Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [120]
Bellows, “Stag at Sharkey’s,” 1909, Cleveland Museum of Art. Bellows captured the dynamism of the city that the Ashcan painters glorified.
ART AS ACTIVISM: AMERICAN SCENE AND SOCIAL REALISM. During the Depression, realism took two forms. The American Scene School, or Regionalism, enshrined Midwest values as the essence of American character. “American art,” said painter Edward Hopper, “should be weaned from its French mother.” Meanwhile, Social Realism exalted the struggles of the working class. Both trends portrayed simple folk, reacted against the growing prestige of abstract art, and tried to stir up either pride or protest during a decade of national trouble.
AMERICAN SCENE: CORNY AS KANSAS IN AUGUST. Those known as “American Scene” painters, Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood, took life on the plains as their subject, elevating its inhabitants to heroic stature. In WPA murals produced during the Depression, they romanticized the can-do pioneer spirit in an attempt to inspire optimism in a time of despair.
BENTON: AMERICAN HEROES. Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), leader of the American Scene, believed hometown reality should inspire art. Benton consciously rejected European styles he had briefly absorbed during a trip to Paris. “I wallowed in every cockeyed ism that came along,” he said, “and it took me ten years to get all that modernist dirt out of my system.” Once he purged himself of foreign influence, Benton produced sinuous paintings of Americans at work and play that .idealized the American past.
Benton, “Steel,” 1930, collection of Equitable Art Advisory, NY. Benton glorified American workers as muscular, powerful figures.
MOUNT RUSHMORE
At the same time that American Scene painters idealized legendary exploits like Paul Revere’s ride or George Washington’s encounter with a cherry tree, an ambitious project transformed an entire mountain wall into the ultimate patriotic monument. At Mount Rushmore, South Dakota, jackhammers and dynamite blasted four 1,300-foot-high presidents’ faces (of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, each with 20-foot-long noses) into a cliff. Its $1.5-million cost was a mountain of money during the Depression. Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor, defended the price, saying, “Call up Cheops and ask him how much his pyramid in Egypt cost and what he paid the creator. It was inferior to Mount Rushmore.”
WOOD: GOTHIC GARGOYLES. Grant Wood (1892-1942) adopted the most primitive style among American Scene realists. His greatest inspiration, he said, came when he was milking a cow, but he produced his homages to the heartland from a Connecticut studio. His reverence for country life drove him to chronicle the people and landscape of his native Iowa in almost obsessive detail. “American Gothic” is Wood’s most famous work, modeled on his sister and dentist. When it appeared, Iowans feared he was mocking their homespun looks. “To me,” Wood insisted, “they are basically good and solid people.” He elongated their faces almost to the point of caricature, he said, “to go with this American Gothic house.” Once the uproar subsided, the picture, along with “Whistler’s Mother,” became one of the most popular paintings in America.
ONLY THE LONELY
EDWARD HOPPER (1882-1967) was out of sync with the home-of-the-free-and-the- brave, booster spirit of American realism. In his meticulously described paintings of American vernacular architecture — storefronts, diners, gas stations — he expressed one theme: loneliness. While Ashcan School pictures vibrate with energy and American Scene canvases drip Apple Pie patriotism, Hopper’s work seems drained of energy and hope. Others waved the flag; Hopper showed the void behind the hoopla. Hopper took his cue from writer Theodore Dreiser, who observed, “It was wonderful to discover America but it would have been even more wonderful to lose