The First Rebel Arts Exhibit

...With the cutting off of relief in these parts next month, the plight of the jobless will be more desperate than ever and there is no more pressing task that confronts us than to see to It that the workless workers have some medium through which to voice their demands...

...Banko are despised and feared...

...This country Is rotten ripe for a revolution of some kind...

...TlIS past week I lost another tooth, a great new crop of gray hairs appeared above my noble brow and 1 read a piece saying that nowadays men were howling at the doors of wolves...

...Time and again, as In Harlan today and on t h e mountains of West Virginia, despite corrupt leadership, despite a chaotic economics In their Industry, despite all the hazards and uncertainties of their bleak existence, they have risen to the summons to that fighting spirit of theirs and gone on, in surging marches, implacable, Invincible to the end...

...When the bankrupted commercial classes make revolutionary whoopee, reaction of the lowest kind must set in through one Fascist form or another...

...Like the French of the late years In the eighteenth century, the middle class is becoming militant and leftlsh...

...Police forces, s t a t e militias, National Guardsmen and the like may fall into divided allegiances The forces of the national government will probably remain true to Wall Street...

...Not a peep comes from the headquarters of organized labor in sincere protest...

...But not of my kind, I fear greatly...

...Our wolf to whom I have frequently referred of late has got hoarse howling around our place...

...How is yours...

...Those who are lucky enough to come out away from the pits, have always with them a memory of the days underground, which gives to all their life a peculiar mystic tinge, a sense of fatalism, mingled strangely with a forthright Independence and defiance of fate itself...

...Bloody riots will be the order of the day...

...MeAlieter Coleman...

...Not a growl comes out of the ranks...

...The F r u i t s of Labor" represents a group of proletarians receiving apples from one of their number, the fruit personifying the complete product of their own work...

...Politicians will scurry about like poisoned rats in a sewer, seeking the winning sides as the winning sides appear...

...The Masonic orders, the fraternal organizations, and the Babbitt bands have an established community of interest and class consciousness that is utterly lacking with the workers of the land...

...At the beginning is a poem, one verse of which reads: "Then thou shalt remember, 0 heart, long days and hot nights in such mines, The daily descent into peril, the darkness, the pain, And remembrance Ww// urge thee on softly with whispers and signs And hid thee leave learning a moment and live in the old days again...

...From this single lithograph, it is not difficult to understand why Rivera stands out, despite the parlor incantations of Critics and others, as a gieantic figure...

...Most Interesting, perhaps, to those who have followed the rapid growth of Rebel Arts, are the works of its active members, Irwin Hoffman, Aaron Berkman, Josef Presser, Bernard Zlsldnd, Molly Wilson, Miss H. Smedley and Lyman Young...

...Much has been accomplished since the cultural adjunct to the Socialist Party was organized...

...Presser, one of the few living Americans to have a drawing in the Ufflzl Gallery at Florence, shows three sketches, one of them a noble study of a Belgian horse...

...This we Socialists might as well understand as an eventuality...

...Unless we multiply our efforts to put our educational program across...

...More important, the group has demonstrated the widespread eagerness of gifted creative workers to find a desired outlet for their revolt against a capitalistic society...

...I n the meantime, those of us who will have courage enough to be foolhardy and frank, who win attempt to Instruct the workers of their opportunity to seize power, will be flung into jail or lynched under martial law...

...This is the poet's way of saying, "Once a miner, always a miner...

...Berkman, another of the original Rebel artists, also has a decided leaning towards human beings, and even in his landscapes or city scenes, one or two figures immediately arrest the eye...

...tto us a book called simply, "Miner," written by F. C. Boden, who went into the pits in England a t the age of thirteen and has made articulate that dark, torturous life underground which la the dally lot of the men of the picks here and abroad...

...And when Franklin does remember him, o r a t any rate, remembers that he has a vote, he can't seem t o think up anything t o do about him...

...But there is hell brewing everywhere, and it won't be long before the pot bolls over...

...Hoffman's lithographs, paintings and etchings stamp him a s a rising artist of the proletarian...

...Here and there, however, we come across rays of light which cheer us on our downward course...

...Bankers of all stripes are akin to burglars and bandits...

...And rumor also has it that the big fellows are refusing to give any kind of credit to tradesmen on whatsoever collateral, because they want to be well heeled with ready cash when the burgain day for distressed bank merchandise arrives...

...And if the middle class hatred flames Into direct action and a dictatorship hell breaks loose here In this land, then all the fine spun arguments of the Socialist militant program and the hefty, sonorous orthodoxies of t h e purists will be so much of the Fascist juggernaut...

...How It will all end up is a matter of conjecture...

...As Marxian academicians we might view this fulfilment of prophecy with inner gloating...

...The chain national bank behemoth Is thumping into his atavistic own...

...Armed fores will be attempted and may grow Into general civil warfare...

...The ballot will probably be ignored in the struggle...

...It Ik this quality of subject which distinguishes him above the mere craftsman or seeker, of beauty, though abstractionists will find In ' F r u i t s of Labor" a harmony of form and design rarely equalled...

...So that your real miner is always a bit of a rebel and will stand up and fight despite all the odds that come against him...

