DRAWING FRIENDS & ENEMIES
Art Young’s images evoke the promise of Eugene V. Debs's presidential campaigns and the cultural vibrancy of the Wobblies. They recall the utopian energy of Emma Goldman and the personal inspiration of Helen Keller. They draw upon the Muckraking investigations of Upton Sinclair and the international reportage of Jack Reed, and they share the the caustic wit and anti-imperialist anger of Mark Twain. Art Young learned from these revolutionaries and reporters, he knew them all, collaborated with several, and he drew them all.
In between his portraits of the Haymarket Anarchists, drawn just days before their execution in 1887, and a Fourth of July picnic with Eugene V. Debs in 1918, a few days before his incarceration for giving an anti-war speech, Art Young's career marks him as a uniquely popular political artist who contributed to the Socialist movement by doing what Debs once described as "cartooning capitalism."
FRIENDS, ALLIES AND COMRADES
Progressive Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette attacking the trusts and political corruption.
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Art Young, On My Way, 1928.
Art Young, Good Morning, May 15, 1921.
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Jose Clemente Orozco, Art Young's Inferno, 1934.
REAL ENEMIES AND IDEOLOGICAL CRITIQUE
Art Young, "Teddy Roosevelt: At it Again,” The Masses, November 1914.