Nearly 100 years ago, a short-lived artistic movement known as regionalism was getting started. Back then, the country was in the middle of unprecedented economic hard times known as the Great Depression. Many were jobless and desperate and professional artists struggled to make a living and sell their work. No one was buying. The federal government stepped in and let out contracts to pay artists to decorate the many federal buildings – post offices and courthouses mainly – that were under construction in cities across the country. The program’s budget was small, but it kept many lucky artists in brushes and paint for a while. Regionalism reached its peak with this federal art program.
Regionalist painters rebelled against the styles thought of as “great art” in those days, like impressionism borrowed from Europe, and rejected the more modern, abstracted work by artists like Picasso who were still selling. Regionalist painters found subjects in rural areas, like farmers and their equipment and small town life. Think Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton and Andrew Wyeth. The scenes they painted were mundane and not terribly engaging, but I guess that was the point. With notable exceptions, the works turned out by the regionalist painters of the 1930s were intended to celebrate rural America and they did so in a direct and unadorned style, something not strictly representational but not quite abstract, either.
Regionalism never really caught on with rich art collectors. It was dying out by the time the war came in 1941 and country people moved to town for jobs. I love this stuff. Whenever I pass through a small town with an old post office, I stop in to see the work left by an impoverished painter paid a few hundred dollars by Uncle Sam to decorate a blank wall with a mural. Very often, the mural you find there can be called regionalist.
In La Grange, Texas, the old post office was closed when I passed through last month. But I found something even better. On the county fairgrounds, the thoughtful people at the Czech Heritage Center had restored an old farmhouse. These were the homes of people back then who baked their own kolaches and brewed their own beer. These folks had no need for a Buc-ee’s. The clouds were dark and threatening a downpour and the sturdy old house and barn seemed to be saying “Bring it!” I took a few photos and tweaked the scene a bit for a regionalist realization. Laid on the canvas with lots of blues, violets and earth tones, it was a great way to spend a rainy afternoon. Mixing colors and dabbing them on, I was sure glad I was not a hungry artist of old, competing with a dozen other painters to win a post office mural contract that would pay a few months rent.
