winifred milius lubell's depression-era sketchbooks

The Smithsonian Institution

Winifred Milius Lubell's Depression-Era SketchbooksAuthor(s): James WechslerSource: Archives of American Art Journal, Vol. 45, No. 1/2 (2005), pp. 33-41Published by: The Smithsonian InstitutionStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25435102 .

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Winifred Milius, Refuge, 1934. Lithograph, 30 x 43 cm. Collection of the artist.

Winifred Milius Lubell's Depression-Era Sketchbooks

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JAMES WECHSLER

The Archives of American Art recently received a gift of

manuscripts and sketchbooks from Winifred Milius

Lubell, an artist known for her many children's books

and, most recently, for her Metamorphosis of Baubo:

Myths of Woman's Sexual Energy.1 Of the twenty-two sketchbooks in the collection, five date from the Great

Depression and reflect the artist's growing commit ment to the Artists' Union, the American Artists' Con

gress, and the Communist Party of America (CPUSA). Her work from these years, well documented in the

sketchbooks, reveals her dedicated participation in

actions and events promoting such causes as federal

support for the arts, the CIO-led effort to establish

racially integrated labor unions, and Loyalist opposi tion to Franco in the Spanish Civil War.2

Born on 14 January 1914, Milius grew up in an affluent German Jewish family on Manhattan's Upper

West Side. Both her parents, Eisa (n?e Simonson) and Lester Milius, were descended from established New York families whose ancestors came to the United States in the nineteenth century and made fortunes in textiles and Manhattan real estate. By the turn of the

33



century, the names Milius and Simonson appeared reg ularly in the society pages, which announced family engagements and described how they spent their holi

days, what they wore, and what was served at their

wedding dinners and parties.3 Upper-class society in New York was rigidly segre

gated at this time, and as a Jew Lester Milius was excluded from certain clubs and organizations. He nonetheless accepted this social system and even main tained it through his bigoted opinions about people below him on the social hierarchy. The humanist edu cation that Winifred Milius received at the progressive Fieldston School of the New York Society for Ethical Culture contradicted her father's views. Though she had yet to embrace the Marxist concept of class strug gle, as an adolescent she began to rebel against the pre tensions and double standards of the privileged class to

which she belonged. Elsa Simonson Milius, the artist's mother, was more

liberal than her father. She had grown up in a very cul

tured, literary atmosphere and upheld the family tradi tion as a patron of the arts.4 As the younger sister of Lee Simonson, the avant-garde designer, critic, and editor of Creative Art, Elsa Simonson Milius belonged to a social circle that included some of the foremost mod ernist artists in New York, including Charles Demuth,

Marsden Hartley, the Stettheimer sisters, and William and Marguerite Zorach.

Elsa Simonson Milius had her own artistic aspira tions. Though she was an amateur painter, she seems

to have been sincerely committed to her work. She had a spacious studio on Riverside Drive and was a mem ber of the cooperative Artists Galleries, where she had a solo show in April 1923. That same year she joined the Salons of America, an organization formed in 1922

by Hamilton Easter Field and other dissenters from the

Society of Independent Artists. Her floral still lifes, nudes, and rural landscapes were exhibited in the Salons of America's annual non-juried, no award exhi bitions from 1923 through 1925 and in 1928, the year Parkinson's disease forced her to stop painting.5

Winifred Milius's first sketchbook is dated June

1933, a month before her mother died, and shows that

during this difficult time she became more serious about art. In October 1933 she entered the art school of the National Academy of Design in order to receive

proper training in the fundamentals of figure drawing. Her enthusiasm soon waned as she found the aca

demy's stringency, conservatism, and elitism to be

overbearing. After an instructor recommended she concentrate on plaster casts in order to bring a "classic

dignity" to her life drawing, she left the school, claim

ing that she was moving out of town.6 In truth, she had only moved as far as the Art Stu

dents League on West Fifty-Seventh Street, where

many different teaching approaches were offered and students were free to choose their own programs.

