Jared French

Around 1934, when Jared French was newly-employed under the Federal government’s first relief program for artists, the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), he must have begun formulating the ideas that would later openly express how the artist under state sponsorship might assert individual identity, establish personal iconography, and uphold social conscience while conforming to the official dictate to paint “The American Scene.” One approach to socially-conscious art is to choose the “noblest expressions of people and society and to demonstrate them as unalloyed goodness,” as French would go on to say. The other is to “choose the subversive, selfish and deadening expressions and to display them in all their destructive malignity.” Dark satire, he asserted, had a place in public works of art as an effective means to make plain and ultimately cast out America’s social evils. [1]

Under the Works Progress Administration—which subsumed the pilot program, PWAP—French painted public murals and easel paintings. The latter were shown regularly in exhibitions, and they launched French nationally first and foremost as an American Scene painter. His dark satire was primarily aimed at despair and injustice in hard economic times. Whatever controversies that attended them were primarily due to their homoerotic subtexts and not to politics.

But one painting French produced at this time did challenge American politics: this canvas, Chess and Politics, dated to around 1934. There is no record of its being exhibited in French’s lifetime, so there is no known measure of the contemporaneous response it could have elicited. In scholarship, the painting’s subject and the artist’s possible intention in creating it have never been addressed. [2]

The subject of the chess match as a metaphor for gamesmanship between politicians is rather commonplace now, and has some history in art and literature as a stand-in for the war games of kings and queens and the test of wills in gentlemanly disputes. But chess came into its own only in the early twentieth century and in the Soviet Union, as Joseph Stalin deliberately employed the game as a tool to control the proletariat and, by this form of mental training, produce a state of armchair warriors ever at the ready to serve. Chess was an officially mandated pastime for Stalin’s workforce, and by 1934 had an obvious association with the Soviet Union. [3]

French’s Chess and Politics followed soon after the newly elected President Franklin Roosevelt officially recognized the Soviet Union on November 16, 1933. The U.S. Government had broken off diplomatic relations with Russia in 1917 after the Bolshevik Revolution, but Roosevelt had been keen to reestablish official recognition so as to serve America’s strategic and economic interests. [4] French’s painting lays out in some detail the overwhelming challenge that Roosevelt faced in trying to normalize relations with the corrupt, even amoral Stalin regime. That he was able to paint a cast of characters who had a place in this dark geo-political game, shows how closely French must have followed it.

When Roosevelt’s move to recognize the Soviet Union was announced, French seems clearly to have been compelled to revisit his art student past and a work by his mentor at the Art Students League, the political satirist Boardman Robinson, the only artist French ever acknowledged as an influence on him. [5] French had studied with Robinson in 1926 and admired him long after, and must have known Robinson’s lithograph, Checkmate, Gentlemen (1920), Robinson’s commentary on Vladimir Lenin’s out-maneuvering of French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, America’s President Woodrow Wilson, and British Prime Minister Lloyd George, who in 1919 tried in vain to negotiate a peace deal with the Bolsheviks and welcome Russia back into the diplomatic fold. [6] French in 1934 would paint the bookend to Robinson’s 1920 picture. In building his complex narrative, French might also have taken his composition from Lucas van Leyden’s comic Chess Players of 1507, an allegory of a woman’s trickery and deceit (Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen); French was an admirer of northern Renaissance art and had a large collection of reproductions of Old Master paintings. [7]

It must be Stalin who plays white here, at right, and he is likely surrounded by the famous chess masters who occupied specific roles in Stalin’s machine. Not all of the faces are as easily identifiable as Stalin’s, but we can reasonably make a few key associations. Leon Trotsky, an avid chess player, appears to be the bearded man standing at center. Having

been banished from the Politburo by his rival Stalin, he had a keen interest in a changing balance of power and here watches the match closely. At center, seated between the players, is possibly the man who was at the center of the Soviet chess world and also of Stalin’s reign of terror: Nicolai Krylenko. He was a pamphleteer and editor of the Soviet chess magazine, which is possibly why French would have shown him with papers in his jacket pocket. Krylenko wrote “Politics and Chess” which became Stalin’s particular “Five-Year Plan” to reform the proletariat through chess. He was also known internationally as the sadistic Justice Minister who instituted the famous public sham trials to purge the government of “wreckers” or traitors. In the United States his name was familiar to New York intellectuals by virtue of his painter-sister, Eliena Krylenko, and her American husband, the leftist journalist Max Eastman. [8]

