Associated American Artists - History

History

Associated American Artists was begun by Reeves Lewenthal. Lewenthal's first job was as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune but he quickly expanded into artists' agent, working as a publicist for British artist Douglas Chandor. By the 1930s Lewenthal had a clientele of 35 groups including the National Academy of Design and the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design. Realizing the limited possibilities in selling high-priced art to high-class dealers, and the correspondingly huge potential in marketing affordable art to the much-larger middle classes, he left his public relations work to try his hand at this new business model.

Prints being relatively cheap to produce, Lewenthal decided to focus on that medium. Before the 1930s, fine-art prints were usually limited editions which sold for $10–$50. During the Great Depression the Federal Art Project had resulted in hundreds of thousands of prints, but these were distributed free (mostly to schools) thus the artists made nothing. Lewenthal's idea was to combine quality, affordability, and profit. In 1934 he met with several well-known American artists, including Thomas Hart Benton, and proposed hiring them to produce lithographs which he would then sell to middle-class buyers for $5 apiece plus $2 per frame, paying the artist $200 per edition. At the same time, corporations began hiring famous artists to work on advertising campaigns -- Dole Pineapple, for example, hired artist Georgia O'Keeffe to "create pictorial links between pineapple juice and tropical romance". This convergence of art, business, and consumerism was the perfect environment for Lewenthal's new Associated American Artists enterprise.

When Lewenthal commissioned his first lithographs in 1934, the American economy was still limping towards recovery from the Depression; high-priced art was an impossible luxury for most people and the old galleries that had always supported artists were finding it difficult to broker their work. AAA was thus "an agent of economic salvation" for numerous American artists including Peggy Bacon, Aaron Bohrod, John Steuart Curry, Luigi Lucioni, and Grant Wood, despite the fact that signing with AAA usually meant being fired from their higher-end gallery.

I knew the regionalists were popular because their names were in the art magazines all the time. But they weren't popular enough, and they weren't making any money. Why, when I first went to Tom Benton's New York apartment he was living in utter squalor. I more or less rescued him.

By the fall of 1934 Lewenthal had contracts with fifty department stores to carry his "signed originals by America's great artists."