>
>>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
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