Wanting to work from live models, at the beginning of

Winifred Milius, from For Spain and Liberty portfolio, 1937. Linocut, 27 x 21 cm. Winifred Lubell Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

1934 Milius entered the life drawing class of German satirist George Grosz, eager to study with an artist who had so successfully integrated academic draftsmanship, modernist formal innovations, and leftist ideology. But, while she expected Grosz to be incisive, rebellious, and

keenly intolerant of injustice, she found him to be aloof as a teacher and politically apathetic. While Grosz

may have been tired and detached from the American

political scene, the League's printmaking instructor

Harry Sternberg was a spirited leftist. Sternberg was a member of the John Reed Club of artists and writers who sympathized with the Communist goal to forge a culture that was "closer to the daily struggles of the workers/'7 Sternberg played an important role in trans

mitting these ideas to Milius and his other students, who included Rita Albers, Julien Alberts, Mary (Sinclair) Annand, Barbara Burrage, Blanche Grambs,

Riva Helfond, Edward "Deyo" Jacobs, Irving Marantz,

34



Winifred Milius, drawing of an unemployed dishwasher, 1935. Pencil on paper, 60 x 57 cm. Collection of the artist.

35



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Left to right: Edward "Deyo" Jacobs, Winifred Milius, and Hugh Miller at an Artists' Union rally, ca. 1935. Photograph by Irving Marantz. Gerald Monroe Research Material on WPA, American Artists' Congress, and Artists' Union, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

and Hugh Miller. He encouraged these young artists to

join the Artists' Union, an organization that strove to eliminate unemployment among artists through ade

quate government support. During her time in Stern

berg's class, Milius participated in union exhibitions and activities and was among the hundreds who demonstrated against what they called "Rockefeller vandalism" after Diego Rivera's Man at the Crossroads fresco in Rockefeller Center was destroyed in February 1934. As Marantz's snapshot of Jacobs, Milius, and

Miller at an Artists' Union rally suggests, a strong sense

of camaraderie developed within the group. Milius formed particularly close friendships with

Jacobs and Grambs, who were similarly enthusiastic about having "just discovered this absolutely wonder ful thing called Communism."8 The friends viewed

prints in the collections of the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and at art gal leries such as E. Weyhe and the Delphic Studio.

Milius's developing social conscience soon found

expression in a series of sketches depicting the victims of the Depression who populated the Crot?n Reservoir

"Hooverville," the Central Park shantytown just a few blocks away from the well-appointed Milius apartment on West Seventy-Second Street. At the League she

developed these studies into compositions for prints. Soon Milius began to gather material from other

parts of the city. She and Grambs met early in the

morning at the Union Square subway station so they could sketch for a few hours on the Lower East Side, at the waterfront, or in the factory district known today as SoHo. On cold days they sketched indoors at places like the New York Public Library. Milius's depictions of this institution show it being used as a shelter for the destitute and effectively suggest a civilization in decay.

Milius and Grambs concentrated on more formal

portraits in the summer of 1935, when they had the use of a studio belonging to Sternberg's friend, the muralist William Karp. To continue making the social statements found in their street drawings, the artists used as models the unemployed men who congregated in nearby Stuyvesant Square. Milius's drawings of a German immigrant who had worked as dishwasher at Catskill Mountain resort hotels before the Depression

36



express the artist's conviction that the capitalist eco nomic system had failed. Her portraits also suggest a faith in the resiliency of the working class.

After the period in Karp's studio Milius and Grambs

joined the informal sketch group that met at Will Bar net's tenement apartment, where Milius concentrated

on making portraits of the children who lived in the

working-class neighborhood. At one of these sittings she produced a pen-and-ink drawing of a youth, which became one of her first images to appear in the Com munist cultural journal New Masses.9

After focusing on the urban scene for two years, in 1936 Milius introduced industrial themes into her

work. That same year, Sternberg received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation grant to travel to min

ing and steel-making centers of the United States, and he invited a number of his former students, including Milius, Helfond, Grambs, and Miller, to accompany him on different trips he made to the anthracite

mining town of Lansford, in eastern Pennsylvania.10 Unfortunately, the locations of Milius's fully realized,

large-scale drawings of Lansford are not known,

though a sketchbook in the Archives contains a num ber of studies of miners preparing for work. In his 1937

essay Coal Town, Sternberg expressed admiration for the miners' courage and criticized the appalling condi tions these brave men's families endured.11 Milius was

similarly moved by the malnutrition from which her

host-family in Lansford suffered. She also described how after dinner, the miner, his wife, and their

teenage children all "crossed to a single sideboard, each in turn taking out their false teeth, which they placed in glasses of water lined in a row, and went straight to bed."12 Milius commented on the problem of poverty in

mining towns with her woodcut Coal Gatherers, which

depicts children collecting from the train tracks bits of coal for their families to use as fuel. Designed to insti

gate public awareness for the plight of miners, it was included in the American Artists' Congress "America

Today" exhibition, which, by opening simultaneously in thirty cities in December 1936, exploited "the adapt ability of the print, which can be produced rapidly and

inexpensively in large quantities, and . . . widely dis tributed at low cost."13

Toward the end of 1936 Milius moved to Chicago with her new husband Daniel House, whom she had wed a year before. House began law school at the Uni

versity of Chicago, and Milius, as a representative of

Winifred Milius, The Artists, WPA Sit Down Strike, Dec. 17, 1937. Ink on board, 30 x 45 cm. Collection of the artist. Depicted are Adrian Troy, who sits in the foreground at the bottom; Morris Topchevsky seated on the chair; Mitchell Siporin, with his distinctive spectacles and shock of curly dark hair, kneeling in the center; and an unidentified woman at Siporin's side.

