Existing comment:
America at the Crossroads:
The American stock market crash of October 1929 brought an abrupt end to the Roaring Twenties, a decade of economic boom fueled by increased industrialization and financial speculation. The Great Depression that followed revealed the disparity between America's cherished ideals of equality and economic opportunity for all and the harsh realities of class difference, which was then, as now, a taboo subject for most Americans. The depression also weakened the market for art; provoked a conservative trend among critics, curators, and collectors; and heightened the divisions that separated the American avant-garde from academic artists.
Many modernist artists, including those interested in abstraction, believed that art should transcend temporal concerns and argued that academic artists were isolationist reactionaries who sought to suppress artistic freedom. Conversely, many American Scene and Regionalist artists publicly rejected European-derived modernism in favor of national or regional schools that embraced indigenous subjects, realism, and a populist sensibility.
Social Realists in the United States and in Mexico argued that their colleagues had a moral responsibility to address the pressing political, social, and economic issues of the day through their work.
The Great Depression also revived longstanding tensions between urban and rural America, and between industrial and agrarian labor. Major cities were depicted as stratified societies in which the economic, ethnic, and racial tensions of American life were visible in the streets. Industrial factories increasingly were perceived as being run by wealthy capitalists who sought to preserve their profits at the expense of their workers. In contrast, rural America was nostalgically imagined as the repository of the country's traditional values and home to farm laborers who embodied the highest ideals of democracy. Many of these ongoing issues were temporary set aside at the outbreak of World War II, which revived the economy and fostered a renewed sense of national unity and purpose. |