Hyphenated Culture: Painting by Numbers
in the New Age of Leisure
There had never been anything quite like it before in the history of civilization. The new American leisure, that is.
"Never have so many people had so much time on their hands-with pay-as today in the United States," crowed a special Business Week report on postwar trends in American living. The fortyhour week was the norm. And that meant two-day weekends, a three-week annual vacation, daily lunch and coffee breaks, and early retirement on a pension. World War 11 had put an end to Saturday half-days. Union contracts made paid holidays standard throughout the workforce. The sociologists Reuel Denney and David Riesman, just beginning a major study of the leisure issue, noted that if Americans "were willing to accept the standard of living of 1870, most of us could presumably get by with a five-hour week."' But almost a third of the increased productivity made possible by mechanization and gains in efficiency went toward subsidizing free time.
For the first time, leisure was a mass phenomenon, too. Thorstein Veblen's old "leisure class" had expanded to include almost everybody So many people had joined the ranks, said the New Yorker, that the term was obsolete. Leisure was classless nowadays, a textbook example of democracy in action. In 1954, with a major recession just ended and business and labor leaders well satisfied with the status quo, Fortune was already plumping for a four-day work week as a boost to consumption. Pooh-poohing all the old objections to shorter hours-the Bible, after all, had allocated only one day of rest-the editors pointed out that leisure spending currently accounted for $30 billion annually, or "half again as much as the American consumer spends on clothing or shelter" and twice what the average family put into new cars and items for the home. Given idle hours, the consumer was rapidly filling them up with recreational shopping, travel, watching a new TV set or listening to a new hi-fi, with do-it-yourself projects, and with hobbies of all kinds. For makers of power tools, snack foods, and recliners, the emerging culture of leisure was highly profitable.
It was also problematic. Ancient capitalist folklore held that the worker with time on his hands was a threat to the public order. Equating leisure with laziness, professional moralists looked for the average Joe or Jill to run riot with drink, dissipation, and wretched excess. Television entered the equation, too, confirming the worst fears of intellectuals who expected a steady diet of pro wrestling, sitcoms, and commercials to turn the masses into passive nitwits, ripe for exploitation. But many thinkers saw themselves as part of the problem, their critical sensibilities blunted by their own middle-class affluence and the blandishments of leisure. Betraying a deep-seated suspicion of consumption, and a preference for the act of production, they thought leisure demanded careful preparation and management. The historian David Potter, writing in 1954, enjoined the postwar American "to cultivate interests that are appropriate to an enlarged leisure." People ought to be doing something, something significant with all those extra hours.
The evidence suggested that they were-or wanted to. National surveys taken in the 1930s, when the Depression curtailed spending on equipment and travel, disclosed a sedentary pattern of recreation: respondents were reading magazines and listening to the radio and visiting with friends. What they really wanted to do, however, was to play tennis and golf, plant a garden, go swimming or skating. In the 1940s, wish became reality. Between 1947 and 1953, revenues for spectator sports and amusements showed a marked dip, despite increases in population and income and the insatiable demand for TV sets. The popular singer and CBS star Perry Como said that his favorite home pastime was "to create a still life consisting of TV set, bowl of fruit, paring knife, cigarette, and Como stretched out on the couch." But he was the indolent exception. Market research proved that it was the heaviest TV-watchers who were liable to be most interested in painting a still life or reupholstering the living room sofa. Power tools and other do-it-yourself accessories were a $12 billion industry by the end of the decade; $30 million more went for amateur art supplies. "There seems to be a major trend away from passive, crowd amusements toward active pursuits that people can carry on independently," concluded a highly regarded study of this "Changed America" with plenty of time on its hands.
Although hobbies often were pursued independently, the notion of making or collecting or generally doing things on the weekends was fostered by large institutions. The Boeing Airplane Company was one of many postwar industries to sponsor employee hobby shows, for example: the 1952 exhibition, held in a hanger-size plant cafeteria, drew 27,652 visitors and included thirteen competitive categories, ranging from a working airplane and a tablecloth crocheted on the bus to work to elaborate model trains. Models and other hobby crafts became popular during the 1930s. Thanks to enforced leisure, hobby shops (along with miniature golf courses) were one of the few new businesses to flourish during the Depression. Making miniature trains and planes was a cheap, weatherproof form of recreation and a comfort for hands accustomed to holding the tools of full-scale industry.
Toward the end of the war, the Navy opened its first hobby craft shop at the Alameda Naval Air Station in California in an effort to improve morale. Hobby outfits had already been included in forward base supplies for the Pacific Theater to promote the mental health of men stranded on remote beachheads. 6 Physical and occupational therapy programs for the wounded also cultivated manual dexterity through courses in pottery, fingerpainting, carving, leatherwork, cabinetry, and various home and auto repairs. Specialists in recreation began to speak of hobbies as the fifth freedom-along with freedom of speech and worship and freedom from want and fear. They provided wholesome emotional release for workers "bored and cramped" by tedious routine. And, when hobbyists came together to examine one another's work, such occasions met "the important need of being accepted by, and belonging to, some group." In a book entitled Emotional Reactions Created from the War, the eminent psychiatrist William C. Menninger advised his readers to have some fun, take it easy, and "develop a hobby ... It is as important in the maintenance of good mental health as good food is to physical health
Franklin Roosevelt, America's wartime president and father of the Four Freedoms, was himself an avid hobbyist. He collected postage stamps. The enthusiast of the 1950s was more apt to be creative, however. Polls taken in the early 50s still ranked collections-stamps, dolls, coins, autographs-high on the Top Ten list, but activities that involved making things for oneself were on the rise. Defense workers and G.I.s had both learned new mechanical skills and the postwar labor shortage encouraged their use. First-time buyers saved money on tract houses by buying models with unfinished attics and basements. Painting and fixing a new home, remarked one overzealous do-it-yourselfer in 1954, "[is] a form of play!
