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Burchfield (born 1893) has already been mentioned as having unwittingly aided in opening the way for an era of American subject painting, through his romantic reconstructions of a late pioneer period in which false store fronts, high-front houses, and wooden sidewalks were conspicuous. He studied at the Cleveland School of Art under H. G. Keller and others, and later became a designer of wallpaper in Buffalo, New York, where he has spent his mature professional life. He is perhaps the only man in America who has painted continuously and gained national prominence as a "museum artist" while carrying on a career in another field. He takes active part in the regional art activities that center about Buffalo and is one of the artist members on the council of the Albright Art Gallery. He has developed an individual water-color use, painting in this medium many scenes that have the appearance of being realized in a weightier and more solid medium. Promenade and Civic Progress are rifles of well-known pictures belonging to his earlier and more satirical expression. November Evening, painted in 1932 and now in the Metropolitan Museum, is fairly representative of his mature landscape style, a style distinguished by its strongly felt atmosphere of place and season. John Steuart Curry (born 1897) is a talented and versatile painter of honestly observed scenes from his native state--tornadoes, lynchings, sunflowers, and baptisms, all with an authentic quality of appeal --and a very significant contemporary artist. In 1932, in the process of broadening his development, he became a camp follower of the Ringling Brothers circus, and a spectacular group of canvases resulted. He has also lived and worked in Westport, Connecticut. In 1937, he was commissioned to paint the story of Kansas as a mural for the new State Capitol. In presenting his sketches to the State Mural Commission, he said of his undertaking: "In great measure it is the historical struggle of man with nature. This struggle has been a determining factor in my art expression. It is my family tradition and the tradition of a great majority of Kansas people." Almost apologetically he explained that politics, education, and public welfare were not included among his subjects because they are not in the contributions of Kansas to civilization. "These phases are removed from my vital experience, and that experience is necessary for me to make a forceful art expression," he said, giving a measure of the sincerity of his painting--a painting in which there is visible evidence of a growing power of plastic expression as well. He is artistin-residence at the University of Wisconsin, where he continues painting with the same rich color effects, in oil and water color, and the same sincerely felt themes as in his earlier work. That Reginald Marsh (born 1898), an urbane citizen of New York and Paris, a painter and the son of a painter, should have been identified with this group in the public mind from the outset is only another evidence of the lack of coherence in American art. His subject matter is often that of the socially conscious artist, his point of view is akin to that of Du Bois, and his paintings give evidence of his meticulous attention to structural stability. The burlesque theater, the crowded subway, the Bowery frequented by "forgotten men," bathing beaches on hot nights where sweltering forms crowd together in grotesque array: these are his subjects. "Well bred people are no fun to paint," he has said. All of these men have been sufficiently explicit about their intention: it is primarily to help establish a tradition of American subject. They have taken it at the source. One of the most spectacular evidences of their appeal (and one of the most unfortunate and confusing circumstances, from the point of view of critical appreciation) is the numbers of painters and students who become American Scenists almost overnight--"all the little four-flushing Picassos turned to little Bentons and little Grant Woodses," to quote C. J. Bulliet, the Chicago critic. Edward Alden Jewell also wrote, about the same time ( 1935), of the "thousands of little unimaginative, uncreative, purloining American artists who hope to ride to popularity and fortune on the tide of a new fashion," describing them as "the very ones or their equivalents, who ran so miserably after the modern French leaders a short time before." "American Scene" art was thus carried to a climax of public interest that for a time made it front-page news and finally discredited the intentions of its originators, who had meantime gone on their individual ways, without group affiliation or close ties of any kind. The emphasis of the movement was on the picturesque aspects of pioneer American life, the growth of the American soil, the rise of the industrial state, and the contemporary social and economic life which has arisen from these beginnings. The expression was prevailingly romantic, often becoming, in the hands of the immature, sentimental, melodramatic, satirical, or merely banal. One of its greatest values was in giving wide prominence to background historical material, in its significance to artists. The term is now tending to fall into disuse. Socially conscious art, grim and bitter and destructive as it usually was at the beginning, nonplastic as its intention was, presents another aspect. Technical gains from this source derive from several antecedent influences. One is the bold, sure draughtsmanship of Boardman Robinson, Hugo Gellert, Art Young, and others who had set a high standard for the graphic arts in the early days of the socalled liberal, or left-wing, periodicals. The black-and-white art work of the Liberator and the Masses was unexcelled in American publications, and some of the same artists and scores of younger men of the same brilliant powers of picturized political generalization have reached their public through the New Masses, the Daily Worker, and other contemporary workers' periodicals, later to enter the field of painting. The Mexicans were the most notable influence. Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros had combined the precedent of Old World wall painting with post-Impressionist procedures and painted a momentous record of their country at a revolutionary crisis. The structural force of their work can be felt throughout all contemporary American painting, but it is particularly conspicuous in socially conscious art. If nothing has been produced in the United States (or anywhere else in the world) that is comparable to Mexican art, it may be because there has not been a national experience of equally unifying power to arouse a spirit of equal national exultation. These murals are clear and vibrant, like the voice of a people raised in spontaneous chorus. In the United States until 1935, dying strikers, starving children, hungry rioters, the armed force of the law represented by mounted police and machine gunners, Capital and Politics symbolized in the guise of brute force, were familiar subjects in the painting which documented the proletarian struggle for power, and which was frankly designed to incite a Communist revolution. The nationalization of relief for unemployed artists of all kinds in that year, the shift in Marxist policies of aesthetic approach, and the organization meetings for the American Artists Congress, operated together then to change the character of socially conscious art. William Gropper, Maurice Becker, Joe Jones, Philip Evergood, the Soyers, and Nicolai Cikovsky are typical of the artists of socially conscious sentiments whose work has now taken its place in the collections of contemporary painting in some of the museums. Also among these artists are Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, I. D. Hoffman, Henry Billings, Edward Laning, Beulah Stevenson, Helen West Heller, Paul Burlin, Eitaro Ishigaki, Anatol Shulkin, Louis Ribak, Saul Berman, and Jack Levine. The American Artists Congress, organized to combat war and fascism and to defend the individual artist's civil rights through collective action, has held an annual membership exhibition since 1937, in which the painting is prevailingly of the social-message character. From a critical standpoint, this is perhaps the ablest and most important of the annual no-jury events. The work of well-known painters, including Rockwell Kent, Stefan Hirsch, Peter Blume, George Biddle, Harold Weston, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi, is represented. Harry Gottlieb, Arnold Blanch, A. S. Baylinson, Alexander Brook, Doris Lee, are also among exhibitors; and there are painters who are less well known to a general public but who are producing work of authentic creativeness. Among them are Karl E. Fortess, Earl Kerkam, Edward Landon, Joseph Raskin, Miron Sokole, Minna Citron, Nathaniel Dirk, Mervin Jules, and Jean Liberté. Boardman Robinson has been mentioned as an antecedent influence. The fact must be stressed, however, that he is a thorough independent. His position is comparable with that of John Sloan, though he is less generally recognized because be has always worked unobtrusively, without close indentification with any movement. He was born in Nova Scotia in 1786 and studied in America and Europe. He was in Russia with John Reed at the time of the Revolution and gathered at first hand material for political caricatures. At the period when American magazines generally were buying the work of the most outstanding American artists, he contributed to Harper's and the wider circulation groups, as well as to the insurgent press. Forain was the most prominent influence in his development, an influence, however, which had entirely disappeared before he painted the murals for the Kaufmann Department Store in Pittsburgh (which constituted a pioneer move in the American mural painting that was to rise to prominence in the next few years). In these, he originated a method in which his clearly designed figures appear in three-dimensional space and in brilliant color, without violating the spectator's sense of wall flatness. His easel paintings have strength and distinction. He is now Director of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. William Gropper was born in 1892 on New York's East Side, and studied art with Henri and Bellows. He achieved extraordinary skill as a social satirist on newspapers of various political opinion. The measure of his creative capacity is in the simplicity of his social generalizations and their plastic impact upon the sensibilities of the spectator. The Senate, owned by the Museum of Modern Art, and The Senators, privately owned, are masterpieces of understatement, showing political figures caught at revealing moments, made to express volumes in a telling gesture. They are as impersonal as steel and have a piercing power as keen. The same power of observation and of economical statement is felt in paintings that were inspired by the Spanish Civil War, among them Refugees, Flight, The Air Raid. In The Air Raid, now privately owned, there is that transvaluation of experience (in this case an imagined experience) that results in a unity where plastic and emotional components seem to become inseparably fused in a scene that is alive in every part. Here the statement becomes an allegory: War is felt as an imminent terror, as an unseen but overmastering reality before which the little group of massed, almost abstract, figures recoil as if in one movement.