Home Go West, Young Art, Go West American Painting 1865-1934 American Painters - The Older Generation The Meaning of Modernism Isms and Wasms American Art in 1900 American Modernism The Whitney Museum of American Art Modern Art's First Museum The twentieth-century principle of form in art The Beginning of American Modernism American Modern Movements Cubism in England and America Activity in Art with American Subjects Backgrounds in European Art The importance of Gauguin and Van Gogh The importance of Picasso and Braque Munch, The Bridge, Kandinsky, Moreau American Backgrounds The establishment of a professional art Contemporary appreciation tends Early Twentieth Century New Directions since 1913 Max Weber, Maurice Sterne, Abraham Walkowitz, Ben Benn Arthur Dove, Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth Dada and Despair Early 1900s American Artists The Spirit of Research and Significant Form Joseph De Martini, Louis Schanker, De Hirsh Margules Pinoeers of Abstract Art American Abstract Pinoeers American Abstract Artists Art in a Skyscraper Significant Vision The term "significant vision" The Influence of the Oriental Scroll Painters Traditionalists and Modernists American Modern Art - Fantasy American Artists More Artists The Painters Discover America The Painters of America American Modern Artists Regionalism in a Broadening View Regional American Artists Pop Art - Modern American Art Stage Design Sculpture Sculptors More Sculptors Definitions Art and Beauty Modern Painting History of Art   Abstract Art Architecture History Painting Process Picasso	The Painters Discover America It is to be regretted that more American painters have not chosen the subject matter of their pictures from the contemporary movement of life especially in New York. In this respect, John Sloan is rather a solitary figure," Albert E. Gallatin wrote in 1925, in a monograph on John Sloan. "The infinitely varied life of New York offers as wide a field of exploration as did the Paris of Gavarni, who in his Physionomie de la Population de Paris gave us . . . a judgment of the entire epoch, the conventions, the fashions and all the types that go to make up the population." In the relatively short time that has elapsed since 1925 America has come into the possession of a voluminous native subject art. We have an exhaustive summation of our own epoch in terms not only of New York City's teeming life, but of the life of Pittsburgh, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, and the rural regions of the Midwest, the Dust Bowl and the flood and tornado areas, the agricultural far South, Alaska, and the Virgin Islands. This could not have come about without the unprecedented art activities in America from the beginning of the century to 1925. But the scope and the character of the painting itself are to be accounted for to a large extent by extraordinary conditions in the national life. Fabulous all-time spending records were being piled up in the United States, including public expenditures for art. In the year 1928 alone, for instance, American art investments totaled a billion dollars. This meant, among other things, unheard-of opportunities for American painters, mature, immature, and uneducated. An impulse had arisen attracting artists to fresh, native American sources and to a spontaneous painting style in the tradition of the untaught realists of earlier days. Outpourings of lighthearted pictures, amusing or pathetic, followed; literary and sentimental pictures or mere illustrations, many of them presented with artistically correct detail, all of them made to sell. Most of this subject art was offered to the public as a gesture of revolt against imported French art and modern conceptions of plastic construction. After 1929, when an atmosphere of social catastrophe descended over public life and when the artist, in common with other workers, had little continuing market except as it was provided presently by the government under emergency conditions, the mood and the character of the subject can be seen to have changed. The spectator must, accordingly, find his way about among contemporary paintings amid confusions not only of precedent and tradition, but also of social values and inspirations so complex that they constantly threaten to dissolve into a state of chaos. "American Scene" art at its inception represented the frank intention of its makers to produce a fresh, spontaneous illustrational expression. Their concern was not primarily plastic, but was rather the concern of individual romantic realists, unsympathetic towards official art as well as modern art. Almost simultaneously with it there arose painting representing the workers' struggle for power. It was at first a small effort, essentially communistic and revolutionary. The two movements went far beyond the initial intentions of their sponsors when they reached, together, a sort of climax of popular appeal around 1935, representing opposing and antagonistic ideas of American life. Since that time the gap between popular art of everyday life and art with a social purpose has tended to become smaller. The only question, ultimately, that is to be asked of work rising from this source is whether, in its own way, it reaches the status of creative art; whether it contains the essence of vital experience plus the aesthetic significance which alone insure survival beyond the period that produces the painting. This entire product has an analogy with the painting that was popular throughout western Europe during most of the nineteenth century and that then had its American echoes. In each country there was a more or less strongly felt impulse to return to the soil, to observe the ways of the homely everyday life of the people and to give them nonliterary, nonsentimental expression in art. Each country in turn succumbed to the temptations of sentimental and melodramatic genre painting produced primarily to flatter and amuse an uncritical public and to enrich the artists. Socially conscious art developed conspicuously in France from the