There were almost as many good reasons for taking up a hobby as there were merchants eager to furnish the necessary supplies and attire for any given creative pastime. Hobbies offered spiritual compensation to those forced to spend their working lives being told precisely what to do. They promoted individuality in the face of terrible pressures for conformity, including the "prefabricated emotional cliches" of TV; they were the weekend revenge of the beleaguered organization man. Conversely, they promoted family togetherness. Fathers and sons could share a backyard workshop. New interests might keep restless parents at home and nip juvenile delinquency in the bud.
In contrast to the workplace, success or failure did not matter much in hobbyland, nor was the livelihood of the amateur boatbuilder at stake if he could not get his creation out of the basement. But small victories counted just the same. Do-it-yourselfism, in particular, was the last refuge for the exercise of control and competence in a world run by the bosses and the bureaucrats. It was a throwback, a rebuke to a buy-it-in-a-box world of TV dinners and ready-made everything. The home handyman was a neo-pioneer, following in the footsteps of his resourceful forebears. "The push-button mechanisms, both domestic and industrial, have repaid with extra leisure for what they've taken from the spirit," wrote a reviewer of the 1953 Do-It-Yourself Show at New York's 71st Regiment Armory. Hobbyists knew what it meant to make things, to come face to face with personal, tangible accomplishments. They alone retained a sense of mastery and potency, reclaiming in small ways what technology had appropriated in big ones.
Husbands who tinkered with home improvements had nothing to apologize for: unlike model-makers or Sunday painters, their afterhours labors were expected to produce practical, money-saving results. But do-it-yourselfers also garnered media respect as heavy-duty buyers of wallpaper, pipe, lumber, instruction manuals, hobby magazines, and expensive power tools. When whole new industries arose to cater to the weekend contractor, self-styled experts began to speculate on the deep-seated appeal of lathes and electric drills. It was a male issue, many thought. Movie idols who used to pose with buxom starlets to assert their masculinity were now apt to pose with decorative fences they had built themselves, as Glenn Ford did in a 1957 issue of Better Homes and Gardens. Ads pitched at the man's man showed rugged types surrounded by their hobby gear. In the largely ungendered spaces of the suburban, open-plan house, in the cloying atmosphere of domestic "togetherness," handiness seemed to be the last badge of unabashed manliness. But men who bought pricey tools to save money on household projects often ended up building a nifty home workshop (11 million of them in 1954) to store the equipment-and not much else. Possessing the fetishistic tool was the object of the hobby "Men love things that whirr," wrote the social critic Russell Lynes. Using them was almost an afterthought.
Within the corporate structure, hobbies were generally approved of as effective aids to the development of junior executives. They were "broadening." Ways to become more interesting to prospective clients. Sources of self-confidence. Major overhauls of the house were another matter, however. The up-and-coming commuter was admonished not "to become a nut over some interest outside his business life." Competence was one thing. Professionalism was quite another. Dreams of making fabulous profits from painting fabric, tinting photos, or shaping old phonograph records into useful objects were left to starryeyed retirees and housewives, the latter newly liberated for craft projects by the proliferation of home appliances. Increasingly, men's hobbycraft tended to the useless, the unprofitable, and the nostalgic.
Model trains of an earlier era and model planes of World War II were the top products of home workshops in the 1950s. In the 1930s and 40s, tinkerers had built working models from scratch. In 1945, Monogram Models put together three rudimentary kits for the construction of ships from lengths of balsa wood. These were relatively hard to assemble and finish. Manufacturers joked that they were catering to "model spoilers, not model builders." Noting the frustration and the high failure rate, the president of a small toy firm in Venice, California, took a different tack. He made an exact, detailed replica of the ancient Maxwell automobile publicized by the comedian Jack Benny and then broke it down into pieces, ready to reassemble at home. There was a wide margin for error. Satisfaction was virtually guaranteed. The first Revell hobby kits, with parts made of injectionmolded thermoplastics, hit the stores in 1951 and were an instant success. Suddenly, men everywhere seemed intent on recreating in miniature their days of glory in the service or some bygone, golden era of chuffing locomotives and Tin Lizzies, back before the advent of traffic jams and last-minute dashes to catch the morning's last commuter local to the city.
Why were the Revell kits an overnight sensation? Lou Glaser, the inventor, believed they appealed to the child in the man: models were, after all, toys for grownups. Because they were easy to make but looked so complicated when finished, they also generated a disproportionate and addictive upsurge of pride in achievement. The biggest single seller in the line in 1954 was a plastic model of the battleship Missouri (for $1.98) that fairly bristled with tiny guns and turrets and anchors. Industry analysts suggested that hobbyists were people who craved realism, precision, and certainty in lives lived in the shadow of nuclear terror. Others thought there was some intrinsic appeal in plastic. "Plastics are definitely it," a trade association representative told the New Yorker in 1956. "Plastic models are the trend. Dollar-wise, more money is being spent on plastic models than on any other hobby Second come metal trains."
