Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
During the 1930s and 1940s, 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 their painting dangerous, regarding its easily understood realism as a vehicle for jingoism and even fascism. Cultivating Citizens focuses on Regionalists and their critics as they worked with and against universities, museums, and the burgeoning field of sociology. Lauren Kroiz shifts the terms of an ongoing debate over subject matter and style, producing the first study of Regionalist art education programs and concepts of artistic labor.
Price: $65.00
Pages: 312
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Publication Date:
30 March 2018
Trim Size: 10.00 X 7.00 in
ISBN: 9780520286566
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
"...a long overdue reevaluation of the American Regionalist triumvirate of Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry. Featuring a mix of lush color reproductions, black-and-white documentary photographs, and preliminary sketches, and drawing on a wealth of primary sources. . . .Cultivating Citizens offers readers a compelling reexamination of the controversies surrounding the art and professional lives of these formidable personalities."
Lauren Kroiz is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle.
List of Illustrations • ix
Preface • xiii
Acknowledgments • xv
Introduction • 1
PART 1: IOWA
1. Art in the University • 19
2. Stone City • 24
3. How to Teach Art • 53
4. Grant Wood, H. W. Janson, and the Case of the Naked Chicken • 74
PART 2: MISSOURI
5. Art and the Museum • 93
6. Opening the Nelson Gallery • 102
7. Building a Regionalist Movement with Thomas Hart Benton • 115
8. Creative Appreciation and Museum Minds • 138
PART 3: WISCONSIN
9. Art and Sociology • 161
10. John Steuart Curry’s Amateurism • 166
11. Inventing the Artist-in-Residence • 182
12. Encouraging Rural Art • 202
Conclusion • 223
Notes • 231
Bibliography • 275
Preface • xiii
Acknowledgments • xv
Introduction • 1
PART 1: IOWA
1. Art in the University • 19
2. Stone City • 24
3. How to Teach Art • 53
4. Grant Wood, H. W. Janson, and the Case of the Naked Chicken • 74
PART 2: MISSOURI
5. Art and the Museum • 93
6. Opening the Nelson Gallery • 102
7. Building a Regionalist Movement with Thomas Hart Benton • 115
8. Creative Appreciation and Museum Minds • 138
PART 3: WISCONSIN
9. Art and Sociology • 161
10. John Steuart Curry’s Amateurism • 166
11. Inventing the Artist-in-Residence • 182
12. Encouraging Rural Art • 202
Conclusion • 223
Notes • 231
Bibliography • 275