Margaret De Patta: Radical Collective Production in Mid-20th-Century California
by Margot Yale
A Decorative Arts Trust Research Grant underwritten by the American Decorative Arts Forum of Northern California facilitated travel to the Margaret De Patta Archives at the Bielawski Trust in Point Richmond, CA. The archives are essential to my dissertation study of how women artists who were surveilled and blacklisted by the United States government for teaching at Marxist-Leninist labor schools engaged with working-class audiences.
My dissertation project at the University of Southern California reveals how a cross-continental network of women artists and students, such as Margaret De Patta, Elizabeth Catlett, Alice Neel, and Emmy Lou Packard, imagined their work advancing multiracial working-class solidarity in struggles against gender oppression, racial capitalism, and imperialism in the United States before the feminist art movement. This story of radical collective production is still absent from the androcentric histories of leftist American art.
My research at the Bielawski Trust supported a dissertation chapter that examines how Margaret De Patta, who stood at the vanguard of the American Studio Jewelry Movement, extended the pedagogical aims of the California Labor School (CLS)—a working-class institution founded in 1942—through her jewelry production. De Patta and her husband, Eugene Bielawski, drew on their Bauhaus training at László Moholy-Nagy’s School of Design in Chicago to create the CLS’s nine-semester industrial arts curriculum (figure 1). Catering to veterans returning from World War II and women seeking job training, their goal was to train students to be both skilled designers and competent labor organizers in the fight against fascism and class struggle.
Figure 1. Flyer announcing the Industrial Arts program at the California Labor School, 1946.
One of my goals for this trip was to further my understanding of De Patta’s approach to art education and her community at CLS. Letters in the archive confirmed the abiding creative relationships from the school that De Patta maintained for the rest of her life—from her colleague Adelyne Cross-Eriksson, who moved to Sweden around 1947 because her husband was deported for suspected Communist affiliation, to her student Clara Rasmussen, who was enrolled in the Industrial Arts program. Early correspondence with Bielawski confirmed how the couple developed their “two heads are better than one” method of instruction. Course syllabi, brochures, and teaching tools—such as a wood-carved “feeler” for an exercise in tactility—demonstrated how De Patta and Bielawski adapted Moholy-Nagy’s conceptually integrative pedagogy for a diverse student body. Introducing the formal and material properties of wood, metal, and plastic, De Patta and Bielawski framed the skills taught in their courses as applicable to opportunities across the postwar job market, and thus impactful in the labor movement.
My second goal for this research trip was to better comprehend De Patta’s jewelry production process. When CLS’s art department was struggling with solvency in 1946, De Patta and Bielawski began producing “limited editions” of her popular designs to increase revenue. She attributed this aspirational and labor-intensive work to her “feelings about democracy” and desire, if unachievable, for her jewelry to be affordable to the rank-and-file. The archive’s collection of original jewelry molds was crucial for better understanding this production process (figure 2). Examining the molds and their complex registration systems introduced new areas of inquiry about how De Patta approached ornament in matrix and object.
Figure 2. Different registration systems on the molds for De Patta’s jewelry production line, c. 1946–57. All images from the Margaret De Patta Archives at the Bielawski Trust, photographed by the author.
The archive also holds material from nearly every step of her process, including initial sketches, master patterns, molds, and promotional photographs that De Patta took herself to carefully cast light and shadow from the metal form (figures 3 and 4). Although I had seen the finished jewelry on a previous research trip to the Oakland Museum, the opportunity to look closely at each step in the process across numerous examples afforded a clearer understanding of how each piece functioned as a calculated and wearable lesson. The form, transparency, tactility, and democratic aspiration communicate aspects of De Patta and Bielawski’s CLS curriculum.
Figure 3. The original sketch, mold, and promotional photograph for Production Pin #22, c. 1947.
Figure 4. Comparing the original sketch, master pattern, and mold for Production Pin #9, c. 1947.
My time at the archive, and the opportunity it afforded me to also work closely with and learn from De Patta and Bielawski’s family members, was instrumental for the development of my dissertation chapter and will be crucial to how I frame De Patta’s production process, her social and pedagogical network, and the trajectory of her artistic career. I am grateful to the Decorative Arts Trust, the American Decorative Arts Forum of Northern California, and Martha and Toby Bielawski for making this research possible.
Margot Yale is a PhD Candidate in Art History at the University of Southern California.
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