By the end of the 1950s there were hobby kits for almost everything: stained glass panels, decorative tiles and trivets and trays, Mickey Mouse Club regalia, tasteful figurines, "design-it-yourself" neckties. A do-it-yourself show at California's Pan-Pacific Auditorium featured a kit for making a mink coat. Jon Gnagy, the Saturday-morning-TV artist, sold boxed "learn to draw" and "learn to paint" kits to his viewers for $4.95 apiece. But the paint-by-numbers set was the biggest hobby breakthrough of the decade and a fad so contagious that it amounted to a national mania. Over the 1953 Christmas holidays, if Americans weren't playing Scrabble, they were filling in the spaces on a printed canvasboard panel. Each space bore a number corresponding to one of twenty or so capsules of ready-mixed oil paint supplied with the kit. When all the spaces were filled in, why there it was. Voila! An instant masterpiece. Da Vinci's Last Supper. A dog. A New England seascape. "Every man a Rembrandt!" just like it said on the box. "Anyone can paint a picture, from 8 to 80!" Industrywatchers predicted sales of $200 million before the end of 1954. But the paint-by-numbers craze had caught the oracles flatfooted and nobody was too confident about the future. "We pray a little, keep our fingers crossed, and hope that when the herd finally turns to glass blowing, enough will stay behind to keep us in business," said a nervous paint kit magnate. "In the meantime, we're cleaning up."
There are several strong claimants to the idea of painting by the numbers. Fill-in books for children had been around for years, too. But the adult version originated in Detroit, in November of 1951, when a chemist and former merchandising researcher for General Motors acquired a small paint plant. According to one account, Max Klein was approached by two employees of the Picture Craft Company of Decatur, Illinois, which already produced a crude art set consisting of a rolled canvas and glass jars containing paint. Picture Craft had sold their sets primarily to the military through mail order and was seeking a broader national market for a line of "mystery" pictures, the subjects of which only became clear as the various colors were applied. Under the terms of the agreement worked out between the principals, Klein's company, Palmer Paint, was to manufacture similar kits in quantity for Picture Craft. The hitch came when the Illinois group could not come up with the capital. Klein and Palmer were stuck with the sets and launched a high-powered campaign to get rid of existing stock. Four-color ads were placed in Sunday supplements. Deep discounts were given to department stores that agreed to run their own ads for the "Craft Master" system. In less than two years, $10 million worth of paint-by-numbers sets were sold. Gimbel's in Philadelphia was forced to set up a special Craft Master department to handle the crush. Red-faced judges at a San Francisco art show were fooled by a Craft Master painting that took third prize.
A more fanciful version of the story had Max Klein yearning to paint but failing miserably until a Palmer employee sketched scenes for him on canvas, complete with numbers. Whether aesthetics or the prospect of financial ruin inspired the paint-by-numbers movement in the first place, however, the artists ultimately responsible for the sets went about their task in a thoroughly businesslike way. Dan Robbins, age 26, headed a staff of twenty-five painters who designed the master pictures "with an eye to public demand." Pets and landscapes were customer favorites. Despite a complicated pattern with hundreds of numbered areas, Three Kittens was an early hit, widely copied in rival shops that sprang up almost overnight. Stanley Silver of Master Artists Materials followed Robbins's lead with a kit called the Twin Scotty. "Where else can you get two genuine original oil paintings for only $1.79?" Silver asked. Meanwhile, back at Palmer, the design department was reading letters solicited from users, calling for seascapes, horses, ballet dancers, religious themes, and more adult "artistic" challenges. Thus the new "Masterpiece" line of larger pictures included nudes, a single abstraction, celebrity portraits, and do-it-yourself versions of the Old Masters, of which an $11.50 Last Supper became the all-time paint-by-numbers bestseller. The treatment of some of the upgraded subjects had a more contemporary "foreign flavor," too, according to Robbins, involving a poster-like application of bright primaries derived from French modernism.
The total lack of originality in this assembly-line Impressionism bothered Robbins at first. "I felt a little uneasy," he remembered. "But then we began getting letters from art supply stores telling how people who had done several of our paintings had gone on to original work.... Our sets started them in the painting hobby on their own." Yet most Craft Master artists were perfectly content to stay inside the lines and indifferent to mounting ridicule of their precooked, predigested "art." And their ranks grew by the week. The demographics of painting-by-numbers cut a broad swath through the new leisure class-"bankers, pilots, housewives, nurses, and cab drivers," according to a hasty corporate survey Of that diverse group, homemakers were most apt to buy one kit after another and to write in demanding better ones. A testimonial from a Baltimore woman was typical: "My home is disgraceful and I sit there all day and paint. I am spending money which I ought to be saving. Please send me a list of any new subjects you have." Perhaps because women were so heavily represented among the connoisseurs of numbered canvases, the popular press did not always treat the pastime kindly. In a satirical look at the new leisure written for Life, Russell Lynes ranked "fillers-inners of numbered pictures" among the peasant class, at the bottom of his scale of good taste and refinement, or several notches below Sunday painters of the bourgeoisie who had dispensed with lines and capsules.
Was it art or just a hobby? Product or process? A store owner run off his feet by the Christmas rush for painting sets in 1953 thought he knew: "I can tell the difference between money and art. This is money" Boosters of amateur painting often cited sales figures for "number painting" as proof of a growing national art-mindedness. Since they explained Sunday dabbling as a form of mild rebellion against the standardizations and frustrations of an age of mass production, however, promoters of the fine arts gagged a little at including paint-by-numbers "addicts" in their movement. And professional artists were apoplectic at the prospect of being run out of business by do-it-yourselfers with their pre-mixed, pre-drawn "Snow-Covered Forest[s] with Elk." The art historian Alfred Werner, author of a recent book on Utrillo, cordially detested all daubers. In a diatribe against "paintitis" written for the American Mercury at the end of 1952, he reserved special scorn for the "self-indulgent philistines" who presumed to work from numbered paint pots. They debased the standards of artistic excellence, Werner thundered. They devalued the originality that was the essence of great art.
