Both Elizabeth Olds and Wanda
Gag were Minnesota
artists active in the 1930s and 1940s, with Gag the better known. Yet as part of the collective amnesia over
this period in history, their art, like the writers of the time, has been
neglected. Today, realist, social
realist or modernist art is over-looked in favor of various forms of
post-modernism. The bourgeoisie has
skillfully enlisted art in being socially abstruse, shocking, meaningless,
socially ignorant or just plain decoration.
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| Harlem Musicians - Elizabeth Olds |
However, given the social
stresses of the present, post-modernism is looking more and more like an
expensive and laughable dead-end.
You could say that Olds might be considered a 'social-realist' while Gag could be included as a ‘Regionalist’ in the tradition of Grant
Wood, Thomas Hart Benton or John Curry. Though some of Old's non-political and 'primitive style' work could be considered in that category too.
Of course, the descriptor ‘Regionalist’ is never applied to fundamentally New York artists, who
by definition are somehow national. Both Gag and Olds lived in New York
for a time. Ben Shawn, a
New Yorker who painted proletarian themes similar to Benton, is never called a ‘Regionalist.’ Olds
and Gag are women, so they are also part of a second neglected group.
This is a great little exhibit
which dedicates a room to each artist. Olds
was born in Minneapolis
and studied at MCAD many years ago. Olds’s
art was sometimes cartoonish, but socially conscious and politically left. She was employed by the New Deal’s ‘Public
Workers of Art Project’ and the ‘Federal Art Project.’ She was inspired by the muralism of the
Mexican painter Jose Orozco. She used
mass production ‘screen printing’ techniques to bring art to many. Olds made fun of Wall Street and the
conformism of ‘white collar boys’ heading to work. She even cast a satiric eye on gallery-goers
worshipping the Italian art classics (“Adoration
of the Masters”) and Picasso (“Picasso
Study Club”). She showed black
musicians, working-class neighborhoods in New York, steel and meatpacking plants and strong
miners. One of her pictures features a dance line of nude women smiling
powerfully down on the audience, which was not allowed to be shown due to
nudity (“Burlesque”). Olds reminds one of Hogarth or Daumier sometimes.
Gag, born in New Ulm, is the
famous children’s artist of “A Million
Cats.” But she also made fun of
consumerism in the midst of the Depression (“Progress”) and like Olds, did covers for the Communist Party-backed
“New Masses” magazine (“Skyscraper”). Gag lived in New York for a time too, painting an
alienated stairway at Macys. (“Macy’s
Stairway”) but left to live in the country at a house she called ‘Tumble
Timbers.’ Her rural upbringing gave her
a left-populist outlook, especially appropriate here in Minnesota with its strong Farmer-Labor Party
influence. This also explains the
influence of nature in her art and drawings. Cats, snowdrifts, garden tools,
fireplaces, lamplight, squash, green peppers, moonlight and trees populate her
later work. I even see bits of R. Crumb
in the way she shades objects.
The exhibit is titled: “The Rabble-Rouser and the Homebody,” on
the third floor at the MIA. It continues
from March 2018 to December 9, 2018. There
are several other new exhibits worth seeing as well. Right nearby is the ‘Duluth Living Room”, a recreation of a prairie-style living room
looking out on Lake Superior. Admission is free or with a donation.
Other reviews of art below:
“9.5 Thesis on Art & Class,” “Adios Utopia,” “Art is Dead,” “Ways of
Seeing,” “State of the Art,” “The Marxist Theory of Art,” “The Hermitage and
Winter Palace,” “Desert of Forbidden Art,” “The Minneapolis Spectacle,” “Hopper
Drawing,” “Women in Soviet Art,” “Frida Kahlo,” “Street Art.” Use these
terms in blog search box on upper left.
Red Frog
August 5, 2018
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