Needlepoint for Men: Craft and Masculinity in Postwar America

Abstract

In 1992 when Clement Greenberg, one of the most influential art critics of the twentieth century, stated “Craft is not art,” it reflected more than half a century of thinking and writing on what he perceived to be the fundamental differences between modern art and mass culture. Greenberg emphatically excluded craft from his conception of modernism as it was neither high nor low culture but had become increasingly aligned, in the aftermath of World War II, with middlebrow consumerism. Furthermore, popular crafts such as needlepoint, for Greenberg and many others like him, embodied essentialist notions of femininity—in their association with amateurism, leisure, and domesticity. And even though professional and amateur crafts grew exponentially in the period, needlecrafts, in particular, became enmeshed in a widespread moral panic about the erosion of American manhood by the perceived threat of feminization and ultimately homosexuality. However, while Greenberg’s views are repeated ad nauseam, the context of his ideas in postwar debates about middlebrow culture and masculinity remain overlooked. This article, therefore, reconsiders the case of Russell Lynes (1910–1991), an exact contemporary of Clement Greenberg (1909–1994), who not only publically parodied Greenberg’s highbrow artifice but sought to destabilize it by drawing attention to the relation of painting to needlepoint, and thus modern art to craft, and more critically by exploring the role of men as fabricators rather than artists or designers.

Keywords:

• Russell Lynes
• Clement Greenberg
• needlepoint
• modernism
• masculinity
• middlebrow
• homosexuality

Notes

¹ Russell Lynes, “Introduction,” in Mary Brooks Picken and Doris White, Needlepoint for Everyone (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).

² For the “flight from masculinity” thesis in this period see Michael S. Kimmel, “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity,” in Stephen M. Whiteread and Frank J. Barrett (eds), The Masculinities Reader (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), pp. 266–87; K.A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 144–52; and Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (Green City NY: Anchor Press, 1983).

³ Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture, p. 149.

⁴ Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) [second edition 2006], pp. 158 and 173.

⁵ Terry Smith, “Intensity: Modernism’s Phallic Aesthetics—An Introduction,” in Terry Smith (ed.), In Visible Touch: Modernism and Masculinity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 24.

⁶ Clement Greenberg, “The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture,” [Horizon, October 1947] in John O’Brian (ed.), Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism: Vol. 2: Arrogant Purpose, 1945–1949 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 161.

⁷ Marcia Brennan, Modernism’s Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2004), pp. 7–8. Women were often blamed for the perceived softening of American manhood; for this, see Roel van der Oever, Mama’s Boys: Momism and Homophobia in Postwar American Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

⁸ Harry Brod, “Masculinity and Masquerade,” in Andrew Perchuk and Helaine Posner (eds), The Masculine Masquerade: Masculinity and Representation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 18.

⁹ For similar readings of Tea and Sympathy see Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), p. 75; George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of Gay Male World, 1880–1940 (New York: Basic, 1994), p. 347; David Gerstner, “The Production and Display of the Closet: making Minnelli’s Tea and Sympathy,” Film Quarterly 50(3) (Spring 1997): 13–26; Steven Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 256–59; James Gilbert, Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2006), pp. 62, 173; Craig M. Loftin, Masked Voices: Gay Men and Lesbians in the Cold War (Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 2012), pp. 203, 212, 220; and Kenneth Krauss, Male Beauty: Postwar Masculinity in Theater, Film and Physique Magazines (Albany, New York: SUNY York Press, 2014), pp. 39–56.

¹⁰ Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture, pp. 104 and 150.

¹¹ Ibid., p. 149.

