American Scene Painting

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American Scene Painting. A very broad term applied to the work of various painters who in the 1920s and 1930s depicted aspects of American life and landscape in a naturalistic, descriptive style. The term probably derives from a book entitled The American Scene (1907), a collection of essays and impressions by the novelist Henry James, who in 1904 made a tour of his native country after an absence of ‘nearly a quarter of a century'; it was first used in the context of the visual arts in the early 1920s. It does not signify an organized movement, but rather an aspect of a general tendency for American artists to move away from abstraction and the avant-garde in the period between the two world wars. Part of this tendency was a patriotic repudiation of European, specifically French, influence; in 1933 Edward Hopper declared that ‘we are not French and never can be and any attempt to do so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface'. Apart from Hopper, the best-known exponent of American Scene Painting is Charles Burchfield; in an essay on Burchfield published in 1928, Hopper wrote that he captured ‘all the sweltering, tawdry life of the American small town, and … the sad desolation of our suburban landscapes'. The term also embraces the Regionalists, who were more self-conscious in their nationalism.

American Scene Painting. A broad term applied to the work of various painters who in the 1920s and 1930s depicted aspects of American life and landscape in a naturalistic, descriptive style. The term does not signify an organized movement, but rather an aspect of a general tendency for American artists to move away from abstraction and the avant-garde in the period between the two world wars. Part of this tendency was a patriotic repudiation of European, specifically French, influence; in 1933, Edward Hopper declared that ‘we are not French and never can be and any attempt to do so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface’. Apart from Hopper, the best-known exponent of American Scene Painting is Charles Burchfield; in an essay on Burchfield published in 1928, Hopper wrote that he captured ‘all the sweltering, tawdry life of the American small town, and…the sad desolation of our suburban landscapes’. The term also embraces the Regionalists, who were more self-conscious in their nationalism.

American Scene Painting A broad term applied to the work of various painters who in the 1920s and 1930s depicted aspects of American life and landscape in a naturalistic, descriptive style. The term does not signify an organized movement, but rather an aspect of a general tendency for American artists to move away from abstraction and the avant-garde in the period between the two world wars. Part of this tendency was a patriotic repudiation of European, specifically French, influence. Burchfield and Hopper are among the best known exponents of American Scene Painting, and the Regionalists, who were more self-consciously nationalistic, are also embraced by the term.