1. American Art History
1930-1950
From social realism to abstract expressionism...
By Karen Stackow, January 2010

2. SOCIAL REALISM; 1930's
D
FAP (Federal Art Project) was designed to promote the idea of a unified and positive
American spirit during the Depression period. Baker's mural pictures the early history
and industry of South County through a scene featuring fertile land, productive activities,
and muscular laborers. All these representations emphasize the reward and value of
hard work, which was deemed crucial to putting an end to economic hardship.
Ernest Hamlin Baker's The Activities of the Narragansett Planter

3. Thomas Hart Benton,
The Fieldworkers,1945
Social Realism-Regionalist

4. American Scene painters, a humble, anti-modernist
style and a desire to depict everydaylife.
The midnight run of Paul Revere, 1931
American Scene Painters or Regionalist
Grant
Wood
Amercan Gothic, 1930
Family Doctor
1940

5. Grant Wood, Stone City, Iowa,
1930

6. Social Realism-Regionalist
Andrew Wyeth, Magic Realism, 1940's

7. Edward Hopper
• Representational;
• The truth of Urban
and Rural America
• Effects of the
Depression
• Solitude, Isolation
• Drug Store, 1927
• Early Sunday Morning, 1930
Gas, 1940

8. Abstraction; Late 1930's
• No moral,
• political,
• or social agenda.
• Reduction
• Geometric

9. Arthur Dove, City Moon, 1938

10. Arthur Dove, Haystack,1931

11. Abstract Expressionism, 1940's
Energetic
• Gestural
Surface
• there is no subject
• at all, but instead
• pure abstract form
Willem de Kooning, 1948
IndividualExpression

12. Ashile Gorky
The Raven,1937 The Barber,19388

13. Franz Kline
Black
Reflections
1959