Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938

'How wonderful is the field of the history of art. How much work there is here for us Communists.'

Lenin to Lunacharsky

History is written by the winners and art history is no exception. The winners in America's history of art are the abstract painters who, subsidised by the CIA from the early 1940s, showed the world the avant garde art American democracy and freedom could produce. The losers were the artists working in the figurative tradition, who were seen from then on as old-fashioned an...