...All our work for half a century will again be destroyed...

...The only thing that Is tragic about this situation is the spineless dejection of the working masses of the land...

...I hate to think of what will happen to the financial oligarchs, once the Lions, the Klwanls, and the notaries start singing "Allons Enfants de la Patrie," adequately Americanised and jazzified to the hectic tempo of our time...

...He Is deeply concerned with people, and, like Higgins, envisages their misery, at the same time suggesting their latent power and strength...

...for him any picture must possess a strong social consciousness...

...It Is a race between Socialist propaganda and impending civil war...

...For instance, the idea of calling FrankMn Roosevelt a "radical" and "demagogue" because be had the bad taste to refer to the fact that the Reconstruction Finance outfit hadn't done such an awful lot for the "forgotten man," the small farmer and home-owner, gives us a chuckle...

...His "Ten Cent Dance Hall," one of t h e outstanding paintings in the exhibition, reveals a power of satire and humor which bodes well for the future...

...The stuffed shirts have the idea that the best thing .to do about "the forgotten man," which by the way, is not a n original phrase with Franklin, is to keep right on forgetting him...

...Outstanding is a lithograph by the Mexican, Diego Rivera, which was presented by the artist as a gift to Rebel Arts...

...Rebel Arts is fortunate, also, in securing for the exhibition canvases by Reginald Marsh, Eugene Higgins and John Sloan, who eloquently answer the recent sneering New York Times editorial which described the "rebel" movement as a seasonal effusion of raw youth...

...the future is even brighter...

...The passing of such a gifted artist leaves a void which can hardly be filled...

...The stock market values recede to the zero mark...

...They take crumbs of charity while being without even hope for jobs, and those that are still at work accept wage cut after wage cut and a lower standard of living without a whimper...

...If anyone thinks that he h a s the miners finally licked, he has another think coming...

...The subtleties of brush on line work do not alone suffice...

...Rumors are rife everywhere now that unless trade and general economic conditions improve rapidly va»t numbers of inland small banks'will be shut down or gobbled up a t bargain prices by the big boys down East...

...And their need today Is even more pressing than In the days when Eugene Victor Debs and Mother Jones first went organizing In the South...

...There has coommee...

...Time and again It has seemed as though the miners were done for...

...And a des i r e for vengeance grows apace...

...War will be declared against the big bankers...

...Once more we urge the comrades in and around New York to get their coupon books from the Emergency Conference on Unemployment, (Leonard Bright, Secretary, at the Party Office) and do their part In helping organize the unemployed...

...As warm, emotional and red blooded humans, with the full posessi «n of Socialist ideals for background, we have much grief ahoad for all of us...

...Nor the special brand so vociferously blurted forth from the barricades of Union Square...

...S. A. <le Wilt...

...Rebel Arts is certainly to be congratulated In assembling an exhibition of such excellence and quality...

...What a hot campaign tills is going to be, with Hoover versus the "demagoguery" of such red, red radicals as the pitiful straddler at Albany who slaps Tammany crooks on the wrists and makes big bow-wows at John Haynes Holmneess aanndd 1R1 abbi Wise...

...The Chatterbox Along the business streets of the land, the best hated man is Morgan, and the most vilified, Hoover...

...The workers will probably find themselves aligned against one another, having no loyalties of their own...

...If any group of American workers ever deserved the wholehearted support of Socialists, It is the coaldlggers...

...These men have been painting for years and have expressed, in powerful terms, their protests against the existing organization of society...

...And so it will come to pass and all that...

...The government belongs to them...

...The day for the rugged little banker of the villuge and town la definitely done...

...K. P. i Mdtun and Co...

...The blame for the whole depression and Its strangulation of trade Is placed squarely upon the big bankers and their affiliates In Wall Street...

...Our party will be outlawed, and our movement driven underground...

...One-half of the south wall is devoted to a special memorial exhibit of woodcuts and lithographs by the late Gan Kolski, one of t he founders of Rebel Arts...

...Surely, few in this count r y can match the exquisite Kolski prints which are notable for their poetry of expression as much as for expertness of technique...

...Under the direction of Irwin Hoffman more than fifty pictures were collected and hung in the studio of the Rand School...

...All over the country, banks nave commenced a suicidal policy of cashing on their stocks and industrial bond holdings, In order to remain "liquid," for what they must feel will be the last assault upon their usefulness...

...It is a tenderly written, sensitive story, with simply magnificent descriptions of the mine fields of the Derbyshire valleys and the* men and women of those fields...

...publish the book in America and we urge that you read it...

...Let us get to work then, pulling together, and saving our voices and ottr strength against the day when destruction rages madly through the land...

...If my hearing is a t all normal, and my understanding of words and feelings a t all average, little, middle sized and many great big tradesmen and bourgeois folks are gathering slowly and lumbering ly Into an armyvof discontent that will s t a r t a march on the temples of the plutes...

...An Art Young Poor Fish represents an earlier tradition which Rebel Arts is reawakening...

...In the dozen works shown, Kolski's genius for woodcuts is beautifully demon, strated...

...Proscription for all radicals will be the order of the day...