JOE PASTERIS/THE ITHACAN ANDREW HEMINGWAY SPEAKS about communist artists in the United States in the 1930s last Thursday at the Handwerker Gallery.

On a nice warm sunny day last Thursday, while the first taste of spring settled into the Ithaca air and students’ thoughts were focused on the summer break a month away, communists seized the Handwerker Gallery.

With the doors open and the warm spring air filling the gallery, Andrew Hemingway from the University College in London brought a collection of communist art and spoke with his slight Yorkshire accent about “Proletarian Love and Revolutionary Art in New York” in the 1930s.

During the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition brought together the American left, including liberals and social democrats as well as some socialists and communists. The 1930s are viewed by many as the high point of the American left.

Hemingway said he was drawn to studying American 20th Century social history after joining the American studies program at Thames Valley College in London.

While much is known about the social history of Europe, very little is known about the social history of the United States, said Assistant Professor Jelena Stojanovic, art history.

“Andrew Hemingway’s work represents one of the most important voices in social history,” Stojanovic said.

Hemingway, a tall lanky man with rose-colored cheeks, rested his hands delicately on the podium while more than 20 students sat in the gallery quickly moving their eyes from the art scholar to the two projection screens he had set up displaying the communist art.

The social historian’s lecture focused on the conflicting ideas of reality in the Soviet Union during the 1930s and “Russia as it appeared in the minds of American Communists,” as Hemingway said.

Many American party members were aware of the gruesome nature of Stalin’s regime, but decided to ignore it and opted instead to embrace the fantasy land propaganda produced by the Soviet state.

One of the problems for American communist artists looking for inspiration from the U.S.S.R. was that Soviet art was less well-known than Soviet cinema or literature, Hemingway said.

American Communist artists also struggled with the question of how aesthetic quality could be fused with the class and political content necessary for Marxist consciousness, he said.

Hemingway showed some of Hugo Gellot’s work that consisted of gigantic male superworkers with glorified phallic muscular features. Hemingway said they looked like stormtroopers in overalls.

While Gellot portrayed hyper-masculinized figures, other Communist artists attempted to break the chauvinist stereotypes of the communist mythos.

One of Philip Evergood’s paintings showed grotesque caricatures of proletarians dancing for the amusement of a sadistic bourgeoisie, Hemingway said. Evergood’s proletariat had accentuated buttocks and thighs and deformed faces.

“The work hints at a frustrated desire,” Hemingway said. “Such an image of the proletariat made Communists weary, I suspect.”

American Communists were uneasy about the way Evergood challenged the communist fantasy by searching for the “deeper reality” of the proletariat, Hemingway said.

Another work that challenged the communist fantasy was an advertisement in the Communist Party publication “The Daily Worker.” The ad displayed a woman in workers’ garb stretching her arms out and calling people to an election rally.

The rally ad was in opposition to another ad in “The Daily Worker” that showed a skinnier woman wearing an elegant hat and a long dress — “traditional” clothes.

The conflicting representations and roles of women in the art of the Communist movement exposed the larger problems that plagued the Communist Party’s politics and uncovered the truths beneath the Stalinist fantasy that many American Communists bought into, Hemingway said.

Junior Denitsa Savakova, an art history major, said she found the combination of art, communism and social history interesting.

“I’m from a former Communist country,” Savakova said referring to her home country of Bulgaria.

Savakova said her experience with life in the Soviet bloc gives her a healthy skepticism about Marxism, yet she enjoyed the lecture.

Hemingway’s visit was the second and final lecture in the Critical Forum Lecture Series at the Handwerker Gallery.