AMERICAN SCENE, THE

The American Scene emerged in the 1920s and was related to the earlier Ashcan school of New York realists. It became the prevailing form of fine art expression during the 1930s as the economic Depression and the developing international crisis prompted American artists to become more culturally introspective and more socially committed. Echoing the New Deal's own values, its most salient characteristics were nationalism and democracy.

The American Scene is associated most closely with the regionalist school of painters based in the Midwest, such as Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975) of Missouri, Grant Wood (1892–1942) of Iowa, and John Steuart Curry (1897–1946) of Kansas. The regionalist artists were committed to an art of the locality and produced engaging images of their region, its landscape, and its people. Their ideal of America was rural, and it is resonant in spirit of the significance that historian Frederick Jackson Turner attached to the frontier in molding American values and institutions. Such an American particularism was often sharpened by the fact that their practice drew upon the "naïve" school of nineteenth-century American art. Unlike the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s, their work was inspired by "commitment" and a determination to engage with their society. This involved not only relating their work to "the people," but also making it accessible for their subjects to appreciate. Its strong representational emphasis and the incorporation of readily recognizable symbols and images have given some of their work lasting iconographic significance. Wood's American Gothic (1930), for example, has been copied, parodied, and recycled in diverse forms.

Visits to Europe during the 1920s reinforced the regionalists' determination to work with American themes and idioms. In 1932 Benton claimed that "No American art can come to those who do not live an American life, who do not have an American psychology, who cannot find in America justification for their lives." Modernism provoked the scorn of the regionalists. In 1935 Wood wrote a manifesto, "Revolt against the City," which proposed that American art free itself of European influences, especially from abstractionism. The regionalists' fierce patriotism, localism, anti-urbanism, and anti-Marxism provoked the scorn of some critics who regarded the group as parochial and complacent. Their celebration of such embattled qualities in Depression America as social order, organic community, and the work ethic was dismissed as an embittered restorationism. The regionalists were also resented because of their influence in New Deal agencies and the prestigious commissions that they received.

However, the regionalists' work was never as uncritical or unproblematic as is often claimed. Benton's decoration of the Missouri State Capitol in Jefferson City (1936) and Curry's murals for the Kansas Statehouse in Topeka (1937–1942) provoked considerable controversy. Despite the regionalists' identification with the people of the Midwest, some of their constituents complained that the murals presented them as caricatures and they objected to their states being associated with the James Brothers, John Brown, and tornadoes. Indeed, the regionalists' anti-modernism should not be overemphasized, their rhetoric notwithstanding. In the rhythmical lines and cartoon figures of Benton's canvases and the satirical and surreal aspects of Wood's work, influences other than American ones are readily apparent, and it should not be forgotten that Jackson Pollock was one of Benton's pupils. The work of Benton, Curry, and Wood was more diverse and less given to cliché than that of their many imitators who worked for the Treasury Department's Section of Fine Arts or the WPA's Federal Art Project.

While the American Scene is often associated with the midwestern regionalists, it should include, also, social realist artists whose outlook was more urban and whose point of view was more critical of existing institutions and values. The didactic paintings of Philip Evergood, Ben Shahn, Moses Soyer, and their metropolitan colleagues provided critiques of the capitalist system, and by affirming working-class lives and satirizing those of the upper classes, they sought to prompt militant political consciousness and action. Like the regionalists, they were committed to an aesthetic of place and to the principle of relating their work to ordinary people, although their focus was upon the everyday experience of the urban working class and the impact of the Depression upon them. Stylistic accessibility was also essential for art as a political project and the social realists condemned the development of modernist abstractionism as politically and socially irrelevant. Although some social realists hoped that the people would become their patrons under the auspices of the union movement, more artists gained the opportunity to communicate to a wider public through federal employment. Their style was ubiquitous, although necessarily politically constrained, and social realists received major commissions, such as Shahn's decoration of the Social Security Building in Washington, D.C. (1941–1942).

Both groups became objects of growing criticism as the decade progressed and they came to be associated with representational art in totalitarian states. According to the influential critic Clement Greenberg, "art for the millions" was tantamount to "kitsch" that could be manipulated by the state for its own purposes. He believed that cultural preservation and progress was possible only through the promotion of a politically innocent avant-garde. It is ironic that for all the strident Americanism of the 1930s, it would be abstract expressionism that would become recognized globally as the first truly authentic American form of art.

AMERICAN SCENE, THE

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