The following Christmas, with paint-by-numbers sets under every tree, American Artist, house organ of the profession, opened its monthly amateur page to a spirited forum on the fad. The first letter came from a convert: "Why oh why didn't you ... tell me before how much fun it is to use these wonderful 'paint-by-number' sets?" The correspondent had never been able to paint, but wanted to, and was so thrilled with the results that he or she had already completed five pictures, and was looking forward to the next one. The letter concluded with a plea that American Artist commend the sets to anyone who loved pictures and was stymied by a lack of innate artistic ability: "They will be proud to show their paintings to their friends!" The second writer believed paint-by-numbers sets portended the demise of the republic since "thousands of people . . . are willing to be regimented into brushing paint on a jig-saw miscellany of dictated shapes and all by rote." Painting-by-numbers was turning Americans into a race of morons. The final comment, from an art teacher, was that "there ought to be a law!" The better students thought they were being highly creative when they brushed "Color 9 into Areas I and 7" and the rest didn't care. Originality was dead .
Michael O'Donoghue, a screenwriter who collects and exhibits number pictures, calls them "a great metaphor for life in rigid McCarthy America. You stayed in the lines." In the 1950s social rigidity was one possible explanation among many for their popularity "Machines taking over from housewives, higher birth rates, dull jobs that produce a need for creative outlets, the desire to emulate the President and the British Prime Minister, and, of course, television," were all reasons for the boom in paint kits, declared the savants from Business Week. Winston Churchill, to be sure, was a cut above the average number painter: he didn't buy kits and in 1950 Hallmark bought the rights to eighteen original Churchill landscapes for use on its Christmas cards. Ike was another story altogether. Although he began to paint using a real palette left behind by an artist called in to do Mrs. Eisenhower's portrait, he was not unduly interested in originality. He copied postcards, photos, and greeting card designs and treated the whole affair like a kind of indoor sport or exercise regimen. He set up his easel twice a week, come hell or high water, was unperturbed by conversation or the TV set, painted fast (the Eisenhower record was seven in ten days), and often wiped off the picture when it was done and started another one right on top. "They're no fun when they're finished," he told a friend. Nor was Ike above painting-by-numbers. In fact, at the height of the craze, the President gave sets to his White House staff for Christmas presents. And if an endorsement from the First Family was not enough, the television Nelsons - Ozzie, Harriet, David, and Ricky: "America's Favorite Family"-also began to advertise Picture Craft kits for holiday giving in 1953. "35 Beautiful Subjects! It's fun, relaxing, you need no experience-and it's GUARANTEED !
There was some feeling that completed sets were a form of fine art; after all, as Picture Craft proudly stated in its ads, all of the available templates had been drawn for use in kits "by real artists." But no artistic talent whatsoever was called for on the part of the "painter" who filled in the blanks. Talent seemed to
demand a commitment on the part of those who possessed it, a seriousness at odds with having fun. Ike was the first to admit a distinction between serious art, which required talent, and tossing off pictures for pleasure, which did not. Although his cooking really was done by the numbers-aides reportedly cut and chopped and measured before Eisenhower ever entered the kitchen to assemble his famous lemon pies or his vegetable soup-he was quicker to take credit for his abilities as a chef than for any artistic gifts. And some proponents of numberless art for amateurs also assured novices that talent had nothing to do with painting pictures. "Whether you have talent or not," counseled a 1952 hobby manual, "you can find enjoyment in putting on canvas or paper what yo see in the way you see it." It was easy! Painting was pure expression, a glorious release except when the object was to execute a representational work. That took training, a knowledge of the rules of perspective, and a lot of talent. Or, perhaps, a paint-by-numbers set.
Winston Churchill is the key figure in the "splash and wallop" school of self-expression. A doughty Cold Warrior much admired in the United States, Churchill was also beloved for his human quirks: the florid prose, the cigar, and most of all, the paint set. When Sir Winston visited the White House in 1954 for foreign policy talks, the press and the President both badgered him about his hobby. Had he brought his paints along? Would he like to borrow Ike's? The Prime Minister's association with art began in 1915, during a trying period in his public life. Thereafter, in times of crisis, he retired to the country and his easel. "Painting is a complete distraction," he wrote. "Whatever the worries of the hour or the threats of the future, once the picture has begun to flow along, there is no room for them in the mental screen." Churchill's reflections on his hobby reached American admirers in 1948, in a slender volume entitled Painting as a Pastime. Quoted widely whenever art, hobbycraft, or the private lives of celebrities were under discussion, the book exhorted inhibited amateurs to splash about in the turpentine and wallop the colors down in "large fierce strokes" for therapeutic reasons. An antidote to boredom, a comfort in times of loneliness, a relief for anxiety and tension, the canvas couldn't "hit back" either, he observed. It existed to be dominated. It "grinned in helplessness" before the flailings of the Sunday painter. It restored one's "psychic equilibrium.
Inherent in this popular view of art were several ideas pertinent to the fine art debates of the 1950s. Churchill's insistence that art was cheap psychotherapy or a way of releasing pent-up feelings found some resonance in the "splash and wallop" technique of the Abstract Expressionists, whose turbulent emotional lives and alienation came to form the basis of their heroic public image. Although Winston Churchill never painted in blue jeans and a t-shirt, the procedures he recommended came close to the drip-and-dribble methods shown in photographs of Jackson Pollock that enjoyed wide circulation in the early 50s. The Churchill approach also lent credence to Surrealist claims about the close relationship between art and the sub- or unconscious. While the Churchillian argument explained what was happening on the New York art scene in blunt, lay terms, and probably contributed to the media's sudden interest in the antics of America's professional artists, it subtly devalued legitimate painting, too. For painting required no talent-merely a litany of frustrations to be exercised on canvas. And because anybody could splash and wallop, the critical reverence for real artists who did so seemed disproportionate to their accomplishments. And the prices! Why pay thousands for somebody else's nightmares when a lovely Twin Scotty set retailed for $1.79?
