Art: Labor Esthetics

On the sunlit steps of the Baltimore Museum of Art last week, aboard a platform directly under the brooding bronze of Rodin’s Thinker, a slender, sharp-featured, gleeful gentleman of 53 saw one of his best thoughts come true before an audience of about 1,000 Labor Day loungers. The happy man was Henry Ernest Treide (rhymes with “tidy”), onetime captain in the U. S. Army Quartermaster Corps, onetime president of Davison Chemical Co., onetime president of the Baltimore Association of Credit Men, and since June 1937, president of the executive board of the Baltimore Museum. Mr. Treide was in unusual company for a museum director. Principal speakers of the day were President Joseph P. McCurdy of the Maryland and District of Columbia Federation of Labor and Spencer Miller Jr., director of A. F. of L.’s Education Bureau. The occasion: Baltimore’s first exhibition of Labor in Art.

When Mr. Treide was elected to his present position, he startled all his friends by moving into a small office in the museum’s basement, paying his own secretary and starting work every morning at 8:30—an hour and a half before opening time. He was writing letters. By the quire, Treide letters went out all that summer to businessmen, professional men, labor leaders, school heads, churchmen, clubwomen, Eagles, Elks, Moose. One result was that no less than 225 organizations appointed committees to cooperate in a ”New Deal” for the Baltimore Museum. A feature of the New Deal was to be special shows on requested subjects. First organization to ask for one was Joe McCurdy’s Labor Committee, which beat the Religious Committee to the draw. An ecclesiastical show is planned for December.

In Baltimore, Joseph P. McCurdy is known as the prime mover in keeping the Duke & Duchess of Windsor out of the U. S. A. In that hour when Charles E. (“Sand-Hog”) Bedaux, inventor of the “B-unit” efficiency system, was preparing to bring the Windsors in, Joe McCurdy thought up and put through the first resolution condemning Bedaux’s auspices on behalf of U. S. Labor. When the visit was called off, he got approving letters from all over the country. “Sure, we put a ban on visiting royalty,” said he last week, “but we believe in whooping it up for Art.” Joe McCurdy whooped it up from the speakers’ stand: “This is the first time in the history of the U. S. that such a project has been initiated by organized labor. It emphasizes Labor’s aim of getting the material things of life as a step toward the spiritual things. . . .”

Said A. F. of L.’s big, red-haired Spencer Miller Jr.: “When we talk about art, what we mean in reality is doing something that needs to be done and doing it supremely well. . . . It is well for American Labor to be thinking about the preservation and democratization of the art life.”

Despite the inevitable self-consciousness of this buildup, Baltimore’s union men and their families found plenty to look at and plenty to like in the museum’s galleries. Most of the 106 items of painting and sculpture were by good contemporaries, though two of the best were Millet’s Woman with a Rake, lent by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Monet’s Les Déchargeurs de Carbon. The artists ranged from such ununionized souls as Academician Jonas Lie and Merrymaker Doris Lee to Proletarians Joe Jones and Mervin Jules. The subject matter of Labor was conceived generously enough to admit a painting of industrial buildings by Classicist Charles Sheeler. Even more varied was a display of 180 prints and drawings, from the 15th Century to the present, from which visitors could get an idea of how differently Labor looked to Pieter Bruegel, to Honoré Daumier, to James A. McNeill Whistler.

The idea that working people ought to get a chance at Art dates precisely from the time when the Industrial Revolution put an end to handicraft. Its prophets in Victorian England were William Morris and John Ruskin; one form of its fulfillment now is the Federal Art Project’s Community Centre program (TIME, Sept. 5). Meanwhile, strict Marxists interpret the social use of art narrowly to mean that art should be an instrument of class struggle, and many Lovers of Labor subjects have appeared. One of these is able Sculptor Max Kalish, represented in the Baltimore show by The Spirit of American Labor (see cut) and seven other pieces. Contrasting such idealization with satirical but penetrating prints such as George Grosz’s Workingman’s Sunday (see cut) or Peggy Bacon’s Help! (see cut), Baltimoreans last week put their teeth in the question of honest eyesight, which has become an international issue of modern art.