Artist as Reporter: Weegee, Ad Reinhardt, and the PM News PictureActive from 1940 to 1948, PM was a progressive New York City daily tabloid newspaper committed to the politics of labor, social justice, and antifascism—and it prioritized the intelligent and critical deployment of pictures and their perception as paramount in these campaigns. With PM as its main focus, Artist as Reporter offers a substantial intervention in the literature on American journalism, photography, and modern art. The book considers the journalistic contributions to PM of such signal American modernists as the curator Holger Cahill, the abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, the photographers Weegee and Lisette Model, and the filmmaker, photographer, and editor Ralph Steiner. Each of its five chapters explores one dimension of the tabloid’s complex journalistic activation of modernism’s potential, showing how PM inserted into daily print journalism the most innovative critical thinking in the fields of painting, illustration, cartooning, and the lens-based arts. Artist as Reporter promises to revise our own understanding of midcentury American modernism and the nature of its relationship to the wider media and public culture. |
Contents
The Artist as Reporter at the Museum of Modern Art | 29 |
Drawing on Newsprint | 64 |
Ralph Steiners Editorial Model | 117 |
Weegees Corpus | 161 |
How to Look at News Pictures in America | 209 |
Acknowledgments | 297 |
Sources | 341 |
Art Credits | 357 |
Common terms and phrases
abstract Ad Reinhardt American Art Artist as Reporter Brooklyn camera Candell caption cartoon Center of Photography cents comic Coney Island Courtesy Katja Goldman critical culture daily newspaper Dewey DRAWING ON NEWSPRINT E. E. Cummings EDITORIAL MODEL editors essay exhibition exhibition album experience fascism figure fire Gallery German Goldman and Michael graphic Hitler illustration John journalism journalistic June Krazy Krazy Kat labor Lippmann Lisette Model look magazine mass McCleery medium Michael Sonnenfeldt Modern Art Archives MoMA Museum of Modern Nazi New-York Historical Society NOTES TO PAGES object offered painting paper photographer's pictorial PICTURES IN AMERICA PM’s PM's readers PM's WEEKLY police political press photographer produced propaganda published race Ralph Ingersoll Ralph Steiner Reinhardt Foundation REPORTER AT MoMA Sacartoff scene sketch reporting social space story Sunday tabloid things tion visual Walter Lippmann Weegee William Gropper William McCleery workers York