Art as a violent, unpremeditated eruption of the psyche was an idea current in other quarters as well. In 1950 Art News inaugurated a nationwide contest for amateurs, crediting the newfound fashionableness of Sunday painting to Irving Stone's novelized biography of Vincent Van Gogh. Stone's Lust for Life first appeared in the 1930s but when the film rights were sold to Hollywood a new edition was issued in 1946 and became a surprise bestseller. The story of a tormented genius whose inner demons surface on canvas in the form of distorted images of reality was a perfect illustration of the Churchill thesis: a painting was a fever chart of temporary madness. Nor did the 1956 movie version, starring a rabid Kirk Douglas, do much to tip the scales in the direction of talent, training, hard work, and skill. As MGM portrayed it, art was instinctual, irrational, and highly entertaining.
Jacob Getlar Smith, in an American Artist feature article of 1957, blamed Stone, Churchill, and Van Gogh for a new wave of ignorant, speed-is-of-the-essence, dilettante painting that denigrated the traditional values of the artist, including "humility, love of craft, [and] sincerity." One of the luminaries of a major 1957 touring exhibition called "From the Executive Easel"-a self-taught New York clothing manufacturer-confessed to Newsweek that "he was inspired by a biography of Vincent van Gogh and ... borrowed from the violent style of that tortured master." Other weekend painters in the group (which included a surgeon, the president of I Magnin, and the 78year-old owner of a Brooklyn underwear factory who called himself "Grandpa Moses") had taken Ike or Winston Churchill as their exemplars. Indeed, while the executive paintings continued their two-year circuit of the nation, forty pictures by Churchill went on view at the Metropolitan Museum in New York early in 1958. They were mostly sunny landscapes or flower pieces, set down in a style that resembled Impressionism and paint-by-numbers sets in roughly equal measure. Detail was all but eliminated; motifs were reduced to the flat, simple shapes of the color areas Churchill saw in the subjects observed. And even critics stung by the thought of Sir Winstons hanging in the Met praised his color sense and good, clear English eye for decoration. The problem, and what ultimately distinguished the professional from the amateur product, was the latter's complete absence of originality. Churchill and Eisenhower and their disciples painted for sport while their real creative energies found expression in war or politics or business. On a daily basis, the amateurs dominated those worlds. But in the world of the artist, they remained weekend guests, exploring what someone else had already imagined and defined .
The fact that a high percentage of the amateurs whose work was hung in galleries and reproduced in magazines had thriving careers in other fields was one of the things that fascinated the public about the art craze of the 1950s. Some were cabbies and housewives and executives but some were very big stars. And they made art of all kinds popular-including the paint-by-numbers variety. A 1948 benefit auction of celebrity art held at New York's Associated American Artists (AAA), for example, featured masterpieces by actor Clifton Webb, boxer Joe Louis, and beauty adviser Helena Rubenstein. Since the 1930s AAA had aimed at getting original American art into the hands of ordinary citizens: the art historian Erika Doss has reconstructed the campaign to democratize the fine arts through selling inexpensive prints by big-name artists and involving member artists in advertising and commercial product design. In a sense, AAA demystified art by treating it as a readily accessible consumer product, like a new appliance or a paint-by-numbers set. Showing the work of amateurs further suggested that art was something for-and by-everybody. When the "artist" was a well-known celebrity with whom the public was already familiar and even comfortable, the cultural product came to resemble the bottle of shampoo or the pack of cigarettes endorsed by a movie star. Or the paint-by-numbers pictures Ozzie Nelson and his smiling family sold on TV.
There was no shortage of genuine, beret-wearing artists in the movies of the 1950s. In An American in Paris (1951) Gene Kelly defined the character of the boy from back home in search of artistic fame and glory on the naughty Left Bank where paintings come to life in Technicolor dance routines. But despite his picturesque studio and a portfolio of touristy Eiffel Tower views, Kelly plays a sort of amateur who is patently better at dancing and turning a buck than he is at painting. His star appeal shines through the flimsy tissue of art and makes him into a dabbler with a day job, like Ike. Nonetheless, the music, the dance, and a series of magical scenes staged within the fictive spaces of paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh put An American in Paris at the forefront of Hollywood's drive to win audiences back from television with spectacle, color, and culture. Showing the stars in a new light-as persons of culture and consequence-was a part of the strategy, too, and as if by the magic of the movies, everybody in the film colony took up painting, circa 1951. Frank Sinatra did clowns. Henry Fonda liked still lifes: plums were his favorite subject. Claudette Colbert read Churchill's book, began to splash and wallop the next day, and specialized in portraits. Dinah Shore began to paint in a corner of her Beverly Hills living room in 1954 and was willing to try anything: flowers, scenery, still lifes, and the occasional portrait. Van Johnson and Linda Darnell were rumored to be "good enough to be professionals." Jose Ferrer took his pictures to a National Amateur Art festival held in New York in 1954, where TV comic Herb Shriner served as a genial model for a sketching conteSt.
Then everybody got into the act. Washington wives hired a teacher and formed an art club in 1954; Senator Kefauver's spouse, who enjoyed painting her children, took several local prizes. A supermarket in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, hung student pictures of the town over the frozen food case and sold $218-worth. Life went to Attica, Kansas (pop. 622) to profile a thriving art group that raised money for lessons and drew eight hundred sidewalk critics to its annual summer show. For those who lacked the confidence of a Claudette Colbert, professional instruction was easy to come by. Nor was it necessary to go to art school. Jon Gnagy taught the fundamentals on TV in fifteen minutes a week. Radio personality John Anthony invented the "Talking Paints" system, which consisted of a six-minute recording that talked the aspirant through completion of an unnumbered canvas (the art supplies came with the record). The Sargent Progressive Painting Portfolio pledged to guide the pupil from a numbered painting to your own original picture" in three easy steps. Stodgy news journals and chirpy home-and-hearth periodicals alike promised foolproof results, if the reader followed the printed instructions, sent away for the patterns, bought the recommended items. These included pantographs, or instruments that reflected an image onto a sheet of paper for tracing. "An Amazing Invention-Magic Art Reproducer," the pantograph meant the owner could "draw from the first day," even if he or she couldn't draw the proverbial straight line. NO LESSONS! NO TALENT !
