ABSTRACT
This chapter overviews the tensions between the egalitarian vision that informs artists' memories of 1930 and the ideological constructions of gender that shaped women's work in relation to stylistic conventions and innovations, the politics of representation, the support or constraint of bureaucratic supervision, and the desire to build a mass audience. The innovative stylistic and thematic developments that characterized much of women artists' work during the 1930s, however, were demeaned with Abstract Expressionism's rise to ascendancy. When leading art critics reconstructed painting as an expression of virile passion in the early 1950s, they significantly minimized women's claims to equal creative status by associating art-making with intellectual and emotional traits conceptualized as pre-eminently male. The ideal of egalitarian comradeship among workers was one theme that had special significance for artists on the New Deal projects; and it offered a vision of shared experience implicitly helpful to women artists' assertions of professional equality.
