Extracts from my essay on the artistic response to the case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and how it illuminated American Cold War Culture.
The
Rosenberg story has been referred to as the case that has received the most
amount of constant attention in the “annals of twentieth century American
justice”[i].
It was the only case in America where a civil court put two individuals to
death for conspiring to commit espionage. Hence, it has become a significant
case by which to understand and illustrate the way in which the Cold War
affected every aspect of American society, be it politically or artistically,
transforming it into an era that came to be defined by Cold War culture.
The 1930s and World War
II represented a turbulent period in American history, and in effect,
contributed to the reasons for the Red Scare in the 1940s and the 1950s. From
the time of the mid-1930s there were intellectuals and political personnel,
from the right who associated the New Deal with socialist and communist
ideology. In 1938 the House Committee on Un-American activities (HUAC) was
established and they began their investigations of left-wing activists. By 1940
the Smith Act was approved in Congress, making propaganda to overthrow the
government using violence or force, a criminal offense. Simultaneously Pres.
Roosevelt permitted J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, to investigate
people or groups considered to be subversive. It was also a decade of
“hyper-patriotism” in America which led to a noticeable infringement of civil
liberties during the war[ii].
 |
| Ethel and Julius Rosenberg at the time of their conviction Photograph Courtesy AP |
The
Red Scare in America following the Bolshevik Revolution was only the most
flagrant of many outbursts, driven both by the government and by popular
vigilantism, against left wing activists. These outbursts revealed the
volatility of popular opinion, the growing capacity of the state to repress
dissent, and the frailty of the civil libertarian thought and action in the United
States[v]
Artworks produced
during the Rosenberg era and even after it, serve as an illustration for Cold
War culture in America. Artwork which illustrated the Rosenberg issue has been
called a “visual diary” of a time difficult for later generations to fully
comprehend[vi].
The artists were said to be ultimately representing “a story of a fear of
communism, a fear of the other” which could only be appeased through brutal
murder[vii]. Thereby for this reason this essay will be
looking at four works of art that represented the Rosenberg case and
effectually conveyed a sense of the conditions prevalent at that time. The four
works will be The Trial by Jack
Levine (Fig.1), His Smiling Face by
Louis Mittelberg (Fig.2) Big Electric
Chair by Andy Warhol (Fig.3), and
Peter Saul’s Ethel Rosenberg in Electric
Chair (Fig.4)
Jack
Levine’s work The Trial (Fig.1) is
said to have been a general reflection of the McCarthy era but also
specifically connected to the Rosenberg execution in 1953. The artist’s intent
seems to have been to put the court on trial, while it can also be an allusion
to the nature of the judicial system in 1950s America[viii].
As Hemingway observes, the gloomy light, the disjointed spaces and indifferent expressions
of influential men does not bode well for the legal proceeding that was taking
place. The scales of justice have been tilted, and the odd composition of the
entire painting has clearly not been produced to reassure the viewer about the
state of justice in the country[ix].
The painting perhaps is reminiscent of the verdict in the Rosenberg case which
meted out a punishment which did not match the crime committed.
Both
Louis Mittelberg and Andy Warhol reflect the execution and death of the
Rosenbergs in their works thus drawing upon the extent to which Cold War
culture in America was willing to remove all forms of dissent and difference
from its social and political boundaries.
The portrait of President Eisenhower by Mittelberg was called ‘His Famous Smile’ (Fig.2) and shows a
smiling president with a mouth full of electric chairs instead of teeth[x].
This image seems to depict the masks or different faces presented to the public
during the Cold War. It reminds us of factors which were completely at odds
with each other. America was the land of the prosperous and the subjugated, the
proud and the fearful[xi].
Thus a seemingly jovial president has a darker side to both the pronouncements
he makes and the decisions he takes.
 |
| Fig 3: Andy Warhol, Big Electric Chair, 1967, Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas, 54 X 74 inches, Centre of Georges Pompidou, Paris, Collection of Musee national d’art modern |
Even though Andy Warhol denied that he was a
social critic and claimed that he chose to paint objects in his paintings which
he felt he knew best[xii].
