How the Great Depression shaped American regionalist art

HostWe often think of the nineteen thirties as a time of gray lines and dusty faces, but if you look at the paintings from those years, they're actually full of bright yellow wheat and big, strong bodies. It was this moment when artists turned away from the fancy styles of Europe and started looking at their own backyards. Why did a massive money crash make painters care so much about the farm?

GuestIt was basically a huge wake-up call for the whole country. Before the banks failed in nineteen twenty-nine, if you were a serious artist, you probably wanted to be in Paris. You wanted to paint things that didn't look like anything real, just shapes and colors that felt new and exciting. But when the crash happened and people started losing their homes and their jobs, that kind of art started to feel a bit hollow. It felt like a luxury for a world that didn't exist anymore. Artists started heading back to the places they grew up, like Missouri or Iowa or Kansas. They wanted to find something solid to hold onto. They stopped trying to be French and started trying to be American. This style they built is what we now call Regionalism. It was a choice to focus on the local, the small-town, and the rural life that most people were living. They weren't just painting what they saw; they were looking for a way to tell a story about who Americans were when everything else was falling apart.

HostSo it was a move back to the roots, but how did these painters actually keep the lights on? I mean, who has the money to buy a painting when they can't even afford to buy bread?

GuestThat's where the government stepped in, and it's a part of the story that feels almost hard to believe today. The government started treating art like a job, just like building a bridge or digging a ditch. They set up programs like the WPA to put people back to work, and they included artists in that. They paid painters about twenty-four dollars a week to create art for the public. The big idea was to put murals on the walls of local post offices and schools all over the country. But there was a catch. The government wanted these paintings to be something the average person could understand and feel proud of. They didn't want weird abstract shapes. They wanted to see the history of the town, the local crops, and the people working the land. It turned the artist into a kind of public worker. Suddenly, you had guys who had studied in Europe standing on ladders in small-town Oklahoma, painting pictures of cattle and corn. It gave people a sense that their daily struggle was important enough to be put on a wall in gold and oil paint.

HostThat sounds like a great way to boost morale, but it also sounds a bit like a tall tale. If things were really that bad, with the Dust Bowl ruining the soil and people starving, weren't these painters just making things look better than they actually were?

GuestYou're hitting on the big tension of that era. Take a painter like Thomas Hart Benton. He painted these incredibly muscular farmers who looked like they were made of solid oak. Everything in his pictures is twisting and full of energy, like the very earth is bulging with life. Now, if you were a farmer whose topsoil had just blown away in a windstorm, you might look at that and think it was a lie. Some critics at the time said these artists were just sticking their heads in the sand. They called the work a kind of retreat into a past that was already gone. But the artists saw it differently. They weren't trying to take a photograph of the misery; they were trying to build a myth. They wanted to show the strength that people needed to have. Even Grant Wood, who gave us the famous picture of the man with the pitchfork, was doing something complicated. He was painting his own dentist and his sister dressed up in old clothes. He was trying to capture a certain kind of stiff, stubborn pride that he thought defined the people of the plains. It was less about what was happening right then and more about the spirit they hoped would last.

HostI wonder about the land itself though. We usually hear about the dirt and the rot during the Depression. Did they ever show the dark side of that?

GuestThey did, but it was often hidden in the edges. Even when they painted the rolling hills of the Midwest, they made them look like waves in the ocean—beautiful but also kind of overwhelming. There was a sense of scale that made the humans look small, even if they were drawn to be tough. And you have to remember that this wasn't just about the country versus the city. It was a fight for the soul of the country. To these painters, the big cities were places of greed and cold stone that had caused the crash in the first place. The farm was where they thought the real work happened. They used these deep, warm colors—burnt oranges and rich greens—to make the land look like the only thing you could trust. It was a very specific choice to ignore the factories and the skyscrapers and focus on a guy with a plow. It was an attempt to say that even if the banks failed, the dirt was still there, and the sun would still come up over the wheat.

GuestEven today, when we think of what the middle of the country looks like, we're mostly seeing it through the eyes of these painters who were just trying to survive the worst years of their lives.

HostThe wheat in those old murals is still golden today, a reminder that when the money went away, we looked to the ground beneath our feet to figure out who we were.