Associated American Artists (AAA) was an art gallery in New York City that was established in 1934 and ceased operation in 2000. The gallery marketed art to the middle and upper-middle classes, first in the form of affordable prints and later in home furnishings and accessories, and played a significant role in the growth of art as an industry.

Beginnings

Associated American Artists was begun by Reeves Lewenthal. Lewenthal's first job was as a reporter for the ''

Chicago Tribune The ''Chicago Tribune'' is a daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, United States, owned by Tribune Publishing. Founded in 1847, and formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" (a slogan for which WGN radio and television ar ...

'' but he quickly expanded into artists' agent, working as a publicist for British artist Douglas Chandor. By the 1930s Lewenthal had a clientele of 35 groups including the

National Academy of Design The National Academy of Design is an honorary association of American artists, founded in New York City in 1825 by Samuel Morse, Asher Durand, Thomas Cole, Martin E. Thompson, Charles Cushing Wright, Ithiel Town, and others "to promote the fin ...

and the

Beaux-Arts Institute of Design The Beaux-Arts Institute of Design (BAID, later the National Institute for Architectural Education) was an art and architectural school at 304 East 44th Street in Turtle Bay, Manhattan, in New York City.Prints being relatively cheap to produce, Lewenthal decided to focus on that medium. Before the 1930s, fine-art prints were usually

limited edition The terms special edition, limited edition, and variants such as deluxe edition, or collector's edition, are used as a marketing incentive for various kinds of products, originally published products related to the arts, such as books, prints, r ...

s which sold for $10–$50. During the

Great Depression The Great Depression (19291939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagio ...

the

Federal Art Project The Federal Art Project (1935–1943) was a New Deal program to fund the visual arts in the United States. Under national director Holger Cahill, it was one of five Federal Project Number One projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administrati ...

had resulted in hundreds of thousands of prints, but these were distributed free (mostly to schools) thus the artists made no profits from print sales. Lewenthal's idea was to combine quality, affordability, and profit. In 1934 he met with several well-known American artists, including Thomas Hart Benton, and proposed hiring them to produce lithographs which he would then sell to middle-class buyers for $5 apiece plus $2 per frame, paying the artist $200 per

edition Edition may refer to: * Edition (book), a bibliographical term for a substantially similar set of copies * Edition (printmaking), a publishing term for a set print run * Edition (textual criticism), a particular version of a text * Edition Recor ...

. At the same time, corporations began hiring famous artists to work on

advertising campaign An advertising campaign is a series of advertisement messages that share a single idea and theme which make up an integrated marketing communication (IMC). An IMC is a platform in which a group of people can group their ideas, beliefs, and conc ...

s – Dole Pineapple, for example, hired artist

Georgia O'Keeffe Georgia Totto O'Keeffe (November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986) was an American modernist artist. She was known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. O'Keeffe has been called the "Mother of Ame ...

to "create pictorial links between pineapple juice and tropical romance". This convergence of art, business, and consumerism was the perfect environment for Lewenthal's new Associated American Artists enterprise. When Lewenthal commissioned his first lithographs in 1934, the American economy was still limping towards recovery from the Depression; high-priced art was an impossible luxury for most people and the old galleries that had always supported artists were finding it difficult to broker their work. AAA was thus "an agent of economic salvation" for numerous American artists including

Peggy Bacon Margaret Frances Bacon (May 2, 1895 – January 4, 1987) was an American artist, best known for her satirical caricatures. Bacon studied under Kenneth Hayes Miller at the Art Students League of New York, where she taught herself drypoint an ...

Aaron Bohrod Aaron Bohrod (21 November 1907 – 3 April 1992) was an American artist best known for his trompe-l'œil still-life paintings. Education Bohrod was born in Chicago in 1907, the son of an emigree Bessarabian-Jewish grocer. Bohrod studied at ...

John Steuart Curry John Steuart Curry (November 14, 1897 – August 29, 1946) was an American painter whose career spanned the years from 1924 until his death. He was noted for his paintings depicting rural life in his home state, Kansas. Along with Thomas Hart B ...

, Luigi Lucioni, and Grant Wood, despite the fact that signing with AAA usually meant being fired from their higher-end gallery. :''I knew the regionalists were popular because their names were in the art magazines all the time. But they weren't popular enough, and they weren't making any money. Why, when I first went to Tom Benton's New York apartment he was living in utter squalor. I more or less rescued him.'' By the fall of 1934 Lewenthal had contracts with fifty department stores to carry his "signed originals by America's great artists."

Populist appeal

Lewenthal marketed his prints as educational resources, as a patriotic choice, and as "art for the people" rather than "art for the wealthy." In January 1935 AAA issued its first mail-order print catalogue; mail-order print sales will continue for the next forty-nine years. He also placed advertisements in magazines such as ''

Time Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to ...

'' and ''

Reader's Digest ''Reader's Digest'' is an American general-interest family magazine, published ten times a year. Formerly based in Chappaqua, New York, it is now headquartered in midtown Manhattan. The magazine was founded in 1922 by DeWitt Wallace and his wi ...

