In May 1932 the Museum of Modern Art opened on 53rd Street in New York in an old mansion. A number of artists associated widi New Masses, the leftist magazine founded in 1925, showed a collection of political murals sharply commenting on die economic imbalance and social cruelty of the times. Hugo Gellert's mural was entided ‘Us fellas gotta stick together’, a phrase drawn from an already notorious conversation between a young member of die wealthy Vanderbilt family, who had obtained a reporting job on a Hearst newspaper, and his equally rich interviewee, Al Capone, then in gaol. Capone, as usual, knew die score and told die young capitalist inheritor: ‘Us fellas gotta stick togedier.‘ Gellert's mural neatly encapsulated the Hearst-gangsterdom axis, since the centre of corruption, then as now, in America was die interlocking of business and crime. Naturally, President Hoover, Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan and J. D. Rockefeller found die exhibition offensive since diey were die ‘fellas’ in die mural with Capone. Another picture, by the great political artist, Ben Shahn, showed figures in the Sacco and Vanzetti case, and one by William Gropper, another fine political artist, showed J. P. Morgan and Andrew Mellon, a couple of notorious millionaires, eating tickertape with two pigs, and protected by militiamen. The Gropper was entitled, with little subdety, but quite accurately, ‘The Writing on the Wall’.
‘NATIONAL COLLECTIONS OF CONTEMPORARY
ART’: PROGRAMME OF THE MINISTER OF
CULTURE AND NATIONAL HERITAGE TO FINANCE
PURCHASES OF CONTEMPORARY ART WORKS
IN 2011–2019 PART 1. HISTORY: FINANCING