AMERICAN SCENE PAINTING

American Scene Painting

( 1920s - early1940 )

   American Scene Painting depicts scenes of typical American life and landscape painted in a naturalistic, descriptive vein during the Great Depression in the United States. It is an umbrella term for the rural American Regionalism and the urban and politically-oriented Social Realism, but its specific boundaries remain ambiguous.

   An antimodernist style and reaction against the modern European style, American Scene Painting was seen as an attempt to define a uniquely American style of art. The term does not signify an organized movement, but rather an aspect of a broad tendency for American artists to move away from abstraction and the avant-garde in the period between the two world wars.

   Benton, Curry and Wood were the three major representatives of Regionalism. They had all studied art in Paris but they declared their goal to create an art form that would be truly American. These artists insisted that the real solution to the many and growing problems of urban American life, made clear by the Great Depression, was for the United States to return to its agrarian roots.

   The Regionalist's argument received unintentional support from the so-called Urban Realists (Social Realists), who focused their attention on the city.

   The art produced by the American Scene artists was ambiguous and cultivated, and it drew from diverse cultures. The choice of subjects might have attested to a quest for identity.