When Lewenthal commissioned his first lithographs in 1934, the American economy was still limping towards recovery from the Depression; high-priced art was an impossible luxury for most people and the old galleries that had always supported artists were finding it difficult to broker their work.
By the fall of 1934 Lewenthal had contracts with fifty department stores to carry his "signed originals by America's great artists.
[5] He also placed advertisements in magazines such as Time and Reader's Digest, and by promoting print collecting in terms of upward mobility—in the same way as buying Listerine ("The Dentifrice of the Rich," according to one ad campaign[6]), owning modern art raised one's life socially.
These artists avoided gritty realism and created positive images of an idealized, strong, capable America, a viewpoint which accorded well with the political environment of the New Deal and was in some senses therapeutic for the anxiety and weakness pervasive during and just after the Depression.
They demanded pictures that showed not realism but idealism, leading Benton to complain that "Every time a patron dictates to an artist what is to be done, he doesn't get any art, he just gets a poor commercial job.
In its press releases and articles, AAA talked about exploring "new frontiers," "new trends"—and made no mention of the $5 mail-order line and the artists who had helped it succeed twenty years earlier.
AAA continued to find new ways to sell art, however, branching out into Stonelain porcelain, fabric, and housewares such as ashtrays, playing cards, and lamp shades as vehicles for work in abstract and other modern styles.
Having been so successful, it was adopted as a model by other companies that began to compete with AAA—marketing fabric, for example, as "etching by the yard" or commissioning artists to do designs for lines of china or wallpaper.
In a strange reversal of its "market to the masses" philosophy, many early AAA prints which sold originally for $5 go to art collectors for thousands of dollars today.