page_title: The Masses
section_title: Illustrations
hierarchical_section_title: The Masses / Illustrations
caption_attribution_description: English: "A slight attack of third dimentia brought on by excessive study of the much-talked of cubist pictures in the International Exhibition at New York" by John French Sloan, April 1913.
context_page_description: The Masses was a graphically innovative magazine of socialist politics published monthly in the United States from 1911 until 1917, when federal prosecutors brought charges against its editors for conspiring to obstruct conscription. It was succeeded by The Liberator and then later The New Masses. It published reportage, fiction, poetry and art by the leading radicals of the time such as Max Eastman, John Reed, Dorothy Day, and Floyd Dell.
context_section_description: Although the magazine's birth coincided with the explosion of modernism, and its contributor Arthur B. Davies was an organizer of the Armory Show, The Masses published for the most part realist artwork that would later be classified in the Ashcan school. Art Young, who served on the editorial board for the full run of the magazine, is credited with first using the term "ash can art" in 1916. These artists were attempting to record real life and create honest pictures, and they would often use the crayon technique to do so. This technique resulted in "capturing the feeling of a rapid sketch made on the spot and permitting a direct, unmediated response to what they saw"  and is commonly found on the pages of The Masses from 1912 to 1916. This type of illustration became less common after the artists' strike in 1916, which ended with many artists leaving the magazine. The strike occurred when Max Eastman began to assert more influence over what was published and began printing material without first submitting it to the editorial board for a vote. While the majority of the editorial board backed up Eastman, some of the staff questioned "what they saw as Eastman's attempts to turn The Masses into a 'one-man magazine instead of a cooperative sheet.'"  One of the main issues the artists took up during the strike was that Eastman and Floyd Dell were appending many illustrations with captions without the approval or knowledge of the artists. This particularly irritated John Sloan who saw the magazine as moving away from its original purpose and stated, "The Masses is no longer the resultant of the ideas and art of a number of personalities. The Masses has developed a 'policy.'"  Not agreeing with this idea of a policy, which became more and more serious with the escalation of World War I, Sloan and other artists (including Maurice Becker, Alice Beach Winter, and Charles Winter) resigned from the magazine in 1916.
  During the later years of its publication, the magazine embraced more modernist art than before, although it never dropped realist illustrations completely. Several of the cover issues from 1916 and 1917 attest to this shift. Instead of featuring crayon drawings of realistic scenes with gentle social satire, they featured cover girls often clad in modern attire and embodying a modernist style. Frank Walts' picture of Mary Fuller has been given as an example of this.
  In addition to the realistic and modernist artwork, the magazine was also well known for its many political cartoons. Art Young is perhaps most famous for these; but other artists, such as Robert Minor, also contributed to this aspect of the magazine. The cartoons, especially those by Young and Minor, were at times quite controversial and, after the United States entered World War I, considered treasonous for their anti-war sentiments.
  The illustrations published often pushed the socialist agenda for which The Masses was known. John Sloan's drawings of the working class and immigrants, for example, advocated for labor rights; Alice Beach Winter's work was known to emphasized motherhood and the plight of working children; and Maurice Becker's city life scenes satirized the extravagant lifestyle of the upper class. While many of the illustrations in The Masses made a political or social point, Max Eastman did frequently publish art for its aesthetic value and wanted the magazine to be a publication, which combined revolutionary ideas with both literature and art for its own sake.
caption: John French Sloan's satirical take on the Armory Show, captioned "A Slight Attack of Dimentia Brought on by Excessive Study of the Much Talked of Cubist Pictures in the International Exhibition in New York."
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