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	Regionalism in a Broadening View For the first time in our history, American painters as a group are conscious of themselves as independent creative workers and of their country in the character that it assumes when seen from their familiar cities, towns, or rural communities. The provincial atmosphere of farms and prairies, logging camps, cattle ranches, and cotton plantations has been taken into account as painting material. So have economic conditions which violate a sense of social justice and create tension and an atmosphere of anxiety throughout large parts of the population. A desire to understand and represent these things in a readily comprehensible manner comes out in some of the work. But in pictures that are being painted all over the country and that are lifting American art to a new level of unquestioned excellence there is a broader, unifying character--a kind of all-embracing regionalism, but one that needs redefining. Instead of a few metropolitan centers, there are now many widely distributed geographical areas that boast educated artists and that furnish these artists with subjects for their pictures. Regionalism has been one of the most significant facts in the national life since about 1900, when the population flow to metropolitan centers was reversed, by electrification and other economic facts, and the decentralization process begun by which people have been redistributed throughout the country and standards of taste and culture spread accordingly. Rural colleges and state universities often assume leadership in educational experiment, including art education. Some of the most talented and original of the younger artists are being absorbed into the American educational system in this way, while those of established reputation are being invited by educational institutions as resident or visiting professors and are exerting influences which tend to change the place of art in education. New generations of native American painters are being formed, meantime, under influences that were not predicted in the art of earlier American days and that are not exactly paralleled in any other country. General public appreciation of American art in its regional character has been furthered by state and regional museums, by the American Federation of Arts and the College Art Association, which assemble traveling exhibitions, by the art sections of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, and through the Federal Arts Projects programs of various sorts. From the Sixteen Cities Exhibition, assembled by the Museum of Modern Art in the early thirties, the Century of Progress Exposition of Chicago in 1933-1934, the San Francisco Exposition of 1939, and the New York World's Fair of 1939, a progressively comprehensive idea of the meaning of regional painting has arisen. The New York World's Fair, for instance, under the direction of Holger Cahill, set up elaborate machinery involving the cooperation of community, county, sectional, state, and regional art interests throughout the country, in order to give the public the best possible representation of all the art of the country. Selections were made by the various juries of admissions without regard for the particular kind of art represented. An even more adequate opportunity to take the measure of the regional art movement is offered by the large annual showings, including those of the Art of the Northwest, assembled at Seattle, Art West of the Mississippi, organized at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, and the Great Lakes Region Art for which the Albright Art Gallery at Buffalo is responsible. These, with comparable smaller events, bring first and last to large parts of the American public in many cities, a fresh conception of the meaning that paint American has assumed among artists. "Regionalism, it would appear, cannot mean much if it is to offer novelties to the city merchant and if it is to be satisfied with excursions into realm however colorful and quaint that are skin deep," Gordon B. Washburn of the Albright Art Gallery wrote in the catalogue of the first Great Lakes Region Exhibition. "An artist may be a tripper even in his own home town. On the other hand it takes time to establish roots and traditions that will support strong foliage and flowers." Particularly under new policies of including with historical painting, painting that portrays contemporary life interest, museums are acquiring the work of regional artists, and these artists for the same reason are annually receiving conspicuous honors at established showings of national and international painting. There are historical summer colonies and schools, such as those at New Hope, Pennsylvania, and Woodstock, New York. There are institutions that have exerted a wide regional influence on painting through the personalities of their leaders, past and present. But the broad movement of indigenous regional art is of phenomenal recent growth and is the result of the spread of cultural progress and the acceleration of art activities. Andrew Dasburg and Marsden Hartley were leaders in a regional movement in New Mexico after the World War, though there had been art colonies there since the nineties. Dasburg, Ernest L. Blumenschein, Victor Higgins, Randall Davey, B. J. O. Nordfeldt, Joseph Bakos, Russell Cowles, Willard Nash, and Kenneth Adam are prominent contributors in Santa Fe and Taos. Certain naturally dramatic aspects of the local scene play their part in the creation of a distinctive regional style expressed in an extensive variety of talents: the intensity of the light, the color on desert mountains, the effects of space and distance, the life of the aboriginal peoples there. French modernism enters in, as does also Mexican fresco art. Raymond Jonson, Bill Lumpkins, Lawren Harris of Santa Fe; Emil Bisstram, Robert Gribbroek, Florence Miller, and H. Towner Pierce of Taos; Stuart Walker of Albuquerque; and Agnes Pelton of Cathedral City, California, are the original members of the American Transcendental Painting Group, which has its headquarters at Santa Fe. Frank Mechau is an outstanding figure in Colorado. "By combining his experience in the study of painting with all western history, the cowboy, the Indian, the pioneer, the corral and ranch life, he is