HOME - Exhibition
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Bibliography -
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Exhibition Sections: Art of
the People - The Radical Impulse -
City Life
Capital and Labor - The American Scene
- Ben Goldstein
THE AMERICAN
SCENE
One of the Depression's first
casualties was the art market. Wealthy collectors stopped buying and
major patrons reined in their spending. Dozens of art galleries went
under, and those that survived did so with great difficulty. A whole
generation of aspiring artists had no prospects, and even work by well-established
figures lacked buyers. Growing frustration and despair led many of them
to a new-found identification with other victims of the economic crisis.
An art of social content and wide accessibility gained favor, as artists
sought common ground and a mass, democratized market. From their search
came the concept of a "people's art." They produced paintings, drawings,
and prints in which urban and industrial scenes coexist with images
of the land, suggesting connections between working people of all types,
from builders and miners to soldiers, farmers, and office girls. "The
early 1930s were coldly sobering years," the painter Louis Guglielmi
recalled later in the decade. "Faced with the terror of the realities
of the day, [the artist] could no longer justify the shaky theory of
individualism and the role of spectator." He concluded that "The time
has come when painters are returning to the life of the people once
again and by so doing are absorbing the richness, the vitality, and
the lusty healthiness inherent in the people."
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Goin'
Home, 1937.
Thomas Hart Benton, 1889-1975.
Lithograph. Printed by George Miller. Distributed by Associated
American Artists.
LC-USZC4-6587
© T.H. Benton and R.P. Benton Testamentary Trusts/Licensed by
VAGA, New York, N.Y. (7)
The Associated American
Artists (AAA) distributed many of Thomas Hart Benton's lithographs,
including Goin' Home, as merchandise in department stores
and through mail order, democratizing art by making it available
to people who lacked the means to buy more costly art. Benton
commented on this lithograph: "From a drawing made 1928--in North
Carolina Smokey Mountain country. With a companion driving the
car I followed these mill people till the drawing was finished."
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Dusty
Plowing, ca. 1939.
Bernard Joseph Steffen, 1907-1980.
Lithograph. Stamped: New York City WPA Art Project.
LC-USZC4-6559 (54)
A native of Kansas, Bernard
Steffen brought a rural sensibility to New York, where he studied
under Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. Benton's
influence is evident in Dusty Plowing, which Steffen created
for the New York City WPA Federal Art Project. Steffen, however,
focused on landscape and eschewed the romance and narrative that
marked the Regionalists.
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Manhunt,
1934.
John Steuart Curry, 1897-1946.
Lithograph. Published in The American Scene, no. 2 (New
York: Contemporary Print Group, 1934).
LC-USZC4-6579
© Mrs. John Steuart Curry. (12)
The darker side of the
Regionalist vision of America is evident in John Steuart Curry's
many powerful depictions of the African American experience. Born
in Kansas, Curry studied art at the Kansas City Art Institute
and the Art Institute of Chicago before heading east to work as
a professional illustrator. His focus on farm subjects and the
American Midwest led many to consider him a leading Regionalist
along with Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood. Manhunt,
a variation on a 1931 painting of the same title, shows a lynch
mob in Kansas.
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Wastelands,
1937.
Joe Jones, 1909-1963.
Lithograph. Distributed by the American Artists' Group.
LC-USZC4-6603
© Grace Adams Jones. (27)
In 1937 Joe Jones received
a Guggenheim fellowship to create a pictorial record of conditions
in the dust bowl, of which Wastelands is an example. Born
in St. Louis, he quit school at age fifteen to work as a house
painter. Winning his first award in 1931, Jones gained the attention
of St. Louis patrons who financed his travel to the artists' colony
in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Returning to St. Louis, he alienated
his supporters with the pronouncement that he had joined the Communist
Party, so Jones signed up for the Public Works of Art Project
in 1934.
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Rural
Retreat, 1930.
Peggy Bacon, 1895-1987.
Lithograph.
LC-USZC4-6585
© Estate of Peggy Bacon. (2)
The Log Cabin, a roadhouse
in Cross River, Westchester County, New York, where she and her
husband Alexander Brook made their summer home from 1927 until
1937, provided the setting for Rural Retreat. Born in Ridgefield,
Connecticut, she attended the School of Applied Arts for Women
in New York City in 1913 and studied landscape painting with Jonas
Lie on Long Island in 1914. From 1915 until 1920 she studied at
the Art Students League, where she came under the influence of
instructors Kenneth Hayes Miller and John Sloan.
