Exhibit goes beyond the farm to show breadth of ’30s American art

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Edward Hopper’s “Gas” (1940) is on loan from the Museum of Modern Art in New York for “America After the Fall.” | © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

American art of the 1930s for many people is embodied in the homespun rural scenes of Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood, the regionalist triumvirate that was featured in a cover story in Time magazine in December 1934.

But a new exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, “America After the Fall: Painting in the 1930s,” argues that the artistic output of that tumultuous decade was considerably more varied. Indeed, Judith Barter, the museum’s chair and curator of American art, boldly asserts that it was artistically the most important decade of the 20th century.

“The variety of aesthetic experience was huge,” she said, “and the one thing that sort of held most of it together was that people were obsessed with American subjects. They were looking for Americanness, whether it was in abstraction or Grant Wood’s satires or [Edward] Hopper’s city streets or even Joe Jones’ depiction of lynching.”

America After the Fall: Painting in the 1930s When: Through Sept. 18 Where: Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Admission: Free with regular museum admission Info: (312) 443-3600; artic.edu

The show contains works by such celebrated artists as Stuart Davis, Georgia O’Keeffe, Hopper and Wood, but it also highlights more obscure figures such as Marvin Cone, a lesser-known regionalist, and Helen Lundeberg, a California surrealist. “They were were great painters, but they just haven’t, for whatever reason, had household-name recognition,” Barter said.

A quarter of the works are drawn from the Art Institute’s collection, and the rest are on loan from private collections and institutions ranging from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln, Nebraska.

The exhibition will not be shown anywhere else in the United States, but it is traveling to the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris and the Royal Academy in London – a rarity for American art, which remains little seen in Europe aside from a few key figures like O’Keeffe and Hopper.

“American Gothic” (1930) by Grant Wood, part of “America After the Fall,” will travel with the exhibit to Europe. | Art Institute of Chicago.

“American Gothic” (1930) by Grant Wood, part of “America After the Fall,” will travel with the exhibit to Europe. | Art Institute of Chicago.

“Suddenly, there is an interest in American art [in Europe]. There is a desire to see things now,” Barter said, noting that the National Gallery of Art in London, for example, has begun to collect works from this country.

She estimates that 60 to 70 percent of the paintings in this show have never been displayed before in Europe. Among them is the Wood’s iconic “American Gothic,” which is traveling to the continent for the first time since the Art Institute presciently purchased it from the artist months after its creation in 1930.

In all, the exhibition, which is on view in the Abbott Galleries in the museum’s Modern Wing, contains a modest 52 works. The size was dictated by the compact dimensions of the exhibition spaces at the two prestigious European institutions where it will be seen.

After the 1929 stock-market crash and the onslaught of the Great Depression, cracks began to appear in the American Dream and doubts arose around the bedrock principles of democracy and free enterprise. During this turbulent economic and political time, artists, too, questioned what constituted the essence of American art, some turning to European modernism for inspiration while others retreated to a kind of indigenous realism.

Georgia O’Keefe is represented by her “Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue, 1931.” | © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Art Resource, NY.

Georgia O’Keefe is represented by her “Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue, 1931.” | © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Art Resource, NY.

Their startlingly diverse responses can be found in the thematic sections of this exhibition, which range from Alice Neel’s politically charged “Pat Whalen” (1935) to Archibald J. Motley’s vivid nightlife scene, “Saturday Night” (1935), to dystopian visions like the surrealist desolation in O. Louis Guglielmi’s “Phoenix” (1935).

“Both Americans and Europeans are going to come away surprised by the richness of this decade and the different attitudes toward crisis – how [artists] dealt with it aesthetically,” Barter said. “Some people were carefree about it, and others were satirical. The regionalists were sort of Utopian.”

There is no section specifically devoted to abstraction, but abstract paintings by such artists as Arthur Dove and Ilya Bolotowsky are sprinkled throughout the show. “It reflects correctly the ’30s,” Barter said, “that there was much more of what we call American Scene painting, because it was supported by the government, than there was abstraction going on.”

Looking ahead, the exhibition ends with an early example by Jackson Pollock, a student of Benton and a mainstay of the coming abstract-expressionist movement, and a 1940 figurative work by Hopper: two competing approaches that would define post-World War II American art.

Kyle MacMillan is a local freelance writer.

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