50 SEPTEMBER 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL A Cultural Diplomat Is Born Joseph LeRoy Davidson was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in March 1908. He studied art history at Harvard and New York University, and in 1936 he and his wife, Martha, moved to Minneapolis, where he became the curator at the Walker Art Center. In 1940, at age 32, Davidson registered for the draft. In 1943 he was assigned to the Army Signal Corps, where he worked in the graphic arts department preparing propaganda materials. After the war, the couple stayed in Washington, D.C., and Davidson went to work for the State Department. State had inherited several cultural programs from wartime bureaucracies like the Office of War Information, combining them into a new cultural affairs bureau where he was put in charge of the international art program. For years, State had sponsored exhibitions of American art abroad, but these were conservative affairs, and the planning was usually farmed out to the National Gallery. A typical show might include works by old stalwarts like Gilbert Stuart and Frederic Remington—lots of American Revolution and Wild West stuff— and even Old Masters from the collections of wealthy Americans, works that, as one critic put it, the “broadest segment of the American public would find accessible and unobjectionable.” This left foreigners with the impression that America was an aesthetic wasteland, a nation obsessed with money and technology but indifferent to the arts. Davidson was determined to change that perception. In an article in the December 1946 edition of The American Foreign Service Journal, he explained that he wanted to put on a traveling show of “creative and experimental work produced in America” to show the world “the United States is a country which produces gifted artists as well as brilliant scientists and technicians.” The exhibition would also draw a sharp contrast with the Soviet Union, where the only art tolerated was socialist realism (think stylized paintings glorifying factory workers and farmers and, of course, Stalin himself). And it would promote core American values: individualism, freedom of expression, tolerance of dissent. From the outset, the exhibition was unusual for two reasons: First, Davidson himself would select the paintings, in consultation with other experts in modern art (including his wife, Martha, who was now a freelance writer for the magazine Art News). Davidson feared a jury or committee would automatically default to the safest works—and he did not intend for this show to be safe. Second, rather than borrowing the paintings from galleries, the State Department would purchase them outright. “When material is the property of the Government it may be used indefinitely,” Davidson explained in the AFSJ. And packing and shipping costs can be reduced to a minimum and flexibility in scheduling raised to the maximum, he added. Given a budget of about $50,000 ($750,000 today), Davidson began scouring galleries in New York. In all, he purchased 117 oil paintings and watercolors by 47 artists. The artists, many of whom were either immigrants or first-generation Americans, represented a broad swath of American modernists at the time: Romare Bearden, Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe, Ben Shahn. All but one (Hartley) were still living. The plan was to divide the collection into two parts: one to tour Europe, the other Latin America. A preview at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the autumn of 1946 received almost unanimous praise from critics. Art News proclaimed it “the most significant modern exhibition” of 1946 in the United States. But some critics anticipated that it would raise hackles. “The pictures make a beautiful show, vital, imaginative, representative of the most progressive trends in American art today,” Emily Genauer wrote in the Ladies’ Home Journal. “But I’ve a notion some of the stuffier gentlemen in Congress, the ones who haven’t been to an art exhibition since their school days and consequently know all about art, won’t like it. They’ll fill the air with their lamentations for the poor taxpayer and his money.” “Your Money Bought These Paintings” While the preview was ongoing at the Met, an event took place that would have grave implications for the “Advancing American Art” exhibition. On Nov. 5, the first national election since the end of the war took place, and Republicans won control of the House and Senate for the first time since FDR’s J. LeRoy Davidson, assistant director, far left, and Walker Art Center staff at a promotional shoot for the exhibition, “Paintings and Their X-Rays,” 1941. Inset: Davidson’s article, “Advancing American Art,” was the lead of the December 1946 Journal. ROLPHE DAUPHIN FOR WALKER ART CENTER
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