Biography from below : Herbert Kruckman - a forgotten man of American art

Abstract

Biography is a genre that has been largely dedicated to 'eminent' lives, yet there is a need to re-evaluate the grounds of biographical eligibility to encompass 'forgotten' and other marginalised lives. BIOGRAPHY FROM BELOW: HERBERT KRUCKMAN -A FORGOTTEN MAN OF AMERICAN ART is a study of one such unrecognised figure, the New York-born artist, cartoonist, illustrator, teacher and author, Herbert Kruckman (1904-98). Throughout his career, Kruckman's works addressed the poverty of the Great Depression, civil rights, workers' rights, European fascism and the perils of capitalism. This is exemplified by his numerous satirical cartoons in left-wing magazines such as New Masses, the Hat Worker and controversial books such as HoI' Up Yo' Head (1936). Kruckman, as a painter, was a key contributor to 1930s American Social Expressionism, yet a reluctance to exhibit and other acts of self-sabotage, along with shifts in the postwar aesthetic and political landscapes of America, hindered his career. By incorporating traditional biography with elements of social history and art history, this thesis is an original study of Kruckman, an artist whose works spanned the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, the Second World War, McCarthyism and the Cold War. This thesis is divided into two interrelated studies: PART ONE: BIOGRAPHY FROM BELOW and PART Two: HERBERT KRUCKMAN -A FORGOTTEN MAN OF AMERICAN ART. The first part comprises a brief study of 'biography from below', which makes the case for using biography to uncover and examine what Virginia Woolf described as 'obscure' lives. This is followed by a historical survey of the biography of the artist as subgenre, which argues that the status of the artist is intertwined with biographical recognition and representation. Part One concludes with a brief introduction to the study of the biographical historiography of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP), which underpins the second and major part of this thesis, Kruckman's biography. The need for a biography of Kruckman is not based solely on his artistic and political contributions. In addition to using biography as a means of exposing a 'forgotten' life, it employs the genre to examine from 'below' the single largest government-sponsored art movement in American history, the WPA/FAP, providing an insight into the experience of a 'typical' New Deal artist working through America's worst financial and social crisis, the Great Depression. Given that there are very few biographical studies of New Deal artists, especially its unknown or forgotten figures, this thesis seeks to make an original contribution to American history and art history through its detailed and extensive research ofan unknown artist. Moreover, this thesis provides a threefold contribution to biography: the first in terms of the addition of a new subject into written discourse; the second in the expansion of the boundaries of biographical eligibility through the introduction a new type of subject; and the third through its demonstration of how biography can be used to examine a social, political, and artistic movement. The broad aims of this thesis are to rescue Herbert Kruckman's life from what E.P Thompson once called the"enormous condescension of posterity", and, equally importantly, to demonstrate the salience of biography as a form of historical enquiry, a lens onto a neglected moment in the social and biographical history of American art