Existing comment:
American Art -- Mid-Twentieth Century:
The devastating stock market crash of 1929 ushered in a wave of socioeconomic crises that dramatically shaped American culture. Overwhelmed by poverty and unemployment, American artists turned inward, committing themselves to creating a home-grown "art for the people." Many adopted a realist style and treated regional subjects as a means of exploring the importance of "place." Others continued to favor an international language of abstraction to express modern truths and utopian visions.
Founded in 1936 in the depths of the Great Depression, the state-owned Virginia Museum of Fine Arts enthusiastically embraced the nationalist call for a vital cultural scene. Many of the objects on view in this gallery, purchased directly from the museum's biennial exhibitions of contemporary American painting (called "the South's most heralded competition"), offer glimpses of institutional taste. In the post-World War II era, the two constants of figuration and realism continued to shape American production and reception. Nevertheless controversial exhibitions and purchased marked VMFA's increasing alignment with progressive national forces that favored nonrepresentational imagery. By the late 1950s, abstraction -- in its myriad variations -- was widely heralded at home and abroad as a dynamic "American" art. |