¹² See Steven M. Gelber, “Do-It-Yourself: Constructing, Repairing and Maintaining Domestic Masculinity,” American Quarterly 49(1) (March 1997): 99; Steven M. Gelber, Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), especially the section on “Needle Crafts: Fancywork”, pp. 163–68; and Roger Horowitz (ed.), Boys and their Toys? Masculinity, Class, and Technology in America (New York and London: Routledge, 2001). Also see Rachel Maines, “Leisure Needlework in the Postwar United States,” in Hedonizing Technologies: Paths to Pleasure in Hobbies and Leisure (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2009), pp. 117–22, 135–46; and Rachel Maines’ important earlier study, “American Needlework in Transition, 1880–1930,” University of Michigan Papers in Women’s Studies (May 1978), pp. 57–84.

¹³ For a discussion of women and craft see Elissa Auther, String, Felt and Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

¹⁴ Mary Brooks Picken and Doris White, “Men and Needlepoint,” in Brooks Picken and White, Needlepoint for Everyone, p. 159.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Irving Sandler quoted in Bradford B. Collins, “Life Magazine and the Abstract Expressionists, 1948–51: A Historiographic Study of a Late Bohemian Enterprise,” The Art Bulletin 73(2) (June 1991): 288.

¹⁷ See “Needlework: An Old and Distinguished Art Enjoys a Modern Revival,” Life 27(11) (September 12, 1949): 68; “Needlers”, Life 27(14) (October 3, 1949): 5; “Hobbies: Crocheting,” Life 6(1) (January 2, 1939): 40; Roger Butterfield, “Is it true what they say about Congress,” Life 13(7) (August 13, 1942): 85; “… And New Champion?” Life 33(12) (September 22, 1952): 108.

¹⁸ “Amateur Needlework Show Opens Wednesday, With Many beautiful Entries,” New York Sun (January 15, 1940): 19.

¹⁹ For the cultural influence of these women, see Victoria M. Grieve, “‘Work That Satisfies the Creative Instinct’ Eleanor Roosevelt and the Arts and Crafts,” Winterthur Portfolio 43(2/3) (Summer/autumn 2008): 159–82; and Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 8–49.

²⁰ Marling, As Seen on TV, p. 51. For the origins of this phenomenon, see T. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 59–96; and Richard Wrightman Fox and T. Jackson Lears (eds), The Culture of Consumption in American History, 1880–1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1983), pp. 1–38.

²¹ Kim Grant, “‘Paint and Be Happy’: The Modern Artist and the Amateur Painter—A Question of Distinction,” The Journal of American Culture 34(3) (2011): 289.

²² Ibid., p. 290.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ See Anne Orr, “Everybody’s doing Needlework!” Good Housekeeping 108(10) (January 1, 1939): 60–1.

²⁵ Josephine Christie, “To 18,000,000 Needleworkers,” Vogue 115(10) (June 1, 1950): 70, 121–2. Rachel Maines has suggested that the needlework revival in America did not in fact happen until the 1960s and 1970s, and that men who engaged with it were “anomalies,” based upon her extensive research in the c.1950–2000 period. In discounting earlier evidence from the 1930s–1950s, and in marginalizing men like Russell Lynes, such speculations ironically serve to reinforce the gendering of such crafts in modernist orthodoxy, in which needlecrafts were deemed secondary, and even irrelevant, to other forms of cultural production, such as painting, and unequivocally “women’s work.” See Maines, “Leisure Needlework in the Postwar United States,” and, Maines, “American Needlework in Transition, 1880–1930.” Although the Embroiderers’ Guild of America was not officially established until 1958, and did not hold annual exhibitions until 1962, some of its male members have recalled that they were producing, and exhibiting, needlework in the 1940s; see Nina Lee Soltwedel, “Rendering Visible the Formerly Invisible: The Men of the EGA,” Needle Arts XXIX(2) (June 1998): 36–44. The American Needlepoint Guild was founded in 1970 and similarly attracted male members in its early years.

²⁶ “Needlework: embroidery and quilting are back,” Vogue 123(3) (February 1956): 102–3. For the influence of advertising and commercial manufacturing on domestic sewing, see Barbara Burman (ed.), The Culture of Sewing (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999).

²⁷ Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 130.

²⁸ Ibid., p. 146.

