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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
The characteristics that contributed in the 1930s to the fame of A Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry, the three leaders of the Regionalist art movement, were the same that led to their being condemned as Fascists in the art criticism of the 1940s. Despite differences in their artistic styles, all three artists based their paintings in the 1930s on the life and land of specific locales in the Middle West. Each artist became associated with a particular region: Wood with Iowa, Benton with Missouri, and Curry with Kansas and later with Wisconsin. In their effort to celebrate the folk and tradition of these American regions, these artists relied heavily upon figurative styles and anecdotal narratives. They eradicated from their paintings the modernist styles such as Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism with which they had experimented in the 1910s and 1920s. Modernism, they now believed, was a difficult language, inaccessible to the ordinary public. Instead, these artists embraced a plain-speaking, folksy pictorial rhetoric.
Author's note: A longer version of this article will be appearing in my forthcoming book AntiFascism in American Art (Yale University Press, 1989). My interpretation of Grant Wood's painting Parson Weems' Fable in this article is greatly indebted to observations and materials that Wanda Corn first published in her catalogue Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). I want to thank Wanda Corn, Jim Herbert, and Rebecca Zurier for their careful readings of this article and their incisive and thoughtful comments.
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3. The stylistic formality of the statement, uncharacteristic of Wood's prose, suggests that one of the gallery employees may have written the final copy, although Wood was undoubtedly consulted. Whether or not the statement accurately reflects Wood's ideas, he chose to present this artistic program to the public as an explanation of his motivations for painting Parson Weems' Fable. A copy of the statement can be found in the Amon Carter Museum files.
4. January 2, 1940, statement.
5. Jones, Howard Mumford, “Patriotism-But How?” Atlantic Monthly 162 (11 1938): 585–92.Google Scholar
6. Ibid., p. 590.
7. Ibid., p. 591.
8. Ibid., p. 592.
9. Karal Ann Marling offers a more extensive analysis of humor in Wood's art in her article “Don't Knock Wood,” published in Art News 82 (09 1983): 94–99.Google Scholar
10. Wanda Corn points out that Wood probably based his painting on these earlier works. See Corn, Wanda, Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 122.Google Scholar
11. January 2, 1940, statement.
12. Corn, , Grant Wood, p. 123Google Scholar. Indeed, Wood has himself transformed Weems's tale. As Corn points out, there are several inconsistencies between Wood's painting and the original story.
13. Jones, , “Patriotism-But How?” pp. 585–86.Google Scholar
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23. The Fair also included a George Washington Museum as well as murals showing Washington's generals on the exterior of the Science and Education Building and the Consumer's Building. The famous Gilbert Stuart Athenaeum portrait was on exhibit. Even a lock of Washington's hair that Lafayette had sent to Simon Bolivar was on exhibit in the Venezuelan pavilion.
24. See, e.g., the portraits of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Paine with the rubric “Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism” in the Daily Worker, 02 22, 1936, p. 2.Google Scholar
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26. In the 1950s Benton stated that this series consisted of ten paintings. In actuality he completed eight by April 1942, and then two more in the fall that he later associated with the original set of eight. Embarkation (Prelude to Death) was painted from sketches made in August 1942 at a dock in Brooklyn as troops were departing for the first Allied landing in Africa. The second, Negro Soldier, was finished by September 1942. See Carr, Barbara, “Thomas Hart Benton's Year of Peril” (Masters thesis, University of Missouri at Columbia, 1981), p. 7.Google Scholar
27. Erika Doss first pointed out this evocation of the patriotic song to me; my thanks to her for generously sending me the materials she had accumulated on this series.
28. John Steuart Curry Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Benton, Thomas Hart, “American Regionalism: a Personal History of the Movement,” University of Kansas City Review 18 (Autumn 1951): 75–6.Google Scholar
32. Kootz, Samuel, New Frontiers in American Painting (New York: Hastings House, 1943), p. 4.Google Scholar
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35. Frankfurter, Alfred M., “Art and the War,” p. 17.Google Scholar
36. Introduction by Samuel Kootz to the catalogue for the Byron Browne show at the Pinacotheca, quoted in Guilbaut, Serge, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 70Google Scholar. See Guilbaut, , pp. 59–71Google Scholar, on the emergence of political and cultural internationalism.
37. Thomas Hart Benton's review of Lawrence Schmeckebier's book on Curry, sent to Schmeckebier on February 25, 1944. John Stueart Curry Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.