Month: June 2018

In early February, 1942, Grant Wood lies in an Iowa hospital, dying of liver cancer. His fellow Regionalist artist and friend, Thomas Hart Benton, has come to visit him. For several years, Benton has seen his friend attacked by art critics and by colleagues at the University of Iowa’s art department. Due to an unfortunate marriage that ended a few years earlier, Wood is also deeply in debt.
He is so despondent, as Benton later recorded in his autobiography, that Wood told Benton that “when he got well he was going to change his name, go where nobody knew him and start all over again with a new style of painting.”

It would never be: Wood died on February 12.

American Regionalism
Wood and Benton, along with John Stuart Curry, were the most publicly recognized Regionalist artists of the 1930s. Wood was an Iowa native; Benton hailed from Missouri, and Curry was raised on a Kansas farm. The three gained national recognition and wide popularity during the Depression with works that memorialized the rural heartland and the doings of its everyday folk. But by the Second World War, Regionalism was out of critical fashion, derided and labeled jingoistic, fascist, naïve, sentimental.

During this period Wood was teaching at the University of Iowa, Curry at the University of Wisconsin, and Benton at the Kansas City Art Institute. Wood and Curry were not only attacked by critics, but by their departmental colleagues. That affected how their students regarded them. Wood and Curry, Benton wrote, “ . . . were much affected and in the course of time under the new indifference, and sometimes actual scorn of the young, began feeling as if their days were over.

“It was one of the saddest experiences of my life to watch these two men . . . finish their lives in ill-health and occasional moods of deep despondency. . . .

“Wood and Curry, and particularly Curry, were oversensitive to criticism. They lacked that certain core of inner hardness, so necessary to any kind of public adventure, which throws off the opinions of others . . . “

Curry died in 1946, after what Benton wrote was a physical failure that took his “big body to pieces little by little.” He came to Martha’s Vineyard to visit Tom and Rita Benton before his death. Tom tried to cheer him up, telling Curry that he must feel good at having achieved a permanent place in American art, and having come such a long way from his boyhood farm.

“I don’t know about that,” Curry replied, “maybe I’d have done better to stay on the farm.”

Regionalists Attacked
The vindictiveness of the critical attacks on Wood, Curry and Benton continues to shock me. The attacks by members of their own art departments greatly contributed to the failing health and depression of both Wood and Curry. The abuse is on a par with the partisan invective now hurled among American politicians. While it is good to see art taken seriously, the grounds of the argument against the three were spurious.

In Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision, Wanda Corn quotes W.H. Janson, an art historian at the University of Iowa and a departmental enemy of Wood, who charged that “Many of the paintings officially approved by the Nazis recall the works of the regionalists in this country.”

Nan Wood reported in her book, My Brother, Grant Wood, that an unnamed professor in the art department sent Grant a note saying, “I do not like you, I do not like your painting.”

An article in the Chicago Times claimed that Wood’s art was socially irrelevant and led to “a trend of escapist and isolationist thought and action which was popular with some groups yesterday, but which is definitely obsolete today.”

Critic Samuel Kootz claimed that Regionalism was “an innocent approximation of the Fascist attitude.” Unlike the Chicago Times writer, however, Kootz saw that Regionalism gave Depression-era Americans “the security of familiar homey scenes . . . an America of insistent actuality.”

But for most critics, it was as though the obvious usefulness of Regionalist art during the Depression was deliberately ignored or unperceived; nor was it understood how useful it was in wartime.

Wood understood that possibility, claiming that Regionalist art was as important for democracy during the Second World War as it had been during the Depression. Wood told the Iowa Press-Citizen that Regionalist art would help Americans to “awake to the real worth of what they possess in the way of life.” If Regionalist painters continued to portray the life around them, he said, they would remind Americans of what they stood to lose in the war. Wood’s last two works, Spring in the Country and Spring in Town, were painted as examples of just what could be lost They were painted the year before he died.

The pugnacious Benton gave back to his critics as good as he got, hurling plenty of insults at those he called “the museum boys.” In the April 14, 1941 issue of Time magazine, Benton said the typical art museum was “a graveyard run by a pretty boy with delicate wrists and a swing in his gait.”

But Wood and Curry, both gentle souls, had done nothing but create communicable art that found widespread popularity. (Curry’s popularity was greater in New York City than in his native Kansas, where his paintings Baptism in Kansas and Tornado were accused of perpetuating Kansas stereotypes). Regionalism’s attackers (Benton called them “highbrows”) were proponents of European modernism, which had greatly influenced American artists, including Marsden Hartey and Arthur Dove, after the First World War.

But none of Benton’s critics were apparently aware of the fact that Benton had spent several years in Paris, closely studying the new works, and according to art historian Henry Adams in Tom and Jack, Benton had absorbed its principles more thoroughly than any of his contemporaries. For several years in and after Paris, Benton painted in a style called Synchronism, which had been developed in Paris by two of Benton’s American friends. Unknown to the critics, for much of his life Benton continued to paint an occasional abstract work. Whether it was to keep experimenting with purely formal principles, or for simple enjoyment, it was something Benton would not publicly admit.

