The Great Debate.

Although the now legendary Armory show had brought modern art to America in 1913, as the 1930s opened, the merits of modernism versus traditional figure painting were still being fervently debated. The social activism and mass political movements of the 1930s demanded a public and useful art. The modern movements — Dadaism, Cubism, Fauvism, and Surrealism — seemed private and effete. As the Depression took hold in America and war brewed in Europe, Americans drew inward, concerned with domestic problems and injustice. This isolationism led not simply to art in search of an American idiom, but anti-European sentiment espoused by the American Regionalists. Thomas Hart Benton, once a student in Paris, led the charge to rid America of what he called the "dirt" of European influence. On the other side of the debate were a small number of young American artists, mostly...