'', and by promoting print collecting in terms of upward mobility—in the same way as buying Listerine ("The Dentifrice of the Rich," according to one ad campaign), owning modern art raised one's life socially. AAA's success led them to open a 30,000-square-foot gallery at 711 Fifth Avenue in 1939 where they featured paintings and sculpture. In 1944, AAA had 107 artists under contract and sold 62,374 lithographs, for a net income of $1 million per month. In addition to its mainstream marketing strategy, AAA chose art and artists with

populist Populism refers to a range of political stances that emphasize the idea of "the people" and often juxtapose this group against " the elite". It is frequently associated with anti-establishment and anti-political sentiment. The term develop ...

appeal. Representational and

regional In geography, regions, otherwise referred to as zones, lands or territories, are areas that are broadly divided by physical characteristics (physical geography), human impact characteristics (human geography), and the interaction of humanity and t ...

art made up the bulk of their lines; particularly popular were the works of Benton, Curry and Wood. These artists avoided gritty realism and created positive images of an idealized, strong, capable America, a viewpoint which accorded well with the political environment of the

New Deal The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1939. Major federal programs agencies included the Civilian Cons ...

and was in some senses

therapeutic A therapy or medical treatment (often abbreviated tx, Tx, or Tx) is the attempted remediation of a health problem, usually following a medical diagnosis. As a rule, each therapy has indications and contraindications. There are many different ...

for the anxiety and weakness pervasive during and just after the Depression. Typical of this was Benton's ''Plowing It Under'', released shortly after the federal government arranged the plowing under of millions of acres previously devoted to cotton production in order to increase farm revenue; Benton's work reassured the public that the government was working in the best interests of the people.

Commercialization of art

The Regionalists by and large were in favor of businesses and advertising using their works, believing that fine art could raise the consciousness of business. They did not fully realize how art figured into corporate branding and advertising in the minds of corporate planners, or consider that their art might be used to inspire confidence in a product. They were soon to learn. Benton's original works for R.J. Reynolds'

Lucky Strikes Lucky Strike is an American brand of cigarettes owned by the British American Tobacco group. Individual cigarettes of the brand are often referred to colloquially as "Luckies." Throughout their 150 year history, Lucky Strike has had fluctuatin ...

, for example, showed black sharecroppers at work, but corporate headquarters were not interested in "Negroes doing what looked like old-time slave work." They demanded pictures that showed not realism but idealism, leading Benton to complain that "Every time a patron dictates to an artist what is to be done, he doesn't get any art, he just gets a poor commercial job." Increasingly, rather than deal with AAA and its artists, companies built in-house

art department Art department in filmmaking terms means the section of a production's crew concerned with visual artistry. Working under the supervision of the production designer and/or art director, the art department is responsible for arranging the overall ...

s that could produce art in the Regionalist style. This appropriation of the regionalist/representational style culminated in the propaganda posters of World War II.

Post-WWII

The increasing association of regionalist and representational art with commercialism and advertising (and in some eyes, with

fascism Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultra-nationalist political ideology and movement,: "extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy an ...

) contributed to its decreasing popularity and to the rise of abstract and

surrealist Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Its aim was, according to l ...

art after World War II. When AAA opened galleries in

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and

Beverly Hills Beverly Hills is a city located in Los Angeles County, California. A notable and historic suburb of Greater Los Angeles, it is in a wealthy area immediately southwest of the Hollywood Hills, approximately northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Bev ...

, it stocked them with modern works by American and—a first for AAA—European artists. (When Lewenthal offered

Jackson Pollock Paul Jackson Pollock (; January 28, 1912August 11, 1956) was an American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was widely noticed for his " drip technique" of pouring or splashing liquid household paint onto a hor ...

an art-for-business commission like those he had offered his artists in 1934, Pollock turned him down.) In its press releases and articles, AAA talked about exploring "new frontiers," "new trends"—and made no mention of the $5 mail-order line and the artists who had helped it succeed twenty years earlier. Thomas Hart Benton resigned from AAA in 1946. AAA continued to find new ways to sell art, however, branching out into Stonelain porcelain, fabric, and housewares such as ashtrays, playing cards, and lamp shades as vehicles for work in abstract and other modern styles. By the mid-1950s, Lewenthal was quoted as saying, "Today's artist is a designer, not an

Ivory Tower An ivory tower is a metaphorical place—or an atmosphere—where people are happily cut off from the rest of the world in favor of their own pursuits, usually mental and esoteric ones. From the 19th century, it has been used to designate an e ...

tenant. His is a field of practical creativity and every American room can become a showcase for his genius.". Now, rather than bringing modern art to the masses, AAA was bringing mass consumer commodities into the world of art. AAA was a victim of its own success in some ways. Having been so successful, it was adopted as a model by other companies that began to compete with AAA—marketing fabric, for example, as "etching by the yard" or commissioning artists to do designs for lines of china or wallpaper. Steubenville China marketed its "American Modern" line of place settings as "art translated into dinnerware."Doss, p. 166 In 1958 Lewenthal took over management of Rust Craft Greeting Cards, handling all AAA's decorative arts lines, while Sylvan Cole took responsibility for the New York gallery and the fine art market. In a strange reversal of its "market to the masses" philosophy, many early AAA prints which sold originally for $5 go to

art collector A private collection is a privately owned collection of works (usually artworks) or valuable items. In a museum or art gallery context, the term signifies that a certain work is not owned by that institution, but is on loan from an individual ...

s for thousands of dollars today.

Sources

* Doss, Erika. "Catering to Consumerism: Associated American Artists and the Marketing of Modern Art, 1934-1958." ''Winterthur Portfolio,'' Vol. 26, No. 2/3. (Summer - Autumn, 1991), pp. 143–167.

References

External links

Associated American Artists records, ca. 1934-1981
at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art
Art for the masses: Associated American Artists Prints
at Tacoma Art Museum

at Syracuse University
Art for Every Home: An Illustrated Index of Associated American Artists Prints, Ceramics, and Textile Designs
{{Coord, 40.763372, -73.975343, type:landmark_globe:earth_region:US-NY, display=title 1934 establishments in New York City Business of visual arts American art dealers Art museums and galleries in New York (state) Art galleries established in 1934