Standing in support of Stalin on the right side of the picture are figures that might represent other key players, like novelist Maxim Gorky (the mustachioed man in brown, perhaps), who had become a propogandist for Stalin, and auto manufacturer Henry Ford (in his businessman’s suit and tie), who had already signed a pact with Stalin in 1929 to build a duplicate of his grand new River Rouge auto plant on the banks of the Volga. [9] The identities of the men and women on the left side of the table, at least some of them Americans in this satirical geo-political game we might assume, have proven elusive in this research.

Everyone had an agenda in the U.S.-Soviet match-up. But what might French’s agenda have been in taking it as a subject for painting? It is daring for an artist on Roosevelt’s WPA payroll: is it a cautionary tale on the dangers of using the arts for political ends? Is it also possible that the subject was personal as well as political for French? Perhaps he understood what the world-wise men in his circle would have known: that among the many unholy alliances Roosevelt stood to make with Stalinists were those with the likes of the brutal and despised Krylenko who, among his many other acts of terror against perceived enemies of the state, wrote into the Soviet penal code the statute criminalizing homosexuality, and with the internationally beloved

Gorky, who vehemently supported it. [10]

— Patricia Junker

[1] The quotations are from the “Credo” that carried Paul Cadmus’s name in the brochure accompanying his 1937 show at Midtown Galleries, New York, but authorship is now given to French; see Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection by Virginia M. Mecklenburg (Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art, 1987), 36; and Mark Cole, “Jared French,” PhD diss., University of Delaware, 1999, 197–99.

[2] The painting was published in the catalogue of Christie’s American paintings sale, May 29, 1989, lot 299, without documentation or commentary. It was included in the checklist of known works in Cole’s doctoral dissertation in 1999, 365–66, checklist no. C1934.11 (the “C” designation meaning “circa”). It was most recently published by Ilene Fort in the exhibition catalogue, American Paintings in Southern California Collections: From Gilbert S tuart to Georgia O’Keeffe (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1996), 25, 91.

[3] Source material on Soviet chess is abundant; see especially Andrew Soltis, Soviet Chess, 1917–1991 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2000).

[4] I have relied upon the lengthy report published online by the U.S. State Department, Office of the Historian, in the “Milestones in the History of Foreign Relations” series: “Recognition of the Soviet Union, 1933,” history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/ussr.

[5] Cole, 30.

[6] U.S. State Department, Office of the Historian, “Milestones in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations, “The Bullitt Mission to Soviet Russia, 1919,” history.state.gov/milestones/1914-1920/bullitt-mission.

[7] The possible source was identified by Charles Brock in reference to a chess-themed painting by French’s close friend George Tooker; see Charles Brock, “George Tooker, The Chess Game, 1947” in Twentieth-Century American Art: The Ebsworth Collection (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2000), 263.

[8] Krylenko’s role as the chess master in Stalin’s machine is discussed at length in Soltis, 24–25, 45–47, 102–03, 113–14. Also see, “Nikolai Krylenko: The Main Goals of the Chess/Checkers Movement” (1931), February 24, 2019, chess.com; and “Armchair Warrior: Nikolai Krylenko,” expertchesslessons.wordpress.com/tag/nikolai-krylenko. Professor Simon A. Morrison, Department of Music, Princeton University, has kindly helped my research, positing that other of the figures are also chess masters—Alexander Alekhine, the red-haired figure standing at center, who for all his chess prowess was considered by Krylenko an enemy of the state; and possibly the German Emmanuel Lasker, at the chess table, who had been enticed into the Soviet chess machine. Professor Morrison, email to the author, November 11, 2024.

[9] Thomas P. Hughes, “How A merica Helped Build the Soviet Machine,” American Heritage 39, no. 8 (December 1988), americanheritage.com/how-america-helped-build-soviet-machine.

[10] In his analysis of Dan Healey’s Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi, writer Samuel Clowes Huneke lays out in detail Gorky’s vehement anti-homosexuality: “Politics of Hate,” Los Angeles Review of Books, October 26, 2018, lareviewofbooks.org/article/politics of hate/.