With the onset of the Second World War, modernism had almost completely captured American galleries and academies, and by the late forties Abstract Expressionism was enthroned. The time when the United States faced inward in its Depression-era period of self-examination had passed.

***

Art critics (and the public) have been equally aroused and incensed in other, fairly recent times. Matisse and Derain and the other Fauves (“wild beasts”) had elicited sneers. (“A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public.”) Musical innovations had fared worse. Stravinsky’s tonal innovations in “The Rite of Spring,” caused at least one riot. The changes in visual and musical forms of early modernism were more abrupt than any in the past. Prior to the last decades of the nineteenth century, changes had come gradually and representational art was not questioned prior to the early twentieth century.

Traditional societies of the past, such as that of the European Middle Ages, perpetuated themselves by virtue of common core beliefs and rituals that ordered their societies. The most fundamental of these beliefs posited the existence of a transcendent world and the existence of a divinity or divinities. These common core beliefs, including the existence of archetypes or ideal patterns in the transcendent world, formed the basis for traditional art. Ananda Coomeraswamy, a former curator of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, demonstrated this in numerous essays on the arts of traditional societies East and West.

Traditional societies would be in complete agreement with Wood that that art which expresses a common sensibility helps that society cohere, a point that modernists will likely consider naïve.

The modernist’s art-for-art’s-sake stance developed over centuries following the breakdown of the common culture of the Middle Ages and the growth of individualism. Following the First Word War, European styles and schools, mostly rooted in Paris and mostly non-representational, began proliferating. The formal content of a work—its interaction of color, shape, and balance—was all that mattered. A work that was pleasing to the eye was “beautiful.” Since modernists deny the existence of a transcendent world, (and what else, philosophically, is modernism?) the notion that art can reflect archetypes is relegated to the category of unsophisticated ideas. Truth, an ancient criterion of beauty, was irrelevant.

In his popular 1934 book, Modern Art: The Men, the Movements, the Meaning, critic Thomas Craven made his case for representational art that sounded the mood of the times. “I have considered art as a human activity,” Craven wrote, “as a healthy act of labor preceding from, and affecting, the lives of people. I cannot, therefore, accept technical experiments in structure as substitutes for experience . . . . I ask that art contain meanings which may be verified, shared and enjoyed by a large and intelligent audience. “

Craven promoted Curry, Benton, and Wood in Modern Art and elsewhere, and his thoughts echoed Benton’s. Both wanted art that reflected meanings, and Benton was particularly concerned with American meanings, by which he meant the work and interaction of people with one another, and with their environment, be it urban or rural.

Wood went further in his expectations for art than Benton. By painting an idealized portrait of Midwestern agrarian society, Wood was hoping to preserve a fragment of American society. In the essay, “Revolt Against the City,” written by Frank Mott but reflecting Wood’s thought and published under Wood’s name, Wood expressed his reaction to the urbanization and homogenization of American life. Influenced by the Southern Agrarians, Wood saw the necessity of shoring up regional cultures. To this end he and Cedar Rapids artist Marvin Cone established the Stone City Art Colony, which lasted two summers. During one summer, Curry came to visit and he and Wood posed for some iconic photographs together.

Wood’s idealism ran deep. The art colony was meant to be a model for other regional art centers, each of which would interpret the life and culture of its own region; thus, each would contribute to the revitalization of regional folkways and life.

At the very opposite of Wood’s idealism is whatever thought might underlie a non-objective painting. While it might have meaning within the mind of its maker, it cannot by its very nature communicate meaning. As the phrase “npn-objective” implies, a non-objective painting does not depict objects. If one considers the confusion, the violence and the irrationality of modern life, and then contemplates the multitudinous collection of modernist and post-modernist art styles, how can one not help but concede that this collection, taken as a whole, is but a mirror of the confusion and irrationality of contemporary life? And what will naïve viewers, which is to say the majority of viewers, make of this collection? What can they take from it except bewilderment? Or, at best, the conviction that one work is beautiful or nice, and another is ugly?

By the very fact that the history of art goes back in continuous line to humanity’s origins, and that today when countless amateurs are creating art of some kind, we sense that art is somehow central to our being. In traditional societies art was symbolic and connected man to a transcendent world. Today that art which is meaningful is representational but lacks the ability to connect. But at least, if it is good, it connects the viewer to a place, or to other people: it fulfills a partial need. But when confronted by a bewildering display of art void of meaning, the naïve viewer may well suspect that meaningfulness itself is denied. That, I think, explains the majority’s aversion to modern art.

How would Wood approach his task today, that of revitalizing rural life, when our farmland is degraded with chemicals and monocultures, and the farmer is often alienated from the land by virtue of his machinery? How would Wood deal with our depopulating towns and villages and the forces that lie behind the depopulation? With his gentle nature Wood might have created more satiric works, like Daughters of Revolution, but we are forced to ask, what art can contribute to the cause?