eighteen thirties; and in England with the growing injustices of the modern capitalist system and industrial centralization. For a time it turned the attention of illustrational painters from their production of humorous episode and intimate everyday scenes and engaged the energies of official art's most conspicuous representatives. It is comparatively simple in perspective to trace the separate courses of these movements: to see where a new, native inspiration in painting passed into the art of various countries, especially Germany and the northern countries; where an overwhelming amount of homely illustration, now mostly forgotten, arose; and where technically correct painting, approximating the standards of "official" art, was lavished upon trivial and sentimental content. So little lasting gain was made because the nineteenth century lacked the capacity to create equivalents in art for the realities of the everyday life. Thomas Benton, Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry, Charles Burchfield, and Reginald Marsh are the names most firmly fixed in the public mind in association with "American Scene" painting, and as the producers of subject painting representing a Midwest region-- Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, and Ohio--and New York City. Thomas Benton and Grant Wood have provided the most conspicuous leadership. In a public address during the annual convention of the American Federation of Arts in 1932, Benton explained his convictions in these words: "No American art can come to those who do not live an American life, who do not have an American psychology, and who cannot find in America justification for their lives. Economic protection on the one hand or ideal declarations on the other, have no bearing on the problem of art. American art can be found only in the life of the American people; and there will be no background for its development until art itself comes out of its cultural enclosures and produces goods which have meaning for the American people." The name of Grant Wood is thoroughly established in the public mind, with that of Benton, as a leader of the movement. In his conception, "American Scene" art is the art which embodies the regional characteristics of the country. In a pamphlet entitled Revolt against the City, he wrote, in 1935: "Each section has personality of its own in physiography, industry, psychology. Thinking painters and writers who have passed their formative years in these regions will, by caretaking analysis, work out and interpret in their productions, these varying personalities. When the different regions develop characteristics of their own, they will come into competition with each other; out of this competition a rich American culture will grow. . . . After all, all I contend for is the sincere use of native material by the artist who has command of it." Thomas Benton was born in the Missouri backwoods in 1889 of a prominent political family and spent his early life in the political atmosphere of Washington. He has recently identified himself as an artist with his native state again after a varied cosmopolitan career. He was a student in Paris at the time of the first Cubist exhibition and for a time worked under the influence of S. MacDonald Wright, exhibiting painting of Synchromist character at the Forum Exhibition in New York in 1915. But he was not a post-Impressionist, though he presented at one time a theory of abstract pictorial construction based upon the movements of the human body. After war service, he traveled through America studying the regional characteristics of the country, collecting the material he was to use from 1925 with spectacular effect in murals of American life. In these murals, as they appeared in the New School for Social Research and the Whitney Museum, in New York, and as the public is most familiar with them, he defines his figures in tense, nervous outline, distorting them, linking them in turbulent scenes, and accentuating their picturesque, or grotesque, character by the use of bright color. In The Arts of the City, one of the sections of the Arts of Life mural in the Whitney Museum, he interprets these titles: "face painting, the comic strip, jazz and the dance, love and war, radio, prohibition, booze, politics, business, 'Shake 'em Baby,' love and gin, beauty and the prize, and 'None Shall Go Hungry.'" His definition of art was given, at the time of this painting, as emotion objectified. Grant Wood was born in Iowa in 1892, and studied art at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Julian Academy in Paris. He was inspired by the German art of the Middle Ages on the occasion of his first visit to Munich, and there are suggestions here and there in his pictures of possible influences absorbed from the nineteenth-century German painters. The influences of American folk artists are conspicuous in landscapes such as that showing the birthplace of Hoover and Paul Revere's Ride, where a not unhumorous use is made of the hard, tight technique of nineteenth-century provincial painters who worked from prints or engravings. American Gothic, Daughters of the American Revolution, and Victorian Survival are prominent in the gallery of homely Iowa portrait studies that is now widely familiar. Return from Bohemia is a serf-portrait in which the artist works with a segment of his rural public looking over his shoulder. His painting is static and linear, and is characterized by an earnest and painstaking explicitness about details--details insisted upon in each case, it is concluded, for their contribution to a total effect of rural picturesqueness. The influence of Grant Wood has been great in his own state. In 1932, he organized the Stone City Art Colony, using an abandoned quarry community and providing art instruction in six-week courses, including living expenses, for a flat rate of fifty dollars. Later, he supervised the state's artist relief project of painting a mural for the Iowa State College. He is now a member of the art faculty at the Iowa State University.