This exhibition tells the story of 1930s America through the art of a nation in flux. Artists responded to rapid social change and economic anxiety with some of the 20th century’s most powerful art. These 45 iconic works paint an electrifying portrait of this transformative period. These are works which have rarely been seen together by artists ranging from Jackson Pollock, Georgia O’Keeffe and Edward Hopper to Thomas Hart Benton, Philip Guston and more. Perhaps the most celebrated work of them all, Grant Wood’s iconic American Gothic (1930), has never left North American shores before.
Grant Wood’s classic 1930 painting American Gothic is possibly the single most recognised
work of American art with its unsmiling duo in front of their church-like wooden house. The generation who found fame as abstract expressionists a decade later survived the 30s working for public art programmes. Realism and Americana were their obsessions in this time of struggle and despair. Jackson Pollock and Edward Hopper are among the stars of this haunting journey through a broken America.
In the wake of the Wall Street Crash, artists sought to capture the changes in urbanisation, industrialisation and immigration that pulsed across the country, resulting in one of the most vital periods for American artists in the 20th century. This was a decade like no other that saw them search for an elusive ‘Americanness’ through realism, populism and abstraction, rural and urban themes, the farm, the new, the traditional.
As Franklin D. Roosevelt said: “Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.” So experience the life of 1930s America through the many masterpieces in this landmark show.
Royal Academy, London, until 4 June.
