Author: Barter, Judith A.
Title: America After the Fall: Painting in the 1930s
Description: Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, 2016. hardcover. Navy blue boards with white lettering. Color-illustrated dust jacket. 204 pp. Color and BW illustrations. This book hightlights 50 American painting master works to illustrate the conditions of the 1930s. Through 50 masterpieces of American painting, this catalogue chronicles the turbulent economic, political, and aesthetic climate of the 1930s. This decade was a supremely creative period in the United States, as the nation's artists, novelists, and critics struggled through the Great Depression in search of "Americanness." Seeking to define modern American art, 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 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. Contents as follows: Exhibition and catalogue sponsors -- Foreword / James Rondeau, Guy Cogeval, and Christopher Le Brun Pra -- Acknowledgments / Judith A. Barter -- Introduction / Judith A. Barter -- Prairie pastoral / Judith A. Barter -- American made? Transatlantic expressions in the 1930s / Sarah Kelly Oehler -- Reviving the old and telling tales: 1930s modernism and the uses of American history / Annelise K. Madsen -- Death, decay, and dystopia: painting the American wasteland in the 1930s / Sarah L. Burns -- Busted seams and bad behavior : bodies for the 1930s / Teresa A. Carbone -- Epilogue: Americanness after the 1930s / Judith A. Barter -- Exhibition checklist. Many of these [aintings came top the AIC as part of the Estate of Alfred Stieglitz. VG+/VG-, slightest curling at bottom of dust jacket .

Keywords: American Art, Painting, 1930s ; Art Insitute of Chicago ; ; Collections - American Art


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