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American Heroes and Invading Barbarians: The Regionalist Response to Fascism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Cécile Whiting
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Extract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 13 , October 1988 , pp. 295 - 324
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

NOTES

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.

1. Janson, H. W., “Benton and Wood, Champions of Regionalism,” Magazine of Art 39 (05 1946): 186.Google Scholar

2. See, for example, “Knocking Wood,” Art Digest 17 (12 1, 1942): 12Google Scholar; and Boswell, Peyton, “The Grant Wood Controversy,” Art Digest 17 (12 1, 1942): 3.Google Scholar

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

14. Although these two particular paintings may have been unknown in the United States, other comparable images were reproduced in American magazines. Verbal descriptions of such Nazi art picked out the same ideological assumptions about the German race that underlie Kampf s and Hilz's paintings. For instance, Ruth Norden wrote: “A visitor from Germany tells of a painting he saw in a Berlin exhibition: ‘A fair woman-Mother Germania. In one hand she holds the model of a village, in the other a bottle containing some fluid. The village is the Soil; the fluid in the bottle is the Blood.’” See Norden, Ruth, “Letters and the Arts,” Living Age 350 (03–08 1936), p. 344.Google Scholar

15. Grosshans, Henry, Hitler and the Artists (New York: Homes and Meier, 1983), p. 83.Google Scholar

16. Ibid., p. 591.

17. For a complete account of these intellectuals and their brand of interventionist thought at the end of the 1930s see Lawson, Alan, The Failure of Independent Liberalism, 1930–41 (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1971)Google Scholar, and Sniegoski, Stephen J., “Unified Democracy: An Aspect of American World War II Interventionist Thought, 1939–41,” Maryland Historian 9 (Spring 1978): 33–47.Google Scholar

18. Mumford, Lewis, “A Call to Arms,” The New Republic 95 (05 18, 1938): 39–42.Google Scholar

19. MacLeish, Archibald, The American Cause (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1942), p. 6.Google Scholar

20. As Alfred Kazin summarized this trend in 1942: “Suddenly all the debunkers of the past … became the special objects of revulsion and contempt. Suddenly all the despised catchwords of the democratic rhetoric took on a brilliant radiance in a Hitler world.” See Kazin, , On Native Grounds, pp. 502–03.Google Scholar

21. See Marling, Karal Ann, “Of Cherry Trees and Ladies Teas,” in The Colonial Revival in America, ed. Axelrod, Alan (New York: Norton, 1985).Google Scholar

22. See Lewis, Thompson Howard, George Washington from 1732 to 1939 (New York: Pyramid Press, 1940)Google Scholar; Knight, George Morgan and Harwood-Staderman, Richard, What You Don't Know About George Washington (Washington: American Good Government Society, 1941)Google Scholar; Stephenson, Nathaniel W. and Dunn, Waldo H., George Washington (New York: Oxford University Press, 1940)Google Scholar; Umbriet, Kenneth, Founding Fathers: Men Who Shaped Our Tradition (New York: Harper and Bros., 1941)Google Scholar. For attitudes toward Washington in the 1920s and early 1930s see Marling, Karal Ann, “Of Cherry Trees and Ladies Teas,” and Wecter, Dixon, The Hero in America: A Chronicle of Hero Worship (New York: Scribner's, 1942).Google Scholar

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

25. See, e.g., the Daily Worker, 02 22, 1937, and 07 3, 1937.Google Scholar

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

33. Frankfurter, Alfred M., “Art and the War,” Art News 38 (10 7, 1939): 9.Google Scholar

34. Heilman, Robert Bechtold ed., Aspects of Democracy: The Defense Lecture Series of Louisiana State University (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1941), p. 99.Google Scholar

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.