The American Mid-west in art - Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio - Brief Article

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 2000 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

During the years between the two world wars, the Midwest, known alternatively as the breadbasket and the heartland of the United States, produced a group of artists who came to be known as regionalists or American scene painters. These artists have been celebrated for being the most. American of all American painters, in part because they were raised in or painted the Midwest--that most American region of the country. Such a view, however, somewhat misinterprets their contribution to the history of American art, which is being reexamined in a provocative international traveling exhibition entitled Illusions of Eden: Visions of the American Heartland. Sponsored by Philip Morris Companies, it opens at the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio on February 18 and remains on view there until April 30. The exhibition is part of the Heartland Project, which also encompasses two other exhibitions and a Web site designed and partially underwritten by Spike.

Illusions of Eden comprises more than one hundred paintings and photographs, which, according to Robert Stearns's catalogue essay, were selected to fit the five thematic divisions of the exhibition: journey (history and mobility), garden (land and topography), home (family and community), work (labor and industry), and word knowledge and belief). Installations were commissioned specifically for this show from four contemporary artists--Maya Lin, Kerry James Marshall, Malcolm Cochran, and Mary Lucier--all of whom have midwestern connections.

The artists most frequently associated with regionalism are the Iowa-born Grant Wood, the Kansas-born John Steuart Curry, and the Missouri-born Thomas Hart Benton. While they painted farm scenes and people, these artists studied and lived elsewhere (Wood in Paris and Munich and Benton in Paris, for example) during the course of their lives. Other less-known artists who fall outside the regionalist label, including the Hungarian-born Zoltan Speshy, who painted in Detroit, and Edmund Lewandowski of Milwaukee, painted the industrial Midwest. However, the farms of the Midwest were inextricably interwoven with the cities, for it was to the urban mills that farmers shipped their crops.

The artists of the Midwest painted in a wide range of styles from hard-edged precisionism to expressionism, in keeping with the diversity and vastness of the region itself. As Michael D. Hall and Nannette V. Maciejunes have suggested in the catalogue, "a certain attitude is common to all of these works--an attitude that is best described as 'realistic'.... The Regionalists of the heartland all grounded their art in direct observations and experiences of their immediate world."

The Midwest was photographed by well-known professionals, local commercial studios, and unknown amateurs, each with different objectives. The iconic images taken by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Charles Sheeler, and Margaret Bourke-White, appeared in popular magazines such as Life and Fortune. Through their wide dissemination, these pictures produced the vision of the Midwest that outsiders have associated with it ever since. Walker Evans made clear his preference for the descriptive term documentary-style photographs rather than documentary photographs, because professional photographers had a social agenda if they were working for the government and a specific assignment if they were working for magazines.

The revisionist view of mid-western regionalists proposed in this exhibition will be an eye-opener for many. The two other exhibitions that are part of the Heartland Project are devoted in part to other heartlands. The first examines the artistic traditions of Poland, Hungary, the former Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, and Austria between 1949 and 1999; and the second presents fourteen contemporary works by Central European and American midwestern artists. Information about these shows and the Heartland Project can be found on the Web site (www.heartlandproject.org). The catalogue, published by Arts Midwest in Minneapolis, may be read on the Internet or ordered from the Columbus Museum of Art of 614-221-6801.