Modernism & the Communist Party (was Re: Jazz/CPUSA)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>Oh, for heaven's sake, Charles. Have you read, e.g., Finkelstein's 
>book on jazz, treating it as "folk music"? The CP had a mechanical 
>view directly linking class to art ("proletarian literature"), 
>treating art more less purely instrumentally, hostile to modernism, 
>intolerant of ambiguity. Ask yourself why the Party couldn't keep 
>Richard Wright. But it did see culture as an important field of 
>struggle. --jks

The CP critics, oftentimes, suffered from the very failings that you 
mention.  In contrast, _artists_ in the CP -- e.g., Tillie Olsen, 
Bertolt Brecht, Tina Modotti, Pablo Picasso, Sergei Eisenstein, etc. 
-- & more broadly artists within or close to the Popular Front 
culture -- e.g., Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Orson Welles, Luis 
Bunuel, etc. -- not only were not hostile to modernism; in many cases 
-- _especially Brecht, Picasso, Welles, & Eisenstein_ -- they were 
the best embodiments of modernism, whose styles _& theories_ have 
continued to influence artists of later generations (including 
artists who are un- or even anti-Marxists).

Even the quintessence of literary modernist _excess_ Goerges Bataille 
was briefly part of the Popular Front!

Yoshie