Associated American Artists - Commercialization of Art

Commercialization of Art

The Regionalists by and large were in favor of businesses and advertising using their works, believing that fine art could raise the consciousness of business. They did not fully realize how art figured into corporate branding and advertising in the minds of corporate planners, or consider that their art might be used to inspire confidence in a product. They were soon to learn. Hart Benton's original works for R.J. Reynolds' Lucky Strikes, for example, showed black sharecroppers at work, but corporate headquarters were not interested in "Negroes doing what looked like old-time slave work." They demanded pictures that showed not realism but idealism, leading Benton to complain that "Every time a patron dictates to an artist what is to be done, he doesn't get any art, he just gets a poor commercial job." Increasingly, rather than deal with AAA and its artists, companies built in-house art departments that could produce art in the Regionalist style. This appropriation of the regionalist/representational style culminated in the propaganda posters of World War II.