37



the New York Artists' Union, made contact with the

Chicago branch where she encountered a core group of committed radicals such as Mitchell Siporin, Morris

Topchevsky, and Adrian Troy. Milius joined them in their ongoing dispute with the Illinois Art Project (IAP) supervisor over dismissals, restrictions on subject mat

ter, and their right to organize. This conflict reached critical mass on 12 December 1936, when twenty seven representatives of the Illinois Workers Alliance, the Technical and Research Employees Union, the

Adult Teachers' Union, and the Artists' Union occupied the headquarters of the IAP at the Merchandise Mart in a sit-down strike. Milius participated in the eight day siege and documented it in drawings that were

published in the Chicago Daily News as well as in New Masses.14

In the spring and summer of 1937 as artists' strikes and skirmishes with the authorities shared headlines with violent industrial struggles, Milius participated more directly with the labor movement. That year Sternberg was in Chicago to paint his Epoch of a Great

City mural for the Lakeview, Illinois, post office. Milius

accompanied him on his search for suitable imagery, and together they visited the stockyards and the Back of the Yards workers' district. The Packinghouse Work ers Organizing Committee's (PWOC) drive to form a

massive, racially integrated union was at its height at that time. Milius contributed by painting banners,

illustrating various PWOC publications, and distribut

ing leaflets bearing her cartoons in front of the stock

yard gates at five in the morning. The gradually mounting strength of organized labor

in the United States may have been encouraging to Communists who awaited the inevitable working-class revolution Marx predicted in The Communist Manifesto. However, the tumultuous events in Spain were

becoming more and more troubling. The anti-Franco

Loyalists' initial gains had started to evaporate. In April 1937 the German air force, working with Franco's

Nationalists, destroyed the city of Guernica; the Nationalists took Barcelona in May and Bilbao in June. When the Communist Party began organizing volun teers to fight with the Loyalists, a number of artists

including Paul Block, Joseph Vogel, and Jacobs joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of American volunteers. To raise awareness and funds the Chicago Section of the American Artists' Congress issued the portfolio of block prints For Spain and Liberty. Along with such well-known Chicago artists as Bernece Berkman, Fritzi

Brod, Todros Geller, Topchevsky, and Troy, Milius

expressed her "solidarity with all who combat those forces which burned books in Germany, plundered Ethiopia, made a shambles of Guernica, and every where imperil the minority peoples of the earth."15

Through these experiences in Chicago Milius became more involved with the Communist Party, and her marriage began to suffer. Her husband was also a

leftist and had been put on probation at least once for

Winifred Milius, Mike Bologoch, 1936 or 1937. Pencil on paper, 32 x 24 cm. Winifred Lubell Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

distributing radical literature at a University of Chicago event sponsored by General Motors, which was then involved in a dispute with the fledgling United Auto

Workers Union.16 As a Trotskyite, however, he

opposed the Communist Party on many important issues. At a time when it seemed that the entire world

was either on the brink of chaos or salvation, depend ing on one's orientation, Milius's and House's commit

ments to such different, and often directly opposing, ideologies doomed the two-year marriage.

When Milius returned to New York in 1938 she learned that her friend Deyo Jacobs had been killed in

Spain during the March siege of Belchite. That same month Dave Doran, director of the party's trade union

activities, former Young Communist League leader, and the youngest commander in the Lincoln Brigade, also died in combat. Because of Doran's status, a CPUSA fundraising organization to aid the Loyalist cause bore his name. In January 1939, this Dave Doran

Memorial Committee sponsored a modern dance

38



recital at Mecca Temple with "some outstanding dancers of America with a viewpoint and technique expressing modern times."17 Milius contributed to the

production by designing costumes for a piece by Ben

jamin Zemach, the Russian born, Los Angeles-based dancer-choreographer.