The notion that a machine, a record, or a kit could turn a rank novice into a competent artist discloses a remarkable faith in instrumentality. In a 1954 essay about off-duty scientists who put together elaborate hi-fi sets, the sociologist Reuel Denney pointed out that their array of speakers and turntables allowed them "to identify at once with the gadgeteering do-it-yourself impulse and with imported elements of high culture." The pantograph bridged the same gap between culture and tinkering. Art was a semi-science, a matter of the right equipment and formulae. Or listening to the experts. In the 1930s thousands of Americans who might otherwise have been at work took painting lessons in WPA studios set up by relief agencies to provide federal jobs for starving artists. The WPA experience, and the popularity of art instruction in veterans' hospitals and union halls, seemed to prove that the rudiments could be taught to almost anybody. In 1948, Famous Artists Schools of Westport, Connecticut, put that thesis to the test in the marketplace.
Famous Artists Schools founder Albert Dorne remembered that the idea came to him during a conversation with the illustrator Norman Rockwell about the unique "know-how" experts like themselves had to offer to people who truly needed clear, simple tutelage in art: veterans on the G.I. Bill, amateurs, and students who had graduated from art schools knowing how to paint Picassos but not how to earn a living. It was the aspiring illustrator that Famous Artists Schools targeted first with a three-year, do-it-at-home correspondence course consisting of twenty-four printed lessons and more than 5,000 instructional drawings and diagrams prepared by the twelve "famous artists" listed in the ads: the folksy Norman Rockwell, cover king of the Saturday Evening Post; Stevan Dohanos, his heir apparent; glamourgirl specialist Jon Whitcomb; Ben Stahl, the Degas of periodical fiction; and eight others, each of whom earned more than $50,000 per annum as an art professional. By 1954, however, with the amateur painting craze in full swing, Famous Artists Schools began to zero in on paint-by-numbers addicts with catchy ads stating that anybody who could copy a simple drawing of a French poodle printed on a matchbook cover probably had the stuff to be an artist. Providing they, too, signed up for a three-year course in the fine arts.
The expanded advisory faculty for this program included several well-known figures, running the aesthetic gamut from Stuart Davis, the designated "modernist" or Cubist, to more representational artists-Ben Shahn, Fletcher Martin, Ernest Fiene, Arnold Blanchworking in a variety of coloristic and stylistic nuances. When completed lessons arrived in the mail, the staff put tracing paper over student drawings and made corrections on the transparencies. Consulting "faculty" criticized the criticisms at regular intervals All this for $300, payable in monthly installments, plus an estimated $11.55 for basic oil painting supplies. By tipping the scales in favor of the realists, who outnumbered Davis by ten to one, Famous Artists Schools acknowledged the lack of public interest in advanced abstraction and put the focus squarely on a kind of art that was both teachable and illustrative of the effort and the craft that went into it, an art that showed the results of learning the familiar tricks of the trade. Famous Artists art wasn't mysterious or divinely inspired. It was normal, nice-and doable.
Of the new fine arts consultants hired for the amateur course, all but one were closely associated with earlier projects designed to make American artists into mainstream figures, as unlike Stone's erratic Van Gogh as possible. Several were members of Associated American Artists. Most had painted murals to order for public places during the Depression era, in a process that forced the ivory-tower artist to take the taste of ordinary Americans into account. The rest had done occasional assignments for firms which, in the immediate postwar years, sought to add an aura of prestige to their products with ads designed by ranking cultural heavies. Doris Lee, the only woman on the Famous Artists roster, was also one of the best-publicized painters of the day Her whimsical pictures often graced the pages of Life, and she did title, background, and publicity work for the movies and for Broadway.
Lee was a do-it-yourself author of record, too. It's Fun to Paint, a beginner's guide to oil painting for enjoyment, appeared in 1947 and stayed in print through the 1970s, probably because Doris Lee's own work, lavishly represented among the models provided for novices, looked so easy to duplicate. The book listed Arnold Blanch, her teacher and spouse, as the coauthor, but the pictorial content was pure Lee: folkish, simple, almost neo-primitive pictures marked by decorative shapes, once-upon-a-time subject matter, and sprightly figures with heads a little too big for their bodies. The sleighing and maypole scenes shown step by step, in various stages of completion, to teach the reader the basics of composition and coloration were quiltlike, childlike in the naivete of drawing and detail. And almost half the volume was taken up with biographies of self-taught painters and reproductions of their canvases, which looked very much like her own. Henri Rousseau, Camille Bombois, and several other Europeans were discussed, but the lion's share of the attention went to celebrated American primitives, including Joseph Pickett, Horace Pippin, and the indomitable Grandma Moses. If Lee did not state outright that incompetence and amateurism were real artistic virtues, the beginner was led to believe that the innocent eye would do nicely, after it had passed over a couple of pages of pointers on perspective and where to place the easel to get the best view of one's subject. Grandma Moses didn't use a regular artist's easel herself; she worked at an eighteenthcentury "tip-up" table in the parlor of her Eagle Bridge, New York,farmhouse. Nor did she examine her motif closely while painting it. "She closes her eyes until she sees a picture," Lee wrote admiringly. Then "she paints [it] with red stable brushes [and] uses a table for a picture rest instead of an easel. That is Grandma Moses' way."
