Regionalism

In US art, a movement in the 1930s and 1940s which, rejecting abstract art and European avant-garde influences, stressed the depiction of American life, typically the rural life of the Midwest. Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and John Steuart Curry were its principal exponents. Their work primarily represented the rapidly vanishing rural countryside and small-town America. Some works stressed the virtues of hard work and family values, such as Wood's familiar painting American Gothic (1930; Art Institute of Chicago).

Regionalist art, although portraying America, differed from the work of urban artists, such as the Social Realists and artists working within the Harlem Renaissance, in that it did not try to highlight social concerns. There were also enormous differences between the two groups in inspiration, motivation, and choice of subject matter.