Paper short abstract:

The emigre illustrators of mass-produced US children's books in the 20th century contributed to the mythologizing of a particular vision of America.However, their art also reveals a residual,perhaps subversive, avant-garde sensibility.

Paper long abstract:

Among children's books illustrators in the US in the 20th century many were recent emigres from Eastern Europe. Fleeing the Russian Revolution, pogroms, the Nazis, or seeking out the vibrant art communities in western Europe, these artists' paths to the U.S. were circuitous; the U.S. not necessarily the planned destination. Along the way, all seem to have been part of artistic and ideological movements in Europe, particularly the avant-garde.

In the US, many of these artists were employed in the corporate world of the Golden Books -- cheap, mass produced children's books directed at middle class consumers. Thus,despite coming from an avant-garde background, they now found themselves not only involved in radical capitalism and consumerism, but agents in the mythologizing of a particular vision of America. From the corporate standpoint, these artists held value because they worked for cheap and because their productions evoked nostalgia for the "old world" that satisfied American expectations. But since many of these expatriates were Jews, their artwork evokes the echoes of now-destroyed shtetl life and of the Russian countryside, overlain by the artistic experimentation of the 1920s. Thus, these artists incorporate traces of a now vanished homeland in their images, which were unremarkably incorporated into mainstream Americana. Their art also displays a residual sensibility about the nature of art and its perception, and the role of art in shaping a new society that comes from this radical European past. Their visual experiences spill out over the page and call the viewer into an emotional and experiential relationship that makes the narrative almost irrelevant.