²⁹ As an archetypal art critic of the modern period Clement Greenberg, for instance, rarely ever mentioned needlework or embroidery by name—for a unique instance in which it is referenced, see “Independence of Folk Art” [Art News, September 1953] In: John O’Brian (ed.), Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism: Vol. 3: Affirmations and Refusals, 1950–1956, pp. 152–552. For a reading of Greenberg’s attitude to needlecrafts, and to craft in general, see Elissa Auther, “The Decorative, Abstraction, and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft in the Art Criticism of Clement Greenberg,” Oxford Art Journal 27(3) (2004): 341–64; and also see Virginia Gardner Troy, The Modernist Textile: Europe and America, 1890–1940 (Aldershot, Hampshire: Lund Humphries, 2006).

³⁰ Greenberg was consistent in his disinterest in craft. The second generation of postwar artists, such as gay men like Robert Rauschenberg, that embraced an interest in abject skills such as domestic sewing were seen as little more than peddlers of popular culture by Greenberg. For the continued associations of this later work with concepts of homosexuality see Gavin Butt, “How New York queered the idea of modern art,” in Paul Wood (ed.), Varieties of Modernism (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 316–37; and idem., Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948–1963 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005).

³¹ Clement Greenberg made the statement “Craft is not art” at Critical Studies in the Craft Arts: Crossings, Alignments and Territories held at New York University in April 1992—the comment is recorded in Bruce Metcalf’s “Replacing the Myth of Modernism,” American Craft 53(1) (1993): 42.

³² Robert J. Corber, In The Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993); and Robert J. Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1997).

³³ Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America, p. 6.

³⁴ Corber, In the Name of National Security, pp. 1–18.

³⁵ Such sources are routinely used in writing about American Abstract Expressionism by art historians to tantalizingly suggest the placing/reading of such work in the expanded field of cultural production. For a discussion of the importance of middlebrow magazines in the promotion of avant-garde art, see Bradford B. Collins, “Life Magazine and the Abstract Expressionists, 1948–51: A Historiographic Study of a Late Bohemian Enterprise,” The Art Bulletin (1991).

³⁶ For an example of the promotion of embroidery by Jean Lurçat in America, see “Modern Needlework,” Vogue, 81(5) (March 1, 1933): 48–9.

³⁷ This was true of other textile crafts—which have generated relatively few serious studies. An exception to this is Cynthia Fowler’s recent Hooked Rugs: Encounters in American Modern Art, Craft and Design (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).

³⁸ Romy Golan, “L'Éternal not LEternal (note the French e acute here). Décoratif: French Art in the 1950s,” Yale French Studies 98 (2000): 110.

³⁹ Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” [Partisan Review, Fall, 1939] In: John O’Brian (ed.), Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism: Vol. 1: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944, pp. 5–22. The article to which Greenberg is responding to is Dwight Macdonald, “The Soviet Cinema: 1930–1938, Part II,” Partisan Review 5(3) (August–September 1938): 35–62.

⁴⁰ Russell Lynes, “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow,” Harper’s (February 1949): 19–28. And see Dwight Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult: I,” Partisan Review 27(2) (Spring 1960): 203–33 and “Masscult and Midcult: II,” Partisan Review 27(4) (Fall 1960): 589–631.

⁴¹ Russell Lynes, Confessions of a Dilettante (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 63. In this book, Lynes quotes several passages from Greenberg’s “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” essay, but resolves “By no means all highbrows are so intolerant or so desperate as this, or so ambitious for authority,” (p. 124). In essence he saw highbrows, like Greenberg, as nothing more than another type of consumer—a position, however, largely obscured by condescension and supercilious indifference. He also quotes, at length, Virginia Woolf’s famous unsent letter to The New Statesman in October 1932, in which she stated “The true battle … lies not between highbrow and lowbrow, but between highbrows and lowbrows joined together in blood brotherhood against the bloodless and pernicious pest who comes between” (p. 132), published posthumously in Virginia Woolf, Death of the Moth and other Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1942), p. 118.

