Book Description
Famous for iconic images of the rural Midwestsuch as American Gothic, Politics in Missouri, and Baptism in KansasGrant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry have long been lumped together under the rubric the Regionalists. James M. Dennis offers a fresh and sophisticated look at the modernist tendencies of this trio of American painters, arguing that the individual styles of Wood, Benton, and Curry were both mislabeled and misunderstood. Revisiting the artistic and political culture of America between the World Wars, he shows that critics and ideologuesfrom Time Magazine to the Partisan Reviewpigeonholed, praised, or pilloried the Regionalists to serve their own critical intentions. Amply illustrating his argument with a thematic assortment of paintings and prints, Dennis explores the social and cultural reasons why critics, from 1930 on, consistently demanded that Wood, Benton, and Curry stop straying in their art toward modernist abstraction, caricature, or fantasy, but stick instead to rural subjects and realist styles. Conservative critics wanted inspiring, all-American imagery, not borrowings from Cubism. Radical critics called for social realism depicting the plight of the workers, even claiming that the Regionalists stylized farmers smacked of fascism. Dennis demonstrates that despite these attempts at rigid categorization, Wood, Benton, and Curry were self-defining artists who freely disregarded promotional dictates of Regionalism. In particular, Dennis discusses the artists diverse portrayals of women, from rural sunbonnet women to cosmopolitan and even erotic figures and, in some of Currys work, women exemplifying themes of social criticism and political protest. In conclusion, Dennis discards the concept of Wood, Benton, and Curry as a homogenous unit, placing them within the school of American modernism more often represented by Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and Georgia OKeefe. He also shows that Sheeler, Demuth, and Hartley were themselves more consistent in painting native locales and regional themes than were the Regionalist Triumvirate.
About the author
James Dennis is professor of art history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Grant Wood: A Study in American Art and Culture, as well as of catalogs for the traveling exhibition Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed and for the Grant Wood collection of the Cedar Rapids Art Center.