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Red
Eye's Hall, 1934.
Meyer Wolfe, 1897-1985.
Lithograph.
LC-USZC4-6558 (60)
In spite of his European
training Meyer Wolfe often returned to his native roots in his
art, as in this 1934 portrayal of African Americans in a Nashville,
Tennessee dance hall. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Wolfe grew
up in Nashville and studied in Chicago at the Academy of Fine
Arts and then at New York's Art Students League under John Sloan.
In New York, Wolfe worked as a newspaper illustrator. In 1926
he went to Paris to train under Pierre Lauren at the Académie
Julien.
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Distress,
1938.
James E. Allen, 1894-1964.
Lithograph. Published in Collier's, September 17, 1938.
LC-USZC4-6581
© Estate of James E. Allen. (1)
Born in Missouri, James
Allen worked as a magazine illustrator, traveling to Paris in
1925, where he shared a studio with fellow printmaker Howard Cook.
There he experimented with various artistic media, making lithographs
and etchings for the first time. Forced by the Depression to return
to the United States, he moved to New York, continuing to hone
his skills as a printmaker under Joseph Pennell and William Auerbach-Levy.
Industrial scenes and muscular images of men working on railroads,
buildings, and bridges form a large part of his graphic repertoire.
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Fabric,
1940.
Lamar Baker, 1908-1993.
Lithograph.
LC-USZC4-6580
© Estate of Lamar Baker. (4)
Graphic arts historian
and curator Carl Zigrosser considered Lamar Baker "one of the
first native artists to reckon with the problems of the new South."
Leaving his native Atlanta in 1935 to attend Harry Sternberg's
classes at the Art Students League in New York, Baker produced
there his largest body of prints, the so-called Cotton Series,
consisting of twelve lithographs of which Fabric is one.
Baker's portfolio combines mysticism, magic, and symbolic imagery
of cotton production with compassion for the sharecropper's daily
struggle for dignity and subsistence.
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Winter
Garden, 1935.
Wanda Gág, 1893-1946.
Lithograph. Distributed by the American Artists Group, Inc.
LC-USZC4-6583
© Estate of Wanda Gág. (18)
Wanda Gág, who
was a painter, a printmaker, and an award-winning children's book
illustrator, said of her work, "A still life is never still for
me, it is solidified energy." In Winter Garden the movement
of the cats interacts with the rugs under the plants, which themselves
seem to dance.
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The
Baptism, ca. 1948.
Clare Leighton, 1898-1989.
Wood engraving. Published in The Frank C. Brown Collection
of North Carolina Folklore, vol. 1 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 1952), facing p. 226.
LC-USZC4-6590
© David Leighton. (29)
Clare Leighton's wood
engraving The Baptism, or The Baptizing, illustrated
text concerning folk beliefs about childhood in the first volume
of The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore. The
artist received a commission to illustrate the seven-volume series
while she was visiting lecturer in art at Duke University in 1943-44.
She traveled to the North Carolina mountains on a research trip
in 1946, completing illustrations for the entire series by December
1950.
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Assembly
Church, 1936.
Prentiss Taylor, 1907-1991.
Lithograph.
LC-USZC4-6592
© Estate of Prentiss Taylor. (56)
Prentiss Taylor began
his artistic career working in an abstract style, adopting realism
under the direction of Charles Locke at the Art Students League
in 1931. His interest in African American life and culture deepened
during his publishing collaboration with the author and poet Langston
Hughes that same year and through his intermittent travels to
South Carolina, including a 1934 trip supported by the New York
City WPA. He made 137 prints in his lifetime, varying in style
and theme, his subject matter ranging from life in the American
South to the architecture of Spain.
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All
God's Chillun' Got Wings!, ca. 1933.
Elizabeth White, 1893-1976.
Soft-ground etching and aquatint.
LC-USZC4-6164
© Sumter Gallery of Art, Sumter, South Carolina. (58)
Born in South Carolina,
Elizabeth White went north to Philadelphia--and later to the MacDowell
Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire--for formal art study. For
most of her life she lived in the South, and the landscape and
people of her native region remained a dominant and evocative
presence in her work.
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HOME - Exhibition
Overview - Object List -
Bibliography -
Credits
Exhibition Sections: Art of
the People - The Radical Impulse -
City Life
Capital and Labor - The American Scene
- Ben Goldstein
Library of Congress
Contact Us
(03/28/2000)
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