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Coming Home: American Paintings, 1930-1950

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Tuesday, 30 August 2005 16:36
ATHENS, GEORGIA.-Thomas Hart Benton, Charles Burchfield, and John Steuart Curry are among the 99 artists whose stirring images completed during the Great Depression and World War II are on view at the Georgia Museum of Art . Coming Home: American Paintings, 1930-1950, from the Schoen Collection, organized by the Mobile Museum of Art and the Georgia Museum of Art, has traveled to six southeastern venues and will end its run in Athens. The show includes 127 works by artists who were active during this significant period of American art. “Coming Home features a wide range of painting styles that represent the diversity of American art during the 1930s and 1940s,” says Paul Manoguerra, curator of American art at the Georgia Museum of Art. “These differences are evident in the naturalistic works, abstract images, and surrealist paintings, all offering a revealing and panoramic look at this tumultuous time in American history.” Jason Schoen, from whose collection these works are on loan, has accomplished at mid-life what many serious collectors never realize. A native of Los Angeles, he began precocious shopping forays into the California gallery scene while in high school. As an undergraduate in the history of art at the University of Texas, Schoen spent hours in the library’s special collections department immersed in books illustrating the works of Benton, Curry, and their peers. Schoen’s collection includes the numerous periods that make up the American Scene from 1930 to 1950 when the influences of the Great Depression and World War II contributed to styles of art variously known as Regionalism, Social Realism, Magic Realism, Surrealism, and Precisionism. Single women were paid equal wages, and there were as many women artists employed as men. Female artists in Coming Home include Agnes Pelton, Grace Clements, Helen Lundeberg, Florence McClung, Helen Forbes, and Ethel Magafan. Now known as the documentary aesthetic, the collective efforts of some of these artists framed the often intolerable plight of Americans during the Depression. These powerful images render statistics unnecessary, even when they are as compelling as the ones citing unemployment, which rose to 15 million workers in 1932, or roughly 30 percent of the nation’s work force.

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