American Regionalism

About

In December 1934 Time magazine put a self-portrait by Thomas Hart Benton on its cover and presented him, Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry as the makers of a truly American art. The three came from Missouri, Iowa and Kansas, and during the Depression they offered farms, small towns, folk history and local legend as an answer to what they saw as the rootless abstraction of Paris.

Each had a distinct manner. Wood's American Gothic (1930) uses tight, almost Flemish detail, and his landscapes roll in rounded, stylised hills. Benton painted muscular, rhythmic figures that twist through crowded murals such as America Today (1930–31). Curry's Kansas scenes include tornadoes, baptisms and the abolitionist John Brown in his mural Tragic Prelude (1937–42). The movement drew charges of provincialism and faded in the 1940s, but its mural ambitions shaped public art, and Benton's student Jackson Pollock carried Benton's rhythms into abstraction.