Regionalism

Regionalism. A movement in American painting, flourishing chiefly in the 1930s, concerned with the depiction of scenes and types from the American Midwest. The term is often used more or less interchangeably with American Scene Painting, but Regionalism can be more precisely thought of as the Midwestern branch of this broader category. Like all American Scene painters, the Regionalists were motivated by a patriotic desire to establish a genuinely American art by using local themes and repudiating avant-garde styles from Europe. Specifically they were moved by a nostalgic desire to glorify, or at least to record, rural and small-town America, and it was on this that their widespread popularity depended. The period when they flourished coincided with the Great Depression, and at this time of profound national doubt, they reasserted America's faith in itself, giving the public pictures with which they could readily identify. Robert Hughes has pointed out the irony ‘that Regionalism, supposed to be the expression of American democracy, was in its pictorial essence the kissing cousin of the official art of 1930s Russia. If socialist realism meant sanitized images of collective rural production, green acres, new tractors, bonny children and muscular workers, so did the capitalist realism [of Regionalism] … Both were arts of idealization and propaganda.’

The three major Regionalists were Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood, who were all Midwesterners but differed greatly in temperament and style. They scarcely knew one another personally, but the idea of a group identity was skilfully promoted by Maynard Walker, a Kansas art dealer. Walker got a Benton self-portrait onto the cover of the Christmas 1934 issue of Time magazine and this largely created the image of Regionalism in the public eye; thus, as Robert Hughes writes, ‘it became the only art movement ever launched by a mass-circulation magazine', or as Benton put it: ‘A play was written and a stage erected for us. Grant Wood became the typical Iowa small towner, John Curry the typical Kansas farmer, and I just an Ozark hillbilly. We accepted our roles.’ Benton was the most vociferous of the group and in his autobiography An Artist in America (1937) he summed up the attitudes he shared with the other Regionalists: ‘We objected to the new Parisian aesthetics which was more and more turning away from the living world of active men and women into an academic world of empty pattern. We wanted an American art which was not empty and we believed that only by turning the formative processes of art back again to meaningful subject matter, in our cases specifically American subject matter, could we expect to get one.’ The fanatically patriotic critic Thomas Craven (1889–1969) was an even more strident spokesman for the Regionalists: ‘He attacked not only the contemporary French painters but American expatriates, and tossed in New Yorkers for good measure: they were all iniquitous and effete, compared with the artistic renaissance taking place west of the Mississippi. Craven undoubtedly overpraised these painters. Wood and Curry, at least, died unhappy, haunted by the contrast between Craven's claims of greatness for them and their own knowledge of themselves’ ( E. P. Richardson, A Short History of Painting in America, 1963).

On the fringes of the Regionalist movement were Charles Burchfield and Ben Shahn. Burchfield's work has a streak of fantasy absent from that of the others, and Shahn was driven by a spirit of social protest. Among the other artists who are sometimes considered part of the movement are painters of the rural scene in other parts of the USA during this period, for example Peter Hurd (1904–84), brother-in-law of Andrew Wyeth, in New Mexico and Paul Sample (1896–1974) in Vermont. Specifically local styles did not develop anywhere and Regionalism died out in the 1940s in the more international spirit that prevailed during and after the Second World War, although individual artists, notably Benton, continued working in the style long after this (Curry and Wood were both dead by 1946).