The Art Institute of Chicago, 2016
Purchase from the Art Institute Museum Shop.
This decade was a supremely creative period in the United States, as the nation’s artists, novelists, and critics struggled through the Great Depression seeking to define modern American art. In the process, many painters challenged and reworked the meanings and forms of modernism, reaching no simple consensus.
This period was also marked by an astounding diversity of work as artists sought styles—ranging from abstraction to Regionalism to Surrealism—that allowed them to engage with issues such as populism, labor, social protest, and to employ an urban and rural iconography including machines, factories, and farms.
Seminal works by Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, Georgia O’Keeffe, Aaron Douglas, Charles Sheeler, Stuart Davis, and others show such attempts to capture the American character. These groundbreaking paintings, highlighting the relationship between art and national experience, demonstrate how creativity, experimentation, and revolutionary vision flourished during a time of great uncertainty.
Edited by Judith A. Barter
WIth essays by Judith A. Barter, Sarah L. Burns, Teresa A. Carbone, Annelise K. Madsen, and Sarah Kelly Oehler
204 pages, 9 3/8 x 12 in.
105 color and 15 b/w ills.
Out of print
ISBN: 978-0-86559282-7 (softcover)
ISBN: 978-0-300-21485-7 (hardcover)
