Author: James M. Dennis
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299155803
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Author: James M. Dennis
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299155841
Category : Art, American
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Famous for iconic images of the rural Midwest--such as American Gothic, Politics in Missouri, and Baptism in Kansas--Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry have long been lumped together under the rubric the "Regionalists." James M. Dennis offers a fresh and sophisticated look at the modernist tendencies of this trio of American painters, arguing that the individual styles of Wood, Benton, and Curry were both mislabeled and misunderstood. Revisiting the artistic and political culture of America between the World Wars, he shows that critics and ideologues--from Time Magazine to the Partisan Review--pigeonholed, praised, or pilloried the Regionalists to serve their own critical intentions.

Author: John Steuart Curry
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN:
Category : Country life in art
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Author: Patricia A. Junker
Publisher: Hudson Hills
ISBN: 9781555951399
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
John Steuart Curry: Inventing the Middle West is the first comprehensive study in more than fifty years of this member of the great triumvirate of American Regionalists: Thomas Hart Benton, Curry, and Grant Wood. It revives the reputation of one of the most important and controversial artists of the first half of the twentieth century, whose paintings of farm life in his native Kansas (including baptisms and tornados), of the circus, of American history, and of the American scene in general were dramatically eclipsed by the ascendancy of abstract art and the New York School at midcentury. 68 colour & 114 b/w illustrations

Author: M. Sue Kendall
Publisher: Smithsonian Books (DC)
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Author: John Steuart Curry
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 54

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Author: R. Tripp Evans
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307594335
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
He claimed to be “the plainest kind of fellow you can find. There isn’t a single thing I’ve done, or experienced,” said Grant Wood, “that’s been even the least bit exciting.” Wood was one of America’s most famous regionalist painters; to love his work was the equivalent of loving America itself. In his time, he was an “almost mythical figure,” recognized most supremely for his hard-boiled farm scene, American Gothic, a painting that has come to reflect the essence of America’s traditional values—a simple, decent, homespun tribute to our lost agrarian age. In this major new biography of America’s most acclaimed, and misunderstood, regionalist painter, Grant Wood is revealed to have been anything but plain, or simple . . . R. Tripp Evans reveals the true complexity of the man and the image Wood so carefully constructed of himself. Grant Wood called himself a farmer-painter but farming held little interest for him. He appeared to be a self-taught painter with his scenes of farmlands, farm workers, and folklore but he was classically trained, a sophisticated artist who had studied the Old Masters and Flemish art as well as impressionism. He lived a bohemian life and painted in Paris and Munich in the 1920s, fleeing what H. L. Mencken referred to as “the booboisie” of small-town America. We see Wood as an artist haunted and inspired by the images of childhood; by the complex relationship with his father (stern, pious, the “manliest of men”); with his sister and his beloved mother (Wood shared his studio and sleeping quarters with his mother until her death at seventy-seven; he was forty-four). We see Wood’s homosexuality and how his studied masculinity was a ruse that shaped his work. Here is Wood’s life and work explored more deeply and insightfully than ever before. Drawing on letters, the artist’s unfinished autobiography, his sister’s writings, and many never-before-seen documents, Evans’s book is a dimensional portrait of a deeply complicated artist who became a “National Symbol.” It is as well a portrait of the American art scene at a time when America’s Calvinistic spirit and provincialism saw Europe as decadent and artists were divided between red-blooded patriotic men and “hothouse aesthetes.” Thomas Hart Benton said of Grant Wood: “When this new America looks back for landmarks to help gauge its forward footsteps, it will find a monument standing up in the midst of the wreckage . . . This monument will be made out of Grant Wood’s works.”

Author: Lauren Kroiz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520286561
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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"Cultivating Citizens rethinks the aesthetics and politics of regionalism in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. During this period, painters Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry formed a loose alliance as American Regionalists. Some lauded their depictions of the rural landscape and hardworking inhabitants of America's midwestern heartland. Others deemed Regionalist painting dangerous, regarding its easily understood realism as a vehicle for jingoism, chauvinism, and even fascism. Cultivating Citizens shifts the terms of this ongoing debate over subject matter and style by considering heretofore neglected Regionalist programs of art education and concepts of artistic labor."--Provided by publisher.

Author: Mary Scholz Guedon
Publisher: Metuchen, N.J. : Scarecrow Press
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Author: Barbara Haskell
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300232845
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The social and political climate in which Wood's art flourished bears certain striking similarities to America today, as national identity and the tension between urban and rural areas reemerge as polarizing issues in a country facing the consequences of globalization and the technological revolution. Wood portrayed the tension and alienation of contemporary experience. By fusing meticulously observed reality with fables of childhood, he crafted unsettling images of estrangement and apprehension that pictorially manifest the anxiety of modern life.