His series of paintings on the Electric Chair are considered to be the most
iconic of all the images in the Death and Disaster Series[xiii].
He used the same photograph of an electric chair from Sing Sing Prison in New
York for all his Electric Chair paintings[xiv].
These photographic images were transferred onto silkscreens and as the art
critique Neil Printz notes, all these pictures are a form of storytelling.
According to Printz, images such as the Electric Chair are not just about
narrating events, but have been placed within a story which has not been
directly referred to[xv].
It can be thus connected to the events of the Rosenberg story which have been
closely linked to Sing Sing Prison and the electric chair, as it was by this
method that both Ethel and Julius were executed. In Big Electric Chair (Fig.3) the image has been cropped, bringing the
chair to the foreground of the picture, which has been coloured in murky tones
of blue and red. The chair is an emotionless object in a vast space with no human
presence. Its “visual sobriety and emotional understatement”[xvi]
make it a powerful reminder of the authority it commanded during the Cold War.
The power it had over life and death, especially in the case of the Rosenberg
family, is potent. Michael Rosenberg in his letter to President Eisenhower begs
that his mummy and daddy be released, and that nothing should be allowed to
happen to them[xvii].
However the paranoia of Cold War culture saw it fit to refuse clemency and
thereby deprive children of their parents by implementing a punishment which,
in twentieth century America, should have been seen as cold and barbaric.
The artist Hugo Gellart
deemed that there existed a clear demarcation between images produced when the
Rosenbers were alive and those made after their deaths[xviii].
However, it is apparent that a later work such as Peter Saul’s disturbing image
of Ethel Rosenberg in Electric Chair
(Fig.4) serves as a constant reminder of a historical past that still has
bearings on present conditions. The image is a grotesque depiction of Ethel
Rosenberg locked into the electric chair. She is dressed in a bathrobe of
garish colours, her head is on fire and her features look almost animalistic as
they have been disfigured and embellished. She is indeed a disgusting sight,
one that caused the reviewer Laura Caruso to dislike the painting completely
and yet not be able to forget it[xix].
Virginia Carmichael feels that although this painting has broken all accepted
norms of decorum it is effective in delving into the deprived mental state of a
“perpetrator-executioner-witness” who believes in the official narrative of the
Rosenberg story told during the Cold War. The shocking image forces the viewer
to review their ideas on the Rosenbergs and the age of the 1950s, and instead approach the events of that
period from a framework more realistic than what would be the commonly accepted
version of the story[xx].
[i] Michael Parrish, Cold War
Justice: The Supreme Court and the Rosenbergs’, The American Historical Review, vol.82, no.4 (1977), p.805
[ii] James Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States,
1945-1974, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996, pp.179-180
[iii]Ibid, pp.178-179
[iv] Patterson, p.179
[v] Ibid
[vi] Rob Okun, Haunted Memories: The
Rosenberg Era Art Project, The Rosenbergs:
Collected Visions of artists and writers, New York, Universe Books, 1988,
p.14
[vii] Okun, p.15
[viii] Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and
the Communist Movement 1926-1956,
Yale University Press, 2002, p.256
[ix] Ibid
[x] Okun, p.18
[xi] Okun, p.24
[xii] Neil Printz, ‘Painting Death in
America’, in Andy Warhol: Death and Disaster, Houston, Texas, Menil Collection and
Houston Fine Art Press, 1988, p.19
[xiii] Printz, pp.16-19
[xiv] Menil Collection, p.82
[xv] Printz. p.11
[xvi] Printz, p.16
[xvii] Michael Meeropol and Robert
Meeropol, “‘The arrests and the dissolution of the family’.” We are your
Sons: The Legacy of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Second. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1986, p.223
[xviii]
Okun, p.19
[xix] Virginia Carmichael, Framing History: The
Rosenberg Story and the Cold War. Volume 6 of American Culture. University
of Minnesota Press, 1993, p.216
[xx] Ibid
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