saying something which interests the nation, but which is based upon a limited local fact," to quote Donald Bear of the Denver Art Museum. In the San Francisco Bay region, Jane Berlandina, Florence Swift, Matthew Barnes, Lucien Labaudt, and Erle Loran give evidence of the scope of modern, independent painting. Other outstanding names are those of Joseph Sheridan, Theodore C. Polos, Farwell Taylor, Frances Roeding, and Rinaldo Cuneo. Florence Swift is an abstract artist. Matthew Barnes is an untaught painter, who conveys in his somber paintings some of the mystic profundity of a Ryder. Erle Loran is a Cézannist who unites formal and plastic expression with subject interest. He was born in Minnesota in 1905. A cash prize of $6,000 for early painting, awarded by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts enabled him to spend several years in and around Aix-en-Provence, studying the work of Cézanne and the scenes in which he painted. Some of Loran's best-known pictures show the Ghost Towns of Nevada. A fine recent landscape is called The First Storm. He says: "I believe the artist's conscious thinking should be along the lines of organization of the plastic elements. I have made a special study of the plastic elements found in great works of art, and I apply this analytical research in my work as professor of art [at the University of California]. However, I am by no means content with purely geometrical constituents. I am deeply concerned with the human and emotional content of art. Even a landscape should contain elements of mood, association, and particulars of the place and region represented. The artist should depend upon feeling to fuse these elements in his works." He is enthusiastic about the present conspicuous trend toward an indigenous painting of America and foresees that, with due consideration for the principles of French postImpressionism, we will arive at a significant modernism. Barse Miller belongs to Los Angeles. The names of Millard Sheets and Paul Sample have come to national prominence from Southern California. Millard Sheets (born 1907) provides one of the success stories of contemporary American art. Before he was twenty-one he had won ten cash prizes for painting, totaling $2,500 and enabling him to finance his further education. At twenty-seven, with representation in a number of museums and public institutions, he became the director of art at Scripps College at Pomona, California, where he has charge of progressive educational experiments of far-reaching significance. This artist paints with a sure grasp of the elements. He designs firmly, developing his realistically envisioned scenes in clear color, with strong, simple rhythmic accents. In Toilers at Sunset and Hidden Bay, the beauty of sky, water, and brown earth are strongly felt. In Tenement Flats, a painting chosen from the Public Works of Art Projects work by President Roosevelt to be hung in the White House, he shows women gossiping against a background of tenement flats and drying clothes. In Angels' Flight, in the Los Angeles Museum, he shows girls who have escaped to the roof of a tall building. "I am trying to learn to paint," he modestly says, "not by any approach through a particular style or method, but by observation, letting as much feeling and taste crop out in the process as may." Paul Sample was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1896. He studied at Dartmouth and served in the Navy, among other activities, and only when he was thirty years old did he decide to become a painter. He studied with Jonas Lie, and for thirteen years, from 1925, divided his time between Southern California and New England, teaching at the University of Southern California and painting persons and places of Vermont meantime. In 1937, he became artist-inresidence at Dartmouth. His painting has won prizes regularly since 1931, at the National Academy, the Pennsylvania Academy, the Carnegie International, and other annual exhibitions, and his prize-winning Janitor's Holiday is now in the Metropolitan Museum. He has been influenced at times by Benton and Wood, but Flemish art, particularly Breughel's painting, has been his inspiration, and he has spent recent seasons in Europe observing this master's work at first hand. His figures are concisely outlined in bright color and given a thoughtfully developed naturalistic environment. His presentation has usually been direct and unsentimental, with emphasis upon the stability and unity of the design. The independent modernism of the Southwest extends to Texas and is felt in paintings of the landscape, by Harry Carnohan, Alexandre Hogue, Everett Spruce, Tom Lea, among the scores of younger men who now work there. Seattle has, for a quarter century, provided an active center for the art interests of the Northwestern states. Through the standard of instruction at the state university and the activities of the Seattle Art Museum, high ideals have been fostered. Ambrose Patterson and Kenneth Callahan have already been mentioned among the leaders. David McCosh, formerly of Iowa, has joined the painters of the Northwest and is beginning to produce fresh, vividly felt, and finely constructed scenes. The outstanding work exhibited by painters of the group that centers in Seattle is informed with a spirit of international modernism. It is more plastic and less conservative in subject and treatment than the painting of the east coast. Molly Luce is the most widely known among a younger generation of painters in Boston, with representation in a number of leading museums. She produces honestly observed and skillfully painted representations of New England village life, the streets, the village greens, the seashore, with people. Her Centennial Celebration is a moonlight scene animated with the quaint, early-American social atmosphere of back-country Massachusetts on historic occasions. The situation, melodramatic in itself, is developed in a simple, interesting manner without literary emphasis. The construction presents the effect of hard, tight, early-American picture design. Molly Luce was a student of Kenneth Hayes Miller. She is the wife of Alan Burroughs of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, who writes of her in his book, Limners and Likenesses, as being artistically a descendant of the early native realists.