Numerous American women artists built successful professional careers in the mid-twentieth century while confronting challenging cultural transitions: shifts in stylistic avant-gardism, harsh political transformations, and changing gender expectations for both women and men. These social and political upheavals provoked complex intellectual and aesthetic tensions. Critical discourses about style and expressive value were also renegotiated, while still privileging masculinist concepts of aesthetic authenticity. In these contexts, women artists developed their careers by adopting innovative approaches to contemporary subjects, techniques, and media. However, while a few women working during these decades have gained significant recognition, many others are still consigned to historical obscurity. The essays in this volume take varied approaches to revising this historical silence. Two focus on evidence of gender biases in several exhibitions and contemporary critical writings; the rest discuss individual artists' complex relationships to mainstream developments, with attention to gender and political biases, cultural innovations, and the influence of racial/ethnic diversity. Several also explore new interpretative directions to open alternative possibilities for evaluating women's aesthetic and formal choices. Through its complex, nuanced approach to issues of gender and female agency, this volume offers valuable and exciting new scholarship in twentieth-century American art history and feminist studies.

Numerous American women artists built successful professional careers in the mid-twentieth century while confronting challenging cultural transitions: shifts in stylistic avant-gardism, harsh political transformations, and changing gender expectations for both women and men. These social and political upheavals provoked complex intellectual and aesthetic tensions. Critical discourses about style and expressive value were also renegotiated, while still privileging masculinist concepts of aesthetic authenticity. In these contexts, women artists developed their careers by adopting innovative approaches to contemporary subjects, techniques, and media. However, while a few women working during these decades have gained significant recognition, many others are still consigned to historical obscurity. The essays in this volume take varied approaches to revising this historical silence. Two focus on evidence of gender biases in several exhibitions and contemporary critical writings; the rest discuss individual artists' complex relationships to mainstream developments, with attention to gender and political biases, cultural innovations, and the influence of racial/ethnic diversity. Several also explore new interpretative directions to open alternative possibilities for evaluating women's aesthetic and formal choices. Through its complex, nuanced approach to issues of gender and female agency, this volume offers valuable and exciting new scholarship in twentieth-century American art history and feminist studies.

"Helen Langa's compelling study of 1930s social viewpoint prints offers a fresh look at the relationship between the decade's visual culture and its social and political bases. The author illuminates the artists' struggles with conflicting demands-how to advocate revolution within a defense of democracy, and how to engage the social world using aesthetic criteria that advocated distance from it. Her engaging account of these contradictions is a major achievement."--Ellen Wiley Todd, author of "The "New Woman" Revised: Painting and Gender Politics on Fourteenth Street

"Privileging 1930s prints, and contextualizing their political, social, cultural, and economic dimensions more completely than any previous book on the subject, Helen Langa's "Radical Art is a welcome addition to studies of American art during the Great Depression. Her astute analysis of social viewpoint styles and themes is a significant contribution. Historically detailed and persuasively argued, this book will be an indispensable source for students and scholars of twentieth-century American art."--Erika Doss, author of "Twentieth-Century American Art

"This beautifully nuanced study reaffirms the primacy of politically engaged printmaking in the 1930s. Langa is attentive to the ways artists invented imagery to address aesthetic dilemmas as well as social ones, with the goal, always, of raising the public's consciousness of labor, gender, and racial inequities. Her research is superb and her sensitivity to a wide range of printmaker's voices, male and female, white and black, is exemplary."--Wanda M. Corn, author of "The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-1935

""Radical Art is a landmarkstudy, both in the history of printmaking and in the history of American art of the thirties. There is no better explicator of the graphic arts of this era and their cultural context than Helen Langa. Her thoroughly researched and compellingly written volume is a major scholarly contribution."--Betsy Fahlman, author of "John Ferguson Weir: The Labor of Art