Immediately after the Doran fundraiser Milius embarked on another theater project. According to the

Daily Worker, she designed the costumes for A Song About America, a musical pageant written by Hoffman R. Hays, scored by Herbert Haufreucht and John Gar

den, directed by Jules Dassin, and produced by the New York State Committee of the Communist Party.18 Using CPUSA general secretary Earl Browder's 1936

campaign slogan "communism is twentieth-century Americanism" as a point of departure, A Song About America coupled revolutionary acts like the Boston Tea

Party with the Great Steel Strike of 1919. During the

Popular Front period, from August 1935 to August 1939, this kind of revisionist Americana was a standard formula in CPUSA-influenced works of art.

Milius became friendly with Hays and his wife Julia, but she did not pursue costume design after 1939. After

returning to New York, she frequented the Fifteenth

Street studio shared by Mervin Jules and the muralist Axel Horn, which was a gathering place for artists, intellectuals, and revolutionaries. There, Milius came to know Cecil Lubell, a Harvard-educated William Blake scholar. Lubell also shared Milius's faith that the Communists were the only group that addressed the serious problems of the day. They were married that

year and moved to Croton-on-Hudson, New York.

They soon collaborated on their first book, Petticoat Picket Lines: The History of Women in the American Labor Movement, which Lubell wrote and Milius illustrated. The support of labor historians Charles and Mary Beard

generated interest in the manuscript, but with the onset of the Second World War and the subsequent postwar backlash against the left, it was never pub lished. Milius continued to comment on race, gender, and class through woodcuts based on historical motifs with a series devoted to the lives of black women abo litionists. Many of these later prints celebrate tradi tional women's work.

After the war, because of disagreements with the

leadership, Milius and Lubell broke with the CPUSA. The anticommunism of the Cold War period affected them nonetheless. Alexander Bittelman, Robert Minor,

A/- /T/r/.lrS 'f?

Winifred Milius, drawing of grieving Spanish mothers, 1939. Watercolor, 28 x 36 cm. Collection of the artist.

39



and Joseph North, friends and neighbors from Croton

on-Hudson, were important leaders of the party charged by the House Un-American Activities Commit tee (HUAC) after the testimonies of fellow CPUSA lead ers Louis Budenz and Elizabeth Bentley. As the gov ernment built the case against North, HUAC attorney Robert Morris subpoenaed Cecil Lubell to appear as a witness. Lubell, according to the New York Times, did not incriminate his friend and "refused to say whether he was a Communist, a member of a Communist group at Croton-on-Hudson or knew a Joseph North."19

To this day Milius believes the party leadership failed to uphold the essential ideals of Communism, but she does not regret her involvement with the movement. On the contrary, she maintains it opened

her eyes to the diversities and complexities of the

world, shaped her values, and instilled in her a com mitment to social justice and a faith in humanity.20 In

addition, it gave her the sense of discipline and faith in hard work that motivated her to be so productive. Since the late 1940s she has illustrated nearly fifty books. She began learning classical Greek when she was in her seventies, and in her eighties she translated The Batrachomyomachia, a fourth-century B.C. antiwar

parody of The Iliad. She has exhibited her work regu larly, and in the past year she has had a retrospective and an exhibition of her recent white line woodcuts based on her goddess research. Approaching her

ninety-second birthday Milius continues to be an activist and working artist, rj

a (0?(M&u? in?*?is UJ>^(pt? hr\iU\js Lm?&'

Winifred Milius Lubell, A Woman's Tools, 1953. Woodcut, 25 x 38 cm. Collection of the artist.

40



Winifred Milius, Coal Gatherers, 1936-1937. Woodcut, 13x8 cm. Collection of the artist.

NOTES

1. Winifred Lubell papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian

Institution (hereafter Lubell papers). Lubell illustrated and co-wrote

The Tall Grass Zoo (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1961) and Green is for

Growing (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964) with her second husband, Cecil Lubell. Sketchbooks in the Lubell papers contain many meticu

lously observed and rendered seashells, plants, insects, and artifacts

that served as source material for several other books including Outer

Lands: A Natural History Guide to Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, Block Island, and Long Island (New York : Norton, 1978) and The Meta

morphosis ofBaubo: Myths of Woman's Sexual Energy (Nashville, Tenn.; Vanderbilt University Press, 1994).

