LIFE Magazine and Modernity

“To see, and to be shown, is now the will and new expectancy of half mankind,” wrote Henry Robinson Luce in his 1936 prospectus for LIFE Magazine. This simple yet powerful idea and its impact on 20th- century American art proved to be compelling topics of discussion at a January 29 lecture held at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum. The lecture, entitled “LIFE Magazine’s Key Role in the Promotion of American Modernism,” was given by Melissa Renn, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Associate in the Division of European and American Art at the Harvard Art Museums.

Renn’s lecture, the first of three in the Sackler Museum’s series entitled “Modernism Comes to the Americas, 1940–1960,” explored the diversity of LIFE Magazine’s coverage of art and architecture from the ‘30s to the ‘60s. In an hour-long presentation, Renn highlighted important events in LIFE’s 36-year history, from its inception by Henry Luce in 1936 to its promotion of Regionalist, figurative, and abstract painters, female and African-American artists, and even modern architects.

Specifically, her talk emphasized LIFE Magazine’s “remarkable and hitherto unrecognized influence” on American modernism’s reception as well as on the American art world as whole.

“LIFE’s impact on American culture is undeniable,” Renn says. The magazine not only featured some of the most recognized American artists of the century—including Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, and Frank Lloyd Wright—but in the process, it also made the art world directly accessible to the average American and revolutionized the way Americans consumed both popular culture and fine art.

After its launch in 1936, LIFE Magazine became immensely popular, its circulation reaching 1.6 million within a year and peaking at 13.5 million weekly readers in the ‘40s. With its considerable influence, the publication promoted the nation’s art world, through what Renn identifies as “the roles of educator, patron, curator, and critic.”

These roles, however, were divorced from neither politics nor nationalism. “The future of the art world lies here rather than abroad,” declared Henry Luce in 1939. Explaining what she calls Luce’s “deep desire to see art become a part of American life and have it inspire and unite Americans,” Renn says, “he saw art as having a key role in both ensuring a democratic society and making the 20th century the American century.”

VES concentrator Remeike J. B. Forbes ’11 echoes this idea, saying that. in the early 20th century, “there was this idea that the U.S. still hadn’t developed a unique and vibrant artistic tradition of its own.” Many artists, he continues, thus shared a common goal: “to create a national art tradition linked to the history, traditions, and culture of the American people.”

Event attendee Marcelo Cerullo ’10 notes that he was surprised by LIFE’s importance in promoting American art. “It was particularly interesting how Melissa Renn weaved in images and paintings that I had taken as characteristically American, but that I didn’t know had been disseminated through LIFE,” says Cerullo.

The next two lectures of the Sackler’s “Modernism Comes to the Americas, 1940–1960” series will both be presented by Harvard Art Museums curators. Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. will discuss “Who Discovered Jackson Pollock? And Why?” on February 12, and Mary Schneider Enriquez will discuss “‘Invention over Imitation’: Modernism in 1940s Argentina” on March 5.

In the meantime, art lovers can still enjoy important 20th-century works on their own. The Sackler Museum currently houses several American modernist paintings. Among them are Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1925 painting “Red and Pink” and Charles Sheeler’s 1929 painting “Upper Deck,” which were once reproduced in LIFE.