Litwack
(whose Introduction really should have been an Afterword, inasmuch as
it picks up the history where the book stops) place the 1946-47
episode within the context of the harsh nativism that is always
present in American democracy and the anti-Communism that was emerging
and which in the soon-to-be years of Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy
and J. Edgar Hoover would form an evil era of American history.
          It did, however, have at least two good outcomes. "All of the
furore seemed hardly to have affected the careers of the exhibit's
artists unless they were enhanced by it." That was one. A second
was and is that Auburn University obtained a collection of fine
paintings, worth one's making a trip to Auburn. 
        