2. Lubell papers, boxes 1 and 3, 1934-1937.

3. For example, at the opening of the 1908 summer season, the New

York Times wrote that Elsa and her brother Lee Simonson were

"among those that [took] advantage of the fine tennis court" at the

Grand Hotel {New York Times, 26 July 1908). The Milius-Simonson

engagement was announced in October 1909 and, of course, after

their wedding on 5 February 1910, a description of the lavish recep tion at Delmonico's Restaurant on Fifth Avenue appeared in the

paper the following morning (New York Times, 16 October 1909, and

New York Times, 6 February 1910).

4. According to Elsa's brother Lee Simonson, their father was "one of a generation of Germans who carried their classics in their hearts"

(Lee Simonson, Part of a Lifetime: Drawings and Designs, 1919-1940

[New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce], p. 1.). Her uncle Samuel Gold

enberg, a wealthy lace importer and philanthropist with houses in

Paris and New York, was the author of Lace: Its Origin and History, which became a standard text on the subject after its publication in

1904. Elsa Simonson Milius was among those listed as patrons in the

1930 benefit concert at Carnegie Hall by tenor Roland Hayes to raise

funds for Hamilton House Settlement, "an organization in lower

Manhattan which perform[ed] all the social service functions possi ble among an international community" ("The Program of Recitals," New York Times, 9 November 1930).

5. See Clark S. Marlor, The Salons of America: 1922-1936 (Madison, Conn.: Sound View Press, 1991), p. 153.

6. According to her registration card, Winifred Milius entered the

Academy School on 3 October 1933 and left on 25 November 1933.

I thank Marshall Price of the National Academy of Design for pro

viding this information.

7. The John Reed Club of New York, "Draft Manifesto," New Masses

(June 1932): 14.

8. Interview with Blanche Grambs conducted by James Wechsler, 20 December 1995.

9. New Masses (17 November 1936): 21.

10. Milius gave one of these works to her friend Steve Nelson, who

had been a CPUSA official and a labor union organizer in the

anthracite-mining region of eastern Pennsylvania. The drawing has not been located since Nelsons' death in 1993. For Sternberg's coal

mining series, see Ellen Fleurov, No Sun Without Shadow: The Art of

Harry Sternberg (Escondido, Calif.: California Center for the Arts,

2000), pp. 52-56. For examples of Gramb's Lansford prints, see

James Wechsler, "The Great Depression and the Prints of Blanche

Grambs," Print Quarterly 13, no. 4 (December 1996): 376-396; for

Riva Helfond's, see Helen Langa, Radical Art: Printmaking and the Left in 1930s New York (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California

Press, 2004), pp. 106-113.

11. See Harry Sternberg, "Coal Town," 1937, in Fleurov, No Sun With out Shadow, pp. 52-53.

12. Milius Lubell to James Wechsler, 3 October 2005.

13. Harry Sternberg, "Graphic Art" (paper read at the "Artist in Soci

ety, the First Closed Session of the American Artists' Congress," New

School for Social Research, 14 February 1936), reprinted in Matthew

Baigell and Julia Williams, eds., Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers

of the First American Artists' Congress (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers

University Press, 1986), p. 137.

14. See Chicago Daily News, 12 December 1936, and New Masses (12

January 1937): 6-7.

15. Dedication by the American Artists' Congress, Chicago Section Morris Topchevsky, Winifred Milius, A. S. Weiner, Cliffa Carson, David Bekker, Ceil Rosenberg, Todros Geller, William Jacobs, Bertram Reibel, Bernece Berkman, Adrian Troy, Eve Teitel, Fritzi

Brod, Adelyne S. Cross, John F. Stenvall, Samuel Himmelfarb, Julio

de Diego, Flora Schofield, Emil Armin, Gregory Orloff, and A. Ray mond Katz, June 1937 (Lubell papers).

16. "Punish 5 U. of C. Students for Red Agitation," Chicago Daily Tribune, 30 March 1937.

17. "Memorial for Doran," Daily Worker, 13 January 1939, p. 7. The

performers included Anna Sokolow and Dance Unit, Juan Martinez

and Antonita, Benjamin Zemach with Freiheit Gezang, Jos? Lim?n

and Katherine Litz, Miriam Blecher, Bill Matons and Ailes Gilmour, the Theatre Dance Group, Sopie Maslow, Jane Dudley, and the

famed Czechoslovakian exile Mira Slavonica.

18. "World Premiere Tonite At Madison Sq. Garden," Daily Worker, 23 January 1939, p. 7.

19. "Employe [sic] of Mirror Defies Senate Unit On Communist Tie," New York Times, 11 April 1956.

20. James Wechsler telephone conversation with Winifred Milius

Lubell, 8 October 2005.

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winifred milius lubell's depression-era sketchbooks

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