New Ideas.

American artists were wrestling with abstraction when the 1940s opened. Cubism and Surrealism had been at the forefront of European art for over two decades but had not really arrived in the United States. Through the 1930s social realism and regionalism dominated the American art scene. This naturalist painting was the style of Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and John Stuart Curry. Edward Hopper had made some gestures toward abstraction, and Stuart Davis was a crossover artist creating work somewhere between figure painting and abstraction. The focus of their work was depiction of place and people, a kind of folkloric representation of American life, the texture and the color of its objects. Though Georgia O'Keeffe and Arthur Dove had worked abstractly in their own style through the 1920s, the American painters as a whole were looking backward. Modernism had not really...