A down-home counterbalance to the aristocratic Churchill and the disturbed Van Gogh, Grandma was America's artist in the 1950s, as wholesome as a country apple pie. "Discovered" in 1938 by a collector who stumbled on a cache of unsold Grandmas in a drugstore window, Anna Mary Robertson Moses had the good fortune to ride a rising tide of interest in folk art. The Depression had turned American attention back to domestic issues, homegrown art, and life's basic pleasures. Later, the A-bomb and the tensions of the Cold War both reinforced a faith in isolationist, pre-technological, and pre-scientific America and in non-experts, who could build their own houses and paint their own pictures. Working at her ancient table by the window, Grandma Moses filled the bill with reminiscent views of horses and wagons, rural feasts and harvests, and winters that used to isolate country people, snug and safe in their cozy valleys until spring. In Grandma's pictorial yesterdays, American living was sweet, slow, and simple-as simple as her embroidery-pattern draftsmanship.
She never had a lesson. She never heard of Pollock or Picasso or Vincent Van Gogh. But she was the hottest ticket in the art world in the 1940s. Praised in Bob Hope's syndicated column. The subject of a popular biography. Holder of a fat new contract to turn her pictures into greeting cards, plates, and drapery fabric. Honored guest of the Gimbel's department store Thanksgiving Festival of 1940 (at which she modestly declined to talk about her art but instead gave tips on home canning). Feted by Harry Truman at a White House awards ceremony in 1949. Truman liked the kinds of pictures Grandma Moses did but he had no use for "the lazy, nutty oderns. It is like comparing Christ with Lenin," he said. Grandma was on the side of angels. Her America was what good American boys had fought and died to preserve.
There was more to it than that, of course. A frail old lady who took up painting at 78 and succeeded was a shining example for hobbyists of every age and station in life. If she could do it, so could Ike and so could you. "Anyone can paint if they want to," Grandma Moses declared. "All they have to do is to get a brush and start right in, same as I did." In the 1950s a documentary about her was nominated for an Academy Award. She wrote her autobiography. Edward R. Murrow interviewed her on TV in color, so the few who had the new monitors in 1955 could better appreciate her work. In 1956 Ike's Cabinet presented him with a specially commissioned Grandma Moses depicting the Eisenhower family farm in Abilene, Kansas. And Anna Moses had a special message for the stay-at-home homemaker of the 1950s who was frazzled and crowded by kitchen appliances, the PTA, and the imperative to deliver a husband to the train station in time for the 7:02 to Manhattan. "Women everywhere have the feeling that if Grandma Moses can paint, so can they," wrote one journalist. "Art is the only thing left . . . that is not mechanized, collectivized and regimented.
In Europe, America was widely regarded as a soulless place, a technological wasteland best symbolized by Coca-Cola and skyscrapers. So Grandma Moses's sweet country reveries came as a surprise when her work began to circulate in shows that aimed to introduce postwar Europe to the human face of the United States. American primitives were first shown in London in 1947, and in 1950 the U.S. Information Agency sent an all-Moses show on tour to six European capitals. In both cases, the pictures were well received-to the disgust of some American art-watchers who felt that by praising a backward Grandma Moses the sophisticated European audience was actually rejecting the New York avant-garde. Others thought the paintings never should have been exported in the first place, that it was a symptom of self-hatred to wax enthusiastic over the daubs of a rustic out of touch with the problems and formal experiments of the twentieth century. Still others thought the very lack of avant-garde dogma was what appealed: although museums and government agencies certified that this was art, it demanded no special connoisseurship to remember one's own childhood drawings. Like $1.79 paint-by-numbers pictures from a plant outside Detroit, it was an art for everybody.
Among the influential critics who helped to create the New York School, American folk and popular art had been under mounting attack since the late 1930s. Clement Greenberg dismissed anything representational as "kitsch" while Dwight Macdonald, in a 1958 essay, wondered whether the intellectuals' love affair with Americana-one of the obsessions of the 1950s, at every level of cultural life-had not actually led them to "a somewhat uncritical acquiescence in the American imperium."41 So it was that Grandma Moses, the new sweetheart of the European art world, came to stand for everything the Abstract Expressionists did not. She was 100 percent American; their heritage was European modernism. She was a woman; theirs was a tough, males-only fraternity She was old and happy; they were young and miserable, and highly critical of a society she patently enjoyed. Albeit a painter of memories and dreams, best seen when she closed her eyes, Grandma stood for realism, the antidote to abstract art or what Harry Truman called "ham and eggs ... dribble art." Abstraction, said Grandma Moses, was mainly "good for a rug or piece of linoleum."
Ironically, what the so-called primitives did-their spontaneous color-slinging, their happy disregard for inhibiting rules-was not all that much different from what the Abstract Expressionists seemed to be up to. But while pictures of out-of-kilter barns "opened up the joys of painting to fun seekers," in the words of a 1953 investigation of amateuritis, the object was still to paint something, not nothing. Nothing was fine for linoleum or a new Formica countertop decorated with gold-and-turquoise shapes that vaguely suggested asteroids or artists' palettes. Nothing may have been what House Beautiful and the other home improvement magazines had in mind when they identified a brand new American design principle in 1952: "Free lines and brush strokes, asymmetrical spacing, an abstract, rather than representational, approach." But this so-called "Free Taste," however acceptable to a homemaker in search of a modern look for the kitchen, lost its charm when framed and hung above the sectional sofa. In pictures, as in plastic models of the USS Missouri, realism was what sold. As a not-so-subtle contrast to a pageful of spiky, spiny modern sculpture, Time ran reproductions of the top calendar designs for 1952-one pretty girl, one idyllic landscape with old mill, one cute kid. Most Americans liked calendar art, "including those who would insist art gives them a pain," read the text. "Although the best calendar art cannot be compared with the best serious painting, it shows far more technical facility and clarity of purpose" than most of what passed for contemporary fine art. Unlike art, calendars were suitable for kitchens, too, and always stayed sunny on the darkest days.
