A unique look at America's quest to carve out an artistic identity during the Depression era Through 50 masterpieces of painting, this fascinating catalogue chronicles the turbulent economic, political, and aesthetic climate of the 1930s. This decade was a supremely creative period in the United States, as the nation's artists, novelists, and critics struggled through the Great Depression seeking to define modern American art. In the process, many painters challenged and reworked the meanings and forms of modernism, reaching no simple consensus. This period was also marked by an astounding diversity of work as artists sought styles--ranging from abstraction to Regionalism to Surrealism--that allowed them to engage with issues such as populism, labor, social protest, and to employ an urban and rural iconography including machines, factories, and farms. Seminal works by Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, Georgia O'Keeffe, Aaron Douglas, Charles Sheeler, Stuart Davis, and others show such attempts to capture the American character. These groundbreaking paintings, highlighting the relationship between art and national experience, demonstrate how creativity, experimentation, and revolutionary vision flourished during a time of great uncertainty.

Although the so-called "American Scene" movement dominated American art during the second quarter of the twentieth century, it has been largely forgotten today, eclipsed by emergence of abstract expressionism and the development of other avant garde art movements which gained prominence in America by mid-century. Today, however, even as the Depression-era generation fades from the scene, its art lives on. The quality, energy and visual impact of this art is abundantly apparent from even a cursory perusal of the masterworks described and reproduced in this catalogue of a private collection of American representational art of the Thirties and Forties. Painting the American Scene: American Art of the Thirties and Forties offers an extraordinary glimpse into the lives and work of twenty-nine American painters whose art was highly acclaimed and widely exhibited during their lifetimes and for whom proper recognition is long overdue.