American Regionalism
アメリカン・リージョナリズム / 1930–1943 / Style / American Modern Art
A movement in Depression-era America that refused the European avant-garde and painted the farming and labour of the Midwest in realist terms. Rolling hills, stylised figures and legible narrative became national imagery by way of murals, magazines and postage stamps. The classic case of a region turned into a style.
Compositions of rolling hills and farmland / Stylised, plain-spoken figures / Scenes with a clearly legible narrative / Colour keyed to the earth
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Dictionary entry
- Best used for
- Civic and cooperative identity for agriculture, regional food and public utilities, where a place has to look as though it belongs to the people who work it · Large-format mural and packaging illustration that must tell its story from across a room
- Type
- A sturdy slab or heavy-stemmed grotesque, set in short declarative lines like a mural caption.
- Composition
- A single figure or task at mid-height, the ground curving behind it in bands, the horizon high and the sky small.
- Material
- Earth pigments of ochre, umber and oxide green, printed on stock warm enough to keep the whites off white.
- Caution
- Borrowing the rolling fields as nostalgic wallpaper: stripped of the labour that is its actual subject, the style collapses into the folksy pastiche its critics accused it of.
- Further study
- The difference between Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton / Its relation to the public mural programmes / The critique of its nationalism