⁴² Russell Lynes, A Surfeit of Honey (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), p. 34.

⁴³ Russell Lynes, The Tastemakers (Grosset & Dunlap: New York, 1954), pp. 257–8.

⁴⁴ Russell Lynes, “High-Brow, Low-Brow, Middle-Brow,” Life 26(15) (April 11, 1949): 99–101.

⁴⁵ Clement Greenberg, “The State of American Writing, 1948: A Symposium,” [Partisan Review, August 1948] in O’Brian, Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism: Vol. 2, pp. 257–8.

⁴⁶ Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992), xv.

⁴⁷ These comments by Greenberg, and those that follow, were initially printed in two parts and can very much be read as a reply to Lynes’ “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow” articles of 1949; see “The Plight of Our Culture: Industrialism and Class Mobility,” Commentary 15(6) (June 1953): 558–66; and “Work and Leisure under Industrialism,” Commentary 16(1) (July 1953): 57–61. They are reprinted as one article, “The Plight of Our Culture,” in O’Brian, Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism: Vol. 3, pp. 122–52; and in a much abridged version in Clement Greenberg’s Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1961), pp. 22–33.

⁴⁸ Ibid., pp. 140, 145.

⁴⁹ Ibid., pp. 148–9.

⁵⁰ Russell Lynes, “Time on Our Hands,” Harper’s 217(1298) (July 1958): 39. Crucially, even though Lynes addresses a male subject he introduces historically feminized hobby crafts such as needlepoint or rug hooking, when most media coverage of amateur craft when addressing the subject as male excluded such feminizing examples. For an example of the hypermasculine language of the press see Albert Roland’s “Do-It-Yourself: A Walden for the Millions?” American Quarterly 10(1) (Summer 1958): 154–64, which is closer in its tone to Greenberg than Lynes.

⁵¹ Russell Lynes, “How Do You Rate in the New Leisure?” Life 47(26) (December 28, 1959): 85.

⁵² Lynes, Confessions of a Dilettante, ix–x.

⁵³ Ibid.

⁵⁴ Debate about the relation of painting to embroidery was hardly new—it was a common feature of interwar discussion of needlework as an art form, but it was, largely, generated from the perspective that hand-stitched textiles were “women’s work.” For earlier analyses of needlepoint’s “affinity to painting that enhanced the status of the object” see Janet Kardon (ed.), Craft in the Machine Age, 1920–1945: The History of Twentieth-Century Craft (New York: Harry N. Abrams for the American Craft Museum, 1995), p. 114.

⁵⁵ Lynes, A Surfeit of Honey, p. 56.

⁵⁶ Ibid., p. 61.

⁵⁷ Ibid., p. 66.

⁵⁸ See James Crump, George Platt Lynes: Photographs from The Kinsey Institute (New York: Bullfinch, 1993).

⁵⁹ For a detailed discussion of needlework made by Russell Lynes and George Platt Lynes, see my book, Queering the Subversive Stitch (forthcoming).

⁶⁰ George Platt Lynes: Photographic Visions (Boston, MA: Institute of Contemporary Art, March 5 to April 29, 1980). Outside America some of Lynes’s images were, however, published in the Swiss gay magazine Der Kreis in the early 1950s.

⁶¹ Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America, p. 11.

⁶² Lynes, A Surfeit of Honey, p. 86.

⁶³ Ibid., p. 77.

⁶⁴ Clement Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of the American Abstract Artists, Jacques Lipchitz, and Jackson Pollock,” [The Nation, 13 April 1946] in O’Brian, Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism: Vol. 2, p. 75.

⁶⁵ Andrew Perchuk, “Pollock and Postwar Masculinity,” in Perchuk and Posner, The Masculine Masquerade: Masculinity and Representation, pp. 35 and 32.