Realism, whether of the calendar, the Grandma Moses, or the paint-by-numbers variety-representational art, that is-drew strength from television, from the sudden intrusion into 1950s living rooms of framed, moving pictures that reduced the objets d'art hanging over the sectional to the status of wallpaper. Like a calendar, television presented images of girls, landscapes, and kids, of real things, in astonishing variety Like Grandma Moses, it conjured up collective memories of bygone times when, for example, Davy Crockett died at the Alamo (on ABC's Wednesday-night Disneyland program during the 1954-55 season). Like the new paint -by-numbers kits that contained decal transfers for adorning trays, glassware, mirrors, and household furnishings with Dutch, French, or Mexican motifs, or horsy British hunting scenes, television was a picture window on faraway places. It was no accident that Ozzie and Harriet and family, who took up the hobby in one early episode of their TV show, became the celebrity spokespersons for the paint-by-numbers movement. A Chicago company sold paint kits in 1955 under the trade name "Tone-o-Vision," as though its pictures were non-electronic TV sets ("Color-ama!") or frozen-in-place big-screen movies ("Cinerama!" "Vista-Vision! ,)
On TV, the distinction between picture and art tended to break down in the welter of shifting images: Ed Sullivan juxtaposed Elvis with Charles Laughton, Maria Callas with a troop of jugglers. Everything occupied the same electronic frame. To optimists, all this popular art-mindedness-Sullivan's guest list, statistics on sales of tickets and sheet music and highbrow records, the number of amateur artists planted before any given cow on a summer day-spelled the growth and diffusion of culture in America. Alvin Toffler, one of the period's most fervent believers in mass culture, was also, however, one of the first to recommend caution in confusing Sunday painting with true art. Art was infinite in its possibilities and variations, unlike automobiles or number pictures, of which there were a finite number for the consumer to choose from. Art was a one-and-only thing, a cure for conformity, of which a prime example was a picture guaranteed to turn out just like every other puppy painted with a Twin Scotty kit. Art was ineffable, difficult, important. It wasn't fun. And somebody else almost always did the painting.
But consumer culture was not as uncreative or second-hand as Toffler assumed. The automobile, for instance, wasn't a finished product, a take-it-or-leave-it affair. Instead, the process of buying a new car in the 1950s was a do-it-yourselfer's dream. Chassis, body style, options, trim: the details were up for grabs. There were two-tone models and finally tricolors, all with mix-'n-match interiors in "Passion Pink" or "Sunset Pink," "Crest Blue," "Horizon Blue," "Robin's Egg Blue," or any of fifty more tints, like the carefully labeled pinks and blues that came with a paint-by-numbers set. The customer literally created his or her own car from a kit, from a catalogue of standardized components. Given the range of variables, the possibilities were statistically close to being infinite. The only dead certainty was that a Chevrolet would be delivered a few weeks later. And what a Chevy! Painted and bechromed in precisely those areas designated by the owner. A paint-by-numbers project of staggering complexity. A work of art.
Oveta Culp Hobby, Eisenhower's aptly named Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, deemed hobbies-art, in particular-essential to the national happiness. "Millions of Americans ... from the President of the United States down to the humblest person" are turning to art, she observed approvingly in 1954. But why art? Why did messing around with paints fill a special, hard-to-discuss void in American life? The answer lay in the sheer, unpractical creativity of painting pictures. Creativity rounded out a busy career like nothing else, stated a prominent physician-painter. William Whyte, author of the 1956 classic The Organization Man, had also pondered the question of creativity and individualism in professional life. The new social ethic of the corporate executive made "the group ... the source of creativity," he concluded. If great art was what the sociologists dubbed "inner directed"-created out of internalized tastes and motives-then, according to Whyte's thesis, the hobby art of the American business community was quite properly derivative or mass produced from a kit. But in some important ways, the high culture of the 1950s was not radically dissimilar from what the hobbyists were doing. The cool classicism of International Style office towers and the repetitious gesturalism of Action Painting both stressed formal values. The emotional content, when it could be read with any certainty, was detached, generalized, grand. So the inner-directed artist produced large, public objects so formulaic, so reticent in meaning and uniform in manner that they were easily adapted to the boardrooms of corporate America, as trappings of the outer-directed executive. The difference between several thousand all but identical dogs painted from kits and any half-dozen look-alike Pollocks or Rothkos came down to one of degree. Everybody played by creative rules, whether they filled in numbered spaces or dripped paint in patterns circumscribed by the dimensions of the canvas.
Art affirmed the way things were in the 1950s. And a little creativity allowed the Sunday painter to be a participant, to claim that ethos as his or her own, to join a group that included Ike, Sir Winston, Vincent Van Gogh, Frank Sinatra, and Grandma Moses. The American Chemical Society, the Bar Association, the International Ladies' Garment Workers, and the American Dental Association all had affiliated art societies. So did the Junior League, the American Red Cross, and the American Association of University Women. 49 Even paint-by-numbers fans subscribed to newsletters dedicated to their brand of art. Art affirmed one's full membership in American culture, a willingness to be part of an ongoing process of filling in the outlines of postwar society Ernest Dichter, who psychoanalyzed the American consumer in the 50s on behalf of major corporate advertisers, posited that successful works of art-TV shows, paintings, and ads, of course-involved their audience in a process of participatory re-creation: "A sculpture, a painting, or a poster is better if it is somewhat incomplete, if the onlooker is invited to fill [it] in."50 By that pragmatic measure, the paint-by-numbers picture was the definitive masterpiece of the period, and the ultimate recreation.