Artists by Movement: American Regionalism
1930's
An American term, Regionalism refers to the work of a number of rural artists, mostly from the Midwest, who came to prominance in the 1930s.
Not being part of a coordinated movement, Regionalist artists often had an idiosyncratic style or point of view. What they shared, among themselves and among other American Scene painters, was a humble, anti-modernist style and a desire to depict everyday life. However their rural conservatism tended to put them at odds with the urban and leftist Social Realists of the same era.
The three best-known regionalists were John Steuart Curry, Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, the painter of the best-known and one of the greatest works of American art, American Gothic.
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