⁶⁶ Timothy J. Clark, “Jackson Pollock’s Abstraction,” in Serge Guilbaut (ed.), Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945–1964 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), p. 229.

⁶⁷ Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 264.

⁶⁸ Brennan, Modernism’s Masculine Subjects, p. 43.

⁶⁹ Michael Leja, “Barnett Newman’s Solo Tango,” Critical Inquiry 21(3) (Spring 1995): 567.

⁷⁰ Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 55.

⁷¹ Griselda Pollock, “Killing Men and Dying Women: A Woman’s Touch in the Cold Zone of American Painting in the 1950s,” in Griselda Pollock & Fred Orton, Avant-garde and Partisans Reviewed (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 219–94; Amelia Jones, “The ‘Pollockian Performative’ and the Revision of the Modernist Subject,” in Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 53–102; and Fionna Barber, “Abstract Expressionism and Masculinity,” in Wood, Varieties of Modernism, pp. 146–86.

⁷² See Peter Hobbs, “The Sewing Machine Desire,” in Janis Jeffries (ed.), Reinventing Textiles: Vol. Two: Gender and Identity (Winchester: Telos, 2001), p. 49.

⁷³ Corber, In the Name of National Security, p. 4.

⁷⁴ This would be a relatively unique divergence in their coverage of modern and contemporary art. More typically in 1966, for example, they commissioned a special series of interviews about Jackson Pollock—mythologizing the man as much as the work. See “Who Was Jackson Pollock: Interviews by Francine du Plessix and Cleve Gray”, Art in America 55 (May/June 1967): 48–59.

⁷⁵ Russell Lynes, “The Mesh Canvas,” Art in America 56(3) (May/June 1968): 49.

⁷⁶ Ibid.: 29 and 49.

⁷⁷ Ibid.: 33.

⁷⁸ Ibid.: 49.

⁷⁹ For example, Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (1974–1979) highlighted the same issue and drew attention to the dynamics of the male fabricator as among the team of needleworkers acknowledged for their work are some men, such as Peter Fieweger. For a photogrpah of Fieweger in the process of sewing the “Millennium runner,” see Judy Chicago, with Susan Hill, Embroidering Our Heritage: The Dinner Party Needlework (New York: Anchor Press, 1980), p. 281.

⁸⁰ An interesting precedent to Lynes’ project is the series of articles entitled “Tomorrow’s Needlework,” in Woman’s Day magazine in 1944. Celebrity male designers who provided advice to women readers, here, included Norman Bel Geddes, Winold Reiss, Raymond Loewy, and William Bolin. The sexual division of labor went unmentioned and unchallenged.

⁸¹ Lynes, “The Mesh Canvas,” p. 46.

⁸² For instance, see the vest by Bernard R. Kelly, a prize-winning entry in the National Exhibition of Amateur Needlework of Today, illustrated in Josephine Christie, “To 18,000,000 Needleworkers,” Vogue (June 1, 1950): 70.

⁸³ Lynes, “The Mesh Canvas,” p. 49.

⁸⁴ Ibid.

⁸⁵ Russell Lynes, “Confessions of a Needlepointer,” House Beautiful 108(11) (November 1966): 252.

⁸⁶ Ibid.: 295.

⁸⁷ Russell Lynes, “The pleasure of making it”, House & Garden 142(1) (July 1972): 82.

⁸⁸ See Andreas Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other,” in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 45.

⁸⁹ Lisa Tickner, “Men’s Work? Masculinity and Modernism,” in N. Bryson, et al. (eds), Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), p. 56.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joseph McBrinn

Joseph McBrinn lectures in design history at Belfast School of Art, Ulster University, in Northern Ireland. He is a critic and curator with a special interest in Irish craft and design. He has written articles and reviews for Embroidery, Selvedge, Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, Homes Cultures, Fashion Theory, Art History, Journal of Design History and Oxford Art Journal. His book, Queering the Subversive Stitch: Feminism, Masculinity and Needlework, is forthcoming.