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Associated American Artists
Art by Subscription
By Staff Writer

The cover of Associated American Artists' (AAA) inaugural catalogue of prints, issued in October 1935, boldly and succinctly declared the corporation's primary objective: "Bringing American Art to Americans." Implicit in this statement were two important notions: 1) Collecting and appreciating serious art was now in the reach of middle-class America and no longer the exclusive domain of the well-heeled; and 2) Americans should collect American art. Prompting an egalitarian culture of art collecting was a marketing strategy that positioned AAA outside the dominant, traditional gallery system and capitalized on the periods popular perceptions of art galleries, dealers and collectors. In the minds of many middle-class Americans the art world was elitist and peopled with blue-blooded connoisseurs and purveyors of the esoteric and rarefied. AAA craftily played on these prevailing sentiments, giving rise to a significant new class of collectors and creating a
highly lucrative art-merchandising machine.

Though the corporation's name suggests otherwise, AAA was the brainchild and operation of Reeves Lewenthal (1910 - 1987), a twenty three year old former publicist and entrepreneurial wunderkind. In July of 1934, Lewenthal gathered a group of twenty-three artists in Thomas Hart Benton's NYV studio and pitched his proposal. He would pay the artists a flat fee of $200 to create a print, and they would produce the stone or plate form from which the image would be printed. Lewenthal would be responsible for the printing, marketing, and distribution of the prints, which would be produced tin editions of 250 and sold for 5 dollars each, initially in large dept. stores and later through mail order.

The circumstances surrounding the initial 1934 meeting are known largely through various versions of Lewenthal's enthusiastic account, which became the enterprise's creation myth and was promulgated through the company's promotional materials and literature.

Lewenthal's pitch suggested that dealers and galleries were no longer part of the equation, giving collectors the opportunity to deal directly with the artists and buy prints for what amounted to a wholesale price. It was a marketing strategy similar to present-day factory or manufacture purchasing schemes.

On Oct. 15, 1934, amid a blitz of newspaper and magazine advertising, Lewenthal launched his vision in fifty American cities, where department store shoppers could view and purchase AAA's five dollar prints. The response was overwhelmingly positive, and Lewenthal's efforts widely praised.

Though AAA's ledgers showed a loss of $30,000 for 1934, largely because of startup costs, the corporation posted a $50, 000 profit the following year after initiating mail order sales of the prints. By 1941 AAA had become what Time magazine characterized "as a $500,000 a year business that drove many a frock coated Manhattan gallery owner furiously to think" and behind whose "rocketing rise lay one of the ablest promotion an distribution jobs the U.S. art world has seen."

Come view the work of the Associated American Artists:
Art by Subscription
Oct. 23 - Dec. 12.
(Gallery closed Nov.
11 and Nov. 26 - 28)
Reception: Friday,
Oct. 23, 7 - 9 p.m.
Gallery Talk:
Oct. 26, 10 a.m.
California State
University Northridge
Art Galleries
18111 Nordhoff St.
Northridge, CA
(818) 